OneBusAway started as a graduate student project at the University of Washington.

http://onebusaway.org/

For example, a friend of ours started a business creating fantastic pastries and desserts for restaurants. Her company will never go public. But she employs 8 or 9 people who probably never would be hired by a tech startup.

A couple of the big obstacles to starting a business need to be addressed:

1. Healthcare - our friend wouldn't have started her business if she didn't have coverage through her husband's employer. She couldn't afford the financial risk.

2. Intellectual property laws are a mess. Everyone on HN already knows about the patent fiasco, but the continual and unjustified extension of copyright law also presents an obstacle for some endeavors.

If you are under thirty and single, you can get health care for $200 or less per month, which is pretty affordable. There are also group plans for small business owners.

Then I took a class called "One Hour to Touch Type" from the University of Washington's Experimental College. I actually learned the entire keyboard in about an hour. I practiced about 20 minutes per day for a month to become proficient.

Bing is a win for Microsoft either way. If it gets about 30% market share, then Bing makes Microsoft money and forces Google to invest more in search. If even the largest software company after investing billions can't stop Google's growth in search, then Microsoft and others will claim that that Google is a monopoly. So it should be subject to anti-trust laws.

In the old days, when General Motors completely dominated the car industry, they made sure to keep their market share under 25%. They believed, probably correctly, that a higher share would bring anti-trust sanctions.

The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick.

What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. Nobody uses other search engines because they suck. The results are irrelevant and the ads are irrelevant. That's not anti-competitive action, that's competitive action -- they make a good product that people like. Seems legal to me.

For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your category, and one day your site throws some errors, or it goes down, or something of that nature, your site is now no longer showing for your category. They don't tell you anything, not even if you use their Webmaster tools, all you know is that according to their search query result performance that all of a sudden you stop showing up for any other term than your name. Previously you were showing up for many terms. After you correct these issues, which you can only really guess at, you submit a re-consideration request describing the issue, your solution, and why you think whatever thing you think is the problem should be corrected. Now you wait. Not for some response, but just an automated reply saying that your response has been dealt with, not whether they did anything, or if in fact you had an issue. This will come 2-3 weeks later, your business may already be dead. But if it's not, and magically you show up for Google results again, and webmaster tools shows you that your previous search terms have relevance, you will most definitely not be in your previous position. Time to get out there again, get fresh in-links, and re-build your business.

This is the current status quo. This is very very scary. Even Credit Cards have to tell you why you were rejected, not enough credit history or something like that, you can even get one free credit report in response that will explain things. Not Google. I would sleep much better at night knowing that there was some process that would tell you if there's a problem, and if possible what the reasons were, in general terms. Once you correct them you should be able to submit that you did, and hopefully that would address the situation in some reasonable amount of time.

It's crazy that most of us are ok with a search engine dominating 70% or so of search, without any ability to resolve conflicts, ask questions, or anything. We can only click buttons and hope that after enough times the great Google will listen.

Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, and they sell you their product, and it's often a good deal for both sides. Google is just like this, except smaller.

In the IT industry, we like to think that Google is important. We see their logo a lot, we hear how nice it is to work there... but they are really small potatoes. Advertising is nothing. Giving people money, giving people drugs, selling gasoline, shipping books to your house overnight, and making light bulbs and jet engines is a lot more profitable than sending clicks to your website. Sorry, that's the reality... there is a lot more evil to be done in the world than Google is capable of. (Look at the number of Fortune 500 companies that are primarily military contractors. Their corporate mandate is to cause people to die as efficiently as possible -- Google manages your RSS feeds and cat pictures! Sorry, not evil.)

(Why isn't Google as heavily regulated as banks? Because they really don't matter that much. Yeah, you can search for your name on Google and see content that you put up on the web under your name. But the banks collect information about you, to make business decisions, without you ever even knowing. Right now, their computers are deciding whether or not you are a credit risk, and if they decide you are, they are canceling your credit card. That vacation you wanted? Gone. That house you wanted? Never. That's power that Google simply doesn't even come close to having!)

I'm just saying their current status quo coupled with the power they have is scary. They should, like the banks, communicate with you. Even if it's not that detailed, a little bit of interaction goes a long way. They already have humans reading your reconsideration requests, they should allow them to issue a response, instead of just an automated reply. It shouldn't be this guessing game that we play. It's not OK that something that controls almost all of search is that inaccessible to communication, follow-up, and resolution.

The fact is their current policy is in all likelihood the one that allows them to serve relevant results to the greatest number of people for the lowest cost. If they start giving it the personal touch as you say then the cost will go way up it won't bed just you and the occasional accidental delisted site owner but will be every spammer, con artist, and fly by night SEO expert. The support costs would be astronomical. And your hoped for solution is to have a government entity step in and mandate they spend that money in a hopeless attempt to let you talk to someone in person? In short you want the government to force Google to reduce its profits, potentially drastically, for your own personal benefit.

Nobody else likes other search engines and can't find your site? Tough shit. That's not Google's concern and it's not the government's concern, which makes you responsible for dealing with it.

