"How do we race towards middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs for white people, simultaneously concentrating white people wealth in fewer hands"
By creating many more jobs for other people, which clearly you don't even see as people in your moral equation.
Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.
But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.
Well, maybe I don't know what you mean by "shop around". There may be multiple exchanges selling the same thing (though not for stocks), and you usually aren't even aware if which one your broker deals with, as arbitrage keeps prices the same on all of them at faster than human scale these days - another example of making markets efficient.
The market makers simply trade on the exchange, filling orders at better prices than the bid/ask would be without them there. Because they trade so frequently, they can make good money off of quite a small price difference between what they buy and sell at.
You seem worried about these "losses for everyone else", but the market makers aren't siphoning off a % of each trade or anything like that. The only ones hurt are real parasites on the system: those who would profit from inattentive traders, by taking advantage of a thin market for price gouging.
It really seems like you're trying to argue "they add no value, because they must be taking money form someone, because they add no value."
Well, these are exchanges, so "shop around for a better price" isn't really a thing. What you can't do is profit from someone not paying much attention - profit from the inefficiency of the market. And that's a good thing: there should be no game to play, no skill at haggling required, nor deep understanding of market mechanics, simply to execute a trade. Deciding what price you're willing to buy or sell at is where the smarts belong, but if you buy something by mistake, and turn around and sell it 2 minutes later, that should cost you as little as possible.
Did you have a problem with those specific companies or something? I'm not sure why you called those out.
Narrow or broad, I can't fault the reasoning here. The government can't ask someone to (directly) act against their religious beliefs without clearing the bars of compelling state interest and least-burdensome (most narrow) approach. When you hand out waivers left and right, you don't have much ground to stand on there.
I don't see it at all. It's not a race to the bottom: it's a race towards first-world middle-class standards for all. It's not like reducing labor costs goes into the pockets of some rich guy somewhere - it's spilt between lower costs for everything, and better returns for all shareholders (and more than half of Americans own stock now).
Long term, the effects on demand from e.g. India emerging as an economic world power would be hugely positive for everyone. It the whole world were consuming at middle-class levels, there'd be no shortage of good jobs for all, even with most manufacturing done by robots.
Neutrons most certainly do interact electromagnetically.
Well, I guess they do have a magnetic moment, fair point. But I was talking specifically about the simple way matter interacts that we see through galactic rotation rates and the CMBR: dark matter doesn't interact with light the way electrons do, nor get dragged along with the electrons the way protons do, and it doesn't seem like dark matter clumps the way normal matter does thanks to friction. Neutrons would fit the bill for all of that, were in not for the short life of a free neutron.
It would be fascinating to learn what dark matter really is. Does it interact with the weak force? Could it be baryonic somehow? (That would be a shocker) Is it even some sort of hadrons, or something really new? (I almost said "exotic", but we're made of the exotic stuff.)
The amount that an $80000 job affects the lives of people in America is much smaller than the amount that the $30000 job helps the lives of people in India. You have to compare purchasing power, not "dollars".
One developer job in America means one guy lifted out of the social safety net or retail job in America (if you think anyone in America is poor, look around the world more). One developer job in India means 10+ people lifted out of abject poverty.
Believe me my job is on the line - I compete for jobs directly on the world market, working for companies large and small that can easily hire developers in India or China and in most of the places I've worked in fact have the majority of their staff there. And those people deserve a job every bit as much as I do.
What Microsoft sadly lacks is vision. They have great R&D teams, pointed at nothing, or at each other, or at random. If they had any kind of clue about what new technologies would be popular in the future, they could do great. They can afford to say "it may be X, or maybe Y, or maybe Z - so lets make all 3!".
But they don't they make second-rate (or acquire) products in markets other people have invented, then try to make those products the best-in-class over time. That's fine and all, but it's the opposite of leadership!
No, what happens is: instead of the prices being set buy the professionals who are perfect at gaming the system (buy a new car, then sell it the next day, see how that goes), the little guy gets a fair price, as the middle man screws the big guy (well, the middle man is likely the biggest guy, but still).
You're missing the entire point here. If the buyer and seller agree on a price, the trade just happens, no market maker needed, the end. All done.
But after all possible trades like that are done you're left with the "bid" and "ask" prices, where the seller and buyer are willing to stand on their prices and not compromise. Any good financial tool will show you the bid/ask for any exchange - you can check it out and see I'm not making this up.
