Of course not, but it's a lot less urgent, and requires less drastic measures. You're not going to send the riot police there, are you? But you should keep an eye in things.
The exact same laws exist in good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and that's good. Enforcement is different, just like it would be with a carbon tax. Everybody playing by the same rules = good, rules that arbitrarily punish specific areas = bad.
You want to take away my car, so someone in a developing country can have a car? Yeah that'll fly.
No. And nowhere did I imply anything like that. But you seem to want to deny them their car so you can keep driving your SUV, because you're too much of a self-righteous dick to admit that your carbon emissions are way beyond reasonable.
The whole argument implies it. The US will have to reduce carbon emissions while developing nations will grow theirs. Your linking with SUVs here and cars in developing countries cemented it. My SUV will go away, they will get new cars.
Fair would be to give everybody the chance to earn and enjoy wealth in a sustainable way.
That's basically what I said. Give people the ability to do what they want in a sustainable way. Don't force them to change negatively and adopt something inferior just to help others.
Because the US is the first to get rich and rape the earth, that is automatically their god-given right, and nobody else will have that right?
Yeah, pretty much. That's history. I'm not going to accept punishment for myself and my family because you are self-hating and/or you hate my ancestors.
I can't believe you are seriously angry at people 200 years ago who didn't know anything about what impact they would have.
Exactly because the US is the richest, it is the duty of the US to take the first step. You're like an older brother who takes his little brother's toys because he should share, while you don't have to because you were there first. You're a childish brat.
Between your insults and your wish that the whole world is a family and everybody will get together and help out, you're the childish one.
Nobody is asking you to hand over all your wealth. I'm just asking you to man up and use it responsibly, rather than acting like a petulant child.
Man up and sacrifice the prosperity of yourself and your family for others! Yeah, that's what men have historically done!
1. Why would you want the government to do it? Would they also be providing the ATM service, or is this just a fee for nothing? 2. Why don't you use free ATMs? I don't think banks charge you for using their own ATMs. I know all the banks I've used don't (5/3, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, BB&T).
Ah, so you are blaming the entire financial crisis on HFT.
That's a totally different thing than flash crashes that I've seen attributed to HFT, which imho are really no big deal. They rarely happen, the correct themselves, and the people "running" the flash crash are the ones losing money. I personally know of one HFT startup that went bankrupt and lost everything. My fiancee interviewed for a job there, luckily chose something more stable in the end.
I don't think you can possibly mean that HFT caused the financial crisis though, so maybe you could clarify. I mean think of the other huge factors here: 1. Government subsidies artificially reducing risk due to mispricing (e.g. the FHA program not charging enough up front) 2. Monetary policy encouraging certain activities (e.g. low interest rates) 3. Changes in population demographics (e.g. retirees cashing out faster than young people putting in... see recent articles on census data on wealth of old vs young... today's young population simply cannot produce as much wealth as old people are taking out) 4. Immigration trends 5. Natural resource depletion and/or inability to keep up with population growth overall and wealth growth in the developing world
But computers making stock trades! That's what really caused mortgage fraud, oil price increases, and all that stuff. Doesn't make sense to me.
A single nation, US of A releases 25% of world's greenhouse gases. "Third world" is not even in the picture here.
He said "Third world" not "The world". But my point still stands. Should we not care about crime in good neighborhoods because bad neighborhoods exist?
The US and Europe are by far the biggest polluters per capita. If you want to put a meaningful dent in carbon emissions, you have to start there.
You have to start everywhere at once, that's the only politically and economically feasible solution.
Do you want to deny people in developing countries a car while Americans keep driving their fat SUVs?
You want to take away my car, so someone in a developing country can have a car? Yeah that'll fly.
There's nothing anti-US about this argument. It's about fairness and common sense.
When you equate absolute economic equality with fairness, then it is anti-US because the US is above average economically.
It's like people who say "No I'm not racist, I just don't like the way they dress... wouldn't like a so-and-so to dress that way either... heh."
What's fair is to say that if one person has earned something, they get to keep it. If a bunch of people in one society have earned something, they get to keep it.
