Any legal action might be a tough sell. Both Uber and Lyft try to say that they are simply a bulletin board (a very modern one) that pairs riders and drivers. If you are a bulletin board, you cannot get angry at anybody coming over to look at your board and see what's going on, even if they are a competitor. It is public information after all.
I was about to mention NYC. I wouldn't say it works fine, but it does work better than most places. The subway stations also have a fairly restricted number of people at a time though, and that is where it works best for me. Also, not everybody business and local is trying to down on it 24/7. I wonder what the peak usage is? I guarantee it is much lower than other places.
His point is that the government will never had enough of oversight of itself -- it shouldn't have had this bad of a failure for so long -- to fix these problems. Saying it would all be better if the government just did something it historically never been able to do well is a fool's dream. Lacking a profit motive, governments have very little natural force correcting them, especially when it comes to bureaucrats paid according to union standards and protected by them. They really don't care if anything works out at long as then can show then put forth even the smallest effort.
You asking for more regulation after giving tax money to a corporation reminds me of the Ronald Reagan quote: "If is move, tax it. It is keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
The problem with government run anything (from democratic socialism to Marxism) is that it never works out like its planned, and those that support it just keep up with the same hitting their head again the wall mantra, "But that wasn't what was supposed to happen; that wasn't real [insert personal economic philosophy]." They never seem to learn that there will always be a huge gulf between theory and practice when it comes to the political economy. Capitalism self corrects around it and uses our worst side -- the greed -- to make the world better.
Probably the most economically astute comment I've ever read on Slashdot. more capital = more valuable labor. (See that period. It means end of statement. No exceptions.)
The guy with a shovel make more than the guy with a spoon, and the guy who can run a backhoe makes more than 10 of both of the combined.
Alton Brown is King Geek Chef and has a rule about unitaskers, single-purpose devices: don't buy them. Turn this into a unit than can also BBQ lamb and cold smoke fish and cheese, please.
It has the environmentalists' dream for years now for high-density living with mostly public transportation. What they call sprawl and fight tooth and nail against is what most of us call personal space, a yard for children, and a nice house. They would rather cram everybody in the smallest area possible and hope we all convert to riding buses because the traffic congestion is so bad. Urban planning classes pump out more and more people with this same view every year, so I can only imagine it getting worse.
FYI, I'm not the original poster, but another HFT developer. That is the only >$1mm loss I've ever had, but have had smaller, and it wasn't exactly for what some consider HFT, but for a trend prediction system. It was for an overseas illiquid market across a couple instruments and we had a bug elsewhere that didn't count our position properly.
To some extend yes, but the order management and routing systems have checks and there are circuit breakers to prevent total trainwrecks. It is a cost/benefit thing. How likely am I to lose $10k immediatey verus make $50k on the market close? One very important skill is in being able to estimate how likely you think you are right.
I wouldn't do this for huge programs or where the lost can be gigantic or I couldn't evaluate the risk.
Trying to cut corners, I did lose $1.6 million one day because I had a bug in my code. A lot of people have these stories when working on some high-risk projects (something HFT place usually try to stay away from). I learned from my mistake and more than made up for it a week later.
That is actually absolute advantage, and people confuse it with comparative advantage all the time.
In comparative advantage, you don't need to be the best at producing anything. You can actually be the worst at producing everything.
With comparative advantage, the weaker producer it taking advantage of the fact that the better producer is much better at producing A than B, even if you are worse at producing both, so you produce B.
That is, no matter how terribly inefficient you are at producing A and B, it still makes sense to trade with you.
Of course, this has nothing to do with how terribly inefficient solar power is.
Prof. Friedman visited China in the early 1960s and was taken by a government official to see a public works project. Chinese workers were building a canal. Friedman was struck by seeing everyone digging the canal with shovels. Friedman asked the official, "why no heavy earth-moving equipment?" The official said, "oh, this is a jobs program." So Friedman then says to the official, "then why don't you just give them spoons instead of shovels to create even more jobs?"
You have it backwards. The dollar has booms or busts and it shows up immediately in the price of gold as gold falls or rises, respectively.
