But the concept of war is a little ridiculous in and of itself. Just look at history and all the bizarre and stupid stuff humans have done. We'll almost certainly continue doing bizarre and stupid stuff well into the future, including if we ever manage to populate anywhere other than this planet.
Commander Data I can see, but Cherry 2000? A mass-produced companion-bot with no self-awareness? The whole point of that movie was that the guy was confused and in love with an object that was simply well-designed to express love it didn't really feel. It had an AI good enough to manage housework and other "domestic duties", but that's about it. Maybe you didn't watch the whole movie, so this next bit might be a spoiler, but he dumps the robot off in the desert and saves the real girl and the robot doesn't care one way or another. If you wanted to find an example of either a "radio controlled [car] with weapons" or "more human than some humans", you picked a really lousy one.
And it's still slower than local disk access. We're talking about splash screens, therefore program loading speeds, so the fact that memory speeds are far, far faster isn't as relevant. Of course, after your program loads, you want it to be fast and responsive and not anchored to a network that could go down at any time (I know the power could go out at any point too, but why add extra points of failure if you don't have to).
Of course, if the program is already running on the remote machine, or at least has a suspended image sitting in ram, then there wouldn't be any load times to run it from "the cloud" (incidentally, am I the only one who despises that term). Of course, if you're willing to spring for the ram, there's no reason there couldn't be a system to do exactly the same thing locally for a limited quantity (rather than number, since programs can have vastly different memory footprints) of programs. Various obnoxious software companies have done exactly that for their own programs, inserting startup items that pre-load their software in the background to create the illusion that their software starts faster than everyone else's at the hidden expense of your memory (Microsoft Office, for example). If it's done at the express desire of a user with tons of ram, then it's not such a bad thing.
Lots of people seem to be in love with Reagan today. Maybe he was a really great guy. Thing is, I was really only a kid when he was President of the US, and it was still completely obvious to me at the time that he had some kind of dementia. It seems plain now that, for pretty much his entire second term, and probably a good chunk of his first, that Alzheimer's had left him medically unfit to actually be President. It says something very, very disturbing about how the US is governed if many people consider him the "greatest Us President"
I'm not really being very precise when I say that. Basically the thinking is that high frequency trading is about inserting the high frequency traders as middlemen into every transaction and taking a cut. Thanks to that cut, sellers don't sell for quite as much as they would have and buyers pay more than they would have. This is where I run into a problem with definitions. Liquidity is basically defined as an asset being readily saleable without affecting its price. Technically, since the price goes up for buyers and down for sellers, the mean price should stay about where it would otherwise, but if you actually add up the extra costs to "real" buyers and extra losses to "real" sellers there's a sort of hidden price in there. The actual definition of "liquidity" doesn't really cover that,so I'm stretching the term when I say that "real liquidity" decreases. It seems to me that the definition should include something like that. Is there another term that covers it?
I'm always happy to be corrected. As I understand bid and ask prices, a seller gives a bid price at which they will sell a given quantity of stock, and a buyer gives an ask price at which they will buy stock. The spread between them has to be closed for a sale to actually take place. A seller might only be selling 10,000 shares, and there might be ten individual buyers who each want 1,000 shares and middlemen can be useful there. Except of course that the sellers and buyers themselves can adjust their prices and quantities, etc. to meet somewhere themselves. But either way, when the seller and buyer are making a trade they eventually meet somewhere. A seller with a bid price of 66.66 each for 1000 shares and a buyer with an ask price of 66.46 for 1000 shares will only trade when one of them adjusts their price. A middleman might come along and get the shares from the seller for 66.56 each. They won't then bid them for 66.56 each, however, because then they won't make a profit.
So, unless the high frequency traders are charitable organizations, how do the sellers get a slightly higher price than they would have otherwise simultaneous with the buyers getting a slightly lower price than they would have otherwise? One or the other could certainly be true, but how are both true at the same time?
I think you're looking at this from a fundamentally different perspective than me. Your concern is entirely for the individual investor, probably since you are one. That's fine in a casino environment. The stock market, however, is not meant to be a casino. The justification for its existence and for treating it like something other than a gambling parlour is that it's a system for providing capital for companies. As such, the selfish needs and desires of individual investors aren't the only concern for the market, not when these markets are one of the props that hold up the economy. The basic principles of investing that you mention I should read up on are based only on the perspective of an the individual investor. From the point of view of the individual investor, successfully gaming the system and the other investors involved in the system is a pure positive over the short term. From the point of view of the system and the economy, operating that way is harmful. Curbing it does reduce the opportunity for some players to win big at the expense of other players, but it increases the possibility that more players will achieve modest gains and that the overall gain will be greater than if just a few players are able to win big.
Well, the distinction isn't clear between discovery and invention. Pure math is one of those things that falls on the discovery side because just about anyone who is any good at math agrees because almost all of those people, while going through the process of learning math have experienced the process of independently rediscovering mathematical principles for themselves based on what they've learned so far. Then they learn (or figure out for themselves) inductive reasoning and it's just blatantly obvious to them that math itself is discovered and not invented. The same thing is actually true of just about everything in the universe, but it's not always so blatantly obvious to the experts who work in the field.
