> Your "last weeks newspaper" analogy is very misleading and insulting. Why not just be honest and admit it's a still legal loophole used to fleece people via being able to complete more actions in the same time?
No, the analogy is apt. It's the normal operation and actual purpose of an exchange... If you're too slow to act, the information from the news release, represented in the price on the exchange, gets absorbed into that price, and you can no longer profit from it... The faster you can react, the more opportunity you have to 'correct' the price AND profit.
That is the way it SHOULD work.
HFTs do that every millisecond... I don't think you do it all.
Many HFTs not only decrease volatility, there are AI systems that 'read' the news and respond to it... Sure, Berkshire Hathaway Industry stock prices might temporarily become overvalued every time Anne Hathaway stars in a new movie, but those who know that can profit from it, and by profiting from it, fix the price... but the AI is profitable ON AVERAGE.. and therefore good... and a better AI that can solve this problem generally will be more profitable still!
> So everyone wins according to you - of course ignoring the sucker that paid more for the shares than if they had time for direct contact and the sucker that sold at a lower price than if they had time for direct contact.
If you studied exchanges, from a game theoretic point of view, or especially a free market theory point of view, the answer is clearly yes.
If there was some rule that somehow we could make the guy who bought too high last week, and the guy who sold too low today get together and come to an agreement at better prices for both of them... we would have punished the guy who, last week, at the right time, realised that the price was too high and sold, and we would have punished the guy who today, at the right time, realised the price was too low and bought! You can't help the first two EXCEPT by removing the opportunity for the latter two to have traded.
And we want more the of the latter two guys trading and less of the former ANYWAY... and this is actually what the market does...
> And, 5% daily swings in a market that only makes an average of 5 to 10% forward progress per year isn't just a gambler's opportunity, it's also a gambler's risk. Invest for 10 years, but, depending on whether or not you got lucky on the day of investment and the day of withdrawal, you might get 11 years worth of planned returns, or 9. I thought that Las Vegas was the place to gamble....
And if you actually knew about investment you could profit everyday from the 5% daily swing... AND play a small role in dampening that swing...AND do better than just the base growth rate.
You need to learn Modern Portfolio Theory.
> Circle back to the French Revolution, if you bothered to pay attention in classes like History.
> Big money dumps a whole lot more than 'two shits' on the little people, and sooner or later, the sheer number of little people who are getting dumped on tips the balance against the small number of people who are holding the big money.
> If big money can present at least a reasonable illusion of fairness, the backlash can be forestalled. When the masses of people are told "work all you lives, save money in the market where it can grow" and then see how their money shrinks in the market while big money grows...
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH...
Yes, the rich get richer, the poor get the picture...
These are problems with WEALTH INEQUALITY... you deal with that problem DIRECTLY... but not by making markets less efficient.
Let markets do their job, solve wealth inequality (free markets can't solve this... it requires political will)... the free market is a distributed information signalling system... let it do its job.
I'm saying you're complaining about the wrong problem.
Because the mathematics of an exchange state that every order is an improvement to what was available without it or it is irrelevant.n
The co-lo's allow them to act faster on the market book than those without... that efficiency means trades get matched faster, or at better prices.. for at least one party... the other only loses in that they didn't get the trade they wanted... and they shouldn't... because someone else actually made a better offer.
It's like arguing that you should be able to read last weeks newspaper and now is a good time to sell malaysian airways, you'll tell your stock broker via a letter and get the trade next week... and be disappointed that all these people with their new fangled internet trading got better prices when they got the news earlier...
HFT is just that exact same efficiency turned up several notches.
This is meant to be a technology website, where people see the value of applying technology to problems... but economics seems to be a really poorly understood subject here... it's a shame, because any understanding of economics shows that this is very good application for it.
5% swings sound like a great opportunity to profit which also stabilises the market.
Either way, the game theory of exchange operation clearly shows that all orders are of value... that each additional order can only improve on prices, or have no effect at worst.
People like you just complain that the market doesn't operate as you want it to... where prices are always fixed or increasing and the bid/ask spread always available in your favour.
No... the market should (and is) really be designed to serve the most money... because money is information... the most money provides the most information. It doesn't give two shits for a 'big time' trader like yourself.