Where the market maker adds value is in making it cheaper for the weak trader, the guy like me who doesn't have the time to play the game, who just wants a stock or bond at a fair price (given today's market mood), and so you just buys or sells "at market". I, the little guy get a better price. I've seen real evolution over the past 15 years in this, and it's like a tax of a few % has been lifted. Inefficient markets suck.
In the real world, where is he getting his bikes from?
Like I said, he hopes to balance buys and sells. If 100 people sell at his price, and 100 people buy at his price, he needs no bikes. If he's off by 1 or 2, he'll trade with Mr B or Mr S, and still do OK. But he does take a real risk.
Anyhow, that's how it really works. Remember, we're talking about markets that trade billions of shares a day, so the metaphor only stretches so far.
It makes it a lot safer. "We laid off 18k and you were one of them" is more defensible from lawsuits than having to individually justify 18k layoffs.
That's exactly backwards. In the US at least, you can lay off anyone without cause at any time in most states. However, a layoff of this size triggers the WARN act (originally written to soften the blow of closing The Factory in a factory town), requiring jumping through 17 flaming legal hoops to keep it all legal.
OTOH, I have no clue about Finland. Maybe you're right there.
You've got it completely backwards, is the thing. Don't worry, most people get this backwards, because they reason from "these guys must be evil" to "ahh, so it must work like this".
It works like this. You want a bike, you don't have time to research the right price, you just hope the market price is OK: * Mr B posts "Bicycle wanted, will pay up to $500" * Mr S posts "Bicycle for sale, $600" * Special user says "OK, now buying bikes for $520, selling for $580" * You post "buying 1 bike, best price".
You get the bike $20 cheaper. The market maker takes a risk here: that he can balance buys and sells, and not get left holding the bag when the price changes.
But the story gets better: * Special user 2 says "Oh, I see you Special 1, I'm now buying bikes for $525, selling for $575, hey, $50 a bike is better than nothing. * Special user 1 says "Oh no you didn, Buying for $530, selling for $570" * Very quickly it's $550/$551.
You get the bike for $551, $49 cheaper. I've seen this happen over the past 15 years, where the bid-ask gap shrank by that much on options. Competition is so fierce you see sub-cent pricing now: you'll get filled at $550.0001 or $549.9999 sometimes, because in very active markets these guys can make a killing with less then 1 cent profit.
Detecting sarcasm often requires hearing the tone of voice, and the assumption that the other party is sane, neither of which is available on the internet.:)
The national average salary somewhere else goes up, though. It's hard to argue against jobs moving from your country to another without claiming that people in your country are somehow better, more deserving of those jobs; otherwise, why is it wrong?
You use it to make concrete predictions about future observations. There might be several such "negative matter" theories, each with a different model and each making different predictions. Much like we had WIMPs and MACHOs for dark matter.
Then you wait for new observations that fit the predictions (or, more likely, don't), and importantly that don't fit the null hypothesis. Something new, that accepted theory doesn't explain, but some hypothesis specifically and accurately predicted.
That's the scientific method. People don't seem to get that. It doesn't require some scientist contriving the scenario being measured - it's faster when you can do it that way, but it was never required.
Dark Matter certainly exists - as certain as anything in cosmology. We know a few things about it: it reacts normally to gravity, but it doesn't interact with light or electrons in any way (these things are true of neutrons as well, of course). Further, it has no analog to EM interaction that could produce friction in some other way - we know this because it doesn't clump like normal matter.
How do we know this? There were many theories for the galactic rotation rate anomaly, but only the WIMP (dark matter) theory accurately predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation results. About 80% of matter in the early universe fits the description of dark matter, and the % was just as expected from the dark matter explanation for galactic rotation. When a theory explains, out of the blue, a set of unrelated measurements (and does so in a way that makes sense), well, that's how the scientific method works! Other theories were falsified, dark matter made accurate predictions.
Dark Energy is just the latest name for the "Cosmological Constant". It has been well measured, but no one hypothesis has emerged for what it actually is - it remains the biggest mystery in cosmology.
Come on now, you're missing the key point here: those people who will be taking good American jobs have brown skin, and that's why it's evil. Threads like this reek of racism. (Nevermind it's Finland where any actual job-shifts here are likely to happen, you'll notice everyone banging on about India).