You give light bulbs as an example. Presumably because the light bulb is famous as an invention of Thomas Edison. The fact is, Edisons (or rather his teams) contribution to the lightbulb really was just a matter of discovery. Light bulbs already existed. They were either very power hungry or burned out too fast. The goal was to find a good filament material that could be used in cheaply mass-produced bulbs. There were lots of teams trying to achieve the same goal since they all knew it was possible, it was just a matter of finding the right material. Also, Edison's team didn't actually even discover the carbonized filament first, Joseph Swan is credited with that. So, really all the team Edison ran did was re-discover a good filament material. Then they later switched to an even better filament material: cabonized bamboo (already discovered by Henricg Globel). In any case, once Edison had secured a patents, you can bet that he, and the courts, interpreted them as broadly as possible. Using a completely different filament type wouldn't be protection against a lawsuit. Anyway, later on, William Coolidge developed a multiply coiled tungsten filament which was just an improvement on earlier work with tungsten. Looked at the way it actually happened, the light bulb doesn't look all that much like an invention either.
I can see your argument about the amount of engineering work that may go into developing an algorithm, the problem is that patents have never been based on how much work went into the development. And you know just as well as I do that opening the door to patents on pure math opens the door to trivial patents on every little thing. Patents are relatively easy to get, but a nightmare to fight in court. The patent office operates as if patent mistakes are easy to fix in court and the courts operate as if the patent office were practically infallible. The clearly stated definitions of what material is patentable is eroded beyond comprehension or outright ignored. The developers of some great idea that doesn't fall under a patentable area may go sadly unrewarded, but that tragedy is nothing compared to the unending parade of horrors that emerges every time things shift and a new area suddenly becomes patentable.
The whole idea of patents is rooted in the traditional practice of monarchs granting business monopolies to cronies. Modern patents are a post-enlightenment reworking of this idea to apply only to truly new inventions. That reworking seems to unravelling. We're back to having "legitimate" business method patents and the democritization of the process has largely failed. I don't want to just stop the scope of what's patentable from expanding, I want it to shrink. All the way back to nothing being patentable at all would be fine by me.
The "liquidity" that I was referring to that has no place in an investment system is the supposed "liquidity" that HFT claims as its "product". Clearly some liquidity must exist, but that which HFT provides is largely illusory and completely unnecessary in any case. In reality, they're actually probably reducing real liquidity.
As for investment being gambling. Proper investment is indeed a gamble based on educated guesses about a company and the market it operates in (not the stock market its stocks are sold in). All activities in life are gambling by that token. The same thing can be said of the term speculation. All investing is speculative based on the common usage of the word. When investing becomes an unacceptable form of gambling is when it becomes a game played between investors where the realities of the company invested in are almost irrelevant. When people are investing not because they think a company will succeed and profit, but because they think other people will invest as well and drive up the stock price and create an opportunity to maybe sell at the peak before everyone else does, that's what is meant by the term "speculation" in stock market terms. That's the bad gambling that leads to boom and destroys the whole point of the stock market, which is to provide capital.
Human nature makes stock market speculation virtually impossible to eliminate and speculative practices have become very heavily ingrained in the way stock markets operate (for example, the fact that most stocks don't pay dividends), but it still performs its function of providing capital. The more it veers towards speculation and gambling, however, the more dangerous it gets. The recent sub-prime mortgage crisis happened largely because investors made extremely poor decisions because there were so many layers of abstraction between the "investment product" they invested in and the actual real-world thing they were investing in.
Certain cheerleaders for certain economic practices love to point at how many rich people there are and say: "Yay, the economy must be doing well and everyone must be prospering for there to be so many rich people." When it's pointed out that those rich people could have become rich by making a lot of people poor, it's pointed out that the economy isn't a zero sum game and that wealth creating economic activity benefits everyone. There's some truth to that, but it's not always true. You can have lots of rich people by enriching everyone and you can also accomplish it by impoverishing nearly everyone. How the money moves ends up being very important. The stock market, operating as a gambling casino, is a zero-sum game. Some people make money, some people lose money, and some middle-men take a cut. Operating as a pure means of providing capital, it isn't a zero sum game (as long as you're not doing final accounting at the end of the universe, anyway). Capital allows companies to perform wealth-creating activities. The stock market, as it stands, is a hybrid of both and the zero-sum gambling aspect of it does actually fulfil a role. It draws investors in. This means that the actual amount of money involved is a lot greater, which makes more money available for capital. If the amount of speculation is too high, however, there's too much instability and the capital aspect suffers. This is obviously exacerbated by excessive leveraging of assets on the part of the companies involved. If they behave recklessly under the assumption that their stock will always grow, then they can collapse very suddenly if their stock price drops. It also leads them to poor decisions when they're dependant on their stock price growing just to stay in business.
My statement was a reference to the claimed product of high frequency trading: high liquidity. I should have said "high liquidity" rather than just "liquidity" to be more clear. I don't actually think that people shouldn't be able to buy and then later sell their investments. Rapid buying and selling of investments is, however, a clear sign of people gaming the system rather than making investments. Where you actually draw the line is a bit tricky, but if you need to buy and then sell a stock in less than say a month without any notable events occurring in the business you bought stock in or the market they operate in, then you're not investing, you're playing a gambling game with other so-called investors.
HFT is not the sole culprit. In general any computerized algorithmic trading system is a problem. Investing should be done by examining the actual realities of the market (not the stock market, the real market) and the company being invested in. People can claim that the numbers in the stock market reflect the real world, and they do in part _unless_ you have algorithmic trading going on in the stock market above a certain threshold. Once you get to a certain point where enough of the trades are being done automatically, then all the data available for the computers to make decisions is being generated by the actions of other computers using that same pool of data to make decisions. This results in all kinds of weird emergent effects. Reality drops out of the equation and you instead get strange attractors, feedback loops, chaos. Many of these systems are designed to detect when things have gotten weird, but this doesn't make things better, because they're usually designed to then enter some sort of failure mode and dump their way out of the market as fast as possible, which leads to a cascading figurative (though possibly literal) run on the bank.
