The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms - yarapavan
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/
======
DoreenMichele
Years ago, a friend of the family said "You're so smart. Everyone thought you
would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?"

I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time."

I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great
wealth.

So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to
lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that your interests will
happen to nicely line up with things that lead to wealth.

Everything I've read suggests that being born into the right family plays a
huge role in wealth, a la the joke "He made his money the old fashioned way:
He inherited it."

Health issues are another thing. Miracles of modern medicine can be very
expensive and come directly out of your pocket if you live in the wrong
country. At the same time, you typically will be less productive and less
competent while enduring serious health issues.

Personal relationships are another biggie. My mother used to work for an
heiress whose husband ran through her money. After the divorce, she had to get
a job to support herself.

Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be
financially ruinous.

Even if you are good at earning it, that doesn't mean you are good at keeping
it or growing it, a la some tagline from some magazine "How money becomes
wealth."

~~~
umvi
Next time just say: "I am a millionaire, and more. My kids are worth more than
I could have imagined"

~~~
DoreenMichele
That's more literally true than you think.

My children nursed me back to health after doctor's wrote me off for dead.
It's supposed to cost about $100k-$250k annually to treat my condition
conventionally.

My oldest has the same condition. Between the two of us, that's up to a half
million dollars per year.

We were diagnosed over 18 years ago. You can conservatively guess that my kids
have been worth at least $1.5 million to me, and potentially more than $9
million.

(That's just the dollar value saved on treatment. You can put no price on the
improvement in quality of life that I got out of it.)

~~~
gowld
Related: [https://faithit.com/i-cant-afford-my-wife-steven-
nelms/](https://faithit.com/i-cant-afford-my-wife-steven-nelms/) a stay-at-
home mom is worth $75K+/yr

------
martinni
Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To
quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck.

1\. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my
control happened

2\. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work,
hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of
opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of
things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.

3\. Luck from preparation - If you are very skilled in a field, you will
notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t
attuned to it won’t notice.

4\. Luck from your unique character - You created your own luck. You put
yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck. Or to attract
that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.

~~~
ta1234567890
However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1.

You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are
blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they
are in control somehow.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them
to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can
be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By
reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the
person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as
someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a
lot farther than the average persona around them.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Being prepared doesn't mean anything unless 1 happens. Hustling => success and
preparation => success are dependent on lucky opportunities.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others
but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that
opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to
the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and
have the drive to do so (hustle).

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is _never_ a lucky
opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and
you _never_ get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people
are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with
preparation or hustle.

IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare
100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have
hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to
better opportunities.

~~~
ativzzz
> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve
> success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity
> to interview. Do you still achieve success?

You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you
describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever
work you are putting in?

Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if
done right, sometimes) increases your odds.

------
buboard
But what did the reviewers say about the paper?
([http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068](http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068))

They used a normal distribution for "Talent", but that's false. There is
plenty of evidence that , like everything in life , it's power-law distributed

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-
myth-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-of-the-
bell-curve-look-for-the-hyper-performers/#335142626bca)

[http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-
reve...](http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reveal-
pattern-for-distribution-of-artistic-talent/)

And the assumtions of the model are rather childish: each random event either
doubles or halves your capital (In real life, the multiplier can be much much
higher or lower). In fact that's the most flawed point of their tiny "model":
by changing the factor 2 and the multiplier distribution they can come up with
any result they want.

Also, everyone meets lucky/unlucky events in the same frequency - the
presumumption that smart people make paths that provide equal opportunity as
the rest or take chances with equal frequency is just false.

They could at least have compared the lifetime wealth fluctuations with real
data for a sense of how wrong thir model is. This is a model of a very simple
casino game, not real life.

The paper has no discussion, no justification for its parameters, no critical
presentation of its limitations , no sensitivity analysis.

Good conversation piece, everyone has an opinion on the subject, but the
experiment is rubbish.

~~~
fingerlocks
Both of your links show a power-law distributions for the _returns on talent_
, not the underlying distribution of raw talent in the population. We already
know this. Wealth begets wealth- a successful book author is more likely to
sell another successful book than a new author. Likewise with artist paintings
and salesmen.

But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably
normally distributed.

~~~
buboard
> But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably
> normally distributed.

Talent would be normally distributed if it was e.g. the sum of your partial
talents, as a result of Central limit. There are different kinds of talent
though, and gifted people are talented in one thing, but may even suck badly
in others. If there are 5 talents, a person barely above average, with 0.6 in
everything has total talent 3 and Mozart who has 1.0 only in music has total
talent 1. That's not how talent works though: extremely gifted people are
almost unstoppable. It would take extremely adverse circumstances for Mozart
of Maria Callas or Michelangelo to not be successful. So, i don't think Talent
works at all like a bell curve. It's futile to make parallels with IQ (which
IS a sum of variable representing partial skills).

That's why i think those studies find those power laws (and frankly, there are
not many ways to measure talent directly). Also: Note that they didn't measure
the wealth of the artist, but the price of their works since the time they
lived , as a long-term testament to their talent.

------
ttul
I went to an elite engineering school. My colleagues are all really smart.
After 20 years, some are wealthy, some are poor. There is no apparent link
between how hard they worked and how rich they became. However you can
definitely trace how a few good breaks led to one guy being rich and another
not.

Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they
are now millionaires. How about the entrepreneurs? A few are super rich now.
The guy who went to work at McKinsey is now a pubco COO making millions.

Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.

~~~
akhilcacharya
> Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they
> are now millionaires.

They probably _are_ smarter though! If they weren't, they wouldn't get in.

~~~
ttul
Haha. They are all smart. Not everyone chooses to apply for a job at Google.

------
zornado
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread
to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecc 9:11

------
omarhaneef
Ugh, I wish the author had made the point without the computer simulation.

I think there might be merit to the argument people make more money than their
intelligence, or effort, seems to indicate. And the author lays out some basic
arguments here:

"But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a
power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal
distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example,
intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is
100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more
hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more
hours than anybody else."

However, you don't need the simulation to add to this argument. If anything,
the simulation undercuts it because now you point out small errors and end up
doubting the whole argument.

~~~
__s
IQ tests are also a bad example because they have a normal distribution by
design. It's like saying grades fall into a normal distribution when you're
graded on a normal distribution curve

~~~
mywittyname
It's a good example because most human traits are normally distributed. There
aren't any 1000IQ humans, just like there are no 18ft tall humans, or ones
that could run a marathon in under an hour.

~~~
__s
Did you read what I said?

Comparing IQ as a measurement to measuring height would require we create a
non linear unit of measurement so that humans fit into a normal distribution
of "Height Quotient" where most humans are 100 units tall. Then every few
years we adjust these units so that most humans are always 100 units tall

100 IQ fifty years ago wasn't the same as 100 IQ today

------
bjornsing
> So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but
> nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else. This is the
> same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even
> characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller
> than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we
> are all quite similar.

I realize this is the politically correct world view in many circles, but it’s
simply not true. The variation in cognitive ability is enormous. You can ask
yourself for example how many randomly selected people would you need to
produce a score aver 200 on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last
Theorem or build something like the SpaceX Falcon.

(Now that fact is not a justification for the enormous economic inequality we
see on this planet. Neither is it proof that luck is not a major component in
success.)

~~~
wklauss
> how many randomly selected people would you need to produce a score aver 200
> on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or build something
> like the SpaceX Falcon.

It's been proven time and again that IQ numbers are more or less meaningless.
Setting that aside, I think the point of the article is exactly that you might
not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things,
key word here being "potential", nor these things require a different order of
magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive,
luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...

~~~
bjornsing
I agree IQ is largely meaningless, and I could have formulated my standpoint
better, but...

> I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge
> sample to find someone with the potential to do these things

If it is then I'm quite sure this conclusion is in no way backed by the
referenced scientific article.

> nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or
> intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration,
> opportunity, etc...

It would be great if this was true, but it's just not. For example, I see
myself as a few standard deviations out on the mathematical talent/ability
scale, but I would not stand a chance against somebody like Andrew Wiles or
Terence Tao. Why is it so important to pretend that it isn't so...?

------
georgeecollins
I just went with my wife to an anniversary event at her graduate school, which
is fairly prestigious. We are older, and one of the things we were thinking
about was how some people had really striking success in their twenties, some
in their thirties and forties, and some later still. The point being that
coming out of the first few years of school you may feel like your cohort is
sorting for success, but actually early bloomers sometimes revert to the mean
and late bloomers happen all the time.

I don't think people typically realize it as much because they don't benchmark
themselves against their classmates when they get older.

------
thrownaway954
I chased the dollar and lost my wife and Pomeranian in a divorce :( I was
rich, but never realized that love and companionship is worth more in the long
term than money. I would give a billion dollars to wake up with my wife in my
arms and that little dude licking my face.

~~~
maerF0x0
^^ Techlead spotted.

You can have both good things in your life again. Dust yourself off, learn
what you need to learn and find someone who will uphold her commitments (I'm
making some assumptions about your vows)...

~~~
thrownaway954
while I appreciate it... i realized that it would never be the same. too much
time has pasted, we're both different people now. i'm just happy that they are
both happy and healthy. divorce doesn't mean you have to hate each other
forever.

~~~
maerF0x0
I didnt mean have your ex back. I meant have someone you appreciate
approximately as much, though maybe for different reasons.