Prices are the result of 2 supply curves and 2 demand curves: the supply and demand for an item and the supply and demand for dollars (more generally, the unit that item is denominated in). Gold's supply and demand curves are fairly static. You cannot simply look at price fluctuations and say therefore the value of gold is rising and falling since you are then ignoring the value of the dollar.
Making things a little more difficult, most currencies move together since we are in a global economy with global trade with central banks that follow similar methodologies. If gold is soaring, but the EUR/USD exchange rate isn't moving too much, it simply means the EUR and USD are inflating together.
The way you see this is by looking at the effects of inflation. This is why so many (poor Keynesian) economists get it so very wrong. They see and flat EUR/USD and assume no inflation and then get really confused by it so they play games with pricing metrics to make it magically disappear. Higher prices cased by inflation will slowing trickle though the economy starting in commodities, moving through the economy finally impacting durable goods and wages on the other extreme (also, this is one of the reason the core CPI and GDP deflator are often poor measure of inflation because they are many years backwards looking).
This also leads to the confusing about "cost push" inflation. The full story isn't that higher oil prices lead to higher goods costs, it is that excess liquidity flows into commodities first and then that liquidity ripples through the economies as contracts renew. All else being equal, if you help the money supply constant and oil prices went up, goods in the rest of the economy would fall. That relative price movement is the market signal to produce more oil. Inflating currencies ruin this pricing signal by showing false signs of scarcity.
Expanding the money supply isn't necessary for economic growth - what happens instead is that as the economy grows, prices of everything fall, which is a reasonable response to having more stuff around for people to buy.
Deflation is a bad thing. Of the three main functions of currency, a stable unit of measurement is one of them. Falling prices because of lower demand or too much supply is one thing. Those are pricing signals. But if supply and demand do not change, the price shouldn't change. It would be like constantly redefining the inch every year to be larger and larger. Contracts to pay $100 for something then have to content with "well $100 from what year?" That is the same problem you have with inflation.
So, bright eyes, what would happen if a gold-backed currency could not find more gold to back it?
You are not understanding how a gold standard is operated. It doesn't mean that the amount of money is tied to an amount of gold. It means that the dollar is tied to the price of gold.
For example, right now you would set the dollar to target $1500 per ounce of gold. As gold rose, dollars would be drained from the economy. As gold fell below $1500, dollars would be injected into the economy. We don't need to monkey with the tax rates either (actually, that would be an absolutely terrible idea). You would use open market operations like they do now. Too many dollars (inflation) - sell bonds and extinguish the dollars. Too few dollars (deflation) - buy bonds with newly printed dollars.
People often get this really wrong and assume that a gold standard implies money has to grow at the rate of gold when that isn't true at all. The central bank doesn't even need to own any gold at all to make it work since you are just doing a price target. People also often confuse inflation and deflation with rising and falling prices. They are not the same thing. For example, inflation will put upward price pressure that will result in rising prices - ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL. But scarcity or high demand can also cause rising prices, but that isn't inflation - it is a pricing signal unrelated to inflation.
Unfortunately, when the population and economy expand, the money supply has to expand with it. When administered responsibly (I.E. not just printing more money to cover debts), a paper money supply can be controlled much more finely. The gold supply expands in a fairly unpredictable way, controlled by how fast mining can be done, which can be completely unrelated to current economic conditions.
Actually the above ground gold stock expands at a fairly steady rate. It has a low industrial demand that tends to match its production. This is one of the reasons gold's value is fairly stable, the most stable over a very long time of anything we know of.
To have a gold standard doesn't mean you need to actually have every dollar backed by gold or use gold directly. It is called a gold target. We say that a dollar is to be worth 1/1500th of an ounce of gold and the money supply is expanded and contracted. This maintains its role of a unit of measurement.
It isn't rocket science or new as to how to make a gold standard work. It is just that politicians like to be in control and use inflation as a tax (Carter's budgets hid out year deficits by predicting inflation pushing people into higher tax brackets it was so institutionalized).
800 pounds seems about right. $440/day is only $88,000/yr. I made $480,000 last year doing HFT core and strategy coding. Of course my salary is technically only $100,000/yr and the rest is in bonus. I'm hoping to crack $650,000 this year since my strategies are producing better PNL and my Sharpe ratio is stratospheric.
