Most basic research, whether in natural sciences, mathematics or the humanities.

The equation 'large-scale government endeavour = bad' is so simplistic, it is painful to hear otherwise smart people repeat it over and over. The real world is way to complex for this kind of black-and-white armchair economics.

(I'll concede that it depends on what you want to measure, but it's hard to argue that cheap trucking has only been a negative)

Or how the "stimulus" produced a counter-reaction that's got the establishment utterly terrified, and using the full force of the state to repress. Which doesn't tend to end well, per Pareto "history is a graveyard of aristocracies".

As an example, the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem started from the confluence of government programs, such as one where private investor dollars were matched by government dollars to create the very first valley VCs. I don't think anybody inside or outside of the government, projected the immensity of the impact of those programs.

Or y'know... about 90% of the stuff that spun out from NASA.

Anyway... I get it: you're a closed-minded ideologue and you weren't REALLY asking a question, you were just being snarky. So I'll stop pretending that I respect you now. And I'll stop pretending that we're having a conversation.

What's the NASA spinoff you allude to? I expect it's, again, what had been promised. Part of the plan was to bring about technological innovations. The development of velcro, or things like it, was part of the plan.

What I actually asked for is any example of what you claimed to be a certainty: a large, complex government program having unintended positive results.

I wasn't being snarky, I was trying to demonstrate that the record here is nearly, if not entirely, on the downside. History shows us governmental programs failing in a myriad of ways, but this isn't balanced on the upside. I honestly can't think of a counterexample within my parameters (large size and complexity, and having unintended positive results).

EDIT: A better way to state my question occurred to me. What I'm looking for is not quantitatively unexpected results, but qualitatively unexpected results, because I think that's what is implied in the above back-and-forth about these qualitatively unintended bad results versus a certainty of unintended good results.

You're pretending that if something good happens after a government action it was all intentional and thus there were never any unintended positive impacts of anything, ever. Because government is full of far-sighted individuals who totally grokked that ARPAnet would eventually be used for every conceivable form of communication, entertainment, and commerce.

The world is complex. Governmental programs aren't all good or all bad. Reality isn't compatible with your small-minded ideology. Deal with it.

I'll admit that I'm walking a dangerous line with the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. I stand by my judgment of the examples cited, but agree there is some room for debate.

I think the NASA example fails not because I'm being too narrow, but because the initial stated objectives were so fuzzy and broad. More importantly, these stated objectives were probably just secondary, a rationalization to enable the true objective - the nationalistic desire to win the "space race" against the Soviets. JFK, who initially got the whole ball rolling, actually wanted nothing to do with space exploration. His backing of it was really just a political ploy. (of course, in pointing this out, I'm making your point to a certain degree: JFK set out to score political points, and in the end he wound up bringing us velcro and ICBMs - yes, I'm being snarky there)

That said, you've also given me the best reply to my question: ARPAnet. While it wasn't large at the time, it was certainly complex (beyond my ability to understand all of its technology, anyway). And since it was developed for defense purposes, the end positive consequences are in a whole different ballpark than what was originally planned.

Anyway, what really drives my questioning here is a Megan McArdle post from yesterday [1] about a political science class at John Hopkins about policy failures. She quotes the prof. as talking about opening minds to critical thinking about the endless ways in which the best-laid plans can go awry.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-04/learning-from-iraq-...

As I read it, it was part of the fight for the hearts and minds of the 3rd world, the "Western" 1st World's approach to things vs. the Communist's 2nd World approach. Eisenhower let the Soviets orbit the first satellite to de facto establish his Open Skies policy, which the Soviets were mightily objecting to (the principle that outer space overflights were beyond territorial claims like those for airspace) ... but that the usual internal infighting led to our being visibly behind the Soviets in the most visible form of high technology. Which severely weakened our sales proposition to the 3rd World....

One explicit objective that developed, especially after LBJ took over, was uplifting the South with high tech. The opportunity of spending an extra billion in Texas is why we didn't build any infrastructure in space....

Actors within government are generally aware that their actions have some negative consequences. They have a lot of smart people who tell them about problems that can (and will) occur, along with some likelihoods of the magnitude and frequencies of those problems. So under your classification scheme, there really aren't many unintended downsides of governmental action.

You seem to be conflating the public marketing of a policy (it will be sunshine and rainbows) with the internal understanding of a policy (it will solve a few problems, create a few different problems, and hopefully net positive).