~~~
thrownaway954
dude... you find one true love in life. if you haven't been married, you won't
know what I mean... and if you are married, then you don't want to find out
what I mean.

~~~
koonsolo
I used to think the same thing, but after my divorce I found a new love.

Nobody is perfect, and there are so many women out there. The chance that you
had the most "optimal" one is very small.

You have what my wife would call a "limiting belief". Believe that you can
find an even better match than before, and maybe you will. I'm sure the chance
of that happening is higher than you think.

------
program_whiz
Watch a survival documentary. 10 contestants, many battle-hardened. The
conclusion after watching 5 seasons of "Alone" is -- its all luck. The fittest
didn't win, it was the person who happened to be dropped off in a relatively
safe area, with access to resources, and had some good luck day to day. The
people who randomly dropped into areas filled with predators or hazards, they
were forced out (despite many being hardened survivalists). People with random
equipment failures, or where the fishing suddenly dries up, they have to quit
too. No matter how hard your will, if the resources disappear you aren't going
to win (one contestant stumbles on a moose and literally has hundreds of
pounds of food fall in his lap, only to have the fat stolen by a wolverine).

~~~
ksdale
I think I watched a few episodes of that with my father-in-law and all I
remember is that several of the contestants spent the first 8 hours or so
building shelter (and if I recall correctly is was summer, so freezing was not
an issue) and only then started to think about finding food. If they had any
trouble at all finding food (which basically everyone did), then pretty soon
they were too weak to continue searching for food because all of the physical
activity had caused them to burn far too many calories for their meager food
intake.

The people who had a lot of experience hunting and fishing tended to know how
long it would take them to find food and went about it with much more urgency.

I do remember bad luck striking as well for sure, but it seemed like strategy
was at least as big of a factor as luck for many of the contestants.

I agree that no matter how hard your will, you can't make it past certain
things, but a lot of contestants hamstrung themselves right off the bat by
badly underestimating how many calories they would need or not accurately
predicting which sorts of problems would instantly end their bid.

------
moosey
When I was young, it wasn't that I was necessarily smart, but I did enjoy
reading. My typical fare from when I was very young included books on biology,
archeology, anthropology, etc. Everyone took this to mean that I was smart,
and I ended up in the classic 'smart trap'. I forgot what it was that made me
knowledgable (practice), and instead believed it was innate.

Regardless of this, now that I am an adult, I find that I would love to spend
my time learning. It's a primary value. I have children, and have to focus on
their upbringing as well, which is a massive drain on the time that I can
bring to bear on learning new things - and I mean taking classes to advance my
understanding of mathematics, not learning a new programming language.

When I think about being wealthy, I actually think about spending my time
going to classes, doing research, and advancing human knowledge. I know others
who would use their time for leisure, and probably a dozen other
possibilities.

In the end, I simply don't value money beyond giving me the basic necessities
of life. I find my time outside of work is best used focusing on studies like
what I described (I mean, they are all free now, for the most part). I find
that people who are focused on wealth, unless it is inherited, put most of
their time in gaining new wealth. I just don't see anything revolutionary in
gaining more power, which is what wealth is to me. True revolution comes from
technological development, which is typically done by the public sector.
Sadly, work there is poorly rewarded by the private sector (companies making
billions on the internet don't donate money back to DARPA for more research,
or for that matter GPS, chip technologies, etc.).

I just think it's a difference in values. Getting to where I wish I could be
at this point of my life would come at too much cost to my family, so now I
find myself working for profit for the rest of my life. Not so bad, of
course... I have some time for the leisure that allows me to expand my
knowledge, and maybe catch up enough to understand the incredible things that
are happening in the space of scientific advancement.

------
kangnkodos
The experiment design was flawed in the following way. What if, in real life,
there are people who are much more likely to take big chances with their whole
career trajectory? Also, what if there are people who are much more likely to
perceive which products will change the world, and when. The combination of
these two qualities is the key.

Even if these qualities are distributed on a normal curve, the result of
possessing the right combination of qualities will have an extremely large
effect in a winner take all world.

Sure, there will be some randomness involved. Start with two kids who both
have the same optimal qualities, and only one will end up a billionaire. But
my guess is that the second kid will also end up ahead of the average. If the
simulation did not end up with this result, then my guess is that something
was left out of the simulation.

~~~
Joeri
This presumes intent from those that “made it”. I’m not so sure the people
that reached the top knew that their actions would take them there. For
example, I doubt anyone in the early days of facebook understood why it was
going to be as big as it was going to be. They wanted it, yes, but they didn’t
know. Facebook’s success is down to luck in making the right choices. And
ofcourse, once you reach a certain level of wealth you create your own luck,
so one hit is enough to lay the seeds for a string of successes.

My point is, we praise captains for industry for their unique insights, but I
doubt they’re really that clever. Yes, they have skills, but not skills as
rare as their wealth would suggest.

------
winrid
Even more luck is required with the way a lot of people on this site are
trying to get rich (startups).

Want to require less luck? Open some kind of store/service yourself and it'll
pay off faster than investing in a startup most likely.

A friend of mine runs a shipping office, single location. Not a giant or
complicated business with 99.999% uptime. He always has much nicer race cars
too.... :)

~~~
michaelmrose
What percentage of the population can do so financially?

~~~
winrid
That's a good point. Have to risk debt at that point.

~~~
michaelmrose
Nobody wants to lend a poor person a large sum of money the fact that you are
presently poor is sufficient proof that you are a bad risk.

~~~
winrid
Nobody said how poor we're talking.

Anyway plenty of people are terrible with their money from a young age. When
I'm a parent I hope I can instill better money management practices in my
kids. :)

------
m3kw9
You can look at it two ways.

First. You had an idea and went with that one that worked out, that’s luck.
Also luckily, you had the physical, mental and monetary capacity to follow
through with it, is lucky to have these resources.

Second way to look at it. You were smart to reject many ideas because you had
the experience and smarts to say no to non-sense. Also you had the grit and
persistence to grind it out despite all the challenges.

Ok which way was it?

------
robmay
It's not entirely random chance. You can increase the probabilities of being
rich by exposing yourself to convexity.
[https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-
unde...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-
understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility)

------
giardini
Previously discussed on ycombinator starting March 2018:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908)

including the Pluchino paper (scroll/search on the above page to find the
reference).

------
jkingsbery
I'm sure the authors will not use this paper in their grant proposals or on
their resumes: "Oh, no, don't count that paper, we were just lucky on that
one."

More seriously: without reading the work more in depth, this seems to show
that luck is sufficient to have the current distribution, not that it's
necessary.

Anecdotally, there sure seem to be people out there that are 10x or 100x as
productive, not by doing the same tasks faster but by identifying a different
set of tasks that accomplish the same thing, or by imagining new possibilities
that others couldn't. Clearly, some luck is involved in that, but so is some
skill, and this paper seems to exclude that as a possibility.

------
Wh1skey
I don’t understand this line of thinking. My father worked a minimum wage job
most of his life and was able to retire a multi-millionaire simply because he
saved and invested his disposable income. Most people can become wealthy but
they choose to drive fancy cars and go to the movie theaters instead then
complain how unlucky they are. That’s simply not true. If people are lucky
because they realized wealth was attainable then yes, the most successful
people are lucky.

~~~
dragonwriter
> My father worked a minimum wage job most of his life and was able to retire
> a multi-millionaire simply because he saved and invested his disposable
> income.

Inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage is _lower_ today than it has been most
of the time since the 1956, and if you measure against minimal needs it's even
worse because CPI also includes hedonic adjustment. Sure, by historical
standards (both before and since) the “Lost" Generation, the Boomers, and (to
a lesser extent) the leading edge of Gen X spent all or a substantial share of
their adulthood in times where, especially if you were a White man at least,
there was unusually strong economic opportunity for the working class.

------
RenRav
Success in life shouldn't be measured solely by someone's wealth. Not if you
value happiness. Beyond a certain point wealth doesn't increase a person's
happiness.

It is pathological to even consider sacrificing your happiness and
compromising your life to chase higher and higher paying jobs.

Knowing when to settle and how to be content in life with what you have is a
form of intelligence rarely praised.

------
auiya
People are quite misinformed about how wealth accumulation works. You don't
become wealthy by working hard at any particular craft. You become wealthy by
acquiring as much capital as possible and charging people a premium for
access. How then do you acquire wealth-building capital in the first place?
Birth lotto most of the time. Turns out, life isn't a meritocracy at all.

------
segmondy
Looks like folks that believe they are smart and not rich love to side with
such articles.

Successful people might be LUCKIEST, but it's not mostly luck.

If you wish to be successful, you need more than luck, hard work,
determination, grit, laser like focus, working on the right stuff, working
smart, proper time management, proper project organization, scheduling and
prioritization of activities will make you successful.

We can't all be billionaires, but if your come from a family making an annual
wage of $40k with a net worth of $0 to $10k and you one day are making $100k+
and have a net worth of $500k or a million, you are successful. Success is
relative to where you start from.

It's true that some have a head start, but it is what it is. Anyone in the
western hemisphere who is healthy and has their freedom can really move
themselves forward if they are willing to work and apply themselves.

It's the uncomfortable truth, but the sooner you embrace it the sooner you can
get on the right path if you're not already on it.