As for the discussion being off topic, I don't think it is. This trial has a lot to do with the secretive, conspiratorial nature of the industry. This is an industry that is very quick to try to see people prosecuted for behaving in ways that are very, very similar to the way they operate.
Well, actually, the casinos are allowed by law to cheat and rig the system so that you can statistically never win. The various jurisdictions they're in set minimum payout odds for the whole casino. Usually something like 75% I think. That's why the slot machines are so important to the casinos. They're rigged for adjustable payout odds to balance out the rest of the casino. Sometimes they'll be up over 100% to balance out a lot of people losing at the craps tables, and other times they'll be down low below the casino's minimum payout because people are doing well at other gambling activities.
Random distribution sees to it that there are some winners and some losers, but the rigging makes sure that the losses outweigh the wins. In a lot of ways, an illegal bookie can be a lot more honest and up front than a casino. Overall though, the investment system should not be like either of those things.
I'm actually of the opinion that vices such as gambling should not be illegal as long as they're clearly labelled as what they are. My opinion that they should be allowed is despite the fact that I've seen gambling addictions utterly destroy people. Also, I should note that gambling mostly is illegal in the US. The prohibition of it (and the nature of the exceptions that are granted) really haven't made things better.
So, anyway, gambling should be allowed, but _not_ in investment markets. If people want to gamble on stock prices, that's fine. They should be allowed to set up betting pools on anything. The activity should just be separated from the actual investment market as much as possible.
I rather should have said "high liquidity" rather than simply liquidity. I don't believe that investors should be stuck with their investment forever even if someone else wants to buy it from them. I was simply referring to the fact that the usual answer for what benefit high frequency trading systems provide is "high liquidity". High liquidity in an investment market means that investment is secondary to speculation, which is a very dangerous thing. The "product" that high frequency traders provide is less than worthless.
And are the cases where they "offer sellers a slightly higher price than they would have gotten otherwise" the same cases where they offer buyers a "slightly lower price than they would have gotten otherwise"? Because the two would seem to be mutually exclusive.
I should have said "high liquidity" then. Obviously we shouldn't eliminate the ability to trade and sell stocks. But the argument always given for what high-frequency trading actually provides the market is "high liquidity". That isn't desirable at all in actual investing. High liquidity just means instability. Algorithmic trading in general just leads to instability.
Real growth of wealth comes from capital actually being used for real things. The stock market can help wealth grow by providing capital to accomplish real things. All the secondary activities of the stock market, however, don't provide any real benefits, they just move money around, often to the detriment of real wealth creation.
Solid rocket fuels are the most immediately obvious example of materials with their oxidiser bound up in them which will burn in a vacuum. Perchlorate candles will burn in a vaccum and produce breathable oxygen. There are plenty of things that carry their own oxygen or other oxidiser that will burn in a vacuum.
Actually, IBM wants to go forward at this point so that they can thoroughly crush SCO into the dirt. A good part of this is about taking away any last assets SCO may have so that they don't get paid to SCO's lawyers.
High frequency trading code shouldn't be legal to use for trading in the first place. It doesn't provide anything useful ("liquidity" has no place in an investment system, it's only good for speculative investing, which is just gambling), and simply parasitically leaches from the market and destabilizes it. The people the programmer was working for are the ones who should be convicted.
Actually it's quite a lot like predicting sports outcomes (at least among teams in the same league, clearly it's a lot easier to predict the outcome of a professional team of adults versus a primary school team) in that you really can't. All you can do is identify statistical trends.
Earthquakes are common in that area. The people have historically altered their behaviour based on the threat of imminent quakes, such as by sleeping in cars. There had been various mild tremors suggesting that a large quake was imminent. The seismologists met, and a spokesperson announced that they had concluded that the mild tremors were actually an indication that a large quake was not going to happen. As a direct result of this statement, people stopped their existing preparations for the quake, and resumed normal activities. Then the quake happened.
Statistically speaking, the people would have been just as safe sleeping in their cars on random nights rather than basing it recent low level tremors. They'd been having about three tremors a day for months. The lesser tremors did not suggest that a large quake was imminent. Typically, such clusters of tremors occur for a while then stop with no major quake. The statement about mild tremors relieving siesmic stress and making future quakes more likely is an old assumption about earthquakes that is actually true in certain circumstances, but not all circumstances, and it seems that the spokesman, who wasn't a seismologist, had heard it in the past, but did not hear it from the seismologists at the meeting that occurred before the press conference. Only one seismologist actually attended the press conference and was not the spokesperson. It was already firmly established that many buildings in l'Aquila were deathtraps so the "no danger" statement needed to be taken with a big grain of salt. I think it would have been better if a seismologist had spoken and taken twenty minutes to actually explain the risk factors. People would have had no idea what the seismologist was talking about, but maybe they wouldn't all be on trial now. No, they'd still be on trial for not clearly communicating in plain language since this isn't a real trial, it's a human sacrifice to a force of nature.
The question I have for you is if you do or do not think that the scientists should be tried for not being able to see the future. You say that the scientists could be at fault for "arriving at such a bad conclusion". It was not a bad conclusion, however. Only hindsight makes it a bad conclusion. The correct conclusion based on existing knowledge was that the danger wasn't statistically significantly different than it always was. Living in those buildings in an earthquake zone represented a statistically significant risk of dying in an earthquake someday. Not going into the house reduced that risk, obviously, but predicting _when_ not to go inside was pretty much impossible. I would say though, that if these people are convicted for this, the best course of action is to evict everyone from every unsafe home in l'Aquila, raze most of them and save some as historic sites to be viewed from the outside, and build new buildings to code for an earthquake zone.
As long as the trans fats are low, the fat in potato chips isn't really a problem, especially for little children, it's the carbohydrates that are more of a problem. In an already high-energy diet, you're better off getting your energy from other sources. Either way, the potato chips are only a problem if they make up a major part of the diet.
Barberi was among the four who gave the press conference, but what did _he_ say? Sure, politics may have played a role, which isn't great, but was he supposed to jump in and have a public argument over semantics? What did he actually say during his part in speaking? Or did he not actually speak at all during the press conference? And what about the other scientists who weren't at the press conference? The article also mentions that "Barberi himself had compiled a massive census of every seismically vulnerable public building in southern Italy; the survey, according to the prosecution brief, indicated that more than 550 masonry buildings in L'Aquila were at medium–high risk of collapsing in the event of a major earthquake.", which is one of the things that the scientists are being accused of _not_ doing. The simple fact that they didn't remind people of what was already public knowledge at that particular press conference seems to be enough in Italy to prosecute the people who were there and even the ones who were not there.
I would also like to point out that the "no danger" statement was originally in Italian. The translation into English doesn't necessarily carry over every connotation or nuance of the words actually used. The meaning could have been subtly closer to the "no new danger" version which would have been perfectly accurate. Even if the connotation is exactly the same, it's still close enough that it hardly seems to need correction given the context. In l'Aquila, people are trusting their lives to fate by being inside one of those earthquake-unsafe buildings. A quake could come along at any moment and collapse the building, killing everyone inside. That was true on the day of the press conference, on the night of the quake, two months before the quake, two years before the quake and even today. In that context, which everyone should have already known, the "no danger" statement was accurate to the limits of human knowledge even given the fact that a large earthquake occurred and killed people.
Oh I know there are always going to be some trans-fats. Many foods have both positives and negatives. Some nightmare food products have pretty much zero nutritional downsides. Remember Olestra? The whole point was that it didn't get absorbed by the body, just sat in the digestive tract. The stuff was terrible for you though because of all the other things it blocked from passing through the intestinal wall and just the physical nature of this fat slurry sitting in your guts. Then there's the wonderful sugar alcohols like xylitol. Completely indigestible, but terrible for you. Makes me glad I don't chew gum because just try finding a chewing gum that doesn't contain it. My sister quit smoking and transitioned from nicotine gum to regular gum and discovered all about the unpleasant side effects. Some really horrible things are produced for us to put in our bodies often with the excuse that they're not harmful every once in a while, then people end up consuming them nearly every single day. It's scary.
Varied nutrition meeting all the requirements and not overdoing it on things like carbohydrates and salts seems to be the best way to go. There isn't one exact set of nutritional guidelines that works for everyone although there are some best practices to follow. If parents are packing a slim jim and a bag of candy for lunch every day, I see cause for concern. The lunch described in the article does not seem to be an egregious case of child abuse from my point of view.
As far as nature "intending" things, that was just me anthropomorphising nature for the purpose of illustration. Obviously nature doesn't have an actual intent. The reason milk exists is because it serves a need and that need, circularly, exists because of the existence of milk. The point is that milk has a role and that role is in infant development and beyond that role, milk is actually contra-indicated. Possibly simply due to a supply problem and, since we solved that supply problem by domesticating other mammals, we've been adapting to make use of milk, but we're not 100% there as a species.
I agree with you that wheat and other grains fill a role in a cultural diet, and that role is reflected in the USDA recommendations (and the products and lobbying of US agribusiness). The point I was making is that's no reason to require them as part of school lunches if the goal is really to provide good nutrition to children. Other goals, such as providing profits and stability for farming interests are served by that approach. Milk is no different as well, and there's a big dairy lobby to go along with that. Whatever foodgroup/pyramid/whatever method the USDA is putting forward at the moment is not the be all and end all of nutrition, and you clearly agree with that, so I'm still not sure what your point is. Now, the USDA guidelines might have the benefit of being simple for some school food inspector to follow by means of a simple mental checklist, but that's hardly proper nutritional science. It's a lowest common denominator approach. It might improve some kids school lunches, but it's going to shortchange other kids especially when you consider that nutrition for children isn't just about what they _should_ eat, but what you can actually get them to eat.
As for the nutritional requirements of other mammals and cats specifically, I brought those up because I was specifically asked:
This is the second post about how milk is ~unnecessary~. Some people will argue so is meat. Hell, so is fish, and just about anything else. I'm truly curious as to why milk is targeted?
so an explanation of the role milk actually plays for mammals seemed in order. Cats came up because they're a mammal that pretty much everyone knows of that love milk, even when they're older, but we're all being told now not to give adult cats milk for their health and comfort. It seemed a good example that someone might grasp even if they didn't see why milk isn't a necessary nutrient for humans.
In the end, humans are omnivores and we can eat all kinds of things. We lack a few omnivore traits that could be really useful, like the ability to make our own vitamin C, but we're still capable of living a long time, perhaps even full lifetimes on a very limited diet (even just corn if it's nixtamalized ) or wheat as you point out (especially if we're eating it fresh and whole as well as prepared). We're almost always far better off on a varied diet including all kinds of things. We can do without meat, but need to make sure we get lots of other stuff to compensate in order to be maximize nutritional health. A vegan diet would be easier if our crops weren't grown nutritionally deprived themselves. Of course, one of the reasons for that is that crops grown with more natural processes are full of nutrients they've absorbed from decaying animal matter in the soil. Given all of that, the grossly over-simplified USDA guidelines are more like shackles to achieving good nutrition than a path towards achieving it.
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But the concept of war is a little ridiculous in and of itself. Just look at history and all the bizarre and stupid stuff humans have done. We'll almost certainly continue doing bizarre and stupid stuff well into the future, including if we ever manage to populate anywhere other than this planet.
Commander Data I can see, but Cherry 2000? A mass-produced companion-bot with no self-awareness? The whole point of that movie was that the guy was confused and in love with an object that was simply well-designed to express love it didn't really feel. It had an AI good enough to manage housework and other "domestic duties", but that's about it. Maybe you didn't watch the whole movie, so this next bit might be a spoiler, but he dumps the robot off in the desert and saves the real girl and the robot doesn't care one way or another. If you wanted to find an example of either a "radio controlled [car] with weapons" or "more human than some humans", you picked a really lousy one.
And it's still slower than local disk access. We're talking about splash screens, therefore program loading speeds, so the fact that memory speeds are far, far faster isn't as relevant. Of course, after your program loads, you want it to be fast and responsive and not anchored to a network that could go down at any time (I know the power could go out at any point too, but why add extra points of failure if you don't have to).
Of course, if the program is already running on the remote machine, or at least has a suspended image sitting in ram, then there wouldn't be any load times to run it from "the cloud" (incidentally, am I the only one who despises that term). Of course, if you're willing to spring for the ram, there's no reason there couldn't be a system to do exactly the same thing locally for a limited quantity (rather than number, since programs can have vastly different memory footprints) of programs. Various obnoxious software companies have done exactly that for their own programs, inserting startup items that pre-load their software in the background to create the illusion that their software starts faster than everyone else's at the hidden expense of your memory (Microsoft Office, for example). If it's done at the express desire of a user with tons of ram, then it's not such a bad thing.
Lots of people seem to be in love with Reagan today. Maybe he was a really great guy. Thing is, I was really only a kid when he was President of the US, and it was still completely obvious to me at the time that he had some kind of dementia. It seems plain now that, for pretty much his entire second term, and probably a good chunk of his first, that Alzheimer's had left him medically unfit to actually be President. It says something very, very disturbing about how the US is governed if many people consider him the "greatest Us President"
I'm not really being very precise when I say that. Basically the thinking is that high frequency trading is about inserting the high frequency traders as middlemen into every transaction and taking a cut. Thanks to that cut, sellers don't sell for quite as much as they would have and buyers pay more than they would have. This is where I run into a problem with definitions. Liquidity is basically defined as an asset being readily saleable without affecting its price. Technically, since the price goes up for buyers and down for sellers, the mean price should stay about where it would otherwise, but if you actually add up the extra costs to "real" buyers and extra losses to "real" sellers there's a sort of hidden price in there. The actual definition of "liquidity" doesn't really cover that,so I'm stretching the term when I say that "real liquidity" decreases. It seems to me that the definition should include something like that. Is there another term that covers it?
I'm always happy to be corrected. As I understand bid and ask prices, a seller gives a bid price at which they will sell a given quantity of stock, and a buyer gives an ask price at which they will buy stock. The spread between them has to be closed for a sale to actually take place. A seller might only be selling 10,000 shares, and there might be ten individual buyers who each want 1,000 shares and middlemen can be useful there. Except of course that the sellers and buyers themselves can adjust their prices and quantities, etc. to meet somewhere themselves. But either way, when the seller and buyer are making a trade they eventually meet somewhere. A seller with a bid price of 66.66 each for 1000 shares and a buyer with an ask price of 66.46 for 1000 shares will only trade when one of them adjusts their price. A middleman might come along and get the shares from the seller for 66.56 each. They won't then bid them for 66.56 each, however, because then they won't make a profit.
So, unless the high frequency traders are charitable organizations, how do the sellers get a slightly higher price than they would have otherwise simultaneous with the buyers getting a slightly lower price than they would have otherwise? One or the other could certainly be true, but how are both true at the same time?
I think you're looking at this from a fundamentally different perspective than me. Your concern is entirely for the individual investor, probably since you are one. That's fine in a casino environment. The stock market, however, is not meant to be a casino. The justification for its existence and for treating it like something other than a gambling parlour is that it's a system for providing capital for companies. As such, the selfish needs and desires of individual investors aren't the only concern for the market, not when these markets are one of the props that hold up the economy. The basic principles of investing that you mention I should read up on are based only on the perspective of an the individual investor. From the point of view of the individual investor, successfully gaming the system and the other investors involved in the system is a pure positive over the short term. From the point of view of the system and the economy, operating that way is harmful. Curbing it does reduce the opportunity for some players to win big at the expense of other players, but it increases the possibility that more players will achieve modest gains and that the overall gain will be greater than if just a few players are able to win big.
Well, the distinction isn't clear between discovery and invention. Pure math is one of those things that falls on the discovery side because just about anyone who is any good at math agrees because almost all of those people, while going through the process of learning math have experienced the process of independently rediscovering mathematical principles for themselves based on what they've learned so far. Then they learn (or figure out for themselves) inductive reasoning and it's just blatantly obvious to them that math itself is discovered and not invented. The same thing is actually true of just about everything in the universe, but it's not always so blatantly obvious to the experts who work in the field.