All I'm saying is that Google should set up some processes so that issues that can be major, such as an accidental delisting, or similar be addressed with some level of human interaction, whether it's an actual response, or an automated response letting you know the issues, nothing more.

In my opinion, and hopefully sometime in the near future the US Congress will agree, that it's not OK for something to have that much sway over the web and not be accountable or have any reasonable processes in place for corrections. It's just not.

Your point would be a lot clearer if you had said, "I wish" instead of "obligation". I wish a human at Google would reply to my email when they accidentally delist my site. I wish someone would spend $100 of Google's time to research my problem and talk to me. I wish Google would mail me ice cream and ponies once a week.

If you actually read what I've been saying, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to skim and let our biases let our emotions get the best of us, I'm not saying anything crazy.

If your sentences focused on one topic, and didn't diverge to psychoanalyze me, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to let our emotions get the best of us, causing a run on sentence, where the word obligation is used a lot, and holy shit this sort of thing is hard to read, emotions or not, and what was I saying? Oh yeah, your points would be easier to follow.

Anyway, Google's philosophy is to make decisions in general rather than in bulk and then they let the computers do the real work. It's the only sane thing they can do; there are billions of websites, and if they had to research every delisting case, they'd be out of business. It's no loss to Google or its users if your site doesn't show up in search results.

You just aren't all that important to Google or the rest of the world. Nor is anyone else.

BofA, Amazon, etc. are all companies that we deal with directly in a customer<->vendor relationship. Amazon puts up products for sale, people buy them. BofA gives people a place to put their money, in return for the ability to lend that money to others.

But your average Internet user isn't Google's customer. They're Google's product, and are "sold" to advertisers. People interact with Google every day, and in return, Google gets to collect, store, and mine our information in ways that we don't really know about or understand, and sell the results of that analysis to others.

So I think some of the Google-fear is based more on that than raw revenue generation. Being sold to advertisers on a massive scale is just kinda creepy.

We shouldn't be ok with a company controlling almost all of search and not having any way to check them. There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws. Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.

Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.

No, it's not a fact at all. Use Yahoo or Bing, as long as there are functional alternatives you can't claim there's a monopoly. Google dominates search, that's not the same thing as a monopoly. Google does not have a monopoly.

> As such, there needs to be some standards and processes to for conflict resolution.

No, there doesn't, you haven't established that they are a monopoly, or that they're promoting anti-competitive practices, or that search is even a vital service like electricity that should be regulated.

> There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws.

Yes, there are, for good reasons, no such reason exists to regulate search.

> Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.

Hopefully we're very far away from it because it's absolutely not necessary and shouldn't happen.

> Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.

Then don't use Google, no one is forcing you to, you can get traffic from other places if you put effort into it. The fact is, you use Google because their product is superior and they bring you more traffic; that doesn't mean other options aren't available, just that they don't work as well as Google does. And for having a superior product, you want to punish them with regulation. That's seriously fucked up thinking.

They didn't force anybody. One of the first things I would do with a fresh install of Windows back in latter 90s was open IE to download Netscape. Having IE on there made it enabled me to easily learn about and get different browsers. I don't understand how that is so bad. Where was the antitrust on Winsock? What? Forced to use their TCP/IP stack?! Consumer-based OSes should have certain software by default.

Wasn't this more a bit of prescience on Microsoft's part? I mean, now we have Google developing a "browser" OS. Can't get much more coupled then that. What if that becomes the monopoly OS in 5-10 years?

Shipping the browser wasn't the problem. The problem was that they stopped system vendors installing Netscape and/or making it the default browser.

Doing that is fine if you are in a competitive market, but if you are a monopoly then it's anti-competitive and abuse of market power.

Having said that, I'm opposed to the initiative. WA needs fundamental tax reform including replacing the B&O tax with a value added tax as well as changes to reduce the regressivity of the state tax system. The initiative is a band-aid.

Also, representing taxes as a percentage of income obscures the increase in spending due to increased income.

http://www.ofm.wa.gov/economy/longterm/2010/lt10ch4.pdf

Taxes should not grow with income - if anything, they should drop. Richer people require fewer government services - many (though not all) government services are either transfers to the poor or protecting people from them.

I believe yfs point was progressive taxation is a bad idea because it costs the rich more but they get less out of it. I don't understand how your comment meshes with yfs. Care to elaborate?

In fact, the US economy is strong because it is relatively low in taxation and regulation, compared to other economies around the world. This shows the benefit of low taxes (for everybody). You guys focus on the rich because you want to pretend like you're just taxing the rich, figuring most voters are not rich. But whether you tax the rich or the poor, taxes lower the standard of living and slow economic growth.

You can see proof of this just by looking at states and the countries and seeing which ones do better than others.

  Denmark 50% of GDP taxed, $56,115 GDP per capita
  Sweden 49.7%, $43,986
  Belgium 46.8%, $43,533
  France 46.1%, 42,747
  Norway 43.6, $79,085
  Netherlands 39.5, $48,222
  US 28.2%, $46,381

PS. I wish I had some statistics chops to see if there's any correlation between these two lists of tax rates and gdp per capita. My hypotheses is that there's not.

