Slashdot Mirror
High Frequency Trading and Finance's Race To Irrelevance
hype7 (239530) writes 'The Harvard Business Review is running a fascinating article on how finance is increasingly abstracting itself — and the gains it makes — away from the creation of value in the real world, and how High Frequency Trading is the most extreme version of this phenomenon yet. From the article: "High frequency trading is a different phenomenon from the increasing focus on short term returns by human investors. But they're borne from a similar mindset: one in which financial returns are the priority, independent of whether they're associated with something innovative or useful in the real world. What Lewis's book demonstrated to me isn't just how "bad" HFTs are per se, but rather, what happens when finance keeps walking down the path it seems to be set on — a path that involves abstracting itself from the creation of real-world value. The final destination? It will enter a world entirely of its own — a world in which it is fighting to capture value that is completely independent of whether any is created in the first place."'
So it'll be like any other virtual world computer game (and with its currency being of similar value, which is to say, not all that much).
Those are the OTC and pink markets.
Flipping penny stocks is like dangling your testicles into shark infested waters.
most trading is done by pension and other big funds
not by hedge funds or small funds that do HFT
Dutch tulip panic in the 1700's... hell, even better example: Neil Stephenson's "System of the World" series, showed what happens when financial systems render themselves obsolete. The world moves on and financiers quickly explore new avenues, leaving the old behind. The section describing Eliza and how she made a living in Amsterdam trading percentages of non-binding stock shares is a great tutorial.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Of course, the only reason why there is a primary stock exchange is that the initial investors expect there to be a secondary stock market. This is particularly true for equity, which has an unlimited lifespan. Most investor's lifespans are shorter than that.
More to the point, stock ownership (and thus the stock market) is about ownership of the company, not the funding of the company.
So companies shuffle stocks back and forth millions of times a day and we wonder NOW what the actual productive value is?? The whole dam stock market is based upon "confidence" aka a house of cards. As I like to say "Main St. built America, Wall St. destroyed it."
There was a good reason that companies were initially prohibited from owning other companies. Greed knows no limit.
This topic has been covered before in the documentary "The Corporation"
http://hellocoolworld.com/file...
2. Birth
How the corporation came to be. Originally, corporations were set up to serve the public
good. Corporation lawyers gained rights through the US Supreme Court using the 14th
Amendment (set up to protect slaves) that gives them the rights of a person. In the last
century, the corporation is given more and more rights while people are increasingly
stripped of theirs.
3. A Legal "Person"
Having acquired rights of immortal persons, what kind of person is the corporation? By
law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally
bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good
6. The Pathology of Commerce
If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a
psychopath using a personality diagnostic checklist by the World Health Organization.
If you have the time (and if you're at work, of course you have the time!), I recommend The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. One guy gets his last goat killed by an aircraft so he can claim twice its value from the airport, and it all goes wrong from there.
Depends on how you define 'most trading'.
Most of the HFT is set up to make a market. Some large companies even set it up to HFT internally, in dark pools for rather esoteric reasons -some not so honest.
Interesting, I'd never read about the Dutch tulip panic before...
I can only speculate that at some point regular sellers and buyers will 'take their business elsewhere' because the parasitism of HFT and it's successors reaches the point that NOT using the standard markets is more cost effective.
Right now for all the money it 'makes', HFT is still a very very small amount of total margin. Either you hit diminishing returns and stability, or the system will suffer an upheaval. I've heard that there are already alternative markets being set up that ban/limit HFT.
I don't read AC A human right
Errr.
Most stocks are held long term by long term investors. A example, as you suggest, are pension funds.
Most trading is done by short term holders – like HFT.
This is why in a single year more stocks of a company can trade than have been issued (suggesting huge turnover) yet the majority long term holders barely budge.
Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year. One of the big problems we have with current markets is that short-term gains are way undertaxed. Funds are allowed to trade without paying taxes; taxes are assessed only when money comes out of the fund.
Of course the stock market is divorced from the real world. It's its own bubble, a game played by the upper 5% to enrich themselves and fuck everyone else. They don't care as long as they get their bonus.
You really think a hedge fund manager gives a crap about real-world value? The dude is making $15 million a year shuffling stocks around and skimming right off the top of everyone. He can buy a Ferrari every other week. That's your 'real world value' right there.
The elite don't care. They have burned up America, and were well paid by the taxpayers to do it. Now they are strip-mining what's left and when the country is a empty husk, ready to collapse into a third-world nation, they will get in their private jets, and fly off to their private, gated, guarded compound in Costa Rica or Belize, and live off the interest in their Bermuda bank accounts for the next 12 or 20 generations.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
by volume about half the trading is done by the large long term funds or corporations buying their own stock. the other half by hedge funds. on large volume days most volume is long term funds as they buy up or dump large amounts of stock.
a lot of the short term traders put money into the market. if you cash out part of your pension or other investments, someone has to buy that stock to give you the cash
After a public offering of new shares, what value does the stock market really add for that company? Sure, there are some things it helps with such as an approximate value that can be used for acquisitions, but once a company offers a set of shares on the market and collects the money from the buyer, those shares are essentially chips with the corporate logo to be bought and sold among gamblers in the world's biggest casino. At that point, those shares do little to create actual value in the real world.
The way I see it, you can eliminate the advantages of HFT while keeping the markets highly responsive by imposing a "clocking" scheme on exchanges. When an order is received by an exchange, it is not executed immediately but stored in a queue to wait for the next clock tick. When that comes, the order queue is shuffled into random order and then executed sequentially. Make the clock ticks wait a random period between 40ms and 50ms and any timing advantage of HFT or geography is nullified. The exchanges are still highly responsive; they just do randomized batch processing. All of the requests they receive in the previous clock period ought to be processed within the new clock period (with perhaps some occasional spill-over, in which case the new clock tick is stretched).
If you get no dividends it's because you chose (or it was chosen for you by your 401k board) to invest in a low/no yield mutual fund. All 3 of my funds provide some dividend despite being growth oriented (I'm 35 so lower yield/higher risk funds make sense), right now the dividend is plowed right back into additional shares of the funds because taking a disbursement before you reach 62.5 has negative tax consequences, but it's still there in my annual statement and still grows my 401ks total value. I also know the top 20 stocks in each mutual fund (though these are typically only 30-50% of the funds total value).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The HBR article notes two issues:
1. HF traders don't participate in stockholder meetings and thus their trades are divorced from steering company direction.
2. CEOs are focused on next quarter profits and, aside from a few corporate founder CEOs, are not able to have their company innovate.
The first problem is not specific to HFT. Even buy-and-hold mom and pop cannot influence a stockholder meeting because they don't own enough shares to meaningfully do so. The exception proves the rule: a bunch of Palestinian human rights defenders got together, bought some Caterpillar stock, and got a human rights issue on the agenda. Even with all that effort, the measure did not pass. And it was a large effort in coordinating. Individual stockholders usually do not organize, coordinate and campaign. (The "transaction cost" is too high.)
The second problem is caused by SEC, SOX and CEO compensation structure, not by HFT. The HBR article suggests without actually accusing that HFT is the cause.
HFT serves little purpose other than providing market liquidity (and even at that arguably harms it given the flash crash), but it's not to blame for the above two pre-existing problems of today's markets of publicly traded companies.
You're probably getting dividends from your 401k stocks, even if they're mutual funds. They just go back into the 401k, so you probably haven't noticed. They show up in statements though.
HFT is an example of rent seeking - where somebody is able to shave some of the economic profit from an activity without doing much of anything. In the HFT case, the US Congress put in a trading rule that caused a little bit of inefficacies in the market and HFT trading ruthless exploits that imposed inefficacies. Those inefficacies will never amount to a fraction a penny per share, but do it millions of times a day..
Think of it as a 160m dollar a day tax on investors. (the number comes from Lewis's book.)
See the historical Robber Barons as an example of rent seaking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
arbitrage === extremely good. Keeps markets liquid. but it only requires a response time of seconds to minutes to be useful. high frequency trading is pure parasitism and should be abolished. Delays in order would remove a lot of it. Random delays in orders would be slightly more effective. And a trading tax would remove the low margin high volume trading. I have no idea why they don't implement this as see what happens. Could always unwind it if something unforseen results.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The facts are otherwise. Based on estimates at a talk I was at recently - see the latter part of this (pdf) http://www.orie.cornell.edu/en... - traditional asset management comprises about 20% of trading volume; HFT accounts for over 30% and hedge funds for more than 25%. There may be some HFT done at hedge funds as well, but it's clear that the tail is wagging the dog.
Corporations have more rights than people, when was the last time you saw a corporation sent to jail? even for causing someones death, you kill someone even though manslaughter you are going to jail, if you steal you will probably go to jail. if a corporation does it, they get a fine, which relative to their income is minor.
I thought it was 59.5. Did they change that?
Two things...
With many companies, the lifetime of the equities are shorter than an investor's lifetime (e.g., nearly all US-based airlines, GM, Chrysler, automobile companies, banks, energy trading companies like Enron, Calpine, PG&E, WorldCom). With some internet companies, significantly shorter...
Stock ownership with its historical PE levels, is often less about ownership of the company, than a bet on the future performance of the company.
The stock market is really about providing a safe place to gamble. Think of it like gambling in Vegas vs gambling in a smoke filled room in the basement of a restaurant wondering if you win the pot, if you are going to get out the room alive. Stocks are merely the chips in this game. They have some intrinsic value which follows the fortune of the company they are attached to, but there is an artificial shortage of chips and people that want to play the game are bidding up the value of those chips...
Why not make more chips? The internet bubble showed what happens when you create more chips (e.g, companies that issue stock) simply to fill that demand...