I will never understand the Slashdot and geek dislike of HFT. It pays coders more than any other industry, and you get exactly what you deserve. But I guess a lot of people here are lazy tools that expect the world to just hand them a living.
The differences between column and row orientation is not merely in the backend. Most column dbs support a more extensive query language that is made possible by the column orientation. They tend to be far better at ordered data (time series, symbol groupings, etc) and have extensions to exploit the ordering, such as moving average functions that aren't poorly bolted on.
SQL is also a huge part of the problem, and one of the benefits of column dbs is that is goes beyond SQL and allows more expressive queries.
Also I don't know where this poor idea keeps coming up that column-oriented tables aren't good for reading. They are often used for things like stock market data that spin tremendous amounts of data into a table very quickly, far faster than any row-oriented db could handle (especially if you need to index the row-based table).
KDB actually does its best when pulling from disk. If you can cache a B-tree in memory, there isn't much as much performance increase since disk seeking is your typical enemy in these large datasets. A hash table is even good when everything is in memory, so standard indexes do well. However, when going to disk, KDB can get away with far fewer disk seeks since it is pulling contiguous regions into memory.
It will be interesting to see how Stonebreaker's new DB performs, since there are a number of column DBs out there, but only a few actually work well with the massive amounts of data that Stonebreader seems to be targeting.
Column-oriented DBs should scale better with more columns if the the query doesn't access all the columns (which they rarely do). The DB only needs to keep the columns in memory that are being accessed. This is far better than a row-oriented DB that needs to cycle though the entire table or numerous indexes to get a result set.
One of the benefits of column oriented DBs is that tables have an ordering, and that ordering can be exploited in queries. SQL doesn't give a good way to exploit it. Column DBs do allows SQL, but they also have other native languages that people tend to use.
I'm not voting for any government official -- from small California state legislators to President of the United States -- that supports Open Source over commercial alternatives. The software industry is having enough employment problems without depressing the demand for commercial software.
Huck Finn marked a very important time on Twain's literary life and personal life. It deals with issue far deeper than Connecticut Yankee. It is often required reading because it is considered his book. The book that made Twain and what he will always be more remembered by.
Slashdot Mirror
Any legal action might be a tough sell. Both Uber and Lyft try to say that they are simply a bulletin board (a very modern one) that pairs riders and drivers. If you are a bulletin board, you cannot get angry at anybody coming over to look at your board and see what's going on, even if they are a competitor. It is public information after all.
I was about to mention NYC. I wouldn't say it works fine, but it does work better than most places. The subway stations also have a fairly restricted number of people at a time though, and that is where it works best for me. Also, not everybody business and local is trying to down on it 24/7. I wonder what the peak usage is? I guarantee it is much lower than other places.
His point is that the government will never had enough of oversight of itself -- it shouldn't have had this bad of a failure for so long -- to fix these problems. Saying it would all be better if the government just did something it historically never been able to do well is a fool's dream. Lacking a profit motive, governments have very little natural force correcting them, especially when it comes to bureaucrats paid according to union standards and protected by them. They really don't care if anything works out at long as then can show then put forth even the smallest effort.
You asking for more regulation after giving tax money to a corporation reminds me of the Ronald Reagan quote: "If is move, tax it. It is keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
The problem with government run anything (from democratic socialism to Marxism) is that it never works out like its planned, and those that support it just keep up with the same hitting their head again the wall mantra, "But that wasn't what was supposed to happen; that wasn't real [insert personal economic philosophy]." They never seem to learn that there will always be a huge gulf between theory and practice when it comes to the political economy. Capitalism self corrects around it and uses our worst side -- the greed -- to make the world better.
Probably the most economically astute comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
more capital = more valuable labor. (See that period. It means end of statement. No exceptions.)
The guy with a shovel make more than the guy with a spoon, and the guy who can run a backhoe makes more than 10 of both of the combined.
Back in my day, you were lucky to get a gopher link and you liked it.
Alton Brown is King Geek Chef and has a rule about unitaskers, single-purpose devices: don't buy them. Turn this into a unit than can also BBQ lamb and cold smoke fish and cheese, please.