[citation needed]

Seriously, where do you get this delusion? Do you mean those low-tax post-war years when the annual growth rate was around 5% and the top marginal tax rate was between 87 and 70%? If you are going to make claims that low taxation and regulation have been a comparative advantage for the US then be prepared to back it up with reputable comparative studies.

If the proof can be found just by looking at tax levels and comparative standards of living then please explain why Norway is kicking our ass.

Also, I'd love to see a study that compares the economic effects of unilateral taxes vs. progressive taxes. Given that $X needs to be procured, what is the most cost-effective progression?

Why wouldn't richer people want better schools, better infrastructure, better law enforcement, etc?

I can see the advantage for politicians and public sector unions. But not for taxpayers.

I am a liberal and believe that government should provide more social services. But I also agree with many conservatives that there is waste, inefficiency and corruption in government, just like in any other large organization. It would be a better country if Republicans took this passion and tried to make government better, more efficient, more business-like, etc. But instead they only ever want to tear government down and give the money to their rich daddies so John Galt can save us all.

All I did was point out that the cost of paving 1 mile of road does not increase just because a bunch of rich microsofties moved into town. Perhaps you could remind me when I advocated against government providing police protection or road paving?

That doesn't even come close to passing the smell test. An influx of rich Microsofties drive up the price for everything, from roads to radishes. A mile of road costs more to build post-Microsoft because land costs more, labor costs more (they need to be paid enough to live approximately near the Microsofties!), and supplies cost more. And I don't know if you've heard the news, but Bellevue isn't a cheap place to live!

Of course, that's not even counting the indirect costs: rich Microsofties like to live in big McMansions in the suburbs, which require not only many miles of new roads, but also new police departments, firemen, sewers, traffic signals, new highway lanes, gas, water and electric lines, etc. The cost increases created by an influx of rich people are non-linear.

Manhattan has incomes about 3x the national average. By your logic, the salary for fast food workers in Manhattan should be about $30/hour, a burrito costing $3 outside the city should cost $9 and a macbook should cost $3000.

The indirect costs you list are simply the costs of having new people. They indicate that total spending should increase when population does, not per-capita spending. Rich people may require slightly more roads, but they also never use welfare, medicaid, visit the ER under a phony name, and they rarely commit crimes.

And no, it isn't just a matter of per-capita spending: when rich people move into an area, costs go up more rapidly than when poor people move into an area. It's the reason you see cheaper rents in the Mission than you do in Pac Heights.

I'm arguing that tax revenue should not grow with income level, they should grow with population [1]. Crime is a part of society, but increasing income levels do not increase crime or increase the cost of road repairs.

Take your favorite progressive tax system. Multiply all tax rates by 1/2. Your new tax system is just as progressive as the old one.

[1] That's my leading order argument. As a second order correction, poor people tend to cost more money than rich people.

Washington benefited from this arrangement and the town of Vancouver wouldnt' be near as big as it is now if it weren't for the tax delta. And it wouldn't be bringing in as much taxes for Washington as it is.

At the same time, Oregon and Portland benefit as well, by having inexpensive housing nearby to supply workers and to facilitate faster growth than would be achievable if every business had to pay their employees more because all their employees were suffering from a state income tax.

In Memphis, where I live, most lower income people can't afford to live outside the bubble of city-provided public transit and/or social services. Even the middle class people live within the city limits, but on the very far outskirts. The wealthier people live outside the city in exclusive, incorporated suburbs where they avoid city taxes. Essentially the incorporated suburbs are designed as tax shelters for the wealthy. The wealthy people almost always work in the city and complain about the crime, poverty, crumbling roads, etc, but will dodge any tax that might help fix these problems.

We also have a pair of large middle class suburbs located just to the south of the city in Mississippi state. The county they're in is now the richest county in Mississippi. All of the income tax and most of the sales tax from these people who undoubtedly work in city is funneled out of the state of TN and into the coffers of MS. Every workday, they use our roads, police/fire protection, and by proxy, most of our other local gov't services. Most of which is paid for by people who are much poorer.

It is honestly a libertarians "see, I told you so" wet dream.

The cost of housing (owner equivalent rent) is included in CPI, BTW.

Whenever you hear someone talk about consumer prices, the CPI, and refer to it as "inflation" you're literally hearing political propaganda being created or repeated.

This is a form of orwellian newspeak that is so common that people will argue about it, because they are certain that inflation is a measure of price increases.

The reason for the newspeak is that it is very easy for government to change the basket of goods, and even to simply exclude important consumer prices from the Index, to make inflation appear less than it is.

You wouldn't claim that nobody uses energy, right? We all use electric power and gasoline in our cars, but these are regularly excluded from CPI because they are quick to reflect the effects of inflation... that is the rise in prices that comes from growth in the money supply.

I know this is tangental to the point you were making, but this misunderstanding of what inflation is causes people to not understand much of the economics in their day to day lives.

The person you were responding to is correct that energy and home costs are generally diminished in CPI to try and make "inflation" look low, and GDP look comparatively better.

As for your claim that CPI excludes energy and housing, you are simply wrong.

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm#Question_1

Or at least, that's how Austrians would like to redefine it.

Yup, you got it. Let's hope it backfires.