Contrary to popular belief, you can sell ownership securities in a company and *not* register them, or even list them in a regulated stock exchange (e.g., if the number of owners is small enough). The only purported rationale to do so is so that if securities are sold to the public at large, the public can have a fair chance to see what they are probably worth so that small-fry can play the game. High-frequency trading pretty much obliterates this idea, so you might begin to wonder what the rationale is for a regulated stock exchange to service a secondary securities market (other than a false sense of security).
If a company wanted to, it could sell partial ownership securities directly to a investment partnership and ordinary joes could invest in that partnership (if they trusted that partnership), but then the investment wouldn't be as liquid. Asset liquidity is really the only reason the stock markets continue to exist, not ownership...
I thought it moved when they moved the SS full retirement age, but I could be wrong. Either way it's a long way off for me and I'm probably not retiring till 72-75 anyways since my life expectancy based on my grandparents is 90-95.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
First, dividend payout has nothing directly to do with the return of a company. If a company makes a profit it can:
Reinvest the profit into new business
Company pays out a dividend and you reinvest that dividend back into the company.
Do a stock buyback / pay down debt
While it is a bit counterintuitive, if you run though the numbers you will see that all 3 strategies return exactly the same return for the investor. I am making the assumption that the company has adequate projects to invest its profits and that leverage is not an issue.
Second, while you might not have direct control of the shareholder vote you do have indirect control. Control over the 401(k) (and its voting rights) should fall to some employee committee – which legally should be separate from the ownership of the company that you work for.
Which is why you always do it running a mutual fund. Dangle other peoples' testicles instead.
it allowed the high frequency traders to peek at the ballots others were sending in to the newspaper before they arrived, in turn giving them the ability to cast their votes using information not yet available to the rest of the market.
Front running is not High Frequency Trading. The existence of front running is not an argument to limit "High Frequency Trading" any more than phishing is an argument to end high speed internet.
Until people can recognize the difference between front running (a biased ordering of particular market events) and high frequency trading (low latency response to available market data) then there really is no point in responding to this nonsense. Not as much fun as donning the tinfoil hat, I know...
By law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally
bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good.
There is nothing at all saying a corporation can't call out the common good in it's bylaws, mission statement, and investment perspectis.
:-) Indeed, there's no one more devoted to keeping it real than those brilliant Harvard intellectuals.
We have been for a long time in the situation where the financial institutions are primarily extracting rents from producers rather that contributing to economic productivity. High frequency trading is simply a particularly obvious example of this. The situation is not particularly new. Those with wealth and power have always influenced the rules to their own benefit. The question is whether there are any counter-measures that effectively push people to contribute value rather than skim off value created by others.
Can you point out the link? I don't think it was directly reference in the underlying article.
And even if that was true I would be skeptical. Most private pension funds are well funded – public funds are another matter. If you want to crank up returns (which is not the correct choice – cranking up contributions is the correct choice) my experience is that portfolio managers move to higher risk stock – not by trying to generate trading profits with short term trades.
I've always done best in the stock market when I'm choosing companies that are clearly operating outside the common good.
Recently, I have started wondering: would it be advantageous for the stability of our economy and financial markets if there was a minimum holding time for shares, options, etc.? For example one day? That would make high frequency trading, which I agree is not really productive to the general economy, disappear. I don't think a rule like that would hinder real investors, because as you say, they hold for a longer time anyway. But it would stop speculators trying to squeeze some money by day trading without contributing anything to the economy.
For those of you not frothing at the mount, Eric Budish has an interesting critique and proposal to replace continuous-time markets with auctions every second or so. The idea is that being forced to wait for the next auction mitigates the advantages of low-latency trading.
I think he makes a very good argument.
Your made up and arbitrary rules will clearly solve a problem which you have not adequately described.
The solution you pulled out of you ass after thinking about it for 5 minutes is clearly better than what the professional experts believe. Do you have an opinion on Dark Matter too? Or the gold standard perhaps?
I wish you the joy of making a typo when buying or selling shares in your system. In today's system, people who hold shares for multiple years are the ones who do well long term, gradually harvesting money from the casino gamblers. I like today's system.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
By law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally
bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good
Pure bullshit. There is no such legal requirement.
Think like you're playing a computer game. How would you get around that rule?
Derivatives are one way. A call option is the right to force some poor schmuck to sell you the stock at a given price. if the stock is $38.50, and a large order comes in momentarily blipping the price up to $38.60, then your option to buy at $38.50 gives you a profit of roughly $0.10. Buy the put option right before the sale goes through, and then sell it mid-blip (we're talking milliseconds before and after), you could make money every day. You make even 0.1% a day, with a couple hundred trading days a year, compounded, and you're making 25-30% profit a year. High frequency trading survives.
The Financial Transactions tax is a lot better because it's much harder to game, and if doesn't work at least you've paid off part of the deficit.
The "professional experts" are a bunch of junkies jonesing like crazy who will do anything for a fix, be it crashing economies, systematically impoverishing populations or overpopulating the planet to destruction rather than accepting the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite world. Their opinions are worth no more than any layman's, at best.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The main thrust of the book "Flash Boys" is that the HFTs get advance notice of your trade on one exchange, and then beat you to all the other exchanges to do the trade before you. This is not normal "first come first served", but rather a form of front-running.
Because I understand how markets work. Thin markets suck. Large bid-ask gaps suck. Losing 20% of your investment because you made a typo, and you take a 20% hit just between the best price you can buy for and the best price you can sell for sucks.
Let the casino gamblers provide liquidity, and rob each other. It doesn't actually cost us anything - in fact, competition between market makers (which is one thing HFT is used for) saves me a non-trivial amount in my once-per-quarter trading. It's much nicer now than even 10 years ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
From the book "Flash Boys", one of the HFT companies mentioned that they were only ever "down" one day in five years. That's not actually taking risk. That's skimming a more-or-less guaranteed tax off the top.
It is that way because we let it be that way. But money doesn't need to be amoral.
Money is not a god that society needs to bow down to. It is a tool that society uses to distribute resources and create a form of justice. So it follows that society should regulate money to serve its ends.. not be a slave to it. Just as you wouldn't want to create an army of warlord soldiers that reign free over humans, you don't want to let money reign free over humans.
Presently economist and politicians have become too dogmatic about what should or should not be done with money. It serves only a small minority and eventually will bring upon ruin.
Investment theory has gotten a bit more sophisticated than from Gramm's day. Then factor is poor accounting and stock manipulation by management. Gramm was very conservative.
One is the recognition that it is not the dividend that is important it is the cash going to a shareholder. For example a stock buyback basically does the same thing as a dividend except that buybacks tend to trigger lower capital gains than dividend income.
Second one needs to balance the value of a payout (bird in hand) verse reinvestment in business (2 in the bush).
As for Apple – year – I can't defend their cash pile.
Thank you. I don't know why everyone keeps repeating this thing.
Well, many of our bosses keep repeating it to us, because it is a convenient excuse for their anti-social behavior. The notion, as far as I know, was first championed by that degenerate geriatric sociopath Jack Welch back in the 1980s.
Financial transaction taxes are not better . They cut into the profits of legitimate market makers and dry up liquidity. Investors get a worse price and more volatility - leaving them worse off.
HFT are gaming the system because brokers are required to execute on "best price". Go back to "best execution" and you close the loophole that HFT use.
Most of the money in the market is in the hands of retirement funds and other long-term investors. The gambling-addicted nutjobs provide liquidity while not harming anything but each other. More power to them, says I. Don't confuse the investment banks for the broader investing world, nor the people who actually run the exchanges.
Plus, what's all that other nonsense you're going on about? Overpopulation? Do people still believe Reverend Malthus? Technology is what lets us have growth in productivity/efficiency with the same resources. There's no reason to think technological progress must someday stop, and as long that progress continues, the broad economy can grow alongside it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I agree mostly with this article, but I have one comment on something said in the final paragraph: "But they're borne from a similar mindset: one in which financial returns are the priority, independent of whether they're associated with something innovative or useful in the real world." The main point of businesses is, and always has been and always will be, to make money. They're producing something people want or need only because that is the way to get money. Otherwise, it would be a governmental subsidy or a charity, rather than a company. I think, instead, the actual dichotomy is between short term and long term gains. The examples the author gives of CEOs that have been successful by resisting the pressure from the financial markets are of companies that did make money, lots of it. There is an interesting article by investor J. Kennon that summarizes it as impatience robbing speculators of much higher gains they could have earned by investing in the long run. So, I think it is more a problem of speculators trying to get rich quickly; investors trying to become rich, in itself, is not so problematic.
you left out "easy access to credit with onerous terms" and "consumerist culture that places tantamount value upon material possessions"
on my desktop background I have a drawing of a tiny little man holding up an oversized credit card, with his neck positioned over the card swiping track (basically a guillotine) -- this kind of sums up consumerist culture in my eyes. I wish I could remember the artist's name :(
Independent of any real world value? Sounds like Bitcoin. Or maybe Bitcoin is merely a symptom of a larger problem that includes creating "value" out of so-called intellectual property like patents for obvious things and the latest media sensation. Which isn't bad as soon as we figure out how to eat bits and bytes.
Me too.
Most portfolio managers and not paid a bonus based on their returns but are paid on their returns (Alpha) relative to an index (Beta).
Most pension I know off have large slug of stocks that track the index and don't move – say 80%. Then there is a thinner slice (say 20%) which is actively traded to generate Alpha – sometimes turning over dozens of times a year.
Or they split the Alpha from the Beta.