It has the environmentalists' dream for years now for high-density living with mostly public transportation. What they call sprawl and fight tooth and nail against is what most of us call personal space, a yard for children, and a nice house. They would rather cram everybody in the smallest area possible and hope we all convert to riding buses because the traffic congestion is so bad. Urban planning classes pump out more and more people with this same view every year, so I can only imagine it getting worse.
FYI, I'm not the original poster, but another HFT developer. That is the only >$1mm loss I've ever had, but have had smaller, and it wasn't exactly for what some consider HFT, but for a trend prediction system. It was for an overseas illiquid market across a couple instruments and we had a bug elsewhere that didn't count our position properly.
To some extend yes, but the order management and routing systems have checks and there are circuit breakers to prevent total trainwrecks. It is a cost/benefit thing. How likely am I to lose $10k immediatey verus make $50k on the market close? One very important skill is in being able to estimate how likely you think you are right.
I wouldn't do this for huge programs or where the lost can be gigantic or I couldn't evaluate the risk.
Trying to cut corners, I did lose $1.6 million one day because I had a bug in my code. A lot of people have these stories when working on some high-risk projects (something HFT place usually try to stay away from). I learned from my mistake and more than made up for it a week later.
That is actually absolute advantage, and people confuse it with comparative advantage all the time.
In comparative advantage, you don't need to be the best at producing anything. You can actually be the worst at producing everything.
With comparative advantage, the weaker producer it taking advantage of the fact that the better producer is much better at producing A than B, even if you are worse at producing both, so you produce B.
That is, no matter how terribly inefficient you are at producing A and B, it still makes sense to trade with you.
Of course, this has nothing to do with how terribly inefficient solar power is.
As related by Mark Calabria of CATO:
Interesting. Thanks.
How do you cook then? Electric stoves kinda suck.
You have it backwards. The dollar has booms or busts and it shows up immediately in the price of gold as gold falls or rises, respectively.
Prices are the result of 2 supply curves and 2 demand curves: the supply and demand for an item and the supply and demand for dollars (more generally, the unit that item is denominated in). Gold's supply and demand curves are fairly static. You cannot simply look at price fluctuations and say therefore the value of gold is rising and falling since you are then ignoring the value of the dollar.
Making things a little more difficult, most currencies move together since we are in a global economy with global trade with central banks that follow similar methodologies. If gold is soaring, but the EUR/USD exchange rate isn't moving too much, it simply means the EUR and USD are inflating together.
The way you see this is by looking at the effects of inflation. This is why so many (poor Keynesian) economists get it so very wrong. They see and flat EUR/USD and assume no inflation and then get really confused by it so they play games with pricing metrics to make it magically disappear. Higher prices cased by inflation will slowing trickle though the economy starting in commodities, moving through the economy finally impacting durable goods and wages on the other extreme (also, this is one of the reason the core CPI and GDP deflator are often poor measure of inflation because they are many years backwards looking).
This also leads to the confusing about "cost push" inflation. The full story isn't that higher oil prices lead to higher goods costs, it is that excess liquidity flows into commodities first and then that liquidity ripples through the economies as contracts renew. All else being equal, if you help the money supply constant and oil prices went up, goods in the rest of the economy would fall. That relative price movement is the market signal to produce more oil. Inflating currencies ruin this pricing signal by showing false signs of scarcity.
Expanding the money supply isn't necessary for economic growth - what happens instead is that as the economy grows, prices of everything fall, which is a reasonable response to having more stuff around for people to buy.
Deflation is a bad thing. Of the three main functions of currency, a stable unit of measurement is one of them. Falling prices because of lower demand or too much supply is one thing. Those are pricing signals. But if supply and demand do not change, the price shouldn't change. It would be like constantly redefining the inch every year to be larger and larger. Contracts to pay $100 for something then have to content with "well $100 from what year?" That is the same problem you have with inflation.
So, bright eyes, what would happen if a gold-backed currency could not find more gold to back it?
You are not understanding how a gold standard is operated. It doesn't mean that the amount of money is tied to an amount of gold. It means that the dollar is tied to the price of gold.
For example, right now you would set the dollar to target $1500 per ounce of gold. As gold rose, dollars would be drained from the economy. As gold fell below $1500, dollars would be injected into the economy. We don't need to monkey with the tax rates either (actually, that would be an absolutely terrible idea). You would use open market operations like they do now. Too many dollars (inflation) - sell bonds and extinguish the dollars. Too few dollars (deflation) - buy bonds with newly printed dollars.