You give light bulbs as an example. Presumably because the light bulb is famous as an invention of Thomas Edison. The fact is, Edisons (or rather his teams) contribution to the lightbulb really was just a matter of discovery. Light bulbs already existed. They were either very power hungry or burned out too fast. The goal was to find a good filament material that could be used in cheaply mass-produced bulbs. There were lots of teams trying to achieve the same goal since they all knew it was possible, it was just a matter of finding the right material. Also, Edison's team didn't actually even discover the carbonized filament first, Joseph Swan is credited with that. So, really all the team Edison ran did was re-discover a good filament material. Then they later switched to an even better filament material: cabonized bamboo (already discovered by Henricg Globel). In any case, once Edison had secured a patents, you can bet that he, and the courts, interpreted them as broadly as possible. Using a completely different filament type wouldn't be protection against a lawsuit. Anyway, later on, William Coolidge developed a multiply coiled tungsten filament which was just an improvement on earlier work with tungsten. Looked at the way it actually happened, the light bulb doesn't look all that much like an invention either.
I can see your argument about the amount of engineering work that may go into developing an algorithm, the problem is that patents have never been based on how much work went into the development. And you know just as well as I do that opening the door to patents on pure math opens the door to trivial patents on every little thing. Patents are relatively easy to get, but a nightmare to fight in court. The patent office operates as if patent mistakes are easy to fix in court and the courts operate as if the patent office were practically infallible. The clearly stated definitions of what material is patentable is eroded beyond comprehension or outright ignored. The developers of some great idea that doesn't fall under a patentable area may go sadly unrewarded, but that tragedy is nothing compared to the unending parade of horrors that emerges every time things shift and a new area suddenly becomes patentable.
The whole idea of patents is rooted in the traditional practice of monarchs granting business monopolies to cronies. Modern patents are a post-enlightenment reworking of this idea to apply only to truly new inventions. That reworking seems to unravelling. We're back to having "legitimate" business method patents and the democritization of the process has largely failed. I don't want to just stop the scope of what's patentable from expanding, I want it to shrink. All the way back to nothing being patentable at all would be fine by me.
The "liquidity" that I was referring to that has no place in an investment system is the supposed "liquidity" that HFT claims as its "product". Clearly some liquidity must exist, but that which HFT provides is largely illusory and completely unnecessary in any case. In reality, they're actually probably reducing real liquidity.
As for investment being gambling. Proper investment is indeed a gamble based on educated guesses about a company and the market it operates in (not the stock market its stocks are sold in). All activities in life are gambling by that token. The same thing can be said of the term speculation. All investing is speculative based on the common usage of the word. When investing becomes an unacceptable form of gambling is when it becomes a game played between investors where the realities of the company invested in are almost irrelevant. When people are investing not because they think a company will succeed and profit, but because they think other people will invest as well and drive up the stock price and create an opportunity to maybe sell at the peak before everyone else does, that's what is meant by the term "speculation" in stock market terms. That's the bad gambling that leads to boom and destroys the whole point of the stock market, which is to provide capital.
Human nature makes stock market speculation virtually impossible to eliminate and speculative practices have become very heavily ingrained in the way stock markets operate (for example, the fact that most stocks don't pay dividends), but it still performs its function of providing capital. The more it veers towards speculation and gambling, however, the more dangerous it gets. The recent sub-prime mortgage crisis happened largely because investors made extremely poor decisions because there were so many layers of abstraction between the "investment product" they invested in and the actual real-world thing they were investing in.
Certain cheerleaders for certain economic practices love to point at how many rich people there are and say: "Yay, the economy must be doing well and everyone must be prospering for there to be so many rich people." When it's pointed out that those rich people could have become rich by making a lot of people poor, it's pointed out that the economy isn't a zero sum game and that wealth creating economic activity benefits everyone. There's some truth to that, but it's not always true. You can have lots of rich people by enriching everyone and you can also accomplish it by impoverishing nearly everyone. How the money moves ends up being very important. The stock market, operating as a gambling casino, is a zero-sum game. Some people make money, some people lose money, and some middle-men take a cut. Operating as a pure means of providing capital, it isn't a zero sum game (as long as you're not doing final accounting at the end of the universe, anyway). Capital allows companies to perform wealth-creating activities. The stock market, as it stands, is a hybrid of both and the zero-sum gambling aspect of it does actually fulfil a role. It draws investors in. This means that the actual amount of money involved is a lot greater, which makes more money available for capital. If the amount of speculation is too high, however, there's too much instability and the capital aspect suffers. This is obviously exacerbated by excessive leveraging of assets on the part of the companies involved. If they behave recklessly under the assumption that their stock will always grow, then they can collapse very suddenly if their stock price drops. It also leads them to poor decisions when they're dependant on their stock price growing just to stay in business.
My statement was a reference to the claimed product of high frequency trading: high liquidity. I should have said "high liquidity" rather than just "liquidity" to be more clear. I don't actually think that people shouldn't be able to buy and then later sell their investments. Rapid buying and selling of investments is, however, a clear sign of people gaming the system rather than making investments. Where you actually draw the line is a bit tricky, but if you need to buy and then sell a stock in less than say a month without any notable events occurring in the business you bought stock in or the market they operate in, then you're not investing, you're playing a gambling game with other so-called investors.
HFT is not the sole culprit. In general any computerized algorithmic trading system is a problem. Investing should be done by examining the actual realities of the market (not the stock market, the real market) and the company being invested in. People can claim that the numbers in the stock market reflect the real world, and they do in part _unless_ you have algorithmic trading going on in the stock market above a certain threshold. Once you get to a certain point where enough of the trades are being done automatically, then all the data available for the computers to make decisions is being generated by the actions of other computers using that same pool of data to make decisions. This results in all kinds of weird emergent effects. Reality drops out of the equation and you instead get strange attractors, feedback loops, chaos. Many of these systems are designed to detect when things have gotten weird, but this doesn't make things better, because they're usually designed to then enter some sort of failure mode and dump their way out of the market as fast as possible, which leads to a cascading figurative (though possibly literal) run on the bank.