The world market for developers is pretty good, actually. For this skill set, there's no real cause for complaint about the competition. For a while it looked bad thanks to doubling of labor supply every few years, but pretty much every university CS program world-wide is tapped now, and so labor supply has stabilized (growing mostly linearly now with average worker age), while demand continues strong.
Most of these layoffs are around an acquisition. This is very common, and you're only hearing about it in advance from MS because they're laying off enough in the US to trigger the WARN act, or a similar law in Finland.
MS has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell.. Nokia has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell. I'm guessing all the overlap will be jettisoned, along with a significant reduction to adjust to poor sales.
So far what we've heard is constrained to the failing mobile business - but we don't know yet. There are 6K jobs that could be anywhere (but given MS has over 100K employees, that might not be a big deal).
I don't know about those specific examples, but yeah, it was not a broad ruling. It was also key to the ruling that Hobby Lobby is self-insured. Both factors together were needed to make the argument that the owners would effectively be paying for (what they saw as) abortions out of their own pockets, against their religious convictions. Many (most?) closely held corporations don't self-insure, so it's pretty narrow.
That... makes no sense at all. Again, no amount of code inspection (or unit tests) will find flaws in your assumptions. That's why end-to-end testing is indispensable: it's how you discover your flawed assumptions.
Wow, that's a non-sequitur (and, BTW, like most things on Slate, the argument fails: the SCOTUS ruling explicitly hinged on the fact that Hobby Lobby was a closely held corporation, and thus no different from a partnership It was not a broad ruling applicable to corporations in general, where the linked argument might have been relevant.)
Dictionaries (in English) catalog every grunt people make. They ain't style guides. You can be sure that the meaning likely to be understood from the use of "irregardless" is, in fact, "I'm an idiot who can't write for shit". If that's not your intended meaning, perhaps choose another word?
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"How do we race towards middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs for white people, simultaneously concentrating white people wealth in fewer hands"
By creating many more jobs for other people, which clearly you don't even see as people in your moral equation.
Microsoft layed off a bunch of v\factory workers and QA guys while complaining how hard I is to hire developers. Seems legit to me.
But is so much more fun to shout "big companies are evil!" "rich guys are evil!". than to think about issues. Here's a thought for you: if you think rich is bad, you won't get rich.
Well, maybe I don't know what you mean by "shop around". There may be multiple exchanges selling the same thing (though not for stocks), and you usually aren't even aware if which one your broker deals with, as arbitrage keeps prices the same on all of them at faster than human scale these days - another example of making markets efficient.
The market makers simply trade on the exchange, filling orders at better prices than the bid/ask would be without them there. Because they trade so frequently, they can make good money off of quite a small price difference between what they buy and sell at.
You seem worried about these "losses for everyone else", but the market makers aren't siphoning off a % of each trade or anything like that. The only ones hurt are real parasites on the system: those who would profit from inattentive traders, by taking advantage of a thin market for price gouging.
It really seems like you're trying to argue "they add no value, because they must be taking money form someone, because they add no value."
Well, these are exchanges, so "shop around for a better price" isn't really a thing. What you can't do is profit from someone not paying much attention - profit from the inefficiency of the market. And that's a good thing: there should be no game to play, no skill at haggling required, nor deep understanding of market mechanics, simply to execute a trade. Deciding what price you're willing to buy or sell at is where the smarts belong, but if you buy something by mistake, and turn around and sell it 2 minutes later, that should cost you as little as possible.
Never forget Poe's Law. Not only is there no statement so absurd that it can't be taken seriously by someone, it will be. Even TimeCube.
Did you have a problem with those specific companies or something? I'm not sure why you called those out.
Narrow or broad, I can't fault the reasoning here. The government can't ask someone to (directly) act against their religious beliefs without clearing the bars of compelling state interest and least-burdensome (most narrow) approach. When you hand out waivers left and right, you don't have much ground to stand on there.
I don't see it at all. It's not a race to the bottom: it's a race towards first-world middle-class standards for all. It's not like reducing labor costs goes into the pockets of some rich guy somewhere - it's spilt between lower costs for everything, and better returns for all shareholders (and more than half of Americans own stock now).
Long term, the effects on demand from e.g. India emerging as an economic world power would be hugely positive for everyone. It the whole world were consuming at middle-class levels, there'd be no shortage of good jobs for all, even with most manufacturing done by robots.
Neutrons most certainly do interact electromagnetically.
Well, I guess they do have a magnetic moment, fair point. But I was talking specifically about the simple way matter interacts that we see through galactic rotation rates and the CMBR: dark matter doesn't interact with light the way electrons do, nor get dragged along with the electrons the way protons do, and it doesn't seem like dark matter clumps the way normal matter does thanks to friction. Neutrons would fit the bill for all of that, were in not for the short life of a free neutron.
It would be fascinating to learn what dark matter really is. Does it interact with the weak force? Could it be baryonic somehow? (That would be a shocker) Is it even some sort of hadrons, or something really new? (I almost said "exotic", but we're made of the exotic stuff.)
The amount that an $80000 job affects the lives of people in America is much smaller than the amount that the $30000 job helps the lives of people in India. You have to compare purchasing power, not "dollars".
One developer job in America means one guy lifted out of the social safety net or retail job in America (if you think anyone in America is poor, look around the world more). One developer job in India means 10+ people lifted out of abject poverty.
Believe me my job is on the line - I compete for jobs directly on the world market, working for companies large and small that can easily hire developers in India or China and in most of the places I've worked in fact have the majority of their staff there. And those people deserve a job every bit as much as I do.
What Microsoft sadly lacks is vision. They have great R&D teams, pointed at nothing, or at each other, or at random. If they had any kind of clue about what new technologies would be popular in the future, they could do great. They can afford to say "it may be X, or maybe Y, or maybe Z - so lets make all 3!".
But they don't they make second-rate (or acquire) products in markets other people have invented, then try to make those products the best-in-class over time. That's fine and all, but it's the opposite of leadership!
No, what happens is: instead of the prices being set buy the professionals who are perfect at gaming the system (buy a new car, then sell it the next day, see how that goes), the little guy gets a fair price, as the middle man screws the big guy (well, the middle man is likely the biggest guy, but still).
You're missing the entire point here. If the buyer and seller agree on a price, the trade just happens, no market maker needed, the end. All done.
But after all possible trades like that are done you're left with the "bid" and "ask" prices, where the seller and buyer are willing to stand on their prices and not compromise. Any good financial tool will show you the bid/ask for any exchange - you can check it out and see I'm not making this up.
Where the market maker adds value is in making it cheaper for the weak trader, the guy like me who doesn't have the time to play the game, who just wants a stock or bond at a fair price (given today's market mood), and so you just buys or sells "at market". I, the little guy get a better price. I've seen real evolution over the past 15 years in this, and it's like a tax of a few % has been lifted. Inefficient markets suck.
In the real world, where is he getting his bikes from?
Like I said, he hopes to balance buys and sells. If 100 people sell at his price, and 100 people buy at his price, he needs no bikes. If he's off by 1 or 2, he'll trade with Mr B or Mr S, and still do OK. But he does take a real risk.
Anyhow, that's how it really works. Remember, we're talking about markets that trade billions of shares a day, so the metaphor only stretches so far.
It makes it a lot safer. "We laid off 18k and you were one of them" is more defensible from lawsuits than having to individually justify 18k layoffs.
That's exactly backwards. In the US at least, you can lay off anyone without cause at any time in most states. However, a layoff of this size triggers the WARN act (originally written to soften the blow of closing The Factory in a factory town), requiring jumping through 17 flaming legal hoops to keep it all legal.
OTOH, I have no clue about Finland. Maybe you're right there.
You've got it completely backwards, is the thing. Don't worry, most people get this backwards, because they reason from "these guys must be evil" to "ahh, so it must work like this".
It works like this. You want a bike, you don't have time to research the right price, you just hope the market price is OK:
* Mr B posts "Bicycle wanted, will pay up to $500"
* Mr S posts "Bicycle for sale, $600"
* Special user says "OK, now buying bikes for $520, selling for $580"
* You post "buying 1 bike, best price".
You get the bike $20 cheaper. The market maker takes a risk here: that he can balance buys and sells, and not get left holding the bag when the price changes.
But the story gets better:
* Special user 2 says "Oh, I see you Special 1, I'm now buying bikes for $525, selling for $575, hey, $50 a bike is better than nothing.
* Special user 1 says "Oh no you didn, Buying for $530, selling for $570"
* Very quickly it's $550/$551.
You get the bike for $551, $49 cheaper. I've seen this happen over the past 15 years, where the bid-ask gap shrank by that much on options. Competition is so fierce you see sub-cent pricing now: you'll get filled at $550.0001 or $549.9999 sometimes, because in very active markets these guys can make a killing with less then 1 cent profit.
Do you see now why it adds value?
Detecting sarcasm often requires hearing the tone of voice, and the assumption that the other party is sane, neither of which is available on the internet. :)
The national average salary somewhere else goes up, though. It's hard to argue against jobs moving from your country to another without claiming that people in your country are somehow better, more deserving of those jobs; otherwise, why is it wrong?
You use it to make concrete predictions about future observations. There might be several such "negative matter" theories, each with a different model and each making different predictions. Much like we had WIMPs and MACHOs for dark matter.
Then you wait for new observations that fit the predictions (or, more likely, don't), and importantly that don't fit the null hypothesis. Something new, that accepted theory doesn't explain, but some hypothesis specifically and accurately predicted.
That's the scientific method. People don't seem to get that. It doesn't require some scientist contriving the scenario being measured - it's faster when you can do it that way, but it was never required.
Dark Matter certainly exists - as certain as anything in cosmology. We know a few things about it: it reacts normally to gravity, but it doesn't interact with light or electrons in any way (these things are true of neutrons as well, of course). Further, it has no analog to EM interaction that could produce friction in some other way - we know this because it doesn't clump like normal matter.
How do we know this? There were many theories for the galactic rotation rate anomaly, but only the WIMP (dark matter) theory accurately predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation results. About 80% of matter in the early universe fits the description of dark matter, and the % was just as expected from the dark matter explanation for galactic rotation. When a theory explains, out of the blue, a set of unrelated measurements (and does so in a way that makes sense), well, that's how the scientific method works! Other theories were falsified, dark matter made accurate predictions.
Dark Energy is just the latest name for the "Cosmological Constant". It has been well measured, but no one hypothesis has emerged for what it actually is - it remains the biggest mystery in cosmology.
Come on now, you're missing the key point here: those people who will be taking good American jobs have brown skin, and that's why it's evil. Threads like this reek of racism. (Nevermind it's Finland where any actual job-shifts here are likely to happen, you'll notice everyone banging on about India).
The world market for developers is pretty good, actually. For this skill set, there's no real cause for complaint about the competition. For a while it looked bad thanks to doubling of labor supply every few years, but pretty much every university CS program world-wide is tapped now, and so labor supply has stabilized (growing mostly linearly now with average worker age), while demand continues strong.
Most of these layoffs are around an acquisition. This is very common, and you're only hearing about it in advance from MS because they're laying off enough in the US to trigger the WARN act, or a similar law in Finland.
MS has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell.. Nokia has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell. I'm guessing all the overlap will be jettisoned, along with a significant reduction to adjust to poor sales.
So far what we've heard is constrained to the failing mobile business - but we don't know yet. There are 6K jobs that could be anywhere (but given MS has over 100K employees, that might not be a big deal).
I don't know about those specific examples, but yeah, it was not a broad ruling. It was also key to the ruling that Hobby Lobby is self-insured. Both factors together were needed to make the argument that the owners would effectively be paying for (what they saw as) abortions out of their own pockets, against their religious convictions. Many (most?) closely held corporations don't self-insure, so it's pretty narrow.
That ... makes no sense at all. Again, no amount of code inspection (or unit tests) will find flaws in your assumptions. That's why end-to-end testing is indispensable: it's how you discover your flawed assumptions.
Wow, that's a non-sequitur (and, BTW, like most things on Slate, the argument fails: the SCOTUS ruling explicitly hinged on the fact that Hobby Lobby was a closely held corporation, and thus no different from a partnership It was not a broad ruling applicable to corporations in general, where the linked argument might have been relevant.)
Dictionaries (in English) catalog every grunt people make. They ain't style guides. You can be sure that the meaning likely to be understood from the use of "irregardless" is, in fact, "I'm an idiot who can't write for shit". If that's not your intended meaning, perhaps choose another word?