But there is always a large slug of securities that match the index. Outperforming the market is good, underperforming the market is bad, but significantly underperforming the market gets one fired.
Well, you are assuming that the company is valueless when you say that. Most companies are not valueless. Most, in fact, make a profit, and as an investor you own a piece of that profit. The profits are not a phantom... that's cold hard cash and it means something whether the company has a dividend or not. It's very real.
Many people treat the market like a game, and there are some game-like elements to it, but the underlying reality is that it isn't a game. The secondary markets have many uses... it is the liquidity and transactional efficiency of the secondary market that gives U.S. industry a level of flexibility that no other country can compete with. our energy infrastructure, renewables industries, small businesses. When the world changes, dollars flow where they are needed.
By dismissing the secondary market you basically dismiss any need for liquidity. You are wrong. The markets aren't about giving people a free pass... it's survival of the fittest. If anything, investors have it the easiest. We can shift our resources literally in a few seconds, and other than the crash of 1929, no crash since has lost investors who stuck with it any money in any reasonable period of time unless they were stupid and sold at the bottom (not understanding what stock ownership actually means).
Look at a graph of the 2008 crash. The economy might have gotten screwed due to the lack of regulation of the financial industry, but the markets recovered relatively quickly and that happened because the efficiency of the secondary markets allowed investment resources to be shifted very quickly. Just looking at tops and bottoms doesn't give you a full picture... very few investors actually went 'all-in' at the top and sold 'all-out' at the bottom. No matter how hyped-up a story you get from the media, it isn't an accurate representation of what people actually made or lost.
If you think the stock market is a crap-shoot then you are probably thinking a bit too short-term. It's never been a crap-shoot. Not even during the 1929 crash.
-Matt
Greater efficiency with the same resources to support a bigger population is pointless, it achieves nothing. Here's a good article on the topic:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Depends on how you define 'most trading'.
Most of the HFT is set up to make a market. Some large companies even set it up to HFT internally, in dark pools for rather esoteric reasons -some not so honest.
Amen to that.
I've been a professional in the market for 25 years. The hypothesis that " [...]those fractions of cents would otherwise most likely be accruing to the big banks instead of these new, smaller HFT firms. As long as people have been trading stocks, there have been middlemen taking a cut; HFTs just mean that the cut is now captured by those with the fastest computers." is true and false. the evolution into "dark pools", "hft" etc. was allowed and encouraged by the authorities, eager to bolster bankprofit and balance sheets.
Think about this. in olden days, the nyse used specialist firms to trade stocks. they acted as the ultimate middlemen, took in a very good profit, and in return they provided liquidity to stocks, so most of the trading volume was concentrated there. with the passage of time and the evolution of technology, there has been a spawning of trading venues, who DO NOT have the obligation to make their trades public in real time, in any shape or form.
Go back centuries, and the concept of a single trading venue, in which all trades of a particular goods were done, was strictly enforced. Public official checked scales, and reputation was the most important good traded. that did not mean a profitless economy, but it was more transparent then. Would you really want to trade with a company that originated an IPO, traded it for its own account, acted as prime broker for an ungodly number of hedge funds, many of whom used it both as a depositor and as prime broker, and also managed both hedge funds and mutual funds? this scheme is legal. that the so called "chinese walls" between the various pieces would ever work, it's open to scrutiny.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Coming soon from Hardcourt and Knee Brace: "Buy If (i > 0 and j > 0 and F(i,j) == F(i-1,j-1) + S(Ai, Bj)) And Sell When (j > 0 and F(i,j) == F(i,j-1) + d)"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The answer is simple, just introduce a small (0.001% maybe) tax on every financial transaction carried out on the things being traded in these HFT markets (be they stocks, bonds, commodities whatever). Everyone (whether they hold the stocks for 5 seconds or 50 years) pays the tax when they sell (the 0.001% comes out of the total sale price, not any capital gains).
Shuts down the HFT engine and the money flowing around it (which then means the owners of that money have to find something different and hopefully more useful to do with it) but with the tax rate being so low, it has little impact on anyone buying these assets to hold them longer term.
And do you have a plan to reduce the surplus population? A final solution, perhaps? That opinion piece seems wrong on every point. At some point we'd obviously need more room than this one planet, sure, but that's far beyond the expected peak population as the remaining corners of the world industrialize and the incentive to have lots of kids goes away. At some point the total solar energy falling on the Earth will be inadequate, but that's also just a matter of technology.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
By your idiotic drivel, hammers have more rights than people too. After all, when's the last time you saw a hammer sent to jail? (incidentally, this argument is chock full of irony since there probably have been hammers and corporations effectively "sent" to "jail" in the US - see below) The fundamental problem here is that corporations don't actually commit crimes any more than any other sort of property commits crimes.
Now, I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail (here, seized in an illegal drug-related raid and auctioned off by the US Marshals or similar organizations) on the basis that the thing in question did commit a crime or was at least used in the commission of a crime.
The legal fiction of corporate personhood is to protect the rights of the people involved in the corporation. In the Citizens United case, the only reason why people care about corporate personhood in the first place, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law gave unaffiliated individuals special, unconstitutional privileges over those associated with a corporation. That's why the law was repealed.
Yeah. It was a few years ago, but the last person who told me that, I made him bleed, and dared him to do anything about it, and walked away. Mod me down if you like. Talk to the human being, never to the hat.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Or at least a stock purchase must be held for at least 4 days and then any gains are 100% taxed if sold in under 4 months.
This stops flipping and incentive to do short term ordinary income gains. Stocks after all are about long term investment.
I know, I know, the BIG trading houses and HFT & DARK POOL guys would absolutely go on insane rants, but what we want is a "CAPITAL MARKET", not really a trading market.
Furthermore I can't see how the gambling-addicted nutjobs aren't harming us. If the number of dollars in circulation increases, that's inflation. So mathematically, by obtaining dollars, they're either siphoning money from the rest of us with their stupid game or driving inflation while creating no value, devaluing the dollars the rest of us hold - just like making counterfeit notes.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Apple has bought back a huge number of shares, as well as increased their dividend 8% this round. The share buy-back is capital-efficient for investors and a big deal. Not only that, but at a minimum they can fold in the dividend they don't have to pay any more for those repurchased shares into the dividend they are paying the remaining shareholders, so you get the best of both worlds.
Believe me, it actually is a big deal. Ignore the crap that comes out of the media.
-Matt
The creation of FPGA's to sit directly on the fiber leaving the stock exchanges has utterly corrupted high frequency trading. _No one_ in their remote office can get equal notice of small changes, and those FPGA's can flip transactions repeatedly as a stock rises to its new level, buying and selling and buying and selling to everyone else, and pulling their profits out of what normal traders would see. The transaction cost is much too low, and the forgiveness time to recall an unwise transaction is much too generous.
Unfortunately, there are also inevitable phase delays and feedback loops in such systems that can destroy the value of companies, and investors, who get caught in the unplanned positive feedback. They can't be "programmed against" because programming against them would slow the transactions and lose the very profit that HFT is reaping.
Oh har har, nice Godwin. But I do have a solution, it's called responsible reproduction combined with patience. I won't have more than 2 kids so I'm doing my part.
So why strain our resources to the limit just for the sake of supporting a bigger population? To try to support economic growth a little longer, leading to a nastier population bust? To try to brute-force another Einstein into existence as if some "jackpot" combination of genes is needed, when there are already millions of potential Einsteins around who simply don't have the resources to pursue similar pursuits? For the warm n' fuzzies of not telling anyone to reproduce responsibly while our environment breaks under our strain around us? Without radically different energy sources - which are totally possible right now but not politically likely - the current level of industrialization is already unsustainable.
If we're not growing the population just for the sake of growing it and we run into any energy limitations in the future, we'll simply have to consider having no-recreational-mech-battles Mondays.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've thought about your "solution" for all of 12 seconds and already I'm buying up stocks on a daily basis so that I can lease shares to people for as long as they would like to hold them.
Congratulations on creating another, more complicated financial product.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exactly right. Most of the people complaining about HFT are these managers of funds who blame the HF traders for preying upon their huge orders. Because, you know, they have a divine right to buy thousands of shares without affecting the price!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, it is a kind of lottery, where everybody is allowed to lie, cheat and steal and those with the lowest morals make the most money. Drug trading has a far more ethical business model and also does far less damage.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Do hammers have agency? Would the sentence "A hammer builds a house" make sense? How about "Apple releases new iWhatever"? Or "US established a beachhead on D-Day"?
We think and treat corporations, nations and other institutions as living beings because they are. We treat hammers as inanimate objects because they are inert matter. Yes, a corporation requires a human to act on its behalf to do anything, but similarly you require your muscle and neural cells to act on yours, and they in turn rely on molecular machines. And the difference between the US and USSR was not that one was made of different kinds of people than the other, but rather about the structures and values and even more importantly what the structures and values embodied - the "national spirit", so to say.
The US legal system is no less fictitious than corporations are. Either they have existence and agency - effective personhood - or they don't. Which one is it?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The "value" of stock is by no means connected to real world revenue of the issuing corporations anymore. It's just dependent on expectations of stock traders and whether or not they have any "faith" in the paper.
So, essentially, it's not really that different from any other religion. It's lost its roots in reality long, long ago, not just since the advent of HFT. If any doubt existed, the dot.com bubble with overhyped "values" of stock of companies that never earned a single dime should've dispelled that assumption that stock value has anything to do with the real world well over a decade ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a strong correlation between share price changes and margin loan acceleration. Most of the "growth" of the share market comes from people borrowing money to speculate, not because those companies are producing more value themselves. Of course, what goes up must come down.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Everyone knows that it's all just a big game (except the people who are suckered in and lose everything). Wall Street is propped up by a steady flow of investors who don't know any better and are easily parted with their money.
