Could be a click pumping system out there somewhere is trying to make Microsoft look bad, though, so take it with a grain of salt. That would explain MS fixing the problem, then the results percolating back to the top. Me? I still suspect bias. If not, it's a good chance for MS to demonstrate whether they are capable of handling SEO poisoning.
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch.
I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks he understands information better than Slashdot viewers.
He is a capitalist, we are information scientists. I would wager there were a lot of people at the turn of the last century opining on the folly of trusting capitalists over agriculturalists. "Everyone needs food, people can make their own carriages!" or something like that.
I'm a serious fanatic about free market economics (to the point that many in this noble forum think me a bit daft). But I see the writing on the wall (admittedly fifty years behind Peter Drucker). Capitalism versus informationism is no contest. It will be a bumpy transition, but the outcome is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow. Hitch your wagon to informationism or suffer the unfortunate decline of the farmer. The business models may not work yet, but that is the funny thing about the future; it comes whether we are ready or not.
All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I think it is best placed doing its right job of offsetting some of the self-doubt that is so common in our sphere. We are the kings of the future and we should set about taking our throne, not bowing and scraping before the embers of the past.
>> Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently.
> You've clearly never been in business, in which a very significant fraction of agreements are not entered into in good faith, but for various strategic reasons, or in the hopes that something will happen that will allow them to be fulfilled.
I do not see how this statement is at odds with my point. My statement was that the free market depends on good faith to operate efficiently. In that sentence, the word "efficiently" is not dangling at the end to adjust the center of gravity of the other characters, it has a meaning. Efficient means using the minimum necessary inputs to produce a given output. If a corporation regularly acts in bad faith, leaving its partners to seek remedy in the courts or to be dissatisfied with the transaction, the system efficiency is reduced (court action is a source of economic friction). The free market solution is for the company's partners and customers to lose faith and stop treating with that corporation. It is how the free market naturally punishes bad actors. Gruesome sometimes, but natural and healthy.
Your statement is that many agreements in the US economic sphere are entered in bad faith. I think that is true. I also posit that the fact that it is in some cases persistent indicates that the sting of the free market is somehow being hindered. A very clear cut example of that is the bank bailout. Another is the cash for clunkers program.
I understand the arguments for these forms of corporate socialism, and I am not trying to dispute them. However, if we are going to remove the free market's sting, we must also remove the opportunity for bad faith actors to direct these welfare queens, precisely because it is no longer a free market.
1) It shouldn't matter if anyone is a sociopath as long as they do not break any laws.
That is an interesting hypothesis, but I do not concur. Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently. Not an intent to be good, mind you, but an intent to faithfully fulfill the agreements into which one enters. If one enters into such agreements in bad faith, it results in either distorted transactions, the inefficiency of court proceedings, or both. The law is neither a cost efficient tool for guiding the free market nor a precisely targeted one.
The goal of the free market, and its free hand, is to minimize the need for government interference by leveraging one inherent aspect of humanity; greed. That is a worthy objective because the law is known to be a blunt weapon, guided as it is by masses, influence peddlers, and politicians. Actors in bad faith can distort the legal system, and its use is costly even when it reaches the correct conclusion.
The solution to the dilemma between bad faith actors and inefficient laws in the free market is to allow corporations which are directed by actors in bad faith to fail. Perfect information, losses incurred from treating with a company that fails, and the stigma of failing the stockholders takes care of the rest. It might be considered a brutal system in some regards, but it is widely held as being relatively efficient -- when it is allowed to correct itself.
Enter the practice of not allowing banks to fail. When we engage in such inhibition of the free market, it loses its ability to correct actors in bad faith. Then we have a problem.
So, there are at least two options; find a way to make it tolerable to let banks fail so the free market can correct bad faith actors, or find a way to prevent actors in bad faith from running banks. A third path is to allow actors in bad faith to take advantage of such a system, and suffer the consequences as we did last Fall. Yet another is to establish that there are no actors in bad faith running banks.
I'm not suggesting which of those solutions is the right answer, nor that those are the only possible answers. All I'm trying to do is to establish a serious and complicated problem one must solve in developing and maintaining a healthy free market economy.
There's a hypothesis that CEOs are disproportionately selected for sociopathy. If that is true, particularly in the case of banks (which are too big to fail -- ie: they have a taxpayer sponsored safety net), then we have a vested interest in finding out if the hypothesis is true.