Yes. I'm doing that consciously, because I think it's appropriate. The very nature of the question is that when it's presented to the public, only the public marketing is on display. At the time we're debating a policy, we can guess at the internal agenda but we never really know for sure until later (if at all).

So if we're trying to learn from history and apply it to today's policy debate, of what use is a history that separates the hidden agenda - a factor that we are unable to know and make use of at the time the decision is being made?

It's true that I'm not impartial here, but there's every indication that you're not either, yet you're trying to pin it all on me.

Of course problems and potential failure modes were debated; that was part of the public marketing. But there clearly was a hidden agenda that we still don't know. Why else would they have worked so hard to pass something overnight -- as if it were an emergency -- and including language making it so far from what anyone wanted and containing provisions contradicting what had been promised (and with every indication that (at the outset, anyway) those promises were sincere?

But where in the debate do you see any discourse about the hidden agendas of either side? How in the world can we include this in today's discussion when even now it can only be speculation? And how can I be intellectually dishonest with it, then, if we can't know what it is?

Sidebar: The debate we had included raging dishonesty on both sides. On the pro side we had misdirection about the problems the bill was putatively intended to solve (preexisting conditions were already significantly addressed by HIPAA; uninsured could already get catastrophic care at hospitals, financed by the government) and funding (expenditure estimates were cooked by showing a runtime starting years before actual outlays began, in order to minimize the deficit impact). On the anti side we had hyperbole about "death panels" and about the government taking over the industry, etc.

I acknowledged that there was room for debate, yet you offered none. I explained why I thought that I was on the correct side of the line (because the NASA case had objectives too fuzzy to judge), despite it being a close call.

I also acknowledged that a further example you gave (ARPAnet) was, in fact, a pretty good response to my initial question. You didn't pursue this point, yet I think it demonstrates that I'm not dishonestly throwing out all counterarguments.

You accuse me of "purposefully conflating completely different arguments to try to score cheap political points." Yet in my remarks about JFK and the space race, which in the sequence of the conversation seems to be what you're referring to, I was quite explicit in admitting "in pointing this out, I'm making your point to a certain degree".

I don't believe that your claim that I'm moving the goalpost has merit. I was pretty explicit in that I was looking for positive results that were qualitatively unexpected. The examples cited to me (with the exception of ARPAnet) were positive ones, but they were quantitatively unexpected. Saying "that worked better than we thought" is very different from saying "that had benefits that we didn't foresee".

Turning this around, now, and looking back on your own claims... your initial statement was "One other thing we can be very sure about this law: there's going to be a bunch of 'unintended consequences'", i.e., with certainty there will be positive consequences that weren't intended. Based on the context (that we're discussing employment effects of a sort that I don't recall ever seeing discussed in the PPACA debating), and the connotations of the word "intended" (as contrasted to the word "expected"; to me, the latter might have referred to quantitative differences but this doesn't work so well for the former), I interpret this to mean that there is a certainty of positive consequences that were qualitatively unintended.

You were intellectually dishonest.

It seems to me that -- as you're accusing me -- you're making brash and unfounded ideological pronouncements. That's what I intended to challenge, because it sounds preposterous to me. If the outcome you promise is certain, then there must be such a laundry list of them from past endeavors that you'll be able to rattle off a list in no time. I couldn't think of a single one (although, as noted above, ARPAnet is one example). So I challenged for examples.

And only one of the examples met the conditions that I believe were implied by your original statement (or how I interpreted it, anyway), that is, positive qualitatively unintended consequences to a large, complex governmental program.

You may disagree with me, but I think the fact that we've only come up with a single example (in between the name-calling) pretty well shows that such outcomes are far from a certainty.

You lose this bet. There are quite a few Kindle books like this: http://cl.ly/image/2t2m2V3Y0513 that won't play on basic Kindle devices. I discovered this when I tried to read one of my books on my gen 1 Kindle.

There are also some unexpected restrictions on some titles, such as books that are viewable only on 1 or 2 of your devices, which is quite annoying to discover when you're not near one of the previous devices to deactivate it.

I can't comment on the functionality of iBooks on Gen1 iPads because I've never purchased an Apple iBook, but your guesses about Amazon are, sadly, wrong.