There are two faces to the financial sector: One is the legitimate 'financial services' part which actually provides value to society by facilitating lending and borrowing money. That's good and necessary. The other face is the one where day traders, hedge funds, "market analysts", and high-frequency trading operate, which is a system that is corrupt to the bone and requires a steady influx of fresh fools to stay alive otherwise it would collapse overnight.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
We think and treat corporations, nations and other institutions as living beings because they are.
If that statement were true (and it isn't), then there's your case for corporate personhood. But alas, corporations, nations, etc don't have agency.
High frequency trading doesn't necessarily hurt investors. Without them individuals would still be paying the ridiculous commissions stock brokers used to charge; one can argue if more can be done, but I'm not convinced computer agents are worse than people.
Of course it harms us. It hurts long term investors by increasing the prices when they want to buy. Some HFTs are winners and losers, but on an aggregate scale they are taking money from long term traders, mutual funds, (ie you, unless you are some kind of mountain hermit).
Adam Smith pointed out in 1776...
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
This is a great idea! It reminds me of my idea to save professional sports: you can only play for teams within either a 30 mile radius of where you were born, or the closest team stadium to where you were born, whichever is farthest.
OR, you can live in a city for 5 years, and then apply.
The quality of the play might go down a little, but then at least the alcohol-fueled idiots aggressively showing their love for their hometown team will at least be worshipping people from their own hometown, not whiny millionaire mercenaries.
Take that idea free of charge, I have a million of them - if you provoke me I will tell you about my great idea for limiting the topics on which musicians can sing.
The reason high frequency trading is possible in the first place is because government regulations have created enormous barriers to entry for engaging in such trading. If anybody with a fast PC and fast network connection could make these trades in cheap, open exchanges, "finance" (i.e., rich political donors in New York) wouldn't be able to gain anything more than you would at home. In different words, high frequency trading would become like bitcoin mining, something for a large number of nerds each making a few bucks.
I do hope "finance" will become irrelevant, and by "finance", I mean the group of protected and politically connected rich guys in New York. Let's not use the problems caused by regulation and government intervention to justify even more regulation and government intervention, in a vicious cycle. And don't make the mistake attributing this problem to one party or the other.
What, you mean pensions that companies are unable to make good on? Sounds to me like they SHOULD be eliminated.
And you forgot the single biggest reason why poor people stay poor. It's a four-letter word. D.E.B.T. #1 reason. Not 'Jim Crow' laws, regulatory capture (huh?), the destruction of unions, or anything else. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder yet you don't know the #1 reason for why poor people stay poor?
-Matt
Bitcoin to me...
If everyone stuck all their cash and other non-cash funds into their mattresses, it is basic mainstream economics that we would have a huge financial depression from lack of currency for exchange. So, why do mainstream economists have trouble understanding that the same thing happens if take all that money and instead stuff it into computers in the digital equivalent of a casino frequented mostly by the wealthiest (the stock market, derivatives, currency speculation, etc.), where the money spends all its time in transactions have little relation to the real goods and services that most people spend all their money on?
My take on that was from an idea I first saw a glimmering of in "Money As Debt II":
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.co...
"Today the largest volume of money by far is changing hands in what is best described as the gambling economy... the foreign exchange market, the derivatives market and the rest of the financial instruments being played by banks and investment funds for as much profit as possible. For example, the volume of trade on the world's foreign exchange markets, in just one week, exceeds the total volume of world trade in real goods and services during an entire year. This money is in continuous play by speculators looking to make windfall profits on currency fluctuations. It exists... but only in the gambling economy."
Your tax on transactions could help with reducing the FIRE-sector casino economy by discouraging so much trading, but it does not get at the root of things like wealth concentration, since wealthy people could still just park money in cash or gold or real estate. A progressive income tax going up to 90%+ like we had in the USA decades ago, with the revenue redistributed as a basic income might help with wealth concentration. So might a wealth tax (but that is harder). Modest inflation also discourages hording money by forcing wealthy people to spend money, invest it, or lose it.
Other alternatives to keep things going despite an absence of cash for the real economy due to it being stuffed into computers include more LETS systems (alternative currency that promotes community), making what little currency there is in the real economy move faster, expanding the gift economy, improved subsistence production, and better government planning using current tax dollars.
So much of our wealth today is the product of generations of hard work by so many people including those creating inventions and other new ideas building on previous ideas, and in that sense is effectively a common inheritance. C.H. Douglas talked about with "Social Credit":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Because I understand how markets work. Thin markets suck. Large bid-ask gaps suck. Losing 20% of your investment because you made a typo, and you take a 20% hit just between the best price you can buy for and the best price you can sell for sucks.
Oh my fucking god. You're seriously saying that the system I described in a couple lines couldn't possibly have a fail-safe mechanism for people who make a typo and purchase the wrong stock. Open your mind a little more.
I don't care if you hate my plan, and you certainly have more experience in the market itself. But don't bring up issues like "typos" if you expect to be taken seriously.
Let the casino gamblers provide liquidity, and rob each other. It doesn't actually cost us anything - in fact, competition between market makers (which is one thing HFT is used for) saves me a non-trivial amount in my once-per-quarter trading. It's much nicer now than even 10 years ago.
This is actually a good argument. Lead with this in future discussions with others, and forget about frickin typos.
I don't have an investment portfolio. The 401k I had at one time got cashed out a while ago. So, are the HFTs saving me money, or making my expenses go up? If they aren't saving me money, and are contributing to higher prices, I have the right to say put a limit on them. Or, if I don't have the right to limit them, what is the SEC for?
Anyhow, thanks for the responses.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Been that way since the 1890s, and the invention of the stock ticker. Computers may be faster, but it has been a VERY long time since the stock market was connected to reality.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Experts"="Con artists with a vested interest in taking money from schmucks" in this case.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Those are the OTC and pink markets.
"Secondary markets" and "OTC" don't mean what you think they mean - Specifically, "OTC" doesn't mean "Pink Sheets". I suspect you've confused OTC for OTCBB. Both the NASDAQ and the NYSE count as secondary markets, and everything on the NASDAQ also counts as OTC, which really just means a "dealer" marker (which in turn has nothing to do with "dealers" as you might understand it, it just means direct sales between buyers and sellers, rather than an agent-mediated auction style market like the NYSE).
That said, I would have to say that the markets as a whole have become about as stable as the classic "pink sheets" markets. Prices have completely decoupled from reality, when a car bomb in Kabul can send the entire market down by over a percent, or an unusually clear message from Janet Y can send it on a three day rally. Companies don't make and lose (as an aggregate) hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of an hour, no matter what the markets say.
As for TFA's comment about dividend stocks... Yeah, they count as a pretty decent safe-haven in a bear market; but overall, they have a piss-poor return - Three to four percent sustained, at best. Beats (core) inflation, but not by much... Certainly not enough to retire on unless you literally sock away half of your paycheck for the next 40 years.
We appear unwaveringly headed for a securities market implosion, and not merely of the recession/depression kind, but something much, much worse.
The government is just hating on your gains, bro.
No homo.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
I've thought for a while there should be 2 classes of Corporation.
1) Does real business (Manufacturing, Retailing, Services...); cannot own any part of other corporations.
2) Owns parts of type 1's; cannot do other business aside from managing shares etc. (mutual funds/investment collectives/trust funds...)
No complex ownership webs allowed. Two layers at most.
Then your statement "I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail" is nonsensical, as only things that have agency can take action (by definition). For that matter, a lot of your other posts are too, for the same reason.
Then again, you already ignored this once, so I suppose you'll do it again. It would be interesting to know what ulterior motives prompt making a claim that's at such odds with your actual demonstrated beliefs, though. Some kind of fear that agency might lead to demands of moral responsibility, perhaps?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The UK had this until Tony Bliar stopped it - so his banking mates could stiff us all.
The EU tried to bring it in Europe wide - but the banks threatened to use the UK and America instead and drive Europe under in retaliation. The maths says this is possible, so they backed down.
In short, bribery and corruption wins again.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
and are allowed to get away with anything provided the outcome is priofitable for their bosses. When it turns sour, they are accused of being rogue traders (especially if from an ethnic minority).
There's no reason to think technological progress must someday stop,
Unfortunately, there is also no reason to suppose that the ease of a plague spreading will not also increase, or that the food and water supply and ability to distribute it will,
If you stop believing the media and go and look for yourself, you will find food shortage was behind most wars (including WW1 and WW2).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So when the 'gambling addicted nutjobs' take their commission on every trade, that doesn't harm anyone by increasing costs for investors? When they cause a flash crash, that doesn't harm anyone by making it harder for companies to raise capital? When they lose all of their money, cry that it was an algorithmic error, and get the exchange to reverse the transactions so that they can keep gambling but other people take the risks, they don't harm anyone? Good to know, thanks for clearing that up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, technology won't fix the infinite growth problem. Even if we were to have vast amounts of cheap fusion power, the waste heat alone would start to cause a problem. If current growth rates continued indefinitely then the waste heat would raise temperatures enough to boil the ocean within about 300 years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
it is costing us tons. it is preventing economic recovery right now.
Businesses are dumping money into the stock market as it is growing by 20-30% annually while the "real economy" is stuck making 1%.
If those businesses were forced to invest in new products and growth instead of in the fake stock market we could get out of this mess easier.
the majority of companies are sitting on trillions of dollars worth of cash. it is just sitting there collecting dust. why aren't they investing it in the future of their company?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Are they increasing prices though? Everything I've seen indicates HFT *decreases* the spread between buy and ask prices, in other words, HFT is reducing the costs to long term investors.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Yeah it's great article ..... but there are many people in trading who just to find out what other people wanted... like the author of the article said.