------
golemotron
There's also the fact that being rich isn't everyone's goal. It looks like it
is a pain in the ass to be rich, actually.

~~~
drukenemo
Why is that? I think there are many ways of being rich. For example, being
rich but still living a relatively simple life.

~~~
rc_hadoken
I was joking with my brother that this narrative of "being rich must be
miserable" is one of the greatest cons played on the middle class -- or just
sour grapes. Taleb states: if you control your preferences you are way way way
ahead of the crowd--most people become rich to impress other rich people and
lose their personal preferences in the process. The treadmill effect is wild.

Note: we were born in Africa moved to NA and slept in a one bedroom apartment
with our parents like sardines. Fast foward to now and life is much better. I
am not rich by any stretch.

When people born here (western world) say being rich isnt worth it I laugh.
You're used to a certain level of safety net that we know is not sustainable
and is soon to disappear (in my humble opinion). We are Zimbabwean (left 2001)

------
michaelmior
I was surprised to see this article have no mention of privilege that many
people experience. Certainly if you grow up in a rich family, you have
opportunities available to you that others do not. There are also privileges
associated with race and gender among other things that certainly impact one's
likelihood of becoming rich.

------
jstewartmobile
How many statisticians, psychologists, etc. does it take to re-create
Ecclesiastes?

" _I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance
happeneth to them all._ "

------
MR4D
An interesting couple of quotes in the article that make me wonder about their
conclusion:

 _The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,

Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck_

By definition, this can't be completely true, as pure luck would mean pure
randomness, and apparently, both tails (the most and the least talented) are
_never_ the richest. Such situation is at odds with a random distribution.

So there is a missing part of the model that may explain it, but it's not
random.

That being said, I'm not trying to nit-pick the work they've done. Clearly
there is something at play here that has huge social significance for every
person on the planet.

Fascinating work - I'm looking forward to seeing how this research grows over
the coming years.

------
gitpusher
They seem to have a flawed core assumption – that everyone is hell-bent on
_maximizing_ their personal wealth. In other words, every person will dedicate
their entire intellect toward the goal of making money. This doesn't really
match up with reality (thank goodness).

~~~
thedragonline
It’s a model. All models are wrong, some are useful. That the models’ wealth
distribution correlates well with the real world is an interesting _fact_ and
strongly suggests further investigation. Edit:grammar

------
wolco
The smarter you are the more you understand the risks and choose safer paths.

Getting rich involves doing stupid things.. things that others would look at
and think would fail but you do it anyways. So getting rich involves
stubborness and fearlessness and the ability to detact from reality.

~~~
lazyjones
You can get rich without risking anything (well except a little time and
effort). It's called VC... If you're good and want to play it safe, you will
use the money carefully and wisely and succeed. No need to be fearless or
detached from reality.

------
gumby
I told my kid the benefits of good eduction and a willingness (but not fetish)
for hard work was 1 - a more interesting life and 2 - the opportunity to "buy"
more lottery tickets for the things you might ed up wanting (which aren't
always $).

------
agota
Okay, so I quickly skimmed the paper in question, and I'm very skeptical of
it.

They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by
"talent"?

 _" talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.)"_

Throwing "intelligence, skills, ability, etc." together doesn't make much
sense to me.

Out of these three, only intelligence (assuming they meant IQ), is an
established measure, at least from what I understand. What does "skills,
ability, etc." even mean?

It's not surprising to me that their conclusion doesn't seem to correspond
with reality:

 _" An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents
are almost never the most talented ones, but those around the average of the
Gaussian talent distribution - another stylised fact often reported in the
literature"_ (what literature??).

I can't comment on this "talent" variable as a whole since it doesn't make
much sense but in terms of IQ it's certainly not the 100 IQ individuals that
tend to be the most successful ones.

I also question the "luck" variable, because:

 _"...does not change this fundamental features of the model, which exposes
different individuals to different amount of lucky or unlucky events during
their life, regardless of their own talent."_

I find it unlikely that "talent" and "luck" are completely independent from
each other.

For example, if I recall correctly, reaction time correlates with IQ, so
wouldn't that make more intelligent people less prone to accidents?

Finally, I'm dubious of their results that show that distributing funds
equally among all scientists would lead to most scientific discoveries.

From what I understand, people with a specific set of traits, aka geniuses,
are over-represented in scientific discoveries.

If that's the case, wouldn't deliberately seeking out geniuses and throwing
money at them lead to more discoveries than distributing funds equally?

Again, I only skimmed this paper, but it seems to me that the researchers
didn't look at the data we already have, and instead made up their own models
that don't appear to correspond with reality.

Also, given that this is a Hacker News comment, not a scientific paper, I
can't be bothered to cite anything :D

------
pmoriarty
_" So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution?
"Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say
Pluchino and co._

 _" The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of
lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. "It
is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,"
they say. "And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones."_

This article kind of assumes everyone wants to be rich, or makes that a
primary goal in their life. That's not really the case.

Some people are more career-driven, more ambitious, more interested in making
money. Others have various psychological issues that prevent them from working
effectively or sometimes getting or keeping a job at all. Is that just bad
luck?

I grew up despising money and looking down on people who chased after money. I
didn't want to be that guy. I did reluctantly get work, but I never tried to
climb the corporate ladder, refused offers of promotion to management, took
many years off work and lived off my savings instead, and I've burnt out many
times, my career suffered as a result. Is that just bad luck?

I had a chance to work at Google early on, pre-IPO, but I decided not to. I
worked at a small financial company for a year, was offered a big promotion
and turned it down and quit instead, because I was burnt out and just not
interested in that job. That company wound up becoming one of the largest
financial companies in the world.

Being depressed much of my life, I didn't really care to plan for or save for
my long term future, because I thought I wouldn't have one. This has become a
self-fulfiling prophecy in some sense, though not how I expected. I didn't
think I'd live, but I did live, just not with as much financial security had I
pursued money money more and saved for the long-term.

In many ways I've been lucky. I grew up mostly in safe suburbs when I was
young. I went to some great schools, some of the best in the country, but also
dropped out of those. I'm not ambitious. I get bored easily. I like to follow
my own interests rather do boring work other people tell me to do. I suffer
from depression and just generally don't feel I fit well in this world, but
also consider that I'm not rich (actually close to becoming homeless at this
point) due in large measure to my own choices rather than pure luck.

Now, you could argue that we really have no free will. If that's so, then yes,
where you are could be said to be "just chance". But to the degree we could
make good or bad choices, we bear some responsibility for where we end up,
though clearly luck plays some role, and it's good to be in the right place at
the right time, doing the right thing.

~~~
throwaway13372
Still the comment about citing one unique sample to overthrow a general
assessment from much larger sample size...

You seem to be blindly lucky and do not really appreciate that...

~~~
pmoriarty
My entire point is that you can be lucky (and smart, if I can flatter myself
so) but not rich.

It can take more than intelligence and luck, it could take a desire and a
choice to make money a big priority in your life, which it rarely was for me.

If Bill Gates had said "Fuck Microsoft, I don't want to do this shit anymore"
and quit early on in his career, (which, if he had free will, he could have
done at any point) then he probably wouldn't have wound up the richest person
in the world, no matter how lucky he was.

He chose to do what he did (didn't he?), and that (in large part) was what
made him unimaginably rich.

------
scarejunba
I wonder if this is an artefact of the rules of the sim. There's weak evidence
that supports the sim in that it predicts the current wealth distribution
somewhat, but that doesn't mean the sim represents reality, of course.

The part that sticks out to me is the variation in the talent param. It's
N(0.6, 0.01), so the mean person has a 60% chance of capitalizing on their
luck. I wonder if perhaps that number is actually substantially lower.

Well, just a thought. I found the paper's methods interesting (simulating the
agents and events random-walking until they encountered each other, etc.).

------
tqi
> The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately
> reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world... They then repeat the
> simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome.

I'm not familiar with the process and rigor that goes into a study like this,
but it seems to me that for experiments like this it would be hard to prevent
researchers from adjusting parameters until they get the answer they are
looking for (which multiple runs doesn't really address).

------
gmuslera
While the book is not perfect, reading Outliers from Malcolm Gladwell could
hint on some not so obvious conditions that could make getting rich not so
random.

------
RickJWagner
Um, no.

Visit Bogleheads.org, where many wealthy people hang out and discuss finances.

You'll find that for a great many wealthy people, the secret is simply living
below your means, saving and investing for decades, and keeping costs low.
That's it. Not lucky. Not necessarily smarter. Just disciplined, and having
the basic knowledge of the simple steps described.

------
jumbopapa
I would say there is some lucky with becoming extremely wealthy, but in
general there is a pretty easy formula to becoming wealthy if you're smart.
Invest a decent portion of your income into index funds and live below your
means. On an engineer's salary it isn't hard to become a millionaire by the
age of 40 even with modest savings.

------
Excel_Wizard
IQ and income are correlated fairly strongly. It's obviously not a perfect
correlation.

[https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...](https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-
of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/)

~~~
pmoriarty
IQ might be more accurately termed SQ (Success Quotient), as it might be
measuring the traits that could make one more likely to succeed than
intelligence per se.

------
anm89
This content of this article does not even come close to supporting the
assertion in its title.

The claim it is making is that wealth and intelligence are not correlated
linearly.

Its not even claiming they aren't positively correlated, and the surely are to
some degree, more or less getting into some type of causality as is implied by
the title.

------
tempsy
I guess it depends on the definition of "rich".

We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make
$300k/year. It wouldn't take that much discipline to save 60%-70% as a single
person and have a million saved in a few years time with the right mix of
discipline and investing.