Given the lack of remorse, the ease with which they claim entitlement in the face of their own catastrophic failure, and that we have been left holding the tab, it seems that a concrete test like this might be reasonable.
So basically the bank and the bank lawyers are doing the job they are legally obligated to do on behalf of their customers.
I hate to quote John Mellencamp, but "Calling it your job, ol' hoss, sure don't make it right."
When a bank takes out a country, patriotic duty comes first. Sometimes failing to break the law is the greatest wrong a person can do.
For an extreme example, consider the blind person walking through an intersection against the light. The law requires that you stay on the curb. The right thing to do, however, is to jaywalk and pull the person to safety.
The chavscum this is aimed at are shirking class, not working class. Some of them are third generation dole bludgers, and most have never done an honest day's work in their lives.
Sounds to me like either your dole system is broken or there is a caste system rejecting these people. Either way, fix the system. Your broken system doesn't give you the right to put people in a surveillance based modern equivalent of debtor's prison.
Hate poor people? Figure out how to make the system not produce poor people. Or don't, and tolerate them. Turn the dole off, or keep it, or change it. But creating an unter-class without civil rights is not a reasonable option.
I didn't mean my post to be an attack on you. More on the system.
A big part of "the system" is that the system pushes us to "be reasonable." To find reasonable solutions to problems, as you did.
The problem with that is while we are being reasonable, the corporations are being sociopathic. That is a recipe for a steady slide.
I'm just trying to encourage you and others to be unreasonable. It is the reasonable thing to do when presented with an unreasonable system.
Of course, the system punishes those who do not conform. That implies that there are times you should choose not to fight or choose a less confrontational approach. This may be one of them.
But if we all keep being reasonable, this great experiment will continue to crumble. Not your fault, per se, just a fact.
You do not have to, and should not have to, opt out of your creative works being infringed.
The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.
If the department dictated that the professor should take your laptop, sell it on eBay, and give the money to some third party corporation, would you see the professor as having done no wrong? This corporation is building its cashflow on your creative work, without license. If they want to come to you and negotiate a deal to use your creative work in their business model, fine. Until then, it is yours.
Copyright law is supposed to protect corporations from potential customers. It is not meant to be used to protect authors from corporations. This is a perfectly honest corporation advancing its agenda by innocently infringing the copyright of authors. Corporations are supposed to get unequal protection under the law. How this court could see fit to apply the law equally in this case is beyond me.
First, you're totally within the GPL. GPL means you distribute the source with the extra freedoms specified by the GPL, and anyone who gets a copy of the object code can get the source code easily (paraphrased, but that's the idea).
But, you sound like a good man who wants to do right by the original developers. That is a noble goal. Not legally necessary, but good for the karmic soup.
It may simply be a question of framing (which, unfortunately, may be tough to redo now). If you can put it this way, it might be easier for the original developer to swallow:
We've ported XPilot to work on the iPhone, and have posted the source code for all to download for free! We've also published the object code on Apple's evil proprietary distribution network, and to the clueless end users who don't want to learn about source code, why it should be free, and how to compile their own apps as The Flying Spaghetti Monster intended -- those for whom RMS merely means Root Mean Squared -- we charge $2.99.
Maybe it would work, maybe not. I know that's why I (a somewhat religious fan of GPL for my (all-to-infrequent) Open Source work) see no problem with charging for object code. If you can't compile, you're not my target audience when I use the GPL, and I have no problem moving some of your money into our society.
JM2C, of course. And I'm not saying that's the right way for everyone to see it. If your views are different, that's fine -- it's just an opinion.
Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material.
What a ridiculous assertion of motive. That might be what is in the press releases, but the important part is that it is long enough for the current executives and boards of directors to not be adversely affected. With any luck, they'll get big bonuses for successfully kicking the can down the road.
Alan, Linus, you both still rock in my book. Nearly every day for the past 13 years I have benefited from all you've done -- both personally and professionally. Squabbles happen, and it's not my place to judge -- cuz no matter what you've both given me a helluva lot more than I've given either of you.
Keep on kicking ass and taking names, however you are happy to do so.
Originally copyright was 7 years plus 7 years (if you filed for an extension). That might work better than either abolition or the current situation.
Or how about logarithmic payments? Free for the first five years, $1,000 for the next five, $1,000,000 for the next five (or whatever).