DING, DING, DING, we have a winner. Someone is paying attention.
Just because the hyper rich are playing with their own turds, doesn't mean they aren't costing us.
Cheap storage VM.
This is a classic mistake made by many intelligent people. If your town/state/country is bursting at the seams and unable to provide sufficient food/water/shelter, then your too many people theory makes sense for you. If not, you are doing a disservice to yourself and future generations by limiting your offspring. Why should the values of the Duggers, India, or China have greater future weight then your values?
Cheap storage VM.
One of Dick's books, sorry I cannot remember the title, concerns an arms race involving entirely fictitious weapons. The financial industry seems to be approaching this level, where the activity in no way concerns real-life financial instruments.
As for TFA's comment about dividend stocks... Yeah, they count as a pretty decent safe-haven in a bear market; but overall, they have a piss-poor return - Three to four percent sustained, at best. Beats (core) inflation, but not by much... Certainly not enough to retire on unless you literally sock away half of your paycheck for the next 40 years.
We appear unwaveringly headed for a securities market implosion, and not merely of the recession/depression kind, but something much, much worse.
3-4% with another 3-4% on top in dividends is in-line with the historic market gains. There's math involved, but how does that compound when the capital gains are recycled back into buying more of the same stock? No, I didn't read much of the article, so I don't know what it said about dividend paying stocks.
As long as your deposits are bet on those fictonal products, and the fairy tale of national debt exists, finance will never be "irrelevant".
You must have missed the part about not being able to use those shares for other activities. It would include plans like yours, and be enforced the same way the SEC handles other rules violations.
After you own the stock for a year, you can lease it to others. But if they have the ability to sell some of your shares in Company X, you cannot buy more shares of Company X for a year. Lease as many out as you wish.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The most effective solution to overpopulation seems to be raising the standard and security of living. The developed world has basically no population growth. As other places get economically developed, their population stops growing. Make people economically secure, arrange things so almost all babies have long lives, provide methods of having sex that don't lead to reproduction, and watch population growth stop. Technological advancement makes it possible to do this with more and more populations.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can't agree with the 1 year minimum rule. Investors need the ability to pull out their money at any time.
If the investors aren't willing to keep their money with a company for a year, then they aren't really investing in that company. They are gamblers, using that company's stock price.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Wait, are they dumping it in the stock market, or is it sitting there collecting dust?
The stock market is behaving normally for the flip from pessimism to optimism. That flip is a prerequisite for companies shifting from fearful (not willing to hire more people they think they'd just have to lay off again in a few months) to greedy (we better hire now or will miss out on all that growth).
It's the same pattern you see every 15 years or so, just the business cycle as usual. The employment picture sucked far worse than is has in nearly 100 years this time around (thanks, bailouts!), so there's a long climb ahead, but we're climbing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, sure, that's would be a real problem without further technological progress, there's no doubt about that. Up to the point power generation is small compared to Solar influx, it doesn't matter. Beyond that, why generate the power on Earth? Why use it on Earth? Why have any groundside heavy industry at all? Given enough progress, there's no point in allowing any sort of industrial blight anywhere on-planet.
Sure, that's centuries away, but so is the need.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you're holding a significant amount of dollars, you're doing it wrong. Dollars aren't supposed to retain value, they're supposed to be an intermediary for trade. Invest, my Slashdot freak, whether index fund or rental property or whatever real financial advice you can get, but invest.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry that sounds too much like the reasoning behind the fundamentalist Christian quiverfull movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Playing population-chicken isn't worth it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't know of any "rogue traders" that were working for retirement funds (admittedly, I could have missed one). You do understand the difference between investment banking and honest finance, right?
As for plague and starvation, history is on my side. 1000 years of solid progress in both respects.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You must have missed the part about not being able to use those shares for other activities
I don't think you've thought this through. Who in the world would invest in US companies if their capital was tied up like this? Even real estate is more liquid.
And you've vastly expanded government regulation by restricting contracts between private individuals. If I'm understanding you correctly, you'd eliminate options. Options are critical for mitigating risk. For an obvious example, try to imagine a farmer planning his crop without someone on the hook to purchase said crop. Imagine a trucking company trying to put a fuel budget together without the ability to lock-in a price for diesel. Now I realize that those are options on commodities and you are talking about equities, but the effect is similar.
Are you talking about regulating private companies or only those traded on the exchanges? I'm pretty sure all you would do is drive trading to the private side, which would be terrible for the little guy. I would have almost no way to buy into the capital markets. Transparency would suck, too, since private companies don't report. Would you want your retirement dollars invested in a company that doesn't need to report to the SEC?
And all of this to prevent HF traders from taking advantage of gigantic trades? I'm sorry but that is (a) not really a big problem and (b) a ridiculously disproportionate response.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
trying to find the optimal prices on exchanges as soon as the quotes lives the order matching engine ...
I like this video here worth 17 minutes of time ... talks about the limitations of how fast brain can process information .. and why machines now dominate the trade decisions ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I didn't read much of the article, so I don't know what it said about dividend paying stocks.
:I
Actually, it says nothing about dividends... The GGP post mentioned them, but not the way I meant. I must have clicked through to another article off TFA and conflated the two into one source, mea culpa.
"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." --Rothschild in 1744.
Casteism
Hammers don't have the right of free speech; therefore, they don't have all the rights I do. Corporations have been granted free speech, and they (and their employees) are largely immune to imprisonment from what looks to me like criminal negligence. They diffuse responsibility to prevent employees from being convicted when they kill people, and don't go to jail themselves.
Moreover, McCain-Feingold didn't give certain individuals special privileges. I can donate to a political campaign. Tim Cook can donate to a political campaign. That's fair. Thing is, the only money I can donate is mine. Cook, due to the Citizens United case, can donate Apple's funds to a political campaign (provided some other people acquiesce, of course). He's donating other people's money, and I don't see why not being able to do that gives me a special privilege over him.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oddly enough, Mom invested in companies that were working for the common good, and that's why I inherited as much as I did. Her picks were largely due to moral reasons, and her stocks did quite well in the 2008 crunch. (Yeah, duelling anecdotes.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Errr.. The whole point of market makers is to churn their account. Buy when the prices are low, sell when high, keep the inventory low to reduce risks. Market makes make their money from the spread in bid / ask prices. Today those spreads are less than a fraction of a penny. Even a small tax would force these spreads to widen.
As for being too small, I will point to France. When they introduced their "small" Tobin tax liquidity went down and volatility went up in a measurable amount.
If there is a problem fix the problem. The issue is that HFT are front running trades. Imposing a tax is not going to prevent front running.
Fixed that for you. The big bailouts started under Bush and continued under Obama. We don't need to be partisan about this.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
by volume about half the trading is done by the large long term funds or corporations buying their own stock. the other half by hedge funds.
Simply false. If half of trading was done by large long term funds or was for buybacks, we would see two things: 1) tremendous turnover in ownership of stocks on an annual basis and 2) disappearing of stocks from the market because they were all brought back into the companies' holdings. Neither of these are true, so something else must be true.
Technology MAY delay the inevitable but it can't prevent it. It is a fact that natural resources are limited if for no other reason other than the size of the Earth is limited. Also, it is debatable whether or not "productivity/efficiency", all things considered including "externalities" such as water, air pollution and other natural resource loss such as oxygen producing plant life, actually continues to grow with the broad economy. There is a well known law of "diminishing returns" in both economics and physics. Each time you "reuse" a resource you loose some of its original advantage. At some point your processes begin to become less and less efficient to the point they are no longer sensible to use at all. At least without the influx of "new" resources. And since various nations gave up on manned exploration of the solar system thirty years ago thanks to Reaganomics and his "war machine" plot, there are no new resources to develop off planet. China and Russia may allude to the idea of national efforts to explore off-world, the fact of the matter is no one country has all the resources necessary to actually develop such programs independently. And it's not very realistic to expect continued international cooperation given the antagonistic state of world relations. Thus, diminishing returns are inevitable, even considering technology. As they say in the capital markets, "past performance does not reflect future returns."
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Not very likely at all. In addition to the challenge of a more equitable system of production and distribution there are almost insurmountable social constraints. The is the problem of educating/training the world's population. Don't see that happening given the culture of greed running rampant because the nature of such investments almost certainly require a more egalitarian world willing to make sacrifices for others. Secondly, many social and cultural ideologies will not give up their authoritarian powers to enable women (for example) access to education, elevated social standing, freedom to pursue careers, etc. Third, (and this is probably the worst problem of all) the various paternalistic world religions which through their teachings limit pregnancy prevention programs and methods. The leaders and adherents of all the various Abrahamic religions (in particular) are very misogynistic, anti-freedom of choice and fear mongering (with excommunication, physical punishments, etc.) that prevent rational population control programs. Those religions promote pro-life moral worldviews for no other purpose other than to purposely GROW the world population. For what purpose? Perpetuation of their beliefs, myths and power. The more people there are the more potential converts. That's it in a nutshell. The grand perpetuation scheme done at almost any cost. So long as the population is growing they're content. Until such time as most of the world becomes atheist and rational thinkers that's simply never going to change.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Gambling is how the "markets" began in the first place. Even just 50 years ago a majority of investors (in stocks for example) were the wealthy, those who had the extra cash laying around and were willing to risk some of it for (even) a quick return (whatever a specific situation was defined as a quick return). It wasn't until the 1980s that the markets saw the potential for huge profits (for themselves) in transaction and administrative costs that they sold the idea of "retirement investments" to the average person and smaller companies. Then everyone jumped on the bandwagon in hopes of decent returns, even potentially millions in retirement accounts (no promises of course), driving up everyone's expectations. Thus the modern markets were created. But just like smoking, it's hard to quit being a profit junkie. Everyone jumps aboard in hopes of making a killing; being a "millionaire" come retirement. Very few have even come close to that goal but in the meantime money managers have got filthy rich. It's really a kind of scheme. They knew from the getgo that the wealthy were going to be the biggest beneficiaries.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Then your statement "I realize that the US legal system is rather dumb in this regard and actually have sent a variety of household items and assets to jail" is nonsensical, as only things that have agency can take action (by definition).