The fair solution to global warming is to come up with an alternative to a carbon economy that is actually better, and that people want to adopt on their own. Forcing some people to give up what they already have for the benefit of others is not fair.
If you want better cops, you need to pay better salaries to attract more qualified people and pay for more training.
What bullshit.
1. What's wrong with cops in general? You think the average cop is too bottom of the barrel to be a cop? 2. Bad cops are bad because of their authority and their above the law status. Paying them more isn't going to do shit. You need more accountability, not more money.
If you want better roads, you need to pay more maintenance, and for a higher grade of construction.
Or maybe invest more of the existing money in automation and technology. Or maybe avoid unions. Why is more money for more of the same the best solution?
If you want better schools, you need to pay to repair the buildings, and pay for more and better qualified teachers.
It's not the teachers, it's not the buildings, it's the students. The idea that all students are these unique delicate flowers that will become awesome and responsible adults if given half a chance is bullshit. Otherwise education spending is the solution to all problems, not just education. Cops would suddenly be super good. Roads would suddenly be really durable, and when there was a problem it would be fixed quickly and efficiently. Not going to happen, ever. It's not real. People aren't programs that can be debugged. They are flawed.
If you live in Oregon and order from a company in California, why shouldn't you pay sales tax in California? You would if you drove to California and picked it up in person.
As soon as there is an official internet sales tax, this will happen. You'll end up paying both sales taxes.
That's the deal - if you want to be rich in our society you have to accept our rules and realise that without us you couldn't be rich.
What made you the spokesperson for our society? I live in this society too, I'm not rich, and I don't want a rule that says people who are above average need to be punished because they are only successful because of others (who just happen to be below average).
If these people decided to move to some third world country they would soon realise how dependent on the population they are for their own wealth.
You have no clue what you're talking about. Go to a poor country. You will find rich people there. You will find poor people who work and produce stuff. How do they do it??? What a mystery.
You really think some millionaire would be worse off living in a posh part of Shanghai, which from what I've seen in the media is a very nice city, 20 miles away from his factories instead of 5000 miles away?
I'm still much better off and I don't mind paying, it is the price of civilisation and I get a lot in return.
It's not the price of civilization, it's the price of people in your civilization who don't contribute as much as you. How can you begin to address the problem when you can't even identify it?
Judging from those examples, very little will change, there will just be more volatility. People are pretty good at adapting to change.
As for the arid and semi-arid low-income countries that will be most affected... they also have the least level of development and complex infrastructure, so adapting is cheaper and easier.
Disruptive? Sure, but populations have moved before. It'll happen again.
The drug wars in Mexico are not a problem, from the world's perspective.
In fact the anti-US argument is like saying the drug wars in Mexico are a problem and we need to focus on them without caring about the greater level of crime in the rest of the world. ("The world" is not even in the picture here.)
Just how big and long-term do you think HFT effects are? You are suggesting that the entire market is being affected enough to affect retirement withdrawals which happen over a 10-20 year period? I find that really unlikely. The most I've heard attributed to HFT is flash crashes that correct themselves within hours.
Okay, my "all things automated" point is too broad, I agree. How about if X is good, then the automation of X should be considered good default until proven otherwise.
People who say trading stocks is fine but it has to be slowed down to pre-automation timeframes must show why the automation of something good has turned bad. It can't be a gut feeling kind of thing, because most values of "X" you can think of fit what I said above.
Here's another wrinkle. Extending your analogy to spam... how would you feel if someone set up a private LAN and sent spam on it? Should that be illegal and/or taxed/micropaymented (to who?)? I bring this up because a lot of HFT is done and was developed for so-called dark pools. They are networks set up by banks off of the big markets and generally open to automation and HFT because they are newer and more experimental. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_liquidity
Nobody gets rich by illegally deducting their $700/month rent. That's small potatoes. And when you're deducting the purchase of your yacht you're already rich.
