Why shouldn't they use drones? They use surveillance helicopters. This is just another method of doing the same thing.
Sure, if we impose the same visibility requirements and an enforceable limit on the total number of drones in existence. If we don't, they aren't "doing the same thing", because the way prices are coming down, it won't be long until each of us can have their own personal surveillance drone following them everywhere.
His exile is self-imposed, on a wild (paranoid?) theory that the charges in Sweden (Sweden!) are trumped up in order to get him extradited there so that he can then be extradited to the US on a non-existent extradition demand. I suppose the Swedes can be grateful that he has imprisoned himself under conditions that are likely worse than a Swedish prison and that don't cost the Swedish tax payer a dime.
I'm going to have to assume you put the quotes around "most" because you were being sarcastic.
"Most" referred to pacific islands in general and is the correct term.
Nauru is 5000+ acres. Not massive by any means. But not the tiny marginal rock you seem to think it is. It's way too small and isolated to be self-sufficient with a modern standard of living, but it's just fine by the standards of pretty much the entirety of history up to the last century or so.
Not by a long shot. Nauru has almost no freshwater, poor soils, and only a thin strip of fertile land.
It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably.
Nauru's resources are phosphate. You can't use that "sustainably". You can dig it out of the ground and sell it, that's all.
Speculation is gambling.
No, it's not. Speculation is taking a high risk. Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return.
"If phosphate mining had been a large number of competitive small enterprises, many would have screwed up their finances anyway, but some would have used their revenues wisely to plan for the future." I've been waiting for you to explain how exactly that would have worked.
The same way it always works: people who own a resource will use it to maximize their own goals. So, some people will squander it and their kids will be poor. Others will use it sensibly and their kids will be rich.
"Well, the problem is that people who advocate policies under the name "sustainability" in fact advocate unsustainable policies, knowingly or unknowingly." There are a lot of people advocating stupid ideas under the names of all kinds of philosophies. Careful, considered, scientific evaluations of the actual ideas are always required.
Stop waving your hands. Show me a feasible, detailed, widely-accepted scientific and economic plan for human global sustainability. Something that the majority of experts agree on (you know, a "consensus", you like those so much).
"Sustainability at the very least means ending the use of all fossil fuels, since they are not renewable. What are you going to replace that energy and those resources with?" Possibly some nuclear if it can be made more economically feasible.
Nuclear energy is not sustainable. Nuclear fuel is a precious and finite resource, just like oil.
Aside from that, mostly solar of one form or another. Panels on rooftops and the like where feasible, and large solar plants of one design or another (molten salt, giant greenhouses with updraft towers and turbines) for the bulk of power generation along with wind and tide generation where practical.
That's handwaving. Work out the economics of making that work: what's the investment? What's the added energy cost? What are the politics?
"People proposing sustainability need to answer these questions in great detail before we change what we're doing. Otherwise, adopting policies imposing sustainability is reckless." I would take the accusation of recklessness way more seriously
It's not an accusation, it's a statement of fact. Nobody has been able to make even a plausible suggestion for how sustainability is to be achieved, let alone a detailed plan. And it's also a fact that unless you can come up with such a plan, neither politicians nor voters are going to go for sustainability.
if it weren't coming from someone who has stated their preference for squandering the future in favor of their present comfort.
You bet I am: what you call "present comfort" amounts to the ability to innovate rapidly. You plan on destroying that by first enforcing an ill-conceived set of plans that somehow are supposed to lead to sustainability and then hoping that innovation will later create the technologies to make it all work.
Of course, it's an idea that has been around for ages, even for electronic documents. Of course, it doesn't meet the criteria of patentability or even publishability.
But, I say, let's give them a patent anyway. I think any dumb idea, and in particular any DRM method, deserves a patent granted exclusively to patent trolls. We should even let them get away with "renewing" it indefinitely by the usual dumb stunts.
I don't know either Gräßlin or KWin. But I get the impression from his blog post that he is unable to separate his personal and political opinions from his role as software maintainer. Perhaps that's the reason he experiences problems and has abuse targeted at him? Or maybe it's just his personality.
Hmm. I'd argue that computers are inherently rational, _within the limits of their programming_
Rational behavior is optimal behavior given the information available to you; if you don't achieve that, you're not rational. Neither humans nor computers are anywhere rational. But humans are better in unusual situations.
But studies have shown that people, especially men, are very emotional in their market decision making
Studies have also shown that emotional decisions are objectively superior to non-emotional decisions.
I'd say that by and large the people/entities very much DO pay the price when things go wrong
When I invest in a company, all I can lose is my investment. That company can then take excessive risk or expose itself to legal or financial penalties and I'm completely shielded. As long as the people losing money are creditors, that doesn't matter (they made a stupid investment). But in other cases, people who never agreed to take on that risk get stuck with it. The solution we use these days is then to put a complex system of regulations in place to make sure companies don't misbehave. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It's not written in stone that investor risk should be limited to the amount of the investment, and it didn't use to be, for example for banks.
But it's well documented that bailouts and insurance have a perverse effect of encouraging investors (and whoever) to do less due diligence, and invest in things that are a bad idea.
Even without bailouts, investors still have a perverse interest to do less due dilligence and invest in companies that take excessive risks, because their upside is unlimited but their downside is limited to just their investment.
But neither buyer, nor seller, nor the exchange are passive bystanders. In order for HFT to profit, there need to be two exchanges with different prices involved. Someone needs to make those prices consistent. Either HFT can do it or the exchange can do it. Right now, the exchange does most of it, but HFT picks up a small difference, presumably because exchanges don't bother investing in doing a better job. If buyers or sellers lose too much through this, they'll just do business elsewhere. HFT keeps the exchanges in line, and exchanges keep HFT in line, and buyers and sellers keep both in line. I don't see a huge problem here. We had a temporary bubble in HFT, and that seems to be correcting itself.
He didn't "include HFT as a problem that stands in the way", he called it a "symptom of a broken system". That is, he just doesn't like markets and the profit motive in general for unspecified reasons, and just observes that they also happen to cause HFT. Presumably, when whatever he believes is wrong with "the system" gets fixed, HFT, being a symptom, would get fixed with it.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that even if we suppose that HFT is harmful, clickclickdrone's condemnation of markets and profits still wouldn't follow from it.
But computers can, in fact that's the whole point.
My sentence didn't come out quite right. What I meant was that I think people can make a reasonable argument that HFT trading is harmful. I'm actually not convinced it is. But the general condemnation of markets by clickclickdrone just wouldn't follow from that even if true.
In fact people aren't very good at purely rational buying/selling decisions (especially men according to the research).
Neither are computers really. While computers can make slightly better decisions than humans under common conditions, they usually become much worse under exceptional situations. Even that wouldn't be a problem if the people deploying the computer programs had to bear the full cost of their actions when things go wrong. However, between liability limits and bailouts, participants in financial markets can take higher risks (with trading software or investments) than they should be able to in a free market, and that's not good. The way to fix this is, of course, not to create new taxes, but to hold those screwing up financially responsible for their actions when they do.
Furthermore, the possibility of people doing HFT is what forces the other market players to make sure that their systems are as close to efficient as possible for them. Existing studies on the effects of HFT cannot address that question because we have never had a situation where all market participants have access to high speed computers but some are effectively prohibited from using them.
Real world value does not change in millisecond increments, except for earthquakes and nuclear holocaust
Oh yes they do. When someone buys or sells a large chunk of stock, the value changes instantly. And that change needs to be propagated through markets and exchanges. Exchanges try to do this themselves but they aren't very good at it, so HFT makes a profit by doing it faster.
Therefor the profit in HFT is extracted by decreasing value for non-HFC entities (that would be you). It's analogous to entropy.
Yes, it does. But if you get rid of HFT profits, they just go to the seller, the buyer, the exchange, or are split between them. Why is that any better? And with HFT, all the other participants in the market have a strong incentive to keep HFT profits down by making the system more efficient. That's why we have hit "peak HFT": high profits from HFT were a temporary situation that is correcting itself.
And speaking of "entropy" (or perhaps better "friction losses"), if we get a transaction tax, it will ultimately come out of your and my pocket no matter what.
Noone needs 100Mbps Internet links, it adds no value. And it makes it hard to find crooks who download child pornography. Let's limit all Internet speeds in the nation to 5 Mbps download (enough for watching a movie) and 100kbps upload (enough for your vacation photos).
HFT may sometimes increase volatility and sometimes decrease it. Overall, there is little evidence that there's a need to act.
But a transaction tax means massive new reporting and data collection on every financial transaction. It probably would require data exchange between all major tax authorities, and the imposition of US rules on foreign financial markets. It also means that any transaction or contract will now have to come under suspicion of being a proxy for a financial transaction that might otherwise be a taxable trade.
I can't figure out how anybody can at the same time get upset about NSA spying and then support such legislation. It looks like people won't rest until every paperclip purchase, every phone call, every trip, every e-book page read, and every bit of our medical information has been reported to the government and exchanged with governments around the world. Of course, each of these regulations has a separate group of people making excuses for them: "for the children", "for financial stability and fairness", "for anti-terrorism efforts", "for your own good", or whatever else excuse-du-jour people come up with.
That doesn't seem to be a problem with HFT, it seems to be a problem with how the NBBO and cross-exchange orders are handled. The HFT traders are doing a better and faster job than the NBBO system.
HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live. For everyone.
HFT is a problem because it interferes with free markets: you can't have people make rational buying decisions within a few microseconds. But your second sentence has nothing to do with HFT. If you want to advocate an economy based on "long term stewardship", do so without erroneously linking it to HFT.
So basically yes, your rights are lower if you are not in the custody of the state. Compulsion is not in play.
I would argue that in any dialog with the police about a crime they suspect you of but you are innocent of, "compulsion" has to be in play in some form.
No, you are not required to identify yourself (or even carry identification). But if the police have cause to need to know your identity and you refuse to identify yourself, they can hold you until they identify you. It's not an arrest and there is no (other) penalty, it's simply that they need to physically hold you until they figure out who you are. That's nothing new either.
People don't say "hey, it's such a nice day, I think I'll talk to police about some murder I didn't have anything to do with". The police were talking to him to find out more about a case that they considered him a suspect in. That should be treated like an interrogation.
The fact that they failed to read him his rights before talking to him as a suspect is itself wrong. And anybody who is considered a suspect should be automatically protected from self-incrimination, otherwise you encourage police to explicitly set up vague situations like this where the subject may technically not be protected but is effectively still being interrogated.
Being Roman Catholic, there's no such thing as "not being human" in my religious worldview. Thanks for playing, though.
Well, you certainly don't share that with your church officials. Cardinal McCormack, for example, referred to atheists as "not fully human". But, you know, the Roman Catholic church is a big tent: it includes confused and well meaning people like you, just like it includes dissemblers, child molesters, Nazis, and murderers. And as long as they contribute to the power and financial well being of the church, they continue to be welcome and forgiven their sins.
And I quote: "The vast majority of the population is unified under the World State, an eternally peaceful, stable global society in which goods and resources are plentiful (because the population is permanently limited to no more than two billion people) and everyone is happy."
Of course, FTL travel is more plausible than that any of that is achievable, even if it were desirable.
You do seem to be enlightened on the subject, even if quoting a handful of authors voicing their opinion doesn't prove much.
Well, you'd have to actually read the books the see the proof.
if there's a latent anti-Americanism in Europe - it's not conscious and maybe nurtured by the politicians
Of course it's not conscious, and of course it's nurtured by politicians. It's so much a part of the intellectual and cultural life of Europe that people don't even notice it, they just assume it's true. And it's not "anti-" as in "we hate you", it's "anti-" as in "we prefer not to be like you" (usually while munching on fast food at some US chain and listening to English lyrics on an iPhone).
Clearly, the average Joe over here is not half as "anti-American" as, say, George Carlin.
Even if I agreed with any of that, so what? The US has a highly diverse, outspoken political culture, much of it extremely self-critical. Of course, Carlin was just trying to make people think; half the time, I can't tell whether he is serious. I'm not convinced that someone from outside the US can actually quite understand US political comedy.
See, some people find that arrogant. It could be read as "we're so many miles ahead of you, your opinion doesn't really matter."
You should read it as "nothing Europe has accomplished in the past 100 years seems relevant to US politics to us" and "please stop exaggerating Europe's accomplishments because it is misleading US voters". Obamacare and high speed rail are just two recent examples of failing attempts to copy European policies in the US and it is hurting us.
The US needs to find its own way because it is very different from Europe and European solutions wouldn't work in the US even if they work(ed) in Europe.
Well, if the public wants something, it should pay for it (through taxes). It shouldn't try to stick random bystanders with the cost, not just because it's unjust, but because it doesn't work: the predictable consequence of such laws is that what you consider valuable now just quietly disappears altogether.
The problem here is that the government tried to push off paying for a benefit to the public onto a single business or individual. Why should one unlucky business owner lose thousands of dollars or more because some archaeologist thinks there might be something worthwhile there?
If you want to fix this, then reward people for their finds, don't punish them: let them call it in, then bid on the right to delay their work and dig the stuff up.
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Sure, if we impose the same visibility requirements and an enforceable limit on the total number of drones in existence. If we don't, they aren't "doing the same thing", because the way prices are coming down, it won't be long until each of us can have their own personal surveillance drone following them everywhere.
His exile is self-imposed, on a wild (paranoid?) theory that the charges in Sweden (Sweden!) are trumped up in order to get him extradited there so that he can then be extradited to the US on a non-existent extradition demand. I suppose the Swedes can be grateful that he has imprisoned himself under conditions that are likely worse than a Swedish prison and that don't cost the Swedish tax payer a dime.
"Most" referred to pacific islands in general and is the correct term.
Not by a long shot. Nauru has almost no freshwater, poor soils, and only a thin strip of fertile land.
Nauru's resources are phosphate. You can't use that "sustainably". You can dig it out of the ground and sell it, that's all.
No, it's not. Speculation is taking a high risk. Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return.
The same way it always works: people who own a resource will use it to maximize their own goals. So, some people will squander it and their kids will be poor. Others will use it sensibly and their kids will be rich.
Stop waving your hands. Show me a feasible, detailed, widely-accepted scientific and economic plan for human global sustainability. Something that the majority of experts agree on (you know, a "consensus", you like those so much).
Nuclear energy is not sustainable. Nuclear fuel is a precious and finite resource, just like oil.
That's handwaving. Work out the economics of making that work: what's the investment? What's the added energy cost? What are the politics?
It's not an accusation, it's a statement of fact. Nobody has been able to make even a plausible suggestion for how sustainability is to be achieved, let alone a detailed plan. And it's also a fact that unless you can come up with such a plan, neither politicians nor voters are going to go for sustainability.
You bet I am: what you call "present comfort" amounts to the ability to innovate rapidly. You plan on destroying that by first enforcing an ill-conceived set of plans that somehow are supposed to lead to sustainability and then hoping that innovation will later create the technologies to make it all work.
Of course, it's an idea that has been around for ages, even for electronic documents. Of course, it doesn't meet the criteria of patentability or even publishability.
But, I say, let's give them a patent anyway. I think any dumb idea, and in particular any DRM method, deserves a patent granted exclusively to patent trolls. We should even let them get away with "renewing" it indefinitely by the usual dumb stunts.
Of course he has a right to delete crap from his blog.
I don't know either Gräßlin or KWin. But I get the impression from his blog post that he is unable to separate his personal and political opinions from his role as software maintainer. Perhaps that's the reason he experiences problems and has abuse targeted at him? Or maybe it's just his personality.
Rational behavior is optimal behavior given the information available to you; if you don't achieve that, you're not rational. Neither humans nor computers are anywhere rational. But humans are better in unusual situations.
Studies have also shown that emotional decisions are objectively superior to non-emotional decisions.
When I invest in a company, all I can lose is my investment. That company can then take excessive risk or expose itself to legal or financial penalties and I'm completely shielded. As long as the people losing money are creditors, that doesn't matter (they made a stupid investment). But in other cases, people who never agreed to take on that risk get stuck with it. The solution we use these days is then to put a complex system of regulations in place to make sure companies don't misbehave. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It's not written in stone that investor risk should be limited to the amount of the investment, and it didn't use to be, for example for banks.
Even without bailouts, investors still have a perverse interest to do less due dilligence and invest in companies that take excessive risks, because their upside is unlimited but their downside is limited to just their investment.
But neither buyer, nor seller, nor the exchange are passive bystanders. In order for HFT to profit, there need to be two exchanges with different prices involved. Someone needs to make those prices consistent. Either HFT can do it or the exchange can do it. Right now, the exchange does most of it, but HFT picks up a small difference, presumably because exchanges don't bother investing in doing a better job. If buyers or sellers lose too much through this, they'll just do business elsewhere. HFT keeps the exchanges in line, and exchanges keep HFT in line, and buyers and sellers keep both in line. I don't see a huge problem here. We had a temporary bubble in HFT, and that seems to be correcting itself.
He didn't "include HFT as a problem that stands in the way", he called it a "symptom of a broken system". That is, he just doesn't like markets and the profit motive in general for unspecified reasons, and just observes that they also happen to cause HFT. Presumably, when whatever he believes is wrong with "the system" gets fixed, HFT, being a symptom, would get fixed with it.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that even if we suppose that HFT is harmful, clickclickdrone's condemnation of markets and profits still wouldn't follow from it.
My sentence didn't come out quite right. What I meant was that I think people can make a reasonable argument that HFT trading is harmful. I'm actually not convinced it is. But the general condemnation of markets by clickclickdrone just wouldn't follow from that even if true.
Neither are computers really. While computers can make slightly better decisions than humans under common conditions, they usually become much worse under exceptional situations. Even that wouldn't be a problem if the people deploying the computer programs had to bear the full cost of their actions when things go wrong. However, between liability limits and bailouts, participants in financial markets can take higher risks (with trading software or investments) than they should be able to in a free market, and that's not good. The way to fix this is, of course, not to create new taxes, but to hold those screwing up financially responsible for their actions when they do.
Furthermore, the possibility of people doing HFT is what forces the other market players to make sure that their systems are as close to efficient as possible for them. Existing studies on the effects of HFT cannot address that question because we have never had a situation where all market participants have access to high speed computers but some are effectively prohibited from using them.
Oh yes they do. When someone buys or sells a large chunk of stock, the value changes instantly. And that change needs to be propagated through markets and exchanges. Exchanges try to do this themselves but they aren't very good at it, so HFT makes a profit by doing it faster.
Yes, it does. But if you get rid of HFT profits, they just go to the seller, the buyer, the exchange, or are split between them. Why is that any better? And with HFT, all the other participants in the market have a strong incentive to keep HFT profits down by making the system more efficient. That's why we have hit "peak HFT": high profits from HFT were a temporary situation that is correcting itself.
And speaking of "entropy" (or perhaps better "friction losses"), if we get a transaction tax, it will ultimately come out of your and my pocket no matter what.
Noone needs 100Mbps Internet links, it adds no value. And it makes it hard to find crooks who download child pornography. Let's limit all Internet speeds in the nation to 5 Mbps download (enough for watching a movie) and 100kbps upload (enough for your vacation photos).
HFT may sometimes increase volatility and sometimes decrease it. Overall, there is little evidence that there's a need to act.
But a transaction tax means massive new reporting and data collection on every financial transaction. It probably would require data exchange between all major tax authorities, and the imposition of US rules on foreign financial markets. It also means that any transaction or contract will now have to come under suspicion of being a proxy for a financial transaction that might otherwise be a taxable trade.
I can't figure out how anybody can at the same time get upset about NSA spying and then support such legislation. It looks like people won't rest until every paperclip purchase, every phone call, every trip, every e-book page read, and every bit of our medical information has been reported to the government and exchanged with governments around the world. Of course, each of these regulations has a separate group of people making excuses for them: "for the children", "for financial stability and fairness", "for anti-terrorism efforts", "for your own good", or whatever else excuse-du-jour people come up with.
That doesn't seem to be a problem with HFT, it seems to be a problem with how the NBBO and cross-exchange orders are handled. The HFT traders are doing a better and faster job than the NBBO system.
HFT is a problem because it interferes with free markets: you can't have people make rational buying decisions within a few microseconds. But your second sentence has nothing to do with HFT. If you want to advocate an economy based on "long term stewardship", do so without erroneously linking it to HFT.
I would argue that in any dialog with the police about a crime they suspect you of but you are innocent of, "compulsion" has to be in play in some form.
No, you are not required to identify yourself (or even carry identification). But if the police have cause to need to know your identity and you refuse to identify yourself, they can hold you until they identify you. It's not an arrest and there is no (other) penalty, it's simply that they need to physically hold you until they figure out who you are. That's nothing new either.
People don't say "hey, it's such a nice day, I think I'll talk to police about some murder I didn't have anything to do with". The police were talking to him to find out more about a case that they considered him a suspect in. That should be treated like an interrogation.
The fact that they failed to read him his rights before talking to him as a suspect is itself wrong. And anybody who is considered a suspect should be automatically protected from self-incrimination, otherwise you encourage police to explicitly set up vague situations like this where the subject may technically not be protected but is effectively still being interrogated.
Well, you certainly don't share that with your church officials. Cardinal McCormack, for example, referred to atheists as "not fully human". But, you know, the Roman Catholic church is a big tent: it includes confused and well meaning people like you, just like it includes dissemblers, child molesters, Nazis, and murderers. And as long as they contribute to the power and financial well being of the church, they continue to be welcome and forgiven their sins.
Of course, FTL travel is more plausible than that any of that is achievable, even if it were desirable.
Well, you'd have to actually read the books the see the proof.
Of course it's not conscious, and of course it's nurtured by politicians. It's so much a part of the intellectual and cultural life of Europe that people don't even notice it, they just assume it's true. And it's not "anti-" as in "we hate you", it's "anti-" as in "we prefer not to be like you" (usually while munching on fast food at some US chain and listening to English lyrics on an iPhone).
Even if I agreed with any of that, so what? The US has a highly diverse, outspoken political culture, much of it extremely self-critical. Of course, Carlin was just trying to make people think; half the time, I can't tell whether he is serious. I'm not convinced that someone from outside the US can actually quite understand US political comedy.
You should read it as "nothing Europe has accomplished in the past 100 years seems relevant to US politics to us" and "please stop exaggerating Europe's accomplishments because it is misleading US voters". Obamacare and high speed rail are just two recent examples of failing attempts to copy European policies in the US and it is hurting us.
The US needs to find its own way because it is very different from Europe and European solutions wouldn't work in the US even if they work(ed) in Europe.
Well, if the public wants something, it should pay for it (through taxes). It shouldn't try to stick random bystanders with the cost, not just because it's unjust, but because it doesn't work: the predictable consequence of such laws is that what you consider valuable now just quietly disappears altogether.
The problem here is that the government tried to push off paying for a benefit to the public onto a single business or individual. Why should one unlucky business owner lose thousands of dollars or more because some archaeologist thinks there might be something worthwhile there?
If you want to fix this, then reward people for their finds, don't punish them: let them call it in, then bid on the right to delay their work and dig the stuff up.