Ok, why is my statement nonsensical? Just because the law in a particular country might treat hammers as having agency doesn't mean that I do. I'm not US law. Examine your logic here.
They diffuse responsibility to prevent employees from being convicted when they kill people, and don't go to jail themselves.
The law is very definite on this point - beyond a reasonable doubt. And people aren't convicted of crimes merely because they kill other people. You have to show other things like a "callous disregard for human life".
And the annoying thing is that removing corporate personhood does nothing to fix the problem of diffusion of responsibility. You're tilting at the wrong windmill.
Moreover, McCain-Feingold didn't give certain individuals special privileges.
Except that yes, it did. For example, from the majority opinion for Citizens United:
"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
So I can be fined and/or jailed for advocating the political views of my corporation under McCain/Feingold while the individual wouldn't be.
Thing is, the only money I can donate is mine.
No, that isn't the law. You could give me money and I could then donate it as an individual. That was still legal under the law. I suppose we could claim that the money is now "mine" which it technically is, though the obvious expectation here is that I would donate it to the appropriate causes.
If that was true, why aren't the banks pushing "best execution" now?
The left, including most young people, are convinced that the way to solve this problem is an HFT tax. This will hit the banks. As time goes on (read: old people who vote for conservative Republicans die), the transaction tax becomes more and more inevitable. Particularly since it has been tried in France, and while it severely annoyed finance geeks nobody else seems to have noticed.
There are basically two explanations for this behavior:
1) For complex technical reasons "Best Execution" won't actually work, which people will know if we implement it now, and it fails. Then the 2020 financial transactions tax becomes fucking inevitable. But if they don't push it now it won;t be proven a failure until 2025 or so.
2) Banks are too dumb to understand politics.
Here's your problem with that argument:
As someone who has a physical job that involves very little direct interaction with the finance system I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility" unless they travel into other sectors of the economy. That hasn't happened in France. Companies have a little more trouble accessing capital, but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust because they have to wait a day for something they used to be able to do in microseconds.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue, and the finance geeks have whined to high heaven. I really can't see a downside here.
Decreasing the spread does not reduce the cost to long term investors on average. It perhaps reduces the costs to less savvy investors and increases costs to more savvy investors. But the aggregate effect is to increase the cost on average.
A retirement fund sounds like something pretty amazing but in reality it's nothing more than any other of these fantasies of capitalism.
It is supposed to provide cash for the future... while in reality we are seeing that many have actually become de-funded what in fact means that they are _costing_ us money. Specially in countries like mine where we are forced the darn funds down the throat like it or not with the sole reason that in the 1980s it sounded so much more cool and smart "Hey, we are modern, we have a mullet, shoulder pads and retirement funds, mate are we smart!!!"
Thus, nothing but another useless chimera.
Had the government taken my money instead and used it to fund the pension system there would have been no difference, but at least I wouldn't have had to swallow all the religious bullshit from the suites. And maybe, just maybe I would be better off.
And sorry, I do still believe in Malthus, at least until we can build technology and goods out of pure photons... or finally decide to cut the crap and take space more seriously. But for that we need to stop thinking in the quarterly results that the makes the butts of the suits water.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Sorry to sour your fairytale.
The resource that is even now the scarcest is agricultural fertile soil. We may already have reached the peak here and the problem is not that we use every time more, the real problem is that there is every time less, through erosion.
And erosion works very very fast, you have had a few extreme examples in the USA and in the European Community countries likes Spain can tell how the fertile soil of the south west dissapeared. I have myself seen how a plot used to grow grow cotton that was at level with a road went to be 2-3m below the road in less than 3 years.
And this is happening every day at a massive scale in all the countries of arid zones the world were industrial agriculture is being applied.
Water wells for Africa? they have proven to just do worse: People that were nomadic settled, exploiting the soil even more intensely and the wells themselves proved to be a real nightmare: at the same time that drinkable water is pumped to the surface salty water is taking it's place. Not always from the oceans but many times the salts come from the fertilisers used on the crops.
Would you tell me what type of industrialisation you would expect from people living at the edge of starvation?
Add to the picture the increasing use of soil for biofuels and the even worse practice of using this soil to grow crops to feed livestock which is inefficient in a ration of 3/1 (in soil alone and 10/1 in water), meaning that we need 3 times as many resources to grow 1 calorie of beef than 1 calorie of vegetables/
And I am quite sorry again, but before you can even thing on industrializing anything you need to feed the potential workers
GMO have already proven worth nothing, else we would be seeing green deserts by now, and they aren't only as dry as ever, they are even bigger.
Maybe this Final Solution will come all by itself, just look at the streams of immigrants that are pressing northwards to the USA and Europe.
There will be (are already are) more and more tension, more and more Boko Haram, Al Qaida, Syria, Chad...
A nuke, a designer organism in hands of any nutjob, from Christian anti-evolutionists, UFO nuts, Islamists, extreme animal rights activists or anti-humanist nihilists (remember 12 Monkeys?). It doesn't take too much, even a simple accident: remember that we still have nukes enough to eradicate all live on earth 100 times. And what about "mother" Nature herself?
In Ecology soil, water and minerals (and energy) are called "limiting factors". You True Believers are always talking about how the Market behaves like an ecosystem or an organism... but very few have ever bothered to really understand this analogy in all it's implications but just cherrypicking the aspects of ecology and biology that fit your needs while you fail to understand a basic fact: That ecology is nothing more and nothing less than information science applied to living systems and that it's basic premises are no more and no less than applying the principles of thermodynamics to ecosystems; it's just data at the end of the day and it can really be extrapolated to almost anything, specially economy.
And you don't need to be very bright to infer that economy can not just ignore it's basic limiting factors which are very much the same as in ecology: Soil to grow food to nourish the masses, feed the workers and produce goods for he consumers, energy to keep everything rolling including the very computers that the financial system is based upon, and minerals to makes stuff from that can be sold...
Can you see Malthus dead hand waving now?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Thanks
-- 29A the number of the Beast
The indigenous populations of the Western countries are decreasing, but the countries are still seeing a constant net growth.
And the impact of each individual in the developed countries is increasing constantly so that it doesn't really matters: One fat couch dweller family whit their cars, their 4K TVs on every room including the WC (no joking), the ma who takes the kids to school in her SUV to later go shopping just out of pure bordom, their Big Macs and their holidays by plane (not forgetting the baby and his/her diaper made of virgin forest trees) have a higher impact than 10 or more families in the 3rd world and this is increasing year by year.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
But more importantly, it would take that people stop thinking in immediate benefits and this means just bluntly to device a new system different from capitalism.
I did know some math about taking excess population to space, I can't recall the exact numbers but it was a lot.
And unless there is a way to take massive amounts of people or industry out to space whith a low impact on he environment and energy need we may be facing the fact that we would need more time and more resources that what we have.
Of course, industry doesn't need to be "lifted" to space, it could be just build there and _substitute_ the one on earth... but the main problem would continue being the people on earth and the scale of time involved in developing space to provide the energy and goods to be consumed on earth.
In theory this would work, we could have an infinite capitalist utopia in from of us, but the only thing stopping us from realising it is capitalism itself.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Do you recall that interest rates have fallen lately?
Nope?
And what good is "investing" to somebody with a normal salary? I would need years to be able to buy something with the interests of the invested money.
And for what reason would I want to retire a bunch of cash and put it somewhere out of my reach just to earn a few extra Euro? It makes no sense.
Taking risks to get a high interest? Iceland, there you have it. There are still a good bunch of people who lost money and we all had to pay for them. Nice thing investing, I love it. We are all capitalists and libertarian individualists, we all love Ian Rand, until the hedge fund goes to hell and the bank we had our money goes bankrupt, and then we are suddenly all wining and complaining that Papa Government ha to do something, we are all ho, so poor victims "Give us our money, daddy"
and the same goes for people taking mortgages
We are still paying for the bank bailouts
But of course, the Bible-Quran says "Invest ye faithful for you will get eternal bliss and be seen as smart and awesome!"
Sorry, but I am an atheist.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Sure? Have you ever heard about the Black Plague? No? Well, never mind.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
+10 BRILLIANT!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Nice, But first you need to lift it there. I haven't done the math but to get all the industry up there it will take a lot of time and a lot if resources that we don't have.
You don't lift all the industry up there - you build it there.
Of course, industry doesn't need to be "lifted" to space, it could be just build there and _substitute_ the one on earth... but the main problem would continue being the people on earth and the scale of time involved in developing space to provide the energy and goods to be consumed on earth.
Yeah, like that - all the power and raw materials you could every need are up there already, and not all that hard to reach even by modern technology. I expect to see early attempts at asteroid mining (but for fuel, not metal) and orbiting solar power stations in my lifetime.
It will take a couple centuries, I'm sure, but what's the rush?
But more importantly, it would take that people stop thinking in immediate benefits and this means just bluntly to device a new system different from capitalism.