As for the discussion being off topic, I don't think it is. This trial has a lot to do with the secretive, conspiratorial nature of the industry. This is an industry that is very quick to try to see people prosecuted for behaving in ways that are very, very similar to the way they operate.
Well, actually, the casinos are allowed by law to cheat and rig the system so that you can statistically never win. The various jurisdictions they're in set minimum payout odds for the whole casino. Usually something like 75% I think. That's why the slot machines are so important to the casinos. They're rigged for adjustable payout odds to balance out the rest of the casino. Sometimes they'll be up over 100% to balance out a lot of people losing at the craps tables, and other times they'll be down low below the casino's minimum payout because people are doing well at other gambling activities.
Random distribution sees to it that there are some winners and some losers, but the rigging makes sure that the losses outweigh the wins. In a lot of ways, an illegal bookie can be a lot more honest and up front than a casino. Overall though, the investment system should not be like either of those things.
I'm actually of the opinion that vices such as gambling should not be illegal as long as they're clearly labelled as what they are. My opinion that they should be allowed is despite the fact that I've seen gambling addictions utterly destroy people. Also, I should note that gambling mostly is illegal in the US. The prohibition of it (and the nature of the exceptions that are granted) really haven't made things better.
So, anyway, gambling should be allowed, but _not_ in investment markets. If people want to gamble on stock prices, that's fine. They should be allowed to set up betting pools on anything. The activity should just be separated from the actual investment market as much as possible.
I rather should have said "high liquidity" rather than simply liquidity. I don't believe that investors should be stuck with their investment forever even if someone else wants to buy it from them. I was simply referring to the fact that the usual answer for what benefit high frequency trading systems provide is "high liquidity". High liquidity in an investment market means that investment is secondary to speculation, which is a very dangerous thing. The "product" that high frequency traders provide is less than worthless.
And are the cases where they "offer sellers a slightly higher price than they would have gotten otherwise" the same cases where they offer buyers a "slightly lower price than they would have gotten otherwise"? Because the two would seem to be mutually exclusive.
I should have said "high liquidity" then. Obviously we shouldn't eliminate the ability to trade and sell stocks. But the argument always given for what high-frequency trading actually provides the market is "high liquidity". That isn't desirable at all in actual investing. High liquidity just means instability. Algorithmic trading in general just leads to instability.
Real growth of wealth comes from capital actually being used for real things. The stock market can help wealth grow by providing capital to accomplish real things. All the secondary activities of the stock market, however, don't provide any real benefits, they just move money around, often to the detriment of real wealth creation.
Solid rocket fuels are the most immediately obvious example of materials with their oxidiser bound up in them which will burn in a vacuum. Perchlorate candles will burn in a vaccum and produce breathable oxygen. There are plenty of things that carry their own oxygen or other oxidiser that will burn in a vacuum.
Actually, IBM wants to go forward at this point so that they can thoroughly crush SCO into the dirt. A good part of this is about taking away any last assets SCO may have so that they don't get paid to SCO's lawyers.
High frequency trading code shouldn't be legal to use for trading in the first place. It doesn't provide anything useful ("liquidity" has no place in an investment system, it's only good for speculative investing, which is just gambling), and simply parasitically leaches from the market and destabilizes it. The people the programmer was working for are the ones who should be convicted.
Actually it's quite a lot like predicting sports outcomes (at least among teams in the same league, clearly it's a lot easier to predict the outcome of a professional team of adults versus a primary school team) in that you really can't. All you can do is identify statistical trends.
Earthquakes are common in that area. The people have historically altered their behaviour based on the threat of imminent quakes, such as by sleeping in cars. There had been various mild tremors suggesting that a large quake was imminent. The seismologists met, and a spokesperson announced that they had concluded that the mild tremors were actually an indication that a large quake was not going to happen. As a direct result of this statement, people stopped their existing preparations for the quake, and resumed normal activities. Then the quake happened.
Statistically speaking, the people would have been just as safe sleeping in their cars on random nights rather than basing it recent low level tremors. They'd been having about three tremors a day for months. The lesser tremors did not suggest that a large quake was imminent. Typically, such clusters of tremors occur for a while then stop with no major quake. The statement about mild tremors relieving siesmic stress and making future quakes more likely is an old assumption about earthquakes that is actually true in certain circumstances, but not all circumstances, and it seems that the spokesman, who wasn't a seismologist, had heard it in the past, but did not hear it from the seismologists at the meeting that occurred before the press conference. Only one seismologist actually attended the press conference and was not the spokesperson. It was already firmly established that many buildings in l'Aquila were deathtraps so the "no danger" statement needed to be taken with a big grain of salt. I think it would have been better if a seismologist had spoken and taken twenty minutes to actually explain the risk factors. People would have had no idea what the seismologist was talking about, but maybe they wouldn't all be on trial now. No, they'd still be on trial for not clearly communicating in plain language since this isn't a real trial, it's a human sacrifice to a force of nature.
The question I have for you is if you do or do not think that the scientists should be tried for not being able to see the future. You say that the scientists could be at fault for "arriving at such a bad conclusion". It was not a bad conclusion, however. Only hindsight makes it a bad conclusion. The correct conclusion based on existing knowledge was that the danger wasn't statistically significantly different than it always was. Living in those buildings in an earthquake zone represented a statistically significant risk of dying in an earthquake someday. Not going into the house reduced that risk, obviously, but predicting _when_ not to go inside was pretty much impossible. I would say though, that if these people are convicted for this, the best course of action is to evict everyone from every unsafe home in l'Aquila, raze most of them and save some as historic sites to be viewed from the outside, and build new buildings to code for an earthquake zone.