~~~
viklove
> We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can
> make $300k/year.

This is just a lie.

~~~
tempsy
What’s the lie?

------
darawk
> The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest

Huh, interesting hypothesis. Certainly a strong claim. They must have done
some really impressive and thorough work to come to this conclusion.

> a new computer model of wealth creation confirms.

 _Sigh_.

------
danesparza
Because I'm smart _and lazy_. I'm 'rich enough' as it were.

------
klyrs
I'm a mathematician because that's what interests me. My richness is not
measured in dollars. As I age, I grow more concerned for my future, but I
still have no regrets.

~~~
pmoriarty
Lots of financial firms love to hire mathematicians (see Renaissance
Technologies for a famous example). So you could probably secure your
financial future relatively easily if you wanted to.

~~~
klyrs
> ...if you wanted to.

I'm well aware of the option. Sacrifice my happiness for _how many years_ in
the process?

Making money has never been a primary goal of mine. I'm lucky that my
interests are moderately lucrative. I know that "very lucrative" is just
around the corner. But so is the liquor store, and I don't drink.

------
citilife
Perhaps "talent" is the wrong term. I can be talented at hammering nails, that
doesn't mean I'll be super wealthy.

What you need is a talent that earns revenue and the foresight to retain the
net income and increase revenue. "It's all about leverage".

Another approach I have personally done is taking out a $30k loan, invested it
and doubled my money paying back the loan. What does that mean, I started with
zero, and ended up with $30k. I then took my newly made $30k and continued to
invest it (without a loan).

My point being, you aren't rich because you didn't take a "chance". You didn't
increase your net worth.

~~~
gdubs
Plenty of smart people lose money through investments, even conservative ones.
There’s risk in anything, and wherever risk plays a part, so does luck.

------
diminoten
True, but you can't be lucky if you don't roll the dice, and some people roll
the dice more than others.

~~~
zornado
And what guarantees that rolling the dice will always be profitable. Rolling
the dice can bring profits or losses.

~~~
diminoten
Nothing guarantees it, but without risk there is no reward.

------
biolurker1
the article assumes that nobody has orders of magnitude higher skills like
nobody has iq orders of magnitude higher. that's extremely faulty because
someone with an iq of 160 doesn't solve 60% more problems. He solves problems
that others find impossible. Paul Allen and Gates hit iq ceiling

~~~
foogazi
Any the compounding effect of a high IQ over time

It’s not about the problem at hand, but every day has been experienced
differently

------
cryoshon
i find the chance argument very compelling, but there's another factor which
to my knowledge the OP researchers didn't investigate: ethics.

the richest people i know (with wealth in the 10M range) are the most amoral
in their thoughts and actions, and it makes a big difference financially. note
that i said amoral, not immoral; they aren't malicious, they simply don't
care.

they don't refuse a business opportunity because the business would be
explicitly unethical; they do it, and profit from it. the same is true if the
business produces negative externalities. it simply doesn't matter to them
because money is money as far as they care.

they don't craft their investing strategy with the goal of investing in
companies that behave well; they chase the money regardless of the ethical
problems that they may be directly incentivizing.

overall, this gives these people a much greater range of freedom when it comes
to making large volumes of additional money. while i don't know for sure if
being amoral helps people become rich in the first place, i assume that it
does because having more options on the table is never a bad thing.

so, maybe the answer to the question of "if you're so smart, why aren't you
rich" is "i refuse to act unethically to make money".

in my personal experience, i think this argument is pretty good. in 2010 or
so, i realized that there was a then-latent market for TDCS / consumer
nootropic brain stimulation systems, and considered making a company around
producing and selling them to consumers.

however, at the time, i knew that brain stimulation hadn't been proven safe to
use in the long term, and selling it to consumers would require working around
the FDA's rules about medical devices to essentially evade their oversight. in
short, i refused to start a company whose time had come because i knew that
i'd probably be harming people as part of the core business. i would have been
one of the first in the space, and while i don't think i would be rich today
if i had done it, i know that it would have been a chance to get rich and
certainly that there were some people who did get rich. and of course, there
have been plenty of consumers who have been harmed by these products, often in
unidentifiable or subtle ways.

so what's the moral of this story? having morals is expensive, and it
sometimes precludes you from becoming rich even if you're lucky enough to be
at the right time to take action.

~~~
cryptica
From my experience this is definitely true. Also our financial system is
incredibly forgiving when it comes to unethical behavior.

For example, if you take a massive loan and then it doesn't work out, you can
just declare bankrupcy, then you just wait a few years and you can start
again. You can change country, then you get a clean credit history and you can
try again.

You could borrow some money from the bank, bet it all on a coin toss; if you
win, you can retire, if you lose, you just need to wait a few years then try
again. If you do it enough times, it's very likely that you will win and
retire within your lifetime.

The real losers of our society are all the honest, hard working people who are
not prepared to gamble with other people's money. This is what loans are;
loans expand the money supply - So when someone makes a reckless bet and they
go bankrupt, it's as if everyone else was paying for that person.

Then we're surprised why the greediest and most reckless people win...

The system is not fair. Rich people already know this but it doesn't matter
because they are not the ones who keep the engines of capitalism turning. So
long as the majority of people believe that the system is fair, the engine
will keep on running and becoming progressively less fair.

Rich people don't care about what is fair or ethical, they will do anything
and say anything to get more money. Regular people are different. For example,
most regular people would probably vote against a referendum to seize and
nationalize all corporations with a market cap of above $1 billion... Even
though such nationalization would almost certainly benefit them personally.
Rich people, on the other hand, don't need any kind of justification or moral
argument in order to take someone else's money; if they can do it, they will
do it; simple as that. If all regular people had the mindset of rich people,
we would be living in anarchy; there would be no government, only mafias and
we would be killing each other over resources (of which there would be very
little since we'd be spending most of our time and energy scheming and killing
each other instead of creating value).

But the reality is that the rich have managed to create a society in which
most people can be reared, prodded and milked like cattle under an obviously
false pretext that they are the ones creating all the value.

------
finishground
The 80:20 rule described here does _not_ hold in every society. Why would they
even claim that?

------
nazgulnarsil
Tautological for some values of 'most'. Statistical innumerracy.

------
tomp
I was just telling a friend how much I hated this article. So many flaws, of
assumptions, reasoning and ethics.

1\. The article assumes that IQ is "normally distributed" and that there are
no extreme outliers, but how true is this really? First of all, IQ is a
constructed metric that consists of multiple dimensions, and is normalized to
mean 100, std 15. That's means it will be _approximately_ normal, but not
actually. In particular, AFAIK IQ tests can't reliably distinguish between
extremely high IQ scores (140+). So we don't really have reliable data about
the tail of the distribution... what we _do_ have is strong anecdotal evidence
that some people _are_ extreme outliers (in either intelligence or
performance) (Ramanujan, Elon Musk, John von Neumann, Steve Jobs). We also
know from other examples that extreme outliers _are_ possible, even though
they're rare - example is breeding (of plants like corn or animals like
chicken [1]), where just (unnatural) selection can produce phenotypes (from
combinations of existing genes) that are multiple standard deviations above
the original average.

2\. Ok, so we have a model that produces some result. Does that make it a good
model? Not necessarily! The point of Central Limit Theorem is that _all_
models (within certain constraints) produce _the same_ outcome.

Have we tried any alternative models? Basically their model is, Success =
payoff * (a * luck + b * talent) and they argue that _a_ is much bigger than
_b_. But what if _a_ was 0? In the present world, with companies like Google,
Facebook, Amazon - i.e. a "winner-takes-all" scenario - I'd argue that even if
success was completely skill-based, as long as the winners get outsized gains,
you'd still expect 80-20 (or worse) wealth distribution.

3\. Can we improve on it? Does it really make sense for the society to
allocate resources / rewards equally to everyone? Maybe in academia (I'm not
too familiar with that area), but in general, I'd argue _not_. The problem is,
what means _equally_? Ok, so we had Fleming who discovered penicillin _by
chance_. So, we should equally reward _him_ , as well as the 9 _other_
researchers that were also doing research in X and could have also stumbled
upon the same substance, but were unlucky and didn't. But the bigger picture
here is that we discovered _antibiotics_. I'm sure there were uncountable
other lines of research that _didn 't_ yield _any_ useful products or results
or discoveries! (I've no experience with research, but I've read on Gwern that
math discoveries are distributed with geometric (memoryless) distribution,
i.e. more time spent on it _does not_ increase your chances of solving it...
that parallels my experience with math competitions, where you can be _the
smartestest_ of all but if you're approaching the problem along the wrong
direction, there's _no way_ for you to reach the goal.) Also, "same reward for
same effort" sounds like a metric that can be very easily gamed.

So, in general, while I'd argue for more _meritocracy_ and more equal rewards
_for producing results_ (i.e. inventors / workers get more money, not just
investors / owners), I'm fairly biased _against_ rewarding mere effort, and
this article (X) definitely doesn't tilt my bias otherwise.