Well, a new kind of capitalism. There's nothing incompatible between capitalism and long-term vision for immense profits, it's the patience we lack today. But cultural advancement to enable large projects is part of technological advancement.
And unless there is a way to take massive amounts of people or industry out to space whith a low impact on he environment and energy need we may be facing the fact that we would need more time and more resources that what we have.
That is just silly scaremongering. There's a lot of available solar power just in accessible land areas - enough for 11-12 billion to consume the power the average American does today, without shading so much land as to become an environmental catastrophe of its own.
but the only thing stopping us from realising it is capitalism itself.
There's nothing about short-term thinking that's special to capitalism. Governments and cultures seem to go through cycles from lots of optimism and long-term visions down slowly to "someone else work and give me all the things today!" and then collapse. Western culture is near the nadir of that cycle, and I'm sure it will get worse before it gets better (junkies always need to hit bottom), but don't panic over extending some portion of a cycle indefinitely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I would need years to be able to buy something with the interests of the invested money.
And you could have ice cream today! All the ice cream you want! Adulthood means thinking about the future, not just today. It's taking me 15 years of living off half my take-home to get to where I could retire if I wanted to, and it will take 5-10 more to retire in comfort (depending on how much comfort I want to seek). But it works, and it's not rocket science, it's just making wealth a priority in your life.
Not willing to make it a priority? Then you have no just complain about not getting the reward.
But don't look for "interest rates", look for ownership of the means of production - common stock index funds, or commercial real estate, or, heck, get real financial advice from a professional and not some internet stranger. But don't claim there's no path to get to wealth - it's not a clear, well-trodden path, to be sure, nor it it always easy going, but there is a path.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The Black Plague was the worst of an amazing catalog of plagues that were common early in the last millennium. Chart the problem over time. Before the vaccine deniers started their BS, it was constant and steady progress towards elimination of death by infectious disease.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The last thing you'd ever want is a defined-benefit retirement fund that puts you at someone else mercy. Fuck that noise. Invest - own the means of production yourownself. Avoid the scam artists and have patience, and that story has a happy ending.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've always understood the limited liability company to be an invention of the Europeans to facilitate the harvesting of the wealth of the Americas, after wealthy individuals and partnerships lost their fortunes in the attempt. They appear to still be successful at the task.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
There is a "death penalty" for corporations when they are judged to be so rife with criminality that there is no hope that a new board of directors or something will straighten them out; however the only company that I know of ever to be thusly dismantled was IGFarben after WWII. And the irony is that even though all assets were stripped in 1952 and the financial entity was left to liquidate itself, pay off legal claims, etc, it continues to exist to this day, with stock still publicly traded, though it is nothing but a shell with no assets other than its stock value.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Exactly. This concept that a corporation is forbidden to do anything that might cost the stockholders is a conservative fairy tale. Nobody seems to object when a corporation sponsors a sports or entertainment event, for instance, even though it can often be questioned whether that is the most effective use of the money.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
That is why stockholders are allowed to vote on company actions, etc. Since they have ultimate control over who makes decisions regarding corporate actions and what they do, there is no need for the government to judge whether the actions are in the stockholders' best interests or not.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market.
"Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
If that was true, why aren't the banks pushing "best execution" now?
They can't because the SEC changed the rules 10 years ago requiring changing the standard that brokers must use from execution to price. FYI “best price” is technically harder to do than “best execution”. Best prices involves lots of complex business rules, execution is subjective.
You then launch into a argument that transactions taxes are inevitable because they are popular. Yes, it is popular to vilify fat cats and purpose cheap populist solutions. However popular does not mean good or effective. The problem is that the tax won't fix the problem. You are confusing how HFT work (going very fast) with what they do (front running). You might cut into HFT profits but you are not fixing the issue. Better to fix the root cause.
You then ask why banks are not being more politically astute. Well, both banks and HFT have gobs of money, if the banks win the HFT lose their jobs so the HFT are going to defend their turf to the last breath, and complex technically issues don't change rapidly.
But that does not mean banks are sitting on their hands.
See IEX. http://www.iextrading.com/abou...
They have built in a 350 millisecond delay and have been going like gangbusters.
It does, however, mean that the legal system is capable of holding positions on various subjects, such as the agency of hammers, and acting according to them. So do companies, countries etc: they have goals they are trying to reach, an agenda they're pushing. Which is pretty much the definition of agency.
Your statement is nonsensical because if institutions have no agency, action cannot be ascribed to them, which you did.
Examine your own writing. You're ascribing actions to the US legal system, which implies it has agency. Indeed, an institution without agency would be completely pointless, since it couldn't do anything.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So the SEC are infallible gods, whose decisions cannot be appealed and never change their minds? They're a Federal Agency.
The President, VP, any 50 Senators, and any 218 Congressman could overturn any regulation tomorrow. And if the banks issued a press release saying "we want this looked at", at least 40 Senators and 200 Congressman would sign on. None of them would have any clue what they were signing onto, but they'd so it because it was the bank's idea. Then Elizabeth Warren would announce "it'll probably help," and that would get it over the hump.
Either the banks know it won't work, or they're benefiting from front-loading. Either way they're betting Republicans continue to dominate the House, and protect them from the transactions tax.
That just won't work in the long-term.
It does, however, mean that the legal system is capable of holding positions on various subjects, such as the agency of hammers, and acting according to them. So do companies, countries etc: they have goals they are trying to reach, an agenda they're pushing. Which is pretty much the definition of agency.
No, it means the people who use the system do. The people remain the ones with agency.
Your statement is nonsensical because if institutions have no agency, action cannot be ascribed to them, which you did.
I did no such thing.
You're ascribing actions to the US legal system, which implies it has agency.
Again, I implicitly ascribe actions to the people who maintain the system. The rules in question were created by people and enforced by people.
which you did.
Reading through your previous posts, I see you admit (in the same sense that you claim I did) that corporations don't have agency.
Yes, a corporation requires a human to act on its behalf to do anything, but similarly you require your muscle and neural cells to act on yours, and they in turn rely on molecular machines.
That is not the same at all, unless you are trying to claim that muscle and neural cells have agency. In other words, humans act in both the macroscopic case of corporations "doing anything" or the microscopic case of peoples' muscle and neural cells "acting". It remains the same fallacy of blaming the inanimate object, be it a corporation or a hammer for the actions of the people who use the object.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market.
"Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
A retirement account. That sounds like something I thought I'd have back in the days when I still had hope.
I work retail. The last time I spent a day a week looking for non-retail gigs on the internet my landlord/father vetoed it because I was "just wasting my time." He was right. They're turning away 22-year-olds. Nobody's gonna give a 34-year-old with no experience in a full-time job that requires a degree an entry-level position that requires a degree.
If the unions get their $15 an hour minimum wage I may re-enter the market with a 401k. Until then a savings account makes way more sense, because sometimes a bill NEEDS to be paid, and retirement money don't pay bills.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
And where would finance shift to if it didn't have Wall Street? We're not an aging military power that hasn't had real economic clout since Napoleon I pissed it all away on a futile European Empire project.
We are a huge chunk of the global economy. All the big rich countries are our allies. The little rich countries are easily bullied into complying with US Tax law. The non-Allied states either have very primitive finance systems (Brazil, India, etc.) or they have governments that insist on shooting/jailing a successful financier every few years to keep the rest in line.
If we pass a tax, and include a credible reason why it's a good idea, as well as sanctions on any state foolish enough to take a significant part of our financial business we'll be fine. NATO and the Asian allies will sign on, and the finance system would rather pay the damn tax then trust Kirchner's Argentina not to confiscate their assets.
Let's turn your questions around and ask why any of those things affect you? My point is to live your life, have as many kids as you want to and don't worry about someone in India filling the planet with their children.
We all get the same shot, don't sell yourself short because of some imagined future problem.
Cheap storage VM.
Actually, your reasoning is more like the quiverfull. You are asking people to make a huge personal sacrifice for some mythical future good.
Cheap storage VM.
In my book, my liberty ends where the liberty of the neighbour starts. Having as many kids as I want means that I definitely will impact the liberty of my neighbour. It will cost him money in taxes in order to pay my daycare allowance and the increase in the social security bill. It will cost him his woods, his clean water and his air if he happens to live somewhere in Indonesia in terms of trees cut down for paper used to make diapers. It will cost him his soil and his health if he happens to live in South America or Africa in the form of soy plantations used to feed the livestock used to feed my children (of course, my children can't eat rice, can they? they have to have canned babyfood and later in their lives Big Macs and KFC Nuggets). So that I don't think that my neighbour be he Dutch or from any other place in the world woil;d be very happy with me having as many children as I would like... (well, as a matter of fact he would be extremely happy because I don't have any)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
What are you talking about? when was the last time a hammer owned assets, lobbied politicians for changes to laws. I am fine with the directors/owners of the companies being held personally liable, to the same extent as an individual is, (i.e. jail time) for the actions of their company . The problem is in most cases no one is, just a fine, to a company that makes more money in 1 an hour (apple makes about 4 million) than you will probably make in a lifetime.
I assure you if you had a hammer, dog, sheep, whatever other entity that is considered, not human, that went around killing people, or destroying their property it would quickly be destroyed.
I never said assets where not seized, that's a type of fine, isn't it basically if the whole organization isn't a criminal one, its not going to be destroyed. Yes directors do go to jail, but unless its the directly doing it its not likely.
If we found out tomorrow, Apple was using say, slave labor (quite likely that it is) in china do you think it would anything more than a please stop doing it, and maybe a relatively small fine. What would happen to you if the police found you where using slave labor? Go directly to jail, do not pass go do not collect your 41 billion dollars per year.