People often get this really wrong and assume that a gold standard implies money has to grow at the rate of gold when that isn't true at all. The central bank doesn't even need to own any gold at all to make it work since you are just doing a price target. People also often confuse inflation and deflation with rising and falling prices. They are not the same thing. For example, inflation will put upward price pressure that will result in rising prices - ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL. But scarcity or high demand can also cause rising prices, but that isn't inflation - it is a pricing signal unrelated to inflation.
Unfortunately, when the population and economy expand, the money supply has to expand with it. When administered responsibly (I.E. not just printing more money to cover debts), a paper money supply can be controlled much more finely. The gold supply expands in a fairly unpredictable way, controlled by how fast mining can be done, which can be completely unrelated to current economic conditions.
Actually the above ground gold stock expands at a fairly steady rate. It has a low industrial demand that tends to match its production. This is one of the reasons gold's value is fairly stable, the most stable over a very long time of anything we know of.
To have a gold standard doesn't mean you need to actually have every dollar backed by gold or use gold directly. It is called a gold target. We say that a dollar is to be worth 1/1500th of an ounce of gold and the money supply is expanded and contracted. This maintains its role of a unit of measurement.
It isn't rocket science or new as to how to make a gold standard work. It is just that politicians like to be in control and use inflation as a tax (Carter's budgets hid out year deficits by predicting inflation pushing people into higher tax brackets it was so institutionalized).
800 pounds seems about right. $440/day is only $88,000/yr. I made $480,000 last year doing HFT core and strategy coding. Of course my salary is technically only $100,000/yr and the rest is in bonus. I'm hoping to crack $650,000 this year since my strategies are producing better PNL and my Sharpe ratio is stratospheric.
I will never understand the Slashdot and geek dislike of HFT. It pays coders more than any other industry, and you get exactly what you deserve. But I guess a lot of people here are lazy tools that expect the world to just hand them a living.
The differences between column and row orientation is not merely in the backend. Most column dbs support a more extensive query language that is made possible by the column orientation. They tend to be far better at ordered data (time series, symbol groupings, etc) and have extensions to exploit the ordering, such as moving average functions that aren't poorly bolted on.
SQL is also a huge part of the problem, and one of the benefits of column dbs is that is goes beyond SQL and allows more expressive queries.
Also I don't know where this poor idea keeps coming up that column-oriented tables aren't good for reading. They are often used for things like stock market data that spin tremendous amounts of data into a table very quickly, far faster than any row-oriented db could handle (especially if you need to index the row-based table).
KDB actually does its best when pulling from disk. If you can cache a B-tree in memory, there isn't much as much performance increase since disk seeking is your typical enemy in these large datasets. A hash table is even good when everything is in memory, so standard indexes do well. However, when going to disk, KDB can get away with far fewer disk seeks since it is pulling contiguous regions into memory.
It will be interesting to see how Stonebreaker's new DB performs, since there are a number of column DBs out there, but only a few actually work well with the massive amounts of data that Stonebreader seems to be targeting.
Column-oriented DBs should scale better with more columns if the the query doesn't access all the columns (which they rarely do). The DB only needs to keep the columns in memory that are being accessed. This is far better than a row-oriented DB that needs to cycle though the entire table or numerous indexes to get a result set.
One of the benefits of column oriented DBs is that tables have an ordering, and that ordering can be exploited in queries. SQL doesn't give a good way to exploit it. Column DBs do allows SQL, but they also have other native languages that people tend to use.
I'd like to agree that JoeLinux appears to be a total loser. Geopolitics, indeed. What do you think this is, Kuro5hin?
/. can such giant monkey cock at times.
And what is this crap he says about no trustings at ACs? Comments like his are why
I'm not voting for any government official -- from small California state legislators to President of the United States -- that supports Open Source over commercial alternatives. The software industry is having enough employment problems without depressing the demand for commercial software.
Huck Finn marked a very important time on Twain's literary life and personal life. It deals with issue far deeper than Connecticut Yankee. It is often required reading because it is considered his book. The book that made Twain and what he will always be more remembered by.