You can check this when purchasing on Amazon: the small print you're looking for in the Product Details section is "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited". If you don't see that, it means your Kindle book is restricted (I believe to 5 devices simultaneously, though perhaps it varies from book to book.)

Because a person who rationally cares about great map data for their whole lives, and also cares about other things (like liberty) might well prefer the growing pains of being an earlier adopter to the instant convenience of using Google Maps.

I understand that you, like many people, have decided that the attributes you care about are the only ones that are rational to care about. But that is a gross mistake, and that mistake undermines the entire premise of your rant.

As another example within GPS, Waze used to give truly horrendous routes, as it would often fail to understand the difference between overpasses and intersections. A bunch of early adopters liked the promise of Waze and helped crowd-source the fixes, so that now Waze is a very good navigator.

By the OP's logic, the early adopters who helped make Waze great were irrational, because it truly was worse for quite a long time.

That said, I get it, you're just here to snark at strangers. After all, if you'd had even a hint of an interest in a real conversation you would've realized I never stated that any set of attributes was better than any other, nor that my interpretation of attribute definitions was the only valid one.

Anyway, thanks for the snarky bullshit and have a nice day.

One is productive, one isn't. That's the key difference.

The difference is even more glaringly obvious if you think about the difference between equity in a productive company, loans to productive organizations, and simply doing nothing.

1) Dropbox has many thousands of their own servers, alongside the Amazon. It's not like they're just using raw S3 and nothing else.

2) Dropbox has a history of egregious mistakes which they try to sweep under the rug. Only a very silly person would believe that Arash has suddenly decided to be open and honest with the customers.

Remember, when you talk about Dropbox, you're talking about a company that flat-out lied, claiming that they encrypted your data so they couldn't read it, and didn't stop lying until the FTC got involved.

So yeah... when somebody says Dropbox is better than X, I tend to think that person is deluding themselves.

Edit: Bias alert; I work for Dropbox on our infrastructure team. I'm just curious about that particular incident, since it predates me and I'm always curious about these things.

This was changed to simply say that they are encrypted after this FTC complaint was filed: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/05/dropbo...

Luckily for them (and unluckily for consumers) they got away with that particular lie during the early years where it was most valuable.

There's also a fundamental problem that Arash doesn't understand security. This was clear after the incident where no password was required in order to login.

Arash claimed that this was only a problem if you were one of the unlucky few who was actually hacked. He didn't understand that a risk exposure is also a serious problem, even if you happen to dodge the bullet on that particular incident. In fact, he seemed to get quite angry with paying customers who were upset by it because in his mind you don't have the right to be even slightly bothered by a major screw-up unless you were affected that time.

I understand that at this point Dropbox is huge, so it's full of people like you who don't have anything to do with the customer-hostile bullshit that the founders did... but it's still impossible to trust anything you guys do. After all, when the CTO is untrustworthy, only a very, very naive person would trust the product as a whole.

They're horrifically expensive, and low quality.

It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.

It really is truly terrible support.

here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

The issue you mention (where you have to treat sg's as being immutable if you want them to work reliably) is another problem with the sg's.

One set is costs directly related to employing you. Benefits, employer paid taxes, equipment, insurance, office space, a fraction of your manager, and so on. These alone are hefty.

A second set is buffer to pay you when you aren't being utilized. A well-run consulting company might expect 80% utilization, so 20% of the time you're incurring salary plus all the above costs and they are receiving absolutely nothing for it. A more typical consultancy might have even lower utilization rates.

A third set is the costs of customer acquisition and account development. There are expensive staff who do a lot of expensive things solely to get the contracts signed in the first place. And if a consultancy stops attempting to grow, it's at grave risk that a few existing customers will leave for one reason or another, and they'll be left in a terrible spot.

A fourth is the cost of finding somebody like you in the first place. If I'm hiring a junior employee it might be something like $10k direct, plus the time associated with sourcing, vetting, and interviewing candidates. For a senior employee, it could be a lot more than that.

Put all of these factors together, and the profits simply aren't nearly as hefty as you'd imagine.

When we have interesting RFPs from consulting clients, then we pull people away from the bench.

It's a great way to retain people, have flexibility in the projects we take, and have significant depth and breadth for a small firm.

[1] we also very heavily draw from a pool of highly trusted subcontractors, many of whom are former employees. Because of our experiences with them, we go to them first and they all give us first crack at their availability.

This is not a help.