[1] [https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/big-
chickens.html](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/big-chickens.html)

(X) I think it's definitely possible that the article is much worse than the
study, and that the study actually addresses all of my concerns... Journalism
is mostly sensationalism these days, especially science journalism.

------
jothezero
You can increase your luck outcome simply by trying more.

------
lazyjones
A simplistic "computer model", interesting. But not science.

------
not_a_cop75
It's nice to say it's luck, sure, and make everyone feel like they have a fair
chance. However, I'm pretty certain the ones that obsess and plan the most to
get rich and squeeze every little bit out they can into their plans have the
best chance. Some lazy slob without the same attention to detail and effort
just isn't going to make it.

------
tropo
...and hard work, and social skills, and liking the challenge enough to not
retire early

------
posterboy
Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take
the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society
at large.

Whowhat?

~~~
jerf
I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I
want them.

I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a
million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough
to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But
I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100
million. Or really wish I had about a year later. (In "reality" I might try to
do something where I take it but dump it into causes I approve of really
quickly; for the sake of this argument I'm assuming that I'd have to actually
step into that level of wealth permanently.)

That level of wealth forcibly inserts you into a class of games that I don't
want to have to play.

~~~
katmannthree
It really doesn't force you into anything. You could just throw it into a
savings account at your nearest national bank, lose a bit year over year to
inflation being higher than the current interest rate, and have a whopper of
an emergency fund. That would give you peace of mind if nothing else.

If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not
lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means necessary.

~~~
olcor
I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a
savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class
game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and
immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I
was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did
not have, and a lot of my peers don’t have. If I had a billion dollars I can’t
even imagine the effect it would have on how I think about things.

I feel I have that mentality of valuing the security the money gives me
because I read books like Millionaire Next Door, Intelligent Investor, FIRE
subreddits, etc and come from a family that has similar ideals.But I’m also
aware that a lot of people are very different from that, and are known to end
up playing differently with their money (status symbols, lifestyle upgrades,
etc). Cultural aspects of many societies value the latter more than the
former.

~~~
isoskeles
That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class
games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not
saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game
than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the
preposition "of."

~~~
jerf
This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into
a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult
because are they _friends_ or are they just after some money? Probably the
latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a
very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can
solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that
are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to
accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some
fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to
influence you, or drain your accounts.

Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you
can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very
famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace.

When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people
trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my
increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and
gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the
expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh,
that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard
problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is
a _class_ of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but
they are not all that hard.)

I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of
them.

(As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this
environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a
long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways
throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have
leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with
another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those
connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)

~~~
DoreenMichele
_having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants
a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or
are they just after some money?_

I've never been rich. Most so-called "friends" have wanted something from me
while having little or nothing to offer me in return.

This became crystal clear while I was homeless for years. People continued to
want something for me, continued to act like I deserved nothing in return and
used my poverty as justification for why the things they wanted from me
"weren't worth anything" and shouldn't lead to money.

Wealth just makes it apparent you can't trust people. People tend to be
assholes. It's not like poor people are all surrounded by wonderful, loving,
caring friends who would go to the ends of the Earth for them.

~~~
1000units
This is a good point. However, if you insert yourself among people who all
have a certain level of material comfort to lack material ambition, it is
much, much easier to forge authentic relationships. The prevailing social aim
becomes to experience joy, learn interesting things, and grow as a person. Of
course, this dynamic is still rare. Even when people aren't fighting for
money, there's still an urge to fight for status, which only rarely perfectly
manifests itself in a competition to create beauty. This is partly why
conspicuous consumption is frowned upon by certain factions of the upper
classes. It reveals you're playing the wrong game.

~~~
DoreenMichele
My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. She was a full-
time military wife for a lot of years, as was I.

My life mostly worked when I was a military wife, but a lot of the values I
was raised with only really work if you are in a position that involves a.
Responsibility for a larger community and b. Somehow provides for you so you
can look out for other people.

Looking out for other people is a real skill, but it doesn't automatically
come back to you. Many people feel zero obligation to do anything in return
for you when you do something for them and this seems compounded by being a
woman. "Social contract" seems like an alien concept for far too many people.

I think I could do good things in an urban planning or economic development
type role. That would sort of be the modern equivalent of what European
nobility did.

Historically, merchants had a terrible reputation because they just wanted
money and felt no obligation to the community. So it was socially problematic
for wealth to be controlled by rich merchants rather than nobility. The
nobility were beholden to the lower classes and held responsible for using
their privilege to serve society by filling roles that required a certain
level of privilege and education.

This is why our legal system uses the term "court," which is the same word
used for audiences held by the nobility. Originally, nobility heard and
settled complaints amongst the townspeople "at court."

------
minikites
[https://twitter.com/MichaelJFoody/status/1022521010078273536](https://twitter.com/MichaelJFoody/status/1022521010078273536)

>it says a lot that when confronted with an objectively dumb rich dude like
trump (no working memory, can't apply grammar consistently, childish
vocabulary, shallow concepts) people will choose to believe he's secretly
smart rather than that wealth isn't a result of intellect

~~~
foobar_
All that he is good at is psychological splitting which effectively looks like
divide and rule.

------
aivisol
> For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern.
> Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

True, but can IQ be, say 210? If yes, then standard deviation cannot be
applied here, right? Because for that you would need someone with opposite IQ,
i.e. -10?

> The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work
> more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times
> more hours than anybody else.

Same here. If average work hours is 8 hours per day, and someone works 17
hours, then again, standard deviation cannot be applied? Am I right or making
some error here?

Edit: thanks for clarifications on IQ, I got it, my bad for not doing a
research. The question of working hours stands, however.

~~~
harryh
Every 15 points of IQ is 1 standard deviation from the mean. So 210 is 7.3
standard deviations away from 100.

Just 7 standard deviations away from the mean means that you would expect only
1 in 780 billion from a population.

Given that this is far more than the number of people on Earth: No, no one has
an IQ of 210.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Well, to be fair, it’s only “highly unlikely” that anyone on Earth has an IQ
of 210.

Given that seven sigma deviation should occur one time in 780 billion and that
there are ~7.8b people on Earth today, then there is a ~1% chance of a person
with an IQ of 210 being alive today :)


Communicate Acquires Y Combinator Startup Auctomatic, Unveils New Business Strategy - paulsb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/26/communicate-acquires-y-combinator-startup-auctomatic-unveils-new-business-strategy/

======
gruseom
I am surprised by the disdain for profitable business in the techcrunch
article:

 _I’m not even sure I’ll remember to check in on them. The domain business is
a cash cow but isn’t exactly exciting stuff._

I would have put it the other way around: the business isn't exactly exciting
but it's a cash cow. Except I wouldn't say that at all. A profitable online
business sounds more exciting to me than 90% of what I've seen on techcrunch.

~~~
axod
I think domains like these were important in web1.0 era. But who has ever gone
to business.com. Who cares about it? It sounds old and boring. I'd be
surprised if the number of people going to domains like perfume.com is
increasing... If you look at alexa rank over 5 years it seems to have hit it's
peak a while ago. Same with business.com.

I think techcrunch was simply meaning the domain business is likely a
shrinking market, and not a new and exciting growing market.

Having said that, there's plenty of money to be made. Congrats on the sale :)

~~~
pchristensen
Goodness no! Internet usage is rising, and since browsers are helpful enough
to add "www." and ".com" if you type a word in the address bar, common word
domains like perfume.com, candy.com, etc are extremely valuable because people
find them on their own. Most people aren't that savvy and they don't know the
difference between the search bar, the address bar, or the bajillion toolbars
they have installed.

The supply/demand equation you need to look at is: supply of common english
words is fixed while internet usage is increasing. People aren't looking for
business.com, they think they're _searching_ for business.

~~~
axod
So alexa is wrong?

Wouldn't there be an argument to say that in the past people used to put
'perfume' in their browser address bar, and perfume.com etc,

whereas now most people seem to think google is where you 'put stuff', and so
aren't the google results for 'perfume' more important than the domain
perfume.com?

~~~
rms
>so aren't the google results for 'perfume' more important than the domain
perfume.com?

Yes, but perfume.com is also #2 on google for perfume!

------
paulsb
Congrats. Nice to see the brits doing well.

Found a short interview as well:
[http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/26/communicatecom-buys-e-
comm...](http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/26/communicatecom-buys-e-commerce-
startup-auctomatic-to-relaunch-top-domains/)

~~~
collision
/ Obligatory offence taken at us Irish being lumped in with the British :)

~~~
falsestprophet
Really though paulsb, don't do that.

------
Xichekolas
Not sure if you are allowed to disclose it, but I was curious what share of
the $5 million was cash and what share was stock, and how much (percentage-
wise) did the founders themselves end up with?

~~~
bosshog
2 million cash

3 million stock

Not sure about the founder split

------
andreyf
Congrats :) Slick idea... I remember pg saying he considers EBay ready for a
startup competitor, but this seems a better strategy, even though it doesn't
solve all problems.

~~~
marcus
True, it doesn't solve all the problems, but taking on EBay one vertical at a
time using a great domain for each field might be a very powerful strategy.

EBays greatest moat is the sheer number of sellers and buyers it has, instead
of trying to fight the entire EBay network, you take them on one vertical at a
time. And maybe later after you've captured enough verticals try to
consolidate all the vertical sites into a single property.