Abuses may happen but they're negligible. You're using them as a reason for attacking the very fundamentals of corporations. Your cure is far worse than the disease.
except the ral payments are hidden and not know for a couple of years
True, but a good number of homeowners also bought the schtick that "the average home is sold in less than 7 years" so having a low introductory rate that increases later wouldn't matter. They figured they'd sell it for a 20% profit in 4 years.
Were there people affected by actual fraud? Sure but I don't think the proportion is anywhere close to the mortgages that ended up distressed. Things like unemployment are utterly dwarfing the effect of mortgage fraud. It's a non-issue.
not by actual experts it wasn't. Sadly those experts talk about actual facts, and historic lesson groups like the Tea party and republicans choose to ignore
What actual experts... there are always some people predicting a collapse, it doesn't make them experts. Even if you were right let's not pretend that every person who sells mortgages (they are really just salesmen) is one of these actual experts who knew that the whole industry was about to collapse. "Just gotta sell to this last sucker before we head for the hills!"
I'm against the illegalization of spam as a matter of fact. To me it's absolutely ridiculous that someone can go to jail for sending email ads.
I guess illegalization isn't exactly what has been proposed with respect to HFT. So would you be in favor of an email tax that everybody pays on every single message, just to punish "high frequency emailers?"
Sorry, just thought of this.. in fact the increased liquidity and volatility from HFT *discourages* speculation and encourages long-term thinking. If there are 1000 bots competing for every possible bit of arbitrage, and 1000 buggy algorithms "predicting" mass psychology or whatever to take advantage of short term gains and losses, who in their right mind is going to toss their hat into that ring? I'll take ARM doubling in 12 months over a complete 50/50 shot (minus transaction fees) in 0.01 ms.
Please explain how a long-term position is harmed by HFT. Those "massive swings" you're talking about are temporary and shouldn't affect the long-term position investor. The people being hurt are the ones who are like "Oh I'm buying all this on margin and I hope MSFT will go up 2.5% after this earnings announcement... oh crap what's happening, algorithms are stealing our profits!"
If you don't trade at all, ever, then how does the speed of trades even affect you? It can only possibly affect you indirectly via stuff like bailouts if you assume that banks collapsed due to HFT (which is ridiculous).
Then the argument falls back into whether the top 0.1% benefits you indirectly, not just directly. You can't count direct plus indirect harm versus only direct benefit.
If securities trading liquidity was dragged back to where it took (gasp) a whole day to buy or sell, I don't think the majority of the world would suffer, just those guys that make money in trading.
What you're talking about is banning the use of computers to be faster than competitors. That just makes no sense to me. It's not about whether we would suffer horribly under an alternate system, it's about how much freedom people have and whether they can use that freedom to compete to be faster and better than others.
If you apply sales tax to all sales you'd have an explosion in prices... typically only the final retail product charges sales tax. I mean, when a furniture maker buys raw materials for furniture, they don't pay sales tax on it afaik.
If you start charging sales tax on stuff like financial transactions and intermediate transactions you'd have a situation like.. you get a loan to buy a house.. the bank sells some securities to free up cash (taxed). You use that cash to buy a house (taxed). You send in a mortgage payment next month. The bank takes that cash and parks it in Treasurys or something (taxed). You've just added 3 levels of sales tax to your house. Notice that rich people who can buy the house outright only pay 1 level of sales tax, or 2 if they had to sell assets to raise the cash.
Is there actually an additional tax on gambling? I assumed it was treated like income, and probably not even subject to the payroll tax. I looked it up and all I can find is that there is a withholding for large winnings, which means you're prepaying the tax that is due anyway -- it's not an additional tax.
If you're buying and selling stocks short term, your profits are subject to the regular income tax just like gambling money as far as I can tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not, but it's a lot less urgent, and requires less drastic measures. You're not going to send the riot police there, are you? But you should keep an eye in things.
The exact same laws exist in good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and that's good. Enforcement is different, just like it would be with a carbon tax. Everybody playing by the same rules = good, rules that arbitrarily punish specific areas = bad.
You want to take away my car, so someone in a developing country can have a car? Yeah that'll fly.