Black and white debates, all or nothing, strike me as mimicking our current political trainwreck of two sides hating each other and refusing to consider the middle ground. Academics should be able to profit from their work (or their sponsors should) for a limited period of time, then it should enter the public domain.
FWIW, I think the same approach makes sense for all copyright -- a period to make a profit, an extension period where you can choose to pay to keep your monopoly, with the cost increasing over time. Seems to capture the best of copyright (giving the creative the opportunity to turn a profit) and also captures the increasing cost to society over time of monopoly.
Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.
Risks, it's all about the risks. How is Congress doing with the health care bill? At the moment, the biggest supporters remaining are the AMA, health insurance companies, and drug companies. Carbon credits? The big supporters at the end included the coal industry.
The cellular corporations are abusive monopolies and a giant, fetid, trust. And if legislation gets anywhere near passage, they'll be the ones writing it.
The reason Larry Lessig got out of the copyright fight is because he realized Congress had to be fixed first, before any progress could be made. Same thing here. Until we disconnect Congress from the grip of lobbyists, it is not possible for good legislation to pass.
I want a solution, badly. I completely understand that the current path is a path toward more unearned wealth concentration. The first, mandatory, step is to break the grip that lobbyists have on D.C. It is the only first step that can lead down a path that is not worse.
I totally dig your post, and I'm not trying to be critical -- just want to express one of my fears of the next stage.
People like Mr. Diller believe that if everybody gets together and starts charging for content then consumers will have no choice but to pay up. The fact is there will always be a free alternative.
Not necessarily true. Consider this possibility: ISPs gain traction and acceptability with traffic shaping. They then start selling a high speed lane. Big media starts paying for the high speed lane, indy alternatives get choked out. ISPs start upping their fees for traffic shaping, and big media starts to grumble and saber rattle. An uneasy cold-war detente develops in which ISPs exclude indy content in exchange for a healthy chunk of the ad revenue from big media. Two types of ISPs remain: those that carry big media and those that carry indy media. As the American Idle become the dominant segment of the ISP customer base, and as monopolies and duopolies continue to dominate the ISP landscape, which type of ISP survives and which withers on the vine?
I'm not sure exactly how it plays out given the popularity of indy media sites like YouTube and Facebook, but the dollars and death-rattles at stake are massive forces.
Very true - and I completely agree on that point. To clarify, I was only pondering the closing of the arbitrages. Very agreed that if the exchange is involved in making those opportunities available to a subset of the market, that is a bad thing. The closing of arbitrages itself, though, I think is a good thing.
Mostly just tagging your comment for myself for future reference. Well said -- the mercantilism perspective is a good one -- I've been using "corporatism", but mercantilism is a term people already know.
Is there a distinction to be made between government which is biased toward business and government which is biased toward large business? If so, would that fit a mercantilism / corporatism dichotomy? Is there a better term for a government which has laws which favor large business?
Other HF strategies include pairs trades (Exxon goes up so RIG will soon), inter-exchange arbitrage where a stock is traded on multiple exchanges, and index arbitrage such as trading the elements of the S&P 500 against the index futures (which has been around almost forever).
The goal of the market is to have efficient pricing, so it seems like this part of it is a good thing. HF traders close arbs faster, getting all markets and correlated products to the equilibrium price faster. Is there a downside?
>> Exactly. So, someone who doesn't have a grasp on the terminology wants to educate folks who don't have a grasp on it either.
> And this kids -- we call journalism.
While I like the point you are making, I would like to precise the term a bit.
What the OP describes is what we call advertainment. Journalism died years ago. It is being reborn on blogs, YouTube, and Twitter, but I think it unlikely that it will ever again be a frequent guest in the traditional media.
not selected from a group that had a higher ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists than the general population. If that is the case, then you're probably looking for terrorists in the wrong place..
Completely agreed, and that is precisely the point. That's why general public screening doesn't work, which is what the BBC is saying. You have to start with intel and investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
Decentralization is the solution to single-link failures.
Cloud is centralization.
JM2C, YMMV.
If you Read The Frakking Article, it states that Bing is now returning non-biased results, due to their old biased system being exposed publicly.
I just now (8:30 AM PST 6 Aug 2009) did the Pepsi Challenge:
http://beach.traxel.com/img/bing-google.png
Could be a click pumping system out there somewhere is trying to make Microsoft look bad, though, so take it with a grain of salt. That would explain MS fixing the problem, then the results percolating back to the top. Me? I still suspect bias. If not, it's a good chance for MS to demonstrate whether they are capable of handling SEO poisoning.