I am fine with the directors/owners of the companies being held personally liable, to the same extent as an individual is, (i.e. jail time) for the actions of their company .
So how liable are you as an individual for the actions of Coca Cola or Exxon? There's a good reason we don't implement your idea. Because no one, not even a director can personally police all of the actions of the people who work for a company. Liability and responsibility without the capability for that level of liability and responsibility is not far to that person.
And as I noted earlier, a company doesn't actually "act". This is a legal fiction.
never said assets where not seized, that's a type of fine
When one speaks of "jail" for an inanimate thing, this is the only way that makes sense.
Seem short sighed, as a I mentioned above.
Cheap storage VM.
I want to counter your last e-mail with advice and saying one should have a optimistic outlook but I can't do that without sounding trite.
I will try to give some practice advice – take a look at a ROTH IRA if "savings account" means "emergency rainy day fund". There are companies (banks and the big online brokers – deals rotate) out there that offer low balance low fee low risk (i.e. short term bond funds) out there. If there is an emergency any money you put in you can withdraw without penalty.
You say we are not a not a decrepit power.
Powers become decrepit powers by wasting their energy on pointless battles. Trying to line up everybody is hard - bulling little countries takes more politcal capital than you think. The EU has been spending a lot of energy to get London in line unsuccessfully and I would argue they have more clout with England on this one particular issue. Then you need to figure out what to do with Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. There small countries have large trading floors and a big incentive to "cheat" and stay out of the system. These will be hard to persuade.
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing” Jean Baptiste Colbert
So - lots of energy, little gain, and it does not fix the system. The energy and political capital would be better spent fixing "transfer pricing" and other dodges corporations use to get out of paying corporate income tax.
My point about killing is that, given some of the spills and explosions which occurred, I'd be looking at charges of negligent homicide at least, since many of those were due to negligence. Typically, in the accidents, nobody goes to jail and the company pays out money that typically isn't much of a deterrent. The reason doesn't matter. This isn't a matter of corporate personhood, but rather an illustration of a right that a corporation has that I don't.
McCain-Feingold didn't give me any special privilege over any other natural human beings (the protoplasmic variety). You are perfectly free to advocate the political views of your corporation, and were for a long time. There are these life-forms called "lobbyists", and they have long advocated their employers' positions in the political arena. What it did was say that corporations themselves could not donate money to campaigns, not that the CEO couldn't donate.
As I said, I can only donate my own money (in addition to money given me by others to donate, I suppose), while Tim Cook can donate his own money and Apple's money.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What has your "sight" to do with undermining the liberties of the rest of the people?
What do you feel so "unshortsighted" about the fact that I have to pay extra taxes for YOUR children to be in daycare?
And that MY water is crap because YOUR children use diapers made from MY trees?
Or that MY health insurance bill is higher because of YOUR children making extra use of it?
That MY grocery lsit becomes more expensive because of YOUR children needing more food?
And if it were that you are talking about existing children that are right now on the planet... but what you meant is jsut to bring more people to the planet, peolple that do not exist yet and taht nobody has any need for them to be here.
Are you willing to pay ME all the extra costs of YOU having extra children? Well, in this case I have no problem.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Your using my childern's money to get your tax cuts. Your using my children's oil to drive your car and my children's trees to make you papers. I am aghast at all the pollution you are dumping on my children's planet.
See what I did there...
I would stack my carbon footprint against yours obviously entitled single life anytime.
Cheap storage VM.
Nobody gets any tax cuts for other people, neither children nor elderly not normal.
Your "children's" oil is MY oil too.. and I DON'T DRIVE A CAR ;)
Yur children are dumping their own polution on teir planet and the more children the more pollution... and remmeber: it is MY PLANET too.
And what you are actually saying is that you are planning on having childnre JUST so that they can suffer from pollution?
Why?
I do't have children, I dont' drive cars and I am extremely concious of what I do and what I don't, and yet, I have to pay for other people's vices and stupidity.
And just for nothing becaue you don't need children for nothing.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Sorry about the sad world you live in, you should visit ours sometime.
Cheap storage VM.
What happens is that I was thought arithmetic in basic school.
So, let me tell you a popular tale from the icy steppes of Flevoland:
Once upon a time there were two very poor fellows living at the age of a desert (the dreaded Flevoland Badlands, you may have heart about them!). They needed to cross this terrible desert in 10 days and as they were so darn poor the only were able to buy a single piece of bread. This bread would be able to feed the tow of them for eleven days, enough to get them through the desert and with a bit of margin for the worst case.
They walked for two days under the unmerciful Flevolandian sun and met a beggar who had nothing to eat.
The poor fellows took pity of the beggar and decided to share their food and fate with him despite the fact that they knew that they would have to fast for the last and hardest part of the way.
And so they walked for for more days and then, at the seventh day they arrived at a local football club, and they said "You know what? I don't know these guys over there, but for no good reason I'm just going to give them the bread we have left.No idea why, I just kinda fancy it"
And that's the story. Got the morale?
No, of course
I will explain it to you:
The ones that are stealing the bread of your children is not me, it's THEM. Because if you only have one bread to feed you and have to share it your part will be reduced, and the more sharing the bread the less part they will have.
If you have no choice but to share with a friend, a needed person or an EXISTING child, you may be honoured by this sacrifice...
But willingly bring more people to the world that did neither exist before not asked to come is absolutely batshit crazy, its' sadomasochism. Nobody will be happier having less to eat, or do you know a means by which a division can produce a higher result as it's factors?
I presume that your idea of happily shitting more bald apes into the world is based on a religion's dogmas, right?
;) Gotcha mate. Big Dady Pimp in Da Sky is not going to feed you with Abracadabra Sweets.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
You act like it's a zero sum game. It's not. Life is a competitions with winners and losers.
Cheap storage VM.
At my tax bracket a Roth would be overkill. A non-retirement account would be fine. I'm not gonna be paying any taxes on it when I withdraw from it when I'm retired (unless my economic situation completely changes), because my main income will be Social Security. Since that is typically $10k-15k, and it's only taxable if your total income is $25k, I'd have to be withdrawing $10k a year to pay any taxes on it. Investment income under $10k would be wiped out by the standard deduction and my exemption. Since I'm likely to live until 85, any tax planning is silly unless I end up with a total of $200k in the account ($10k times 20 years), which would probably require me to put at least $2-3k away a year (I only have 30 or so years left). I made $14k last year. At this income level all the conventional wisdom is pretty much BS for rich people.
As for the bullying, who said we're bullying the countries directly? Hell, simply require that any transaction involving a US-based corporation gets reported to the IRS if the country itself doesn't have an equivalent transaction tax. Then you levy the transaction tax on the company. Since that's a huge pain in the ass, most countries would simply pass the tax themselves.
Remember the international outcry when we required so much paperwork for foreign banks with US-account-holders? It mostly resulted in said banks refusing to have US account holders. This would be the same thing, except instead of screwing with our own people, in every country we're allied with, it would only screw with the ones who genuinely prefer not to have a transaction tax.
Well, I see that you have learned some buzzwords somewhere... but you haven't been able to make any sense of them, did you? Nope, I am not talking about a zero sum game: That's when you have opposing forces that equilibrate each other. I am talking about simple arithmetics: Substraction and division. And about finite resources. I assume that you read this phrase about competition in the "Big Manual of Captain Obvious", right? So putting in terms of your beloved meme: What you propose is that instead of you alone becoming the winner (by not having too many offspring) you want to become a looser yourself and all the ones that come too, because no matter how much you try you will have less to win as there are more competitors for less price... unless you become the Ultimate Winner and just eradicate and utterly exterminate all the competitors, Adolf Hitler style... and I assume that that's not what you had in mind with your "happy reproduce until you drop" thingy, right ? See, there's no way around logic and arithmetic. There is now way that you can make that less become more, not even with the help of the Pink Unicorn in Sky.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Not true, nobody knows the future. Overpopulation is self correcting if it comes to that, but educated and content people will have less children, it's been proven. I am asking why the educated and content should have even less then they want, which you are proposing. I am positing that for every childless Einsten, there should be an Eintein's father who has the children they want to have.
Another genius or great leader can come from anywhere, but there is alot of momentum for creating well educated people in the west. We should not abandon that to make more room for uneducated people.
Cheap storage VM.
That's wishful thinking. Resources do not regenerate. And even if they did if population grows there will be inevitably a moment when the resources to be shared are not enough to maintain this population... and then it will self-correct, you betcha that it will. It has already happened a few times here in Europe. Ever heard about the Black Plague? And talking about the Black Plague: Ever heard how we Europeans managed to overtake the rest of the world and become colonial powers, etc? No. Well, it began with the Plague. Right now we are ripe for another "Self Regulatory Event" and in any case, any normal event, hurricane, earthquake etc, that in the past would have caused a limited impact is getting amplified many times just because there are more people that can be affected by them. On the other hand: Do you know Iceland? No? They got a crisis there, and now they are O again, in only 5 years. Norway? Finland? Sweden? Betting your ass on the eventual emergence of a potential Einstein makes no sense, from the point of view of probabilities even with a low increase in population (even with a decline in population) an Einstein may arise while with an increase in population we can be 100% certain that we will have less resources. Theres' no way around that. Sorry. it's just plain arithmetic.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
the majority of companies are sitting on trillions of dollars worth of cash. it is just sitting there collecting dust. why aren't they investing it in the future of their company?
The United States government has a vested interested in having corporations (or individuals) sit on large sums of cash. The value of that cash is being sucked out of it every minute of every day. Where does this value go? Yeah...
Have a nice day :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen