Is it your intent to claim that when two people trade amongst themselves that that is not a free market?
You're using the shopworn libertarian/market-fundamentalist rhetorical trick of talking about it like it was a couple of regular Joe's doing a little exchange. Guess what, I don't think garage sales should be regulated. Sell that old rocking chair and the lawn dart set for whatever you like. No sales tax either. Golly Homer, how are things around the pickle barrel these days? Should we play checkers today, or put on some bespoke suits and trade a few billion in equities?
Corporations (not "two people" as you describe), which courtesy of the government enjoy a special privilege called limited liability, trading tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in equities every day, in a way that has a major effect on everything from retirement funds to employment, is a little different matter. I'm all for keeping my nose out of the fact that you sold that old lawn dart set to your buddy for a bargain price. The stock markets that effect my retirement and my employment? Not so much.
You know who are against dark pools? HFT firms; because they believe dark pool remove information from the markets.
And they're right. Not that I think HFT traders should be able to buy their special privileges so they can front run, but the basic objection is completely legitimate.
For every dark market whale buyer who doesn't want the price to rise, there's a dark market whale seller who doesn't want the price to fall. If they get together quietly on the side and trade, it doesn't effect you at all.
Bull. For example, if a whale had to buy through the exchange, I could take advantage of the price rise as an opportunity to sell.
If you look at the history of the SEC, it was effective for many years. Starting from Reagan erra to now, the SEC has been slowly stripped of their power. SEC was effective in the past. SEC can be effective again, if they are given the power to go after the bad guys and new leadership is installed in the SEC.
Thanks for the effective rebuttal. Quoting in full just to get it off score 0. To the best of your knowledge, back when the SEC was effective, did they employ "gulags and torturers"? I though it was mostly people in suits, but Tailhook doesn't seem to think that could possibly have been effective. Cognitive dissonance and all.
Obama got re-elected because lake or hate his policies, at least he's not a complete diplomatic embarrassment.
Romney was completely unelectable, and the US political system only has room for two candidates. Which shouldn't surprise anyone as 2012 was a poor year for a Republican candidate strategically (defeating an incumbent is always hard and people largely saw Obama as cleaning up Bush's mess) so it shouldn't be surprising that they could only field candidates that don't quite grasp strategy.
Of course it's harder to win against an incumbent, but it's been done many times. GHWB in '92, Carter in '80, Ford in '76. At least the R's could have tried. Instead they ran Gordon Gecko in the middle of a financial mess. They might as well have run ads that said "don't vote for us" or just sat out the election. As much as I dislike the 2 party system, it's much better than a 1 party system. That's what the R's gave us in 2012.
Sad attempt at deflecting the issue. It hasn't been 10 years, let alone 20. Did you think that the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression wouldn't affect employment and the economy in general for some years after? If the 22nd Amendment didn't exist and Bush had been elected for a third term, do you think he would have waved his magic wand and fixed everything in short order?
Because those Bush years of steady 5-6% high unemployment were horrible, no? Those Bush years where a majority actually had a full-time job were bad, right? Look how work force participation has fallen off a cliff starting, oh, around 2009 or so.
If you've got the balls to learn something, I'll clue you in on something called cause and effect. That awful unemployment rate was caused by the financial crisis of 2007–08.
unless you're willing to employ gulags and torturers you can't prevent them from emerging
I wasn't aware the SEC employed gulags and torturers. Is there an SEC gulag hidden deep in the interior of Alaska, of do they just rent space at Gitmo?
So we employ righteous hyper-statists to punish anyone that might jiggle system a bit and upset all that tasty income.
Being a philosopher means never having to address reality. Which one are you a fan of, Ludwig, Murray? To avoid ideological cognitive dissonance ignore the fact that between 1933 (Glass-Steagall) and 2007 we had the greatest amount of statist intervention, and the most stable and trusted financial markets in history. Many fortunes were made off it too. The whole thing went to hell in the late 90's when they started being less statist. Like I said though, just ignore that.
When a whale buys or sells a sizable amount of stock in the public market it moves the price. When they execute the trade it doesn't happen all at once but in blocks. When bids and offers are made other players in the market see it and they try to jump on. This moves the price. The whale would like the price not to move so they can maximize profit.
In other words, the great defenders of the Free Market don't want the markets to function if it'll cost them. In a market, if somebody is buying a lot of X, I would expect the price to go up. Supply and demand is a key part of capitalism. By your account (and I have no reason to doubt it) the dark pools defeat the purpose of a public stock exchange, which should let everybody see the prices and volumes at any time. Market theory says markets function best when everybody has as much information as possible, like current prices and volumes.
That and we got a good look at his opposition. The Republicans put on a clown show in 2012 with the candidates trying to out-derp each other to appeal to the far-right religious nutjobs that make up the Republican base. I don't see that changing any time soon.
To be fair, that was only the warmup act. They wound up running Gordon Gekko in the midst of the worst job market since the Great Depression. I wonder why they lost?
That pretty much sums it up. This comes from someone who voted for Obama in 2008, and voted Green in 2012, so I'm not exactly a rabid right-winger upset that Mitt didn't get elected. I'd vote for the Democratic party if it was still around.
Really... anti-bacterial? I knew Americans had an obsession with bacteria but this is getting ridiculous.
For phones it's ridiculous (though possibly harmless) but what about ATM's and other touch screens that can be used by hundreds, possibly thousands, of people each day?
They're not. Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, so low tax politicians crow about how they've created the Great Texas Job Machine. Oops, most of those new Texas jobs in recent years have been government jobs.
When they are too old, it is very time consuming (and often impossible) to learn them new things.
Unless you're talking about so old that their brains are breaking down, you're making a terrible generalization here. The thing about good old developers is that they've already seen pretty much everything, they just may not know the current fad to which it's attached. It's amusing to me how, for instance, closures have become this huge fad lately when even at 35 they're very old hat to me.
Closures are considered a hot new thing? They're old hat to me, and I'm a hardware guy!
What company of over 100 employees isn't international these days? Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. However the 'I' for international was simply the trendy way to name companies 102 years ago when IBM was founded. It meant international sales. They had foreign offices for foreign sales, support and customization (e.g. helping the Nazis keep track of death camp inmates), but it was still very much an American company. Moving things offshore for cheap labor and then re-importing the product is very different from how they traditionally did business though, and has nothing to do with the 'I'.
they also do a tremendous amount of US hiring and consulting
Consulting? Yes (although a lot of customers are catching on that the name IBM means little anymore and they peddle overpriced crap). US hiring, of Americans? You're really living in the past.
For internet companies, they're sure bad at using the internet internally.
It's ironic how people who brag about the technology that eradicates distance, think that anything outside of their little valley is too far away to do business with. Exception: India. Apparently there's a wormhole between SV and India, so that in practice they're closer than say, SV and Pittsburgh (lot of serious software talent near Carnegie-Mellon). I think Google Maps should be updated to reflect that wormhole.
The kind of money they have to pay a single 20 something so he can have a decent lifestyle there is enough to allow a 40 or 50something to have a decent lifestyle with a family in other parts of the country. Poof! No more hiring problem.
The only way to get the SV companies to do that, or end tech industry age discrimination in general, is to shut off the H-1B cheap labor spigot (exactly the opposite of what Congress is planning on, of course). Companies will whine and moan for nanny government to make special exceptions for their ever so special needs, but if that door is slammed in their face (a guy can dream, can't he?) then they'll find other ways, even if it means overcoming their prejudices.
Nothing ends discrimination like a tight labor market. Then it's either get over your prejudices, or have your business suffer. The best examples of that are the world wars. In both cases lots of industrial labor was needed at the same time that many young men were being shipped off. In WWI companies suddenly found that people with dark skins can do good work too! Whudda thunk? In WWII they even found that people without a Y chromosome could do a good job!
When they are too old, it is very time consuming (and often impossible) to learn them new things. And yes, we DO look for the exception. We will not rule out anybody on age. They often just do not fit the profile.
"Learn them new things"? Is that a line from the Beverly Hillbillies?
You don't have to learn them new things because if they're any good they can learn by themselves. Formal courses may help, but I think that even those are overrated except in cases where there is a lot of formal mathematical theory behind a "new" technology (which, especially in software, is pretty rare). I've being doing hardware and software for 30 years and I've almost always learned new things by myself, without formal training. I'm good at what I do, but it's hardly that unusual.
As for "we DO look for the exception", how do you determine who is an exception? Furthermore, what does "often just do not fit the profile" mean? What profile are you looking for?
I wonder if it's not so much a function of age, but rather that "older" programmers want to live in a place where they can own a home and raise a family. That is exceedingly hard in the Silicon Valley, even for someone with a well-paid tech job. The cost of a rundown three bedroom bungalow in Cupertino is in excess of one million dollars
I'm sure that's part of the reason in SV, but the survey looked at tech companies all over the country. FTA:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett – Packard, came in at 41 years.
The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).
AFAIK IBM, Nokia, Dell and Sony may have SV operations, but they're not based there. Even HP has a lot of facilities and people outside of SV.
Wow, you are brilliant. Have you thought about running for Congress?
Be serious. If there ever was anyone in Congress who understood the definition of median, they had to unlearn it in order to stay in office. How else could they keep a straight face when voting for an H-1B increase because the "evidence" says it's necessary. Looking at objective statistics and actually understanding them would make that impossible.
Silicon Valley's business model used to be creating jobs, and environments. Now it is about selling businesses that have no real business value. Look at Google, Facebook, and so on.
You can't compare Google and Facebook. Facebook is at 24.37 and has a P/E of 529.78! That's a scam. Google is at 893.49 and has a P/E of 26.73. That's a seriously successful business. I'm of the old-fashioned school that loves the idea of products, but advertising can fund a real business. That's what Google does. It's no different from how broadcasting was/is supported by advertising, and how newspapers used to be (that was their biggest revenue source, not the news stand price). As my examples show, there isn't even anything new about a business model where revenue comes from advertising.
Another Austinite here. I work for a small but fairly old tech company doing some cutting edge stuff that gets recognized here occasionally, and yet we still can't fill a few reqs for experienced hardware engineers. Our median age is likely 45, we have a fair number of employees on their 30th anniversary with the company, and all but one of our offices is in a relatively low cost of living area.
Meanwhile I regularly have to tell recruiters to f off looking to fill positions on the west coast where the cost of living bump would suck 1/4 of my salary.
Are you free to say what company that is, what specific type of hardware work, and/or what locations? Sounds like you'll get some job applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it your intent to claim that when two people trade amongst themselves that that is not a free market?
You're using the shopworn libertarian/market-fundamentalist rhetorical trick of talking about it like it was a couple of regular Joe's doing a little exchange. Guess what, I don't think garage sales should be regulated. Sell that old rocking chair and the lawn dart set for whatever you like. No sales tax either. Golly Homer, how are things around the pickle barrel these days? Should we play checkers today, or put on some bespoke suits and trade a few billion in equities?
Corporations (not "two people" as you describe), which courtesy of the government enjoy a special privilege called limited liability, trading tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in equities every day, in a way that has a major effect on everything from retirement funds to employment, is a little different matter. I'm all for keeping my nose out of the fact that you sold that old lawn dart set to your buddy for a bargain price. The stock markets that effect my retirement and my employment? Not so much.
You know who are against dark pools? HFT firms; because they believe dark pool remove information from the markets.
And they're right. Not that I think HFT traders should be able to buy their special privileges so they can front run, but the basic objection is completely legitimate.
For every dark market whale buyer who doesn't want the price to rise, there's a dark market whale seller who doesn't want the price to fall. If they get together quietly on the side and trade, it doesn't effect you at all.
Bull. For example, if a whale had to buy through the exchange, I could take advantage of the price rise as an opportunity to sell.
If you look at the history of the SEC, it was effective for many years. Starting from Reagan erra to now, the SEC has been slowly stripped of their power. SEC was effective in the past. SEC can be effective again, if they are given the power to go after the bad guys and new leadership is installed in the SEC.
Thanks for the effective rebuttal. Quoting in full just to get it off score 0. To the best of your knowledge, back when the SEC was effective, did they employ "gulags and torturers"? I though it was mostly people in suits, but Tailhook doesn't seem to think that could possibly have been effective. Cognitive dissonance and all.
Obama got re-elected because lake or hate his policies, at least he's not a complete diplomatic embarrassment.
Romney was completely unelectable, and the US political system only has room for two candidates. Which shouldn't surprise anyone as 2012 was a poor year for a Republican candidate strategically (defeating an incumbent is always hard and people largely saw Obama as cleaning up Bush's mess) so it shouldn't be surprising that they could only field candidates that don't quite grasp strategy.
Of course it's harder to win against an incumbent, but it's been done many times. GHWB in '92, Carter in '80, Ford in '76. At least the R's could have tried. Instead they ran Gordon Gecko in the middle of a financial mess. They might as well have run ads that said "don't vote for us" or just sat out the election. As much as I dislike the 2 party system, it's much better than a 1 party system. That's what the R's gave us in 2012.
Sad attempt at deflecting the issue. It hasn't been 10 years, let alone 20. Did you think that the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression wouldn't affect employment and the economy in general for some years after? If the 22nd Amendment didn't exist and Bush had been elected for a third term, do you think he would have waved his magic wand and fixed everything in short order?
Because those Bush years of steady 5-6% high unemployment were horrible, no? Those Bush years where a majority actually had a full-time job were bad, right? Look how work force participation has fallen off a cliff starting, oh, around 2009 or so.
If you've got the balls to learn something, I'll clue you in on something called cause and effect. That awful unemployment rate was caused by the financial crisis of 2007–08.
unless you're willing to employ gulags and torturers you can't prevent them from emerging
I wasn't aware the SEC employed gulags and torturers. Is there an SEC gulag hidden deep in the interior of Alaska, of do they just rent space at Gitmo?
So we employ righteous hyper-statists to punish anyone that might jiggle system a bit and upset all that tasty income.
Being a philosopher means never having to address reality. Which one are you a fan of, Ludwig, Murray? To avoid ideological cognitive dissonance ignore the fact that between 1933 (Glass-Steagall) and 2007 we had the greatest amount of statist intervention, and the most stable and trusted financial markets in history. Many fortunes were made off it too. The whole thing went to hell in the late 90's when they started being less statist. Like I said though, just ignore that.
When a whale buys or sells a sizable amount of stock in the public market it moves the price. When they execute the trade it doesn't happen all at once but in blocks. When bids and offers are made other players in the market see it and they try to jump on. This moves the price. The whale would like the price not to move so they can maximize profit.
In other words, the great defenders of the Free Market don't want the markets to function if it'll cost them. In a market, if somebody is buying a lot of X, I would expect the price to go up. Supply and demand is a key part of capitalism. By your account (and I have no reason to doubt it) the dark pools defeat the purpose of a public stock exchange, which should let everybody see the prices and volumes at any time. Market theory says markets function best when everybody has as much information as possible, like current prices and volumes.
That and we got a good look at his opposition. The Republicans put on a clown show in 2012 with the candidates trying to out-derp each other to appeal to the far-right religious nutjobs that make up the Republican base. I don't see that changing any time soon.
To be fair, that was only the warmup act. They wound up running Gordon Gekko in the midst of the worst job market since the Great Depression. I wonder why they lost?
That pretty much sums it up. This comes from someone who voted for Obama in 2008, and voted Green in 2012, so I'm not exactly a rabid right-winger upset that Mitt didn't get elected. I'd vote for the Democratic party if it was still around.
The law is not supposed to punish the government for doing things we've authorized them to do.
"We"? I know I didn't authorize them to do it. Even if I, or anyone else including the president had, it still doesn't repeal the 4th Amendment.
Really... anti-bacterial? I knew Americans had an obsession with bacteria but this is getting ridiculous.
For phones it's ridiculous (though possibly harmless) but what about ATM's and other touch screens that can be used by hundreds, possibly thousands, of people each day?
Since TIMTOWTDI, there should also be TIMTOWTCI.
low taxes might be sucking jobs into Texas
They're not. Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, so low tax politicians crow about how they've created the Great Texas Job Machine. Oops, most of those new Texas jobs in recent years have been government jobs.
never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym
It most certainly is, according to Larry Wall no less. PERL = Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
What's "Blue Suit" influence?
Unless you're talking about so old that their brains are breaking down, you're making a terrible generalization here. The thing about good old developers is that they've already seen pretty much everything, they just may not know the current fad to which it's attached. It's amusing to me how, for instance, closures have become this huge fad lately when even at 35 they're very old hat to me.
Closures are considered a hot new thing? They're old hat to me, and I'm a hardware guy!
to be fair, IBM is an International company
What company of over 100 employees isn't international these days? Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. However the 'I' for international was simply the trendy way to name companies 102 years ago when IBM was founded. It meant international sales. They had foreign offices for foreign sales, support and customization (e.g. helping the Nazis keep track of death camp inmates), but it was still very much an American company. Moving things offshore for cheap labor and then re-importing the product is very different from how they traditionally did business though, and has nothing to do with the 'I'.
they also do a tremendous amount of US hiring and consulting
Consulting? Yes (although a lot of customers are catching on that the name IBM means little anymore and they peddle overpriced crap). US hiring, of Americans? You're really living in the past.
For internet companies, they're sure bad at using the internet internally.
It's ironic how people who brag about the technology that eradicates distance, think that anything outside of their little valley is too far away to do business with. Exception: India. Apparently there's a wormhole between SV and India, so that in practice they're closer than say, SV and Pittsburgh (lot of serious software talent near Carnegie-Mellon). I think Google Maps should be updated to reflect that wormhole.
The kind of money they have to pay a single 20 something so he can have a decent lifestyle there is enough to allow a 40 or 50something to have a decent lifestyle with a family in other parts of the country. Poof! No more hiring problem.
The only way to get the SV companies to do that, or end tech industry age discrimination in general, is to shut off the H-1B cheap labor spigot (exactly the opposite of what Congress is planning on, of course). Companies will whine and moan for nanny government to make special exceptions for their ever so special needs, but if that door is slammed in their face (a guy can dream, can't he?) then they'll find other ways, even if it means overcoming their prejudices.
Nothing ends discrimination like a tight labor market. Then it's either get over your prejudices, or have your business suffer. The best examples of that are the world wars. In both cases lots of industrial labor was needed at the same time that many young men were being shipped off. In WWI companies suddenly found that people with dark skins can do good work too! Whudda thunk? In WWII they even found that people without a Y chromosome could do a good job!
When they are too old, it is very time consuming (and often impossible) to learn them new things. And yes, we DO look for the exception. We will not rule out anybody on age. They often just do not fit the profile.
"Learn them new things"? Is that a line from the Beverly Hillbillies?
You don't have to learn them new things because if they're any good they can learn by themselves. Formal courses may help, but I think that even those are overrated except in cases where there is a lot of formal mathematical theory behind a "new" technology (which, especially in software, is pretty rare). I've being doing hardware and software for 30 years and I've almost always learned new things by myself, without formal training. I'm good at what I do, but it's hardly that unusual.
As for "we DO look for the exception", how do you determine who is an exception? Furthermore, what does "often just do not fit the profile" mean? What profile are you looking for?
I wonder if it's not so much a function of age, but rather that "older" programmers want to live in a place where they can own a home and raise a family. That is exceedingly hard in the Silicon Valley, even for someone with a well-paid tech job. The cost of a rundown three bedroom bungalow in Cupertino is in excess of one million dollars
I'm sure that's part of the reason in SV, but the survey looked at tech companies all over the country. FTA:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett – Packard, came in at 41 years.
The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).
AFAIK IBM, Nokia, Dell and Sony may have SV operations, but they're not based there. Even HP has a lot of facilities and people outside of SV.
Wow, you are brilliant. Have you thought about running for Congress?
Be serious. If there ever was anyone in Congress who understood the definition of median, they had to unlearn it in order to stay in office. How else could they keep a straight face when voting for an H-1B increase because the "evidence" says it's necessary. Looking at objective statistics and actually understanding them would make that impossible.
Silicon Valley's business model used to be creating jobs, and environments. Now it is about selling businesses that have no real business value. Look at Google, Facebook, and so on.
You can't compare Google and Facebook. Facebook is at 24.37 and has a P/E of 529.78! That's a scam. Google is at 893.49 and has a P/E of 26.73. That's a seriously successful business. I'm of the old-fashioned school that loves the idea of products, but advertising can fund a real business. That's what Google does. It's no different from how broadcasting was/is supported by advertising, and how newspapers used to be (that was their biggest revenue source, not the news stand price). As my examples show, there isn't even anything new about a business model where revenue comes from advertising.
Another Austinite here. I work for a small but fairly old tech company doing some cutting edge stuff that gets recognized here occasionally, and yet we still can't fill a few reqs for experienced hardware engineers. Our median age is likely 45, we have a fair number of employees on their 30th anniversary with the company, and all but one of our offices is in a relatively low cost of living area.
Meanwhile I regularly have to tell recruiters to f off looking to fill positions on the west coast where the cost of living bump would suck 1/4 of my salary.
Are you free to say what company that is, what specific type of hardware work, and/or what locations? Sounds like you'll get some job applications.