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch.
I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks he understands information better than Slashdot viewers.
He is a capitalist, we are information scientists. I would wager there were a lot of people at the turn of the last century opining on the folly of trusting capitalists over agriculturalists. "Everyone needs food, people can make their own carriages!" or something like that.
I'm a serious fanatic about free market economics (to the point that many in this noble forum think me a bit daft). But I see the writing on the wall (admittedly fifty years behind Peter Drucker). Capitalism versus informationism is no contest. It will be a bumpy transition, but the outcome is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow. Hitch your wagon to informationism or suffer the unfortunate decline of the farmer. The business models may not work yet, but that is the funny thing about the future; it comes whether we are ready or not.
All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I think it is best placed doing its right job of offsetting some of the self-doubt that is so common in our sphere. We are the kings of the future and we should set about taking our throne, not bowing and scraping before the embers of the past.
>> Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently.
> You've clearly never been in business, in which a very significant fraction of agreements are not entered into in good faith, but for various strategic reasons, or in the hopes that something will happen that will allow them to be fulfilled.
I do not see how this statement is at odds with my point. My statement was that the free market depends on good faith to operate efficiently. In that sentence, the word "efficiently" is not dangling at the end to adjust the center of gravity of the other characters, it has a meaning. Efficient means using the minimum necessary inputs to produce a given output. If a corporation regularly acts in bad faith, leaving its partners to seek remedy in the courts or to be dissatisfied with the transaction, the system efficiency is reduced (court action is a source of economic friction). The free market solution is for the company's partners and customers to lose faith and stop treating with that corporation. It is how the free market naturally punishes bad actors. Gruesome sometimes, but natural and healthy.
Your statement is that many agreements in the US economic sphere are entered in bad faith. I think that is true. I also posit that the fact that it is in some cases persistent indicates that the sting of the free market is somehow being hindered. A very clear cut example of that is the bank bailout. Another is the cash for clunkers program.
I understand the arguments for these forms of corporate socialism, and I am not trying to dispute them. However, if we are going to remove the free market's sting, we must also remove the opportunity for bad faith actors to direct these welfare queens, precisely because it is no longer a free market.
1) It shouldn't matter if anyone is a sociopath as long as they do not break any laws.
That is an interesting hypothesis, but I do not concur. Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently. Not an intent to be good, mind you, but an intent to faithfully fulfill the agreements into which one enters. If one enters into such agreements in bad faith, it results in either distorted transactions, the inefficiency of court proceedings, or both. The law is neither a cost efficient tool for guiding the free market nor a precisely targeted one.
The goal of the free market, and its free hand, is to minimize the need for government interference by leveraging one inherent aspect of humanity; greed. That is a worthy objective because the law is known to be a blunt weapon, guided as it is by masses, influence peddlers, and politicians. Actors in bad faith can distort the legal system, and its use is costly even when it reaches the correct conclusion.
The solution to the dilemma between bad faith actors and inefficient laws in the free market is to allow corporations which are directed by actors in bad faith to fail. Perfect information, losses incurred from treating with a company that fails, and the stigma of failing the stockholders takes care of the rest. It might be considered a brutal system in some regards, but it is widely held as being relatively efficient -- when it is allowed to correct itself.
Enter the practice of not allowing banks to fail. When we engage in such inhibition of the free market, it loses its ability to correct actors in bad faith. Then we have a problem.
So, there are at least two options; find a way to make it tolerable to let banks fail so the free market can correct bad faith actors, or find a way to prevent actors in bad faith from running banks. A third path is to allow actors in bad faith to take advantage of such a system, and suffer the consequences as we did last Fall. Yet another is to establish that there are no actors in bad faith running banks.
I'm not suggesting which of those solutions is the right answer, nor that those are the only possible answers. All I'm trying to do is to establish a serious and complicated problem one must solve in developing and maintaining a healthy free market economy.
There's a hypothesis that CEOs are disproportionately selected for sociopathy. If that is true, particularly in the case of banks (which are too big to fail -- ie: they have a taxpayer sponsored safety net), then we have a vested interest in finding out if the hypothesis is true.
http://www.google.com/search?q=sociopath+executive
Given the lack of remorse, the ease with which they claim entitlement in the face of their own catastrophic failure, and that we have been left holding the tab, it seems that a concrete test like this might be reasonable.
Just a thought.
traces of cocaine, heroin, cannabis, amphetamine and methamphetamine.
Reminds me of the sing-song thing from... Sesame Street? "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong."
JM2C, YMMV, lighten up, and all that.
So basically the bank and the bank lawyers are doing the job they are legally obligated to do on behalf of their customers.
I hate to quote John Mellencamp, but "Calling it your job, ol' hoss, sure don't make it right."
When a bank takes out a country, patriotic duty comes first. Sometimes failing to break the law is the greatest wrong a person can do.
For an extreme example, consider the blind person walking through an intersection against the light. The law requires that you stay on the curb. The right thing to do, however, is to jaywalk and pull the person to safety.
The chavscum this is aimed at are shirking class, not working class. Some of them are third generation dole bludgers, and most have never done an honest day's work in their lives.
Sounds to me like either your dole system is broken or there is a caste system rejecting these people. Either way, fix the system. Your broken system doesn't give you the right to put people in a surveillance based modern equivalent of debtor's prison.
Hate poor people? Figure out how to make the system not produce poor people. Or don't, and tolerate them. Turn the dole off, or keep it, or change it. But creating an unter-class without civil rights is not a reasonable option.
I didn't mean my post to be an attack on you. More on the system.
A big part of "the system" is that the system pushes us to "be reasonable." To find reasonable solutions to problems, as you did.
The problem with that is while we are being reasonable, the corporations are being sociopathic. That is a recipe for a steady slide.
I'm just trying to encourage you and others to be unreasonable. It is the reasonable thing to do when presented with an unreasonable system.
Of course, the system punishes those who do not conform. That implies that there are times you should choose not to fight or choose a less confrontational approach. This may be one of them.
But if we all keep being reasonable, this great experiment will continue to crumble. Not your fault, per se, just a fact.
they had no issue with me opting out
You do not have to, and should not have to, opt out of your creative works being infringed.
The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.
If the department dictated that the professor should take your laptop, sell it on eBay, and give the money to some third party corporation, would you see the professor as having done no wrong? This corporation is building its cashflow on your creative work, without license. If they want to come to you and negotiate a deal to use your creative work in their business model, fine. Until then, it is yours.
Copyright law is supposed to protect corporations from potential customers. It is not meant to be used to protect authors from corporations. This is a perfectly honest corporation advancing its agenda by innocently infringing the copyright of authors. Corporations are supposed to get unequal protection under the law. How this court could see fit to apply the law equally in this case is beyond me.
/sarcasm
First, you're totally within the GPL. GPL means you distribute the source with the extra freedoms specified by the GPL, and anyone who gets a copy of the object code can get the source code easily (paraphrased, but that's the idea).
But, you sound like a good man who wants to do right by the original developers. That is a noble goal. Not legally necessary, but good for the karmic soup.
It may simply be a question of framing (which, unfortunately, may be tough to redo now). If you can put it this way, it might be easier for the original developer to swallow:
We've ported XPilot to work on the iPhone, and have posted the source code for all to download for free! We've also published the object code on Apple's evil proprietary distribution network, and to the clueless end users who don't want to learn about source code, why it should be free, and how to compile their own apps as The Flying Spaghetti Monster intended -- those for whom RMS merely means Root Mean Squared -- we charge $2.99.
Maybe it would work, maybe not. I know that's why I (a somewhat religious fan of GPL for my (all-to-infrequent) Open Source work) see no problem with charging for object code. If you can't compile, you're not my target audience when I use the GPL, and I have no problem moving some of your money into our society.
JM2C, of course. And I'm not saying that's the right way for everyone to see it. If your views are different, that's fine -- it's just an opinion.
Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material.
What a ridiculous assertion of motive. That might be what is in the press releases, but the important part is that it is long enough for the current executives and boards of directors to not be adversely affected. With any luck, they'll get big bonuses for successfully kicking the can down the road.
Alan, Linus, you both still rock in my book. Nearly every day for the past 13 years I have benefited from all you've done -- both personally and professionally. Squabbles happen, and it's not my place to judge -- cuz no matter what you've both given me a helluva lot more than I've given either of you.
Keep on kicking ass and taking names, however you are happy to do so.
hehe - thanks - I not math good. :)
Then again, you do get a logarithmic number of years per dollar. :)
Why abolish? Why not simply shorten?
Originally copyright was 7 years plus 7 years (if you filed for an extension). That might work better than either abolition or the current situation.
Or how about logarithmic payments? Free for the first five years, $1,000 for the next five, $1,000,000 for the next five (or whatever).
Black and white debates, all or nothing, strike me as mimicking our current political trainwreck of two sides hating each other and refusing to consider the middle ground. Academics should be able to profit from their work (or their sponsors should) for a limited period of time, then it should enter the public domain.
FWIW, I think the same approach makes sense for all copyright -- a period to make a profit, an extension period where you can choose to pay to keep your monopoly, with the cost increasing over time. Seems to capture the best of copyright (giving the creative the opportunity to turn a profit) and also captures the increasing cost to society over time of monopoly.
Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.
Risks, it's all about the risks. How is Congress doing with the health care bill? At the moment, the biggest supporters remaining are the AMA, health insurance companies, and drug companies. Carbon credits? The big supporters at the end included the coal industry.
The cellular corporations are abusive monopolies and a giant, fetid, trust. And if legislation gets anywhere near passage, they'll be the ones writing it.
The reason Larry Lessig got out of the copyright fight is because he realized Congress had to be fixed first, before any progress could be made. Same thing here. Until we disconnect Congress from the grip of lobbyists, it is not possible for good legislation to pass.
I want a solution, badly. I completely understand that the current path is a path toward more unearned wealth concentration. The first, mandatory, step is to break the grip that lobbyists have on D.C. It is the only first step that can lead down a path that is not worse.
I totally dig your post, and I'm not trying to be critical -- just want to express one of my fears of the next stage.
People like Mr. Diller believe that if everybody gets together and starts charging for content then consumers will have no choice but to pay up. The fact is there will always be a free alternative.
Not necessarily true. Consider this possibility: ISPs gain traction and acceptability with traffic shaping. They then start selling a high speed lane. Big media starts paying for the high speed lane, indy alternatives get choked out. ISPs start upping their fees for traffic shaping, and big media starts to grumble and saber rattle. An uneasy cold-war detente develops in which ISPs exclude indy content in exchange for a healthy chunk of the ad revenue from big media. Two types of ISPs remain: those that carry big media and those that carry indy media. As the American Idle become the dominant segment of the ISP customer base, and as monopolies and duopolies continue to dominate the ISP landscape, which type of ISP survives and which withers on the vine?
I'm not sure exactly how it plays out given the popularity of indy media sites like YouTube and Facebook, but the dollars and death-rattles at stake are massive forces.
Bravo! Bravo! Author! Author!
Very well played, Mr. Gerard. Thank you for starting my day with a belly-laugh. :)
Very true - and I completely agree on that point. To clarify, I was only pondering the closing of the arbitrages. Very agreed that if the exchange is involved in making those opportunities available to a subset of the market, that is a bad thing. The closing of arbitrages itself, though, I think is a good thing.
Mostly just tagging your comment for myself for future reference. Well said -- the mercantilism perspective is a good one -- I've been using "corporatism", but mercantilism is a term people already know.
Is there a distinction to be made between government which is biased toward business and government which is biased toward large business? If so, would that fit a mercantilism / corporatism dichotomy? Is there a better term for a government which has laws which favor large business?
Other HF strategies include pairs trades (Exxon goes up so RIG will soon), inter-exchange arbitrage where a stock is traded on multiple exchanges, and index arbitrage such as trading the elements of the S&P 500 against the index futures (which has been around almost forever).
The goal of the market is to have efficient pricing, so it seems like this part of it is a good thing. HF traders close arbs faster, getting all markets and correlated products to the equilibrium price faster. Is there a downside?
>> Exactly. So, someone who doesn't have a grasp on the terminology wants to educate folks who don't have a grasp on it either.
> And this kids -- we call journalism.
While I like the point you are making, I would like to precise the term a bit.
What the OP describes is what we call advertainment. Journalism died years ago. It is being reborn on blogs, YouTube, and Twitter, but I think it unlikely that it will ever again be a frequent guest in the traditional media.
not selected from a group that had a higher ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists than the general population. If that is the case, then you're probably looking for terrorists in the wrong place..
Completely agreed, and that is precisely the point. That's why general public screening doesn't work, which is what the BBC is saying. You have to start with intel and investigation.