No. And nowhere did I imply anything like that. But you seem to want to deny them their car so you can keep driving your SUV, because you're too much of a self-righteous dick to admit that your carbon emissions are way beyond reasonable.
The whole argument implies it. The US will have to reduce carbon emissions while developing nations will grow theirs. Your linking with SUVs here and cars in developing countries cemented it. My SUV will go away, they will get new cars.
Fair would be to give everybody the chance to earn and enjoy wealth in a sustainable way.
That's basically what I said. Give people the ability to do what they want in a sustainable way. Don't force them to change negatively and adopt something inferior just to help others.
Because the US is the first to get rich and rape the earth, that is automatically their god-given right, and nobody else will have that right?
Yeah, pretty much. That's history. I'm not going to accept punishment for myself and my family because you are self-hating and/or you hate my ancestors.
I can't believe you are seriously angry at people 200 years ago who didn't know anything about what impact they would have.
Exactly because the US is the richest, it is the duty of the US to take the first step. You're like an older brother who takes his little brother's toys because he should share, while you don't have to because you were there first. You're a childish brat.
Between your insults and your wish that the whole world is a family and everybody will get together and help out, you're the childish one.
Nobody is asking you to hand over all your wealth. I'm just asking you to man up and use it responsibly, rather than acting like a petulant child.
Man up and sacrifice the prosperity of yourself and your family for others! Yeah, that's what men have historically done!
1. Why would you want the government to do it? Would they also be providing the ATM service, or is this just a fee for nothing?
2. Why don't you use free ATMs? I don't think banks charge you for using their own ATMs. I know all the banks I've used don't (5/3, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, BB&T).
Ah, so you are blaming the entire financial crisis on HFT.
That's a totally different thing than flash crashes that I've seen attributed to HFT, which imho are really no big deal. They rarely happen, the correct themselves, and the people "running" the flash crash are the ones losing money. I personally know of one HFT startup that went bankrupt and lost everything. My fiancee interviewed for a job there, luckily chose something more stable in the end.
I don't think you can possibly mean that HFT caused the financial crisis though, so maybe you could clarify. I mean think of the other huge factors here:
1. Government subsidies artificially reducing risk due to mispricing (e.g. the FHA program not charging enough up front)
2. Monetary policy encouraging certain activities (e.g. low interest rates)
3. Changes in population demographics (e.g. retirees cashing out faster than young people putting in... see recent articles on census data on wealth of old vs young... today's young population simply cannot produce as much wealth as old people are taking out)
4. Immigration trends
5. Natural resource depletion and/or inability to keep up with population growth overall and wealth growth in the developing world
But computers making stock trades! That's what really caused mortgage fraud, oil price increases, and all that stuff. Doesn't make sense to me.
Sorry, the original quote was
A single nation, US of A releases 25% of world's greenhouse gases. "Third world" is not even in the picture here.
He said "Third world" not "The world". But my point still stands. Should we not care about crime in good neighborhoods because bad neighborhoods exist?
The US and Europe are by far the biggest polluters per capita. If you want to put a meaningful dent in carbon emissions, you have to start there.
You have to start everywhere at once, that's the only politically and economically feasible solution.
Do you want to deny people in developing countries a car while Americans keep driving their fat SUVs?
You want to take away my car, so someone in a developing country can have a car? Yeah that'll fly.
There's nothing anti-US about this argument. It's about fairness and common sense.
When you equate absolute economic equality with fairness, then it is anti-US because the US is above average economically.
It's like people who say "No I'm not racist, I just don't like the way they dress... wouldn't like a so-and-so to dress that way either... heh."
What's fair is to say that if one person has earned something, they get to keep it. If a bunch of people in one society have earned something, they get to keep it.
The fair solution to global warming is to come up with an alternative to a carbon economy that is actually better, and that people want to adopt on their own. Forcing some people to give up what they already have for the benefit of others is not fair.
If you want better cops, you need to pay better salaries to attract more qualified people and pay for more training.
What bullshit.