------
iamelgringo
Woot! Congrats, guys.

I had a hunch you'd do well. It's a field ripe for the picking. Ebay has a lot
of customers, and their interface leaves a little to be desired, and their API
really looks pretty decent. Good job.

------
Prrometheus
I like the new business plan – put shopping sites on great domain names. It
isn’t exciting but it sounds profitable.

Congrats on the buyout! I hope you all made a bundle.

~~~
wanorris
I apologize if I'm putting a damper on the congratulations, but it sounds
exactly backwards: it seems like the reason to start a shopping site in a
vertical should be because you have insight or value-add _in that vertical_ ,
not because you own a domain name.

~~~
pchristensen
A good domain = lots of free traffic. No marketing, spending on adsense, etc
required. It is a very valuable asset.

~~~
wanorris
No question. But ultimately the underlying value of the service is what
determines whether it matters or not.

If you wanted to win a significant share of the search engine market, which
would help you more, owning search.com, or designing a search engine that was
actually better than Google in a way that users can perceive?

~~~
sharpshoot
No - ecommerce is about connecting buyers with sellers. The domains capture
the intent, auctomatic provides the inventory to take advantage of that
intent.

Powersellers used to be tied to eBay, now they can connect to huge vertical
audiences that are tied to their intent to purchase hence increasing their
sales. Makes a LOT of sense this.

------
SwellJoe
Gonna miss seeing the guys at events here in the valley, but good for them.
I'm surprised it took this long for someone to snap them up.

~~~
Harj
we'll still be around, we're going to be splitting our time betweeen the
valley and vacouver rather than moving there permanently.

we structured the deal in a way that keeps our US visas intact exactly for
that purpose.

------
byrneseyeview
Here's a rather poor writeup of communicate.com's stock:
[http://blog.valueinvestingcongress.com/2008/01/04/a-diamond-...](http://blog.valueinvestingcongress.com/2008/01/04/a-diamond-
in-the-rough/)

------
simianstyle
I met the founders at eBay live, congratulations on a job well done :)

------
whacked_new
I suppose this means the Auctomatics aren't aiming for eBay anymore?
Acquisition is nice, but repositioning for domain trade isn't that slick of a
score for the hackers.

~~~
Harj
i should think we'll spend more of our time building than trading

~~~
wumi
so who does the hacking?

------
prakash
Many congrats guys!!

------
abstractbill
Congrats guys, that's awesome news!

------
hooande
Congrats guys

------
jamescoops
big props and well deserved

------
pius
Nice exit!

------
brianmckenzie
Way to go!

------
tonyvt2005
congrats! great idea...

------
utnick
congrats guys

------
andr
kudos!

------
ideas101
congrats - another payday for pg & company.

~~~
Prrometheus
It’s small ($300,000 - $500,000 for YCombinator, pre-tax, I’m estimating), but
it’s nice to see that YCombinator is self-funding.


Investigating a malware sample which sometimes fails to behave maliciously - Jerry2
https://sentinelone.com/blogs/anti-vm-tricks/
======
nighthawk454
> _evades detection simply by counting the number of documents – or the lack
> thereof – that reside on a PC and not executing if a certain number are not
> present._

This is so simple, it's a one line trick:

        Public Function DKTxHE() As Boolean
            DKTxHE = RecentFiles.Count < 3
        End Function

> _the typical lack of documents in a ... test environment make it easy ...
> for malware authors to fly under the radar_

Dev environment is dissimilar to prod --> works in dev but not prod. Surprise,
surprise.

Original blog: [https://sentinelone.com/blogs/anti-vm-
tricks/](https://sentinelone.com/blogs/anti-vm-tricks/)

~~~
13of40
The funny thing about these is that the obfuscator leaves a billion clues that
can tip you off that the macro is malicious, without even having to run it.
Any human being can tell you that DKTxHE is a bogus name for a function, so
the only trick is to implement that detection in code...

~~~
jstanley
> the only trick is to implement that detection in code

String entropy scoring works surprisingly well for problems like this: build a
corpus of function names (scrape it from github?), generate a markov model,
see how probable the candidate function name is according to the markov model.

~~~
Senji
Then I'll just run a prettifyer with the same sample data and name functions
in my malicious macros from that.

~~~
jstanley
Like a lot of things, it's an arms race. For the most part people aren't doing
that yet because it's easier, and almost as effective, to just generate them
at random.

------
Animats
Malware which simply doesn't do anything for the first few weeks, or even
hours, is hard to detect by running it in a VM box. Some "advanced persistent
threats" are like that.

~~~
meowface
This has become really common. Most modern malware sandboxes attempt to
greatly accelerate the system clock to account for this, in addition to trying
to detect and intercept long sleep (or equivalent) calls.

Like most long cat-and-mouse games, modern malware families all use a
combination of many different tricks and anti-sandbox/analysis techniques. The
sandboxes play whack-a-mole at the same rate as malware keeps adding more
moles.

~~~
Tinyyy
If the malware attempts a CPU test that maxes out the host CPU, will it be
obvious that the system clock is sped up?

~~~
cnvogel
So… only speedup the clock while the software under test is sleeping (waiting
on a muted, timer,…) . Stealthy software shouldnt have excessive cpu
consumption, otherwise people will investigate.

It's obviously a cat & mouse game.

------
userbinator
This reminds me of some software which would refuse to run if it detected you
had a debugger like SoftICE installed, the irony being that those who do would
also be the most likely to know how to defeat those checks. (See also:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-
read.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html) )

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Similarly, there were a few PlayStation games that would refuse to run if the
console had a modchip, which was a pretty big footbullet when you consider
that only licensed discs were likely to retain this check, meaning that it
mostly stopped people who obtained the game legally.

------
dpitkin
Sounds exactly like what VW did for emission testing, score another one for
the bad guys.

------
lucb1e
> If no [other, existing documents] are found [on the system], the [code]
> terminates

I almost missed it while scanning the article. This is what the headline
mentions. Interesting yes, but "novel"? I'm not sure.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
> Interesting yes, but "novel"? I'm not sure.

It's not. And I don't know anything about SentinelOne so maybe they're
amazing, but being stymied by dynamic analysis of VBScript malware seems, um,
odd.

------
homero
How do the researchers detect anything when I assume every virus has Anti-VM
or anti-sandbox checks

~~~
userbinator
By taking anti-anti-VM and anti-anti-sandbox measures, obviously ;-)

A stock VM is extremely easy to detect because most VM software today doesn't
even try to make it look like a physical machine (e.g. would a physical
machine have hardware named "VMware virtual SVGA"?), but there are certainly
patches you can do to change this, often at the cost of performance. (The
80-20 rule applies: the majority of software won't notice the difference and
making the VM "perfect" to cater to the rest becomes increasingly difficult.)
And a sandbox lets you control to varying degress of precision the exact
environment an application sees.

Besides, these researchers presumably know reverse-engineering. They can just
inspect the malware for such checks and force them to go the way they want.

~~~
ago
It would be really nice to have physical hardware that identifies the same as
the VMware / VirtualBox hardware.

~~~
aurelianito
It is even easier to just do your work on a VM. If malware actually does not
work on a VM you are instantaneously protected.

------
dzhiurgis
The solution is quite lovely - uninstall MS Office /s

~~~
tluyben2
People will often say: yeah but business! I work with very large corps and
never needed MS office. I use Ubuntu mostly. The only occassios I need
proprietary software is when working with some proprietary hardware but I
usually can get it working under Linux with some effort.

~~~
VoidWhisperer
What do you usually use for document editing then, out of curiosity? Google
docs? Libreoffice?

~~~
tluyben2
Google docs, Libreoffice and, VIM. I usually type everything in vim first; I
use Ubuntu with I3 on second hand X220. With xterm + vim (and other terminal
apps), I have 18 hours battery life. When a browser or Libre kicks in, the
battery drops to < 7 immediately. But after that I copy it to docs or Libre
and add images, styling etc. Then I usually export to PDF and send. But as doc
works fine. When I get documents from others, Libre office works fine. Never
had issues so far (and it's been quite a few years).

------
mbreedlove
This sounds like Luckystrike.

[http://www.shellntel.com/blog/2016/9/13/luckystrike-a-
databa...](http://www.shellntel.com/blog/2016/9/13/luckystrike-a-database-
backed-evil-macro-generator)

------
chris_wot
Seriously, the amount of malware that is missed by virus scanners is getting
ridiculous. If you run MalwareBytes it seems to catch a lot of stuff that
Symantec and McAfee misses entirely.

~~~
dingo_bat
Considering McAfee goes berserk with the CPU and disk regularly, I'm surprised
that it is still unable to do the job properly.

------
C3Ne0
Would anyone here be interested in a Q&A with the author of this article? I
may or may not be able to hook that up if there's enough interest.

------
anonymousDan
Why bother opening 3 word documents when you could modify the predicate to
only terminate the program if less than 0?

~~~
oakwhiz
Malware might be designed to run a kind of self-test to see if it's been
tampered with, in order to A) prevent detection and reverse-engineering and B)
discourage code reuse by other malware writers

------
tshtf
Original link, rather than threatpost blogspam:
[https://sentinelone.com/blogs/anti-vm-
tricks/](https://sentinelone.com/blogs/anti-vm-tricks/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. We've changed the URL to that from [https://threatpost.com/malware-
evades-detection-with-novel-t...](https://threatpost.com/malware-evades-
detection-with-novel-technique/120787/), and the title to a representative
phrase from the article.

Submitters: HN prefers original sources. This is in the site guidelines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).

------
Retr0spectrum
This is such a clickbaity title, and it's absolutely nothing new.

It seems that the only new thing according to the article is that "less
sophisticated" malware is using a "more sophisticated" technique.