As long as the trans fats are low, the fat in potato chips isn't really a problem, especially for little children, it's the carbohydrates that are more of a problem. In an already high-energy diet, you're better off getting your energy from other sources. Either way, the potato chips are only a problem if they make up a major part of the diet.
Barberi was among the four who gave the press conference, but what did _he_ say? Sure, politics may have played a role, which isn't great, but was he supposed to jump in and have a public argument over semantics? What did he actually say during his part in speaking? Or did he not actually speak at all during the press conference? And what about the other scientists who weren't at the press conference? The article also mentions that "Barberi himself had compiled a massive census of every seismically vulnerable public building in southern Italy; the survey, according to the prosecution brief, indicated that more than 550 masonry buildings in L'Aquila were at medium–high risk of collapsing in the event of a major earthquake.", which is one of the things that the scientists are being accused of _not_ doing. The simple fact that they didn't remind people of what was already public knowledge at that particular press conference seems to be enough in Italy to prosecute the people who were there and even the ones who were not there.
I would also like to point out that the "no danger" statement was originally in Italian. The translation into English doesn't necessarily carry over every connotation or nuance of the words actually used. The meaning could have been subtly closer to the "no new danger" version which would have been perfectly accurate. Even if the connotation is exactly the same, it's still close enough that it hardly seems to need correction given the context. In l'Aquila, people are trusting their lives to fate by being inside one of those earthquake-unsafe buildings. A quake could come along at any moment and collapse the building, killing everyone inside. That was true on the day of the press conference, on the night of the quake, two months before the quake, two years before the quake and even today. In that context, which everyone should have already known, the "no danger" statement was accurate to the limits of human knowledge even given the fact that a large earthquake occurred and killed people.
Oh I know there are always going to be some trans-fats. Many foods have both positives and negatives. Some nightmare food products have pretty much zero nutritional downsides. Remember Olestra? The whole point was that it didn't get absorbed by the body, just sat in the digestive tract. The stuff was terrible for you though because of all the other things it blocked from passing through the intestinal wall and just the physical nature of this fat slurry sitting in your guts. Then there's the wonderful sugar alcohols like xylitol. Completely indigestible, but terrible for you. Makes me glad I don't chew gum because just try finding a chewing gum that doesn't contain it. My sister quit smoking and transitioned from nicotine gum to regular gum and discovered all about the unpleasant side effects. Some really horrible things are produced for us to put in our bodies often with the excuse that they're not harmful every once in a while, then people end up consuming them nearly every single day. It's scary.
Varied nutrition meeting all the requirements and not overdoing it on things like carbohydrates and salts seems to be the best way to go. There isn't one exact set of nutritional guidelines that works for everyone although there are some best practices to follow. If parents are packing a slim jim and a bag of candy for lunch every day, I see cause for concern. The lunch described in the article does not seem to be an egregious case of child abuse from my point of view.
As far as nature "intending" things, that was just me anthropomorphising nature for the purpose of illustration. Obviously nature doesn't have an actual intent. The reason milk exists is because it serves a need and that need, circularly, exists because of the existence of milk. The point is that milk has a role and that role is in infant development and beyond that role, milk is actually contra-indicated. Possibly simply due to a supply problem and, since we solved that supply problem by domesticating other mammals, we've been adapting to make use of milk, but we're not 100% there as a species.
I agree with you that wheat and other grains fill a role in a cultural diet, and that role is reflected in the USDA recommendations (and the products and lobbying of US agribusiness). The point I was making is that's no reason to require them as part of school lunches if the goal is really to provide good nutrition to children. Other goals, such as providing profits and stability for farming interests are served by that approach. Milk is no different as well, and there's a big dairy lobby to go along with that. Whatever foodgroup/pyramid/whatever method the USDA is putting forward at the moment is not the be all and end all of nutrition, and you clearly agree with that, so I'm still not sure what your point is. Now, the USDA guidelines might have the benefit of being simple for some school food inspector to follow by means of a simple mental checklist, but that's hardly proper nutritional science. It's a lowest common denominator approach. It might improve some kids school lunches, but it's going to shortchange other kids especially when you consider that nutrition for children isn't just about what they _should_ eat, but what you can actually get them to eat.
As for the nutritional requirements of other mammals and cats specifically, I brought those up because I was specifically asked:
This is the second post about how milk is ~unnecessary~. Some people will argue so is meat. Hell, so is fish, and just about anything else. I'm truly curious as to why milk is targeted?
so an explanation of the role milk actually plays for mammals seemed in order. Cats came up because they're a mammal that pretty much everyone knows of that love milk, even when they're older, but we're all being told now not to give adult cats milk for their health and comfort. It seemed a good example that someone might grasp even if they didn't see why milk isn't a necessary nutrient for humans.
In the end, humans are omnivores and we can eat all kinds of things. We lack a few omnivore traits that could be really useful, like the ability to make our own vitamin C, but we're still capable of living a long time, perhaps even full lifetimes on a very limited diet (even just corn if it's nixtamalized ) or wheat as you point out (especially if we're eating it fresh and whole as well as prepared). We're almost always far better off on a varied diet including all kinds of things. We can do without meat, but need to make sure we get lots of other stuff to compensate in order to be maximize nutritional health. A vegan diet would be easier if our crops weren't grown nutritionally deprived themselves. Of course, one of the reasons for that is that crops grown with more natural processes are full of nutrients they've absorbed from decaying animal matter in the soil. Given all of that, the grossly over-simplified USDA guidelines are more like shackles to achieving good nutrition than a path towards achieving it.
Ok. That's pretty much a given... I may have missed the point.