1. What's wrong with cops in general? You think the average cop is too bottom of the barrel to be a cop?
2. Bad cops are bad because of their authority and their above the law status. Paying them more isn't going to do shit. You need more accountability, not more money.
If you want better roads, you need to pay more maintenance, and for a higher grade of construction.
Or maybe invest more of the existing money in automation and technology. Or maybe avoid unions. Why is more money for more of the same the best solution?
If you want better schools, you need to pay to repair the buildings, and pay for more and better qualified teachers.
It's not the teachers, it's not the buildings, it's the students. The idea that all students are these unique delicate flowers that will become awesome and responsible adults if given half a chance is bullshit. Otherwise education spending is the solution to all problems, not just education. Cops would suddenly be super good. Roads would suddenly be really durable, and when there was a problem it would be fixed quickly and efficiently. Not going to happen, ever. It's not real. People aren't programs that can be debugged. They are flawed.
If you live in Oregon and order from a company in California, why shouldn't you pay sales tax in California? You would if you drove to California and picked it up in person.
As soon as there is an official internet sales tax, this will happen. You'll end up paying both sales taxes.
That's the deal - if you want to be rich in our society you have to accept our rules and realise that without us you couldn't be rich.
What made you the spokesperson for our society? I live in this society too, I'm not rich, and I don't want a rule that says people who are above average need to be punished because they are only successful because of others (who just happen to be below average).
If these people decided to move to some third world country they would soon realise how dependent on the population they are for their own wealth.
You have no clue what you're talking about. Go to a poor country. You will find rich people there. You will find poor people who work and produce stuff. How do they do it??? What a mystery.
You really think some millionaire would be worse off living in a posh part of Shanghai, which from what I've seen in the media is a very nice city, 20 miles away from his factories instead of 5000 miles away?
I'm still much better off and I don't mind paying, it is the price of civilisation and I get a lot in return.
It's not the price of civilization, it's the price of people in your civilization who don't contribute as much as you. How can you begin to address the problem when you can't even identify it?
But the feds transfer a lot of money to the states. Would their budgets still be balanced without it?
Judging from those examples, very little will change, there will just be more volatility. People are pretty good at adapting to change.
As for the arid and semi-arid low-income countries that will be most affected... they also have the least level of development and complex infrastructure, so adapting is cheaper and easier.
Disruptive? Sure, but populations have moved before. It'll happen again.
Once 51% of us are doing it, we can politically beat up on the 49% bloodsuckers
Haha
Are you allowed to graze animals in Central Park?
I thought the solution to the tragedy of the commons was the eliminate the commons, not depend on a bunch of people doing the right thing?
It's not nothing. What you are doing gives you the moral right to demand the same from others, and that is what politics is all about.
How do you figure? You have absolutely no moral right to demand anything from others just because you do it.
And that is before trying to calculate energy consumption in third world countries to have them produce stuff for 'us'...
Imagine if we subtracted the energy used in the West to provide the consumption used to give those third world countries jobs and growing economies...
The drug wars in Mexico are not a problem, from the world's perspective.
In fact the anti-US argument is like saying the drug wars in Mexico are a problem and we need to focus on them without caring about the greater level of crime in the rest of the world. ("The world" is not even in the picture here.)
Talk about a bad argument.
Just how big and long-term do you think HFT effects are? You are suggesting that the entire market is being affected enough to affect retirement withdrawals which happen over a 10-20 year period? I find that really unlikely. The most I've heard attributed to HFT is flash crashes that correct themselves within hours.
Okay, my "all things automated" point is too broad, I agree. How about if X is good, then the automation of X should be considered good default until proven otherwise.
People who say trading stocks is fine but it has to be slowed down to pre-automation timeframes must show why the automation of something good has turned bad. It can't be a gut feeling kind of thing, because most values of "X" you can think of fit what I said above.
Here's another wrinkle. Extending your analogy to spam... how would you feel if someone set up a private LAN and sent spam on it? Should that be illegal and/or taxed/micropaymented (to who?)? I bring this up because a lot of HFT is done and was developed for so-called dark pools. They are networks set up by banks off of the big markets and generally open to automation and HFT because they are newer and more experimental. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_liquidity
Nobody gets rich by illegally deducting their $700/month rent. That's small potatoes. And when you're deducting the purchase of your yacht you're already rich.
Abuses may happen but they're negligible. You're using them as a reason for attacking the very fundamentals of corporations. Your cure is far worse than the disease.
except the ral payments are hidden and not know for a couple of years
True, but a good number of homeowners also bought the schtick that "the average home is sold in less than 7 years" so having a low introductory rate that increases later wouldn't matter. They figured they'd sell it for a 20% profit in 4 years.
Were there people affected by actual fraud? Sure but I don't think the proportion is anywhere close to the mortgages that ended up distressed. Things like unemployment are utterly dwarfing the effect of mortgage fraud. It's a non-issue.
not by actual experts it wasn't. Sadly those experts talk about actual facts, and historic lesson groups like the Tea party and republicans choose to ignore
What actual experts... there are always some people predicting a collapse, it doesn't make them experts. Even if you were right let's not pretend that every person who sells mortgages (they are really just salesmen) is one of these actual experts who knew that the whole industry was about to collapse. "Just gotta sell to this last sucker before we head for the hills!"
I'm against the illegalization of spam as a matter of fact. To me it's absolutely ridiculous that someone can go to jail for sending email ads.
I guess illegalization isn't exactly what has been proposed with respect to HFT. So would you be in favor of an email tax that everybody pays on every single message, just to punish "high frequency emailers?"
Sorry, just thought of this.. in fact the increased liquidity and volatility from HFT *discourages* speculation and encourages long-term thinking. If there are 1000 bots competing for every possible bit of arbitrage, and 1000 buggy algorithms "predicting" mass psychology or whatever to take advantage of short term gains and losses, who in their right mind is going to toss their hat into that ring? I'll take ARM doubling in 12 months over a complete 50/50 shot (minus transaction fees) in 0.01 ms.
Please explain how a long-term position is harmed by HFT. Those "massive swings" you're talking about are temporary and shouldn't affect the long-term position investor. The people being hurt are the ones who are like "Oh I'm buying all this on margin and I hope MSFT will go up 2.5% after this earnings announcement... oh crap what's happening, algorithms are stealing our profits!"
If you don't trade at all, ever, then how does the speed of trades even affect you? It can only possibly affect you indirectly via stuff like bailouts if you assume that banks collapsed due to HFT (which is ridiculous).
Then the argument falls back into whether the top 0.1% benefits you indirectly, not just directly. You can't count direct plus indirect harm versus only direct benefit.
If securities trading liquidity was dragged back to where it took (gasp) a whole day to buy or sell, I don't think the majority of the world would suffer, just those guys that make money in trading.
What you're talking about is banning the use of computers to be faster than competitors. That just makes no sense to me. It's not about whether we would suffer horribly under an alternate system, it's about how much freedom people have and whether they can use that freedom to compete to be faster and better than others.
If you apply sales tax to all sales you'd have an explosion in prices... typically only the final retail product charges sales tax. I mean, when a furniture maker buys raw materials for furniture, they don't pay sales tax on it afaik.
If you start charging sales tax on stuff like financial transactions and intermediate transactions you'd have a situation like.. you get a loan to buy a house.. the bank sells some securities to free up cash (taxed). You use that cash to buy a house (taxed). You send in a mortgage payment next month. The bank takes that cash and parks it in Treasurys or something (taxed). You've just added 3 levels of sales tax to your house. Notice that rich people who can buy the house outright only pay 1 level of sales tax, or 2 if they had to sell assets to raise the cash.
What tax do you pay for an ATM withdrawal?
Is there actually an additional tax on gambling? I assumed it was treated like income, and probably not even subject to the payroll tax. I looked it up and all I can find is that there is a withholding for large winnings, which means you're prepaying the tax that is due anyway -- it's not an additional tax.
If you're buying and selling stocks short term, your profits are subject to the regular income tax just like gambling money as far as I can tell.