~~~
ipsin
Seconded. The headline calls it a "novel technique" and then the article goes
on to explain how no part of it is actually novel.

------
northisup
We do clickbait now?

------
PeekPoke
Old news. Lastline has been beating this evasion technique for a while now.


Sylicon Valley's Criticism of Donald Trump - mastazi
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21716020-tech-firms-are-last-departing-their-see-no-evil-stance-society-and-politics?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/schumpetersiliconvalleyscriticismofdonaldtrump
======
patja
Can we get a spelling correction for the word silicon on the title?

~~~
mastazi
Yes, I'm very sorry for the spelling mistake. I don't seem to have the
necessary permission level to change the title.


John Carmack's BAFTA Introduction, Speech and Interview [video] - nailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjJrF2gJ34
======
db1
Really inspiring. I really loved his comment about how there are always new
opportunities and new waves for people to ride. This is something I've always
personally struggled with, the feeling that everything has already been done
and that I've missed the boat.

I guess a lot of these things are only obvious in hindsight. People are
exploring all sorts of ideas right now, but it won't be obvious which ones are
the winners and the losers until 10 years from now.

~~~
jacobolus
Depending how far down the ladder you go, some ideas take longer than that.

For example, geometric algebra, invented by Hermann Grassmann more than 150
years ago, is the biggest “new” idea in mathematical modeling of geometry, and
it’ll probably take another 50 years more to percolate down throughout math
education and physics and engineering practice.

~~~
9erdelta
Do you have any interesting reads about geometric algebra being the "new"
thing?

~~~
theoh
Not the parent poster, but I have some experience of geometric algebra being
promoted as a superior language for geometric computing. This started for me
in the first year of university with a tutor who was keen to introduce
bivectors (a GA concept) though officially they weren't on the syllabus.
(Bivectors can represent 3D angular momentum in a slightly more useful way
than straight vectors.) David Hestenes was presented as a bit of a hero, the
pioneer of GA for physics. It didn't stick for me.

At Siggraph 2001 there were for the first time a couple of "GA for computer
graphics" presentations given by Leo Dorst and Steve Mann. They were promoting
GA as "the way" for doing geometric computations on computer. Dorst is an
interesting and pleasant speaker and the apparent brashness of the "one true
framework for geometric computing" claim didn't really colour his delivery of
the presentation. Again, for me it just didn't stick, though the idea of a
breakthrough in the design of geometric mathematics, with strong historical
roots in the 19th C, was appealing.

Since then the GA bandwagon has rolled gently on but I haven't seen any killer
apps produced so far.

[http://www.geometricalgebra.net/](http://www.geometricalgebra.net/)
[http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/GABLE/SIGGRAPH01/](http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/GABLE/SIGGRAPH01/)

------
9erdelta
"...I'm just getting started..."

What a hero! Very excited to see the innovations coming out of VR/AR over the
next few years.

~~~
hanief
Right? His speech is really good. Not a lot of engineer (or people, as the
matter of fact) can give a speech that fluently.

~~~
anton_gogolev
Not to diminish Carmack's significance and genius, but, from waht I can tell
from the first minutes of the interview, he knew he was going to be awarded,
so je had plenty of time to prepare and rehearse his -- very inspiring, I
should say -- speech.

~~~
masklinn
For something like a decade (2004~2005 until 2013), Carmack gave a fluent
hours-long speech/discussion/brain-dump at QuakeCon. I doubt a few minutes's
speech is something he needs "plenty of time to prepare and rehearse" for at
this point.

Recent examples:

2h50 2013 QuakeCon keynote
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M)

2h20 2014 SMU talk
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_oTvUl88hs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_oTvUl88hs)

1h30 2014 Oculus Connect keynote
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqzpAbK9qFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqzpAbK9qFk)

~~~
bojo
His 2013 keynote where he touched on functional programming is what inspired
me to attempt learning and writing a game server in Haskell.

------
nailer
Intro is OK but most people on HN will be aware of its contents:

Speech starts at 4:10, interview at 7:20

------
louthy
John Carmack is such an inspiration. It was his early blog that taught me the
techniques for raycast engines. I was working at an educational software
company in my home town, we were doing a 2D educational game for Famous Five
on a Treasure Island. I convinced my boss to allow me to make the bit where
they go into a dungeon to be 3D, and I wrote a raycast engine for it. Not long
after that, I used it to get my first job in the London games industry as a
Playstation 1 lead programmer!

His willingness to share what he's learned must have given many programmers a
boost, as it did with me. Well deserved.

------
russtrotter
I'd encourage anyone in the twittersphere to follow @ID_AA_Carmack. His
musings there waste few words and he often tosses questions out there that
will get you thinking.

Congrats to him on the BAFTA, but yes, he really is just getting started. I
hope to see the fruits of his current labors but I'm not sure if I'm cut out
for the VR tech as I'll most likely just puke on my shoes :-(


TechCrunch Author Colleen Taylor Joining YC as Editorial Director - minimaxir
https://twitter.com/loyalelectron/status/609473968198660096
======
minimaxir
This follows fellow TC alum Susan Hobbs moving to YC:
[http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/19/shining-like-the-
brightest-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/19/shining-like-the-brightest-
stars-a-transmission-on-the-midnight-radio/)


Black Swan Events - simonpure
https://danco.substack.com/p/black-swan-events?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0MTM5Nzg1LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozMzY2MDgsIl8iOiI5R21UeiIsImlhdCI6MTU4NTQ5MjA2NCwiZXhwIjoxNTg1NDk1NjY0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItODYyMyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.RMd2JQv4ETeqg-LZ_LIppo6gfZY-NIpkSvukYVYbO_Q
======
zenlot
N.N. Taleb repeated many times already that COVID-19 is not a Black Swan
event. Author of the article is just a con artist. This should be flagged.

~~~
pixl97
The author of this article did not say that COVID-19 was a BSE. They stated
the jobless claims were.

~~~
zenlot
You're missing the point.

------
alpineidyll3
The only thing worse than Taleb is dollar store imitation Taleb.

Get this armchair stats newsletter ad off the frontpage plz.

~~~
yawboakye
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article because I had a sense it will be a
rehash of Dr. Taleb's work. That said I'm interested in your criticism of the
man (or his work instead?). I've read Taleb's volume and found them
convincing. They're well argued and pull from several sources (history being a
big part, which appeals to me a lot as a history buff). Antifragile is up
there with the best book I read and has merited a yearly re-read.

~~~
alpineidyll3
Taleb has made a career out of popularizing common financial statistics with
historical flavor. He usually presents himself as a polymath/oracle in this
writing although he has never developed any interesting ideas in the area. His
work is mostly a pop-sci rehash of non-gaussian wikipedia stats formatted in
Mathematica with a helping of cringey memes. For an especially embarrassing
example see
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488). All of
this serves the purpose of juicing Universa, a fund which charges a generous
incentive fee for holding a rolling SPX put, something which I think a dog
could do.

Since people don't read books much anymore he picks fights with people on
twitter to raise his profile. He targets people who he thinks are likely to
engage him (Nate Silver, Elon Musk etc), although most are too smart to take
the bait. He fancies himself a powerlifter although he has physique of Homer
Simpson. The man is generally a sad caricature of someone who traded
volatility once. I personally mathematically model volatility for a living,
and although I wouldn't pretend to have done as much as Bergomi I still feel I
have the right to find Taleb grotesque.

I agree that a mathematical history of non-Gaussian mathematics would be a
fascinating thing, especially the recent past. I also would agree that just
following links from "alpha Levy-stable" might not be as digestible as Taleb.
But his pretensions and self-importance, in the face of completely superficial
understanding and achievement, is gross. If history records his name and not
Gatheral's it would be a crime.


What 1970s to 1980s home computers had their graphics chars added to Unicode 13? - JdeBP
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/14099/1932
======
JdeBP
See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544798)
.


Britain Pledges to Ban New Diesel and Gas Cars by 2040 - kimsk112
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/world/europe/uk-diesel-petrol-emissions.html
======
nthcolumn
All they have done is made an announcement. Convolutedly, this is more about:
the now lame-duck prime minister who asked the people for a stronger mandate
to negotiate the best out of the Brexit disaster but went down like a bag of
sick with the electorate thereby weakening the government's position even
further to 'laughing-stock in Europe' status. Who then showed utter contempt
and a complete lack of integrity by trying to delay the inevitable, cling to
power and refusing to do the honorable thing and resign, in doing so creating
even more uncertainty for a repulsive, back-stabbing cabinet member to jockey
for position during the recess and a gutless party desperately sucking up to
the Greens and their ilk for support in a minority government and trying to
divert attention from the stories of historical incompetence emanating daily
from the press.

It also ironically falls in line with other EU states recent announcements. So
old-, non-, fake- whatever you want to call it news.

~~~
dang
> _All they have done is made an announcement._

Yes. We added "pledges" above.

------
piyush_soni
Recently, Indian government led by PM Modi declared their plan to sell only
electric cars by 2030 as well [0]. Both are great examples of how technology
is trying to fix technology's side effects.

[0] : [http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/03/technology/future/india-
elec...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/03/technology/future/india-electric-
cars/index.html)

~~~
iamshs
And undoing with two horrible policies:-

1\. Creating a taxpayer funded Uber competitor, all to break up a monopoly.
Looks like they don't know concept of a regulator.
[https://qz.com/1037837/indias-uber-ola-cab-wars-could-
have-a...](https://qz.com/1037837/indias-uber-ola-cab-wars-could-have-a-new-
player-the-modi-government/)

2\. Banning self driving cars, because India needs jobs.

~~~
piyush_soni
While I find the ban on self driving cars absurd (and something I hope they'll
take back when self driving cars become more common), I don't find anything
wrong with a government created competitor of Uber and Ola. Why not, if it
eventually benefits the consumers? Also, regulation doesn't increase
government's revenues. I don't think the idea is bad by itself, it all depends
on the implementation now.

~~~
jsudhams
Seriously? Like they run all the existing services. What we want less
government involvement not more.

~~~
iamshs
India has glorious public money burning corporations like Air India, BSNL,
DoorDarshan, HMT why not add one more?

~~~
dingo_bat
Air India is going to be sold off soon. HMT is still alive? Does it just exist
as an accounting exercise, because I don't see any HMT products.

------
boyce
It's mad that we're in this situation, with a government so paralysed and
impotent that kicking the can down the road like this is being touted as an
achievement.

~~~
tonylemesmer
The only justification I can think of for putting it off until 2040 is
improvements to the national grid. The grid would fail faster than enough
capacity could be brought online. Annoyingly the UK government cancelled solar
panel installation subsidies which could have perhaps mitigated this somewhat
(along with some energy storage solutions).

It is a tragedy that pollution levels will increase between now and then
through a deliberate government policy. 23 years is a ridiculously long way
off. The Dutch pushing for a ban by 2025 (8 years!).

------
mavhc
Today my 14 solar panels generate enough electricity to make my car go 12000
miles per year. It's not really going to be an issue by 2030 at the latest

~~~
itchy_eyelids
It's all about the batteries and always has been. Hydrogen is ultimately the
only thing that makes sense in the super-long term as a complete and total
solution, providing the necessary energy density (given current knowledge),
but something like lithium batteries might very well be a long-term stepping
stone until then. We are pretty much already there. We just need a few
megafactories to pump out those batteries on the cheap.

~~~
mtgx
And we'll have them. By 2025 global Li-Ion battery capacity should increase by
about 10x. That should lower prices by at least 4x, which should make EVs very
competitive on an _upfront_ cost with gas-powered cars, and a no-brainer when
you take into account maintenance and gas costs, too.

EDIT: I'm also hoping that by 2025, the 100kWh battery capacity will be
standard in pretty much all $15,000+ EVs. The reason I'm hoping and I'm not so
sure it will happen is because Tesla itself has signaled that it's not in a
hurry to pass the 100kWh battery capacity mark even with the more expensive
Model S for now.

My guess is it said that because it wants to put that extra money into buying
more expensive self-driving equipment. Similarly, on the Model 3 it has
already installed the self-driving hardware, even if the customer doesn't want
to use it, so Tesla probably doesn't want to further expand those costs with
larger capacity batteries for now.

I'm not a fan of this plan because for one, I think self-driving cars will be
in "beta" for a lot longer than expected anyway, and two, it will
unnecessarily slow down the EV revolution by compromising on battery capacity
to include expensive self-driving equipment.

This wouldn't be a problem if it merely affected Tesla. Unfortunately, so far
most of the other car makers have tended to "wait for permission" from Tesla
before pushing the limits of their own EVs.

They kept "one-upping" (laughably so) each other for years with an extra 5
mile range from a bottom of 70 mile range on their EVs, until Tesla said Model
3 would have over 200 miles. Even now there are a bunch of cars planned for
2018 with only 30-40 kWh batteries and about 120 mile real world range.

I'm still optimistic for now, and I hope that now that most car maker have
actually started taking EVs more seriously (we won't see the effects of that
until 2021+ though), there will be a "megapixel-race" of sorts, but for
battery capacity in the not too distant future. I want the EV makers to "go
crazy" with 200kWh batteries, 300kWh, 400kWh, etc. Let the _market_ decide
what is the optimum battery size for passenger cars, for trucks, for semis,
and so on.

------
SamReidHughes
I'm real confused how an elected government in 2017 can deign to make policy
promises on behalf of one in 2040.

~~~
timthorn
A UK parliament can't bind future parliaments. However, long term policies can
be set - it's then up to governments in future to change the policy if they
see fit.

I can certainly see the deadline slipping if pragmatic concerns dictate, but I
doubt the policy will change in substance.

~~~
andygates
The "bad example" in this case would be the Fuel Duty Escalator, a policy to
ratchet up fuel tax year-by-year in order to fund sustainable transport and
simultaneously make inefficient vehicles unattractive. The government bottled
just as it was starting to bite.

Arguably, it was ahead of its time - as opposed to this announcement, which is
almost tardy - but it's a sad truth that one of the "pragmatic concerns" is
whether or not it'll annoy the sitting party's voting base.

------
3pt14159
Efforts like these just confuse me. At first I thought It would be _any_ cars
on the road by 2040, in which case this is enough notice, since the warning
gives consumers enough time to plan (22 years). But outside of a few strange
edge cases like specialised cars, what's the point of banning them by 2040?

Electric cars are going to dominate sales within 10 years. At scale, they are
cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, have an acceptably high top speed
(anything over 160km/h isn't really needed and Telsas can go 250km/h), a
better acceleration curve, they are better for human health (no particulates),
they are better for the natural environment (no oil spills), they are better
to fight global warming.

The only thing that they are worse at is fuel up time and range. And if either
of those problems are solved, both of them effectively are, since fast fuel up
gets us a longer effective range and extremely long range (say 2000km) makes
fill up time irrelevant.

The writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are going to be completely replaced
very quickly. By taking aggressive steps to ban non-electric vehicles sooner
both the environment AND our economy will be better off since we'll gain an
advantage in the new industries.

In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. It's like building
a whale blubber processing plant after the early commercialisation of crude
oil.

~~~
djhworld
> what's the point of banning them by 2040?

It sets a deadline. Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, but I
think the UK government had to say something otherwise they'd be contravening
agreements made in the past.

Like you said, within 10 years electric cars sales will probably become the
norm anyway, but I guess from a policy perspective it's signalling to
manufacturers and the general public that they have 22 years to make the
shift.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> Future parliaments can change it as they see fit,

And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current
administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just
change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while
pretending to make policy" kind.

------
patrickg_zill
It's good I guess, to state a goal and start working on it.

However, up until 2039, any legislative session can modify, change, even
repeal such a goal, is that correct?

~~~
k-mcgrady
Yes but there's no legitimate party in the UK against environmental policies
like this (some other parties might make the deadline sooner but that's as
much change as there would be).

------
yitchelle
The resource industry will experience a big change if this becomes reality.
The oil industry will have to shift some of their focus on other non-
automotive markets. The electrical energy suppliers will have to step up and
take up the gap and reap the profits.

~~~
rtpg
legit Q: is there a place in the world where we could go and basically burn as
much oil as we want? A place where the effects of greenhouse gases wouldn't be
much of an issue?

Or would it just spread everywhere?

~~~
dp-tyvek
The moon

Any gas released into Earth's atmosphere would diffuse quite quickly.

~~~
yitchelle
You mean the Moon's atmosphere, right?

~~~
dp-tyvek
The moon has ~no atmosphere, so any gas released there would diffuse into
space.

What I was trying to say is, because any gas will diffuse from an area of high
concentration to one with a lower concentration, there is no place in Earth's
atmosphere one can release gas without it diffusing throughout it. The best
you can do is slow the process down.

------
itchy_eyelids
Everyone remember when Japan and Germany said they were done with nuclear
power and gave "hard" dates for retirements?

It's easy to make declarations for things way out in the future.

The hard work of paving that road head awaits. Politicians don't like hard
work. They will be absent during the process, nowhere to be found, should it
ever be paved, until the very end, golden shovel and oversized scissors in
hand.

------
tempodox
This is nothing more than a desperate headline grab. Who would even want to
build gasoline or diesel cars in 2040?

------
mFixman
I am sceptical. Are there any examples of successful government policy planned
23 years in advance?

~~~
grecy
Oh yeah, have a look at Japan.

Their world-class airport built on an island? they planned and "built" that
island for decades.

Bullet trains? They planned and designed and built those things for decades.

There are a ton more examples.

------
bcoates
Britain commits to power cars with its overwhelmingly fossil fuel based
electrical grid and/or its even more fossil fuel heavy electricity imports by
2040.

(kidding, they'll just keep using petroleum.)

edit: apparently I can't read graphs, it's mostly natural gas not mostly coal.
The "renewables" slice seems to be a bit heavy on not-exactly-green "biofuel"
though...

~~~
timthorn
> mostly coal

Coal hasn't been in the majority for some years, and indeed there have been
days this year where no coal powered generation powered the grid.

[https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-
updates/infographi...](https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-
updates/infographic-promoting-sustainable-energy-future)