Maybe you should understand how an exchange works... I've doubt you've ever traded, and don't really understand the system in the first place.
Either one or both of them will get their trade matched either faster or at a better price with S involved. These are the only mathematically possible outcomes of having more orders placed on a system.
Faster matching is generally considered value too... the fact that you don't value it is not anyone's problem... Would you wait a day, 10 days or 10 years for a match? Well then... you can see that going the other way is marginal improvement on value too.
Absolutely correct... and I have argued this many times before... on a fair and open exchange you literally cannot place a bid or ask that decreases the efficiency of the market.
Except the bit about front running... front running is illegal... because then the front runner could always guarantee that they were at the front of the queue regardless... but this is not the case, otherwise the HFT algorithms would be far simpler.
People just have a hard time understanding that HFT brings efficiencies to the system and they get paid to do it.
They can't understand the algorithms, see stuff happening on the millisecond time scales and assume that something like algorithmic front running is occurring, when it is not.
If you have proof they can see the queue of pending orders and the ability to jump those orders in the queue, I would like to see it.
My understanding of HFT is that they have very fast access to the market book, and ability to place orders based on that information very quickly, but don't actually have access to the pending order queues or the ability to have their orders prioritised with in it.
The former is fully legal and expected out of an efficient trader, the second is probably illegal.
> They are ACTING BEFORE Alice or Bob can which is why it is a TIME BASED man in the middle attack.
Everybody is acting before the next order comes in... Kind of the definition of a QUEUE.
They get to see the state of the order book first and act on it faster because of their colo deals with the stock exchanges --- again, this changes nothing.
Only if they see Bob's order, then make the order, and it is on the queue before Bob's order, and therefore in the market book before Bob's order, are they doing anything that would actually damage the market and should be banned from.
Ie, they would have to have prioritised access to the QUEUE, not the MARKET BOOK.
And I'm 95% sure this is NOT the case. If you have proof otherwise, now is the time to show it.
> Nice euphemism for a timing based man in the middle attack. > Alice asks for shares. Bob has shares for sale. Speedy buys shares from Bob and sells them to Alice before Bob can get the message that Alice is buying and before Alice can get the message that Bob is selling. Of course it can be argued that it's just a "sharp" business practice, the "American Way you commie" or whatever and that a man in the middle attack that adds zero value to the market is perfectly fine.
That's not how it works... unless they are intercepting Alice and Bob's orders before they hit the exchange and placing their orders before Alice or Bob, they are taking a (tiny but existent) bit of risk and doing arbitrage in time, because the exchange is still processing the orders in the order they are received.
If they are intercepting Alice and Bob's orders I would agree with you, this should not be a legal practice... but if the exchange is genuinely processing orders in the order they arrived, you are wrong... they actually are making the markets more efficient, in some sense.
> the drug itself, not psychological factors, not social factors, nothing else except the chemistry of the drug itself, is the causative effect of the addiction
This is a statement of scientific fact, I presume? There are many animal models that prove this, correct? And the Rat Park study confirms your point of view? Hmmm... guess not.
> why are you so ignorant about this subject yet still speaking on it?
You might have a point, except, that at the same time the current system actively attempts to destroy them, by forcing them into the black market, and threatening their freedom... sometime even their lives... independently of the drugs themselves.
So, if you wanted to advocate that approach... to leave them to their own devices, then remove the negative forces on their lives as well.
Finally... if it were to be legalised, it would be possible to tax them at a rate to cover their social costs, the costs for those who seek rehabilitation and costs associated with emergency help for overdoses and the like.
Mind you, in a legal context, substances like nalaxone would be available, which instantly neutralize the effects of heroin and overdosing would not be a problem (in a supervised setting).
Basically... if you advocate a personal responsibility point of view, you cannot also advocate a prohibitionist point of view. The 'free market' with pigouvian taxes covering rehabilitation could go a long way to improving people's lives.
> every single problem you can find with fighting hard drugs is smaller than the negative effects of hard drugs themselves (heroin, cocaine, meth)
Every single problem with hard drugs (heroin, cocaine and meth) is smaller than the negative effects of fighting them.
You actually think that bloggers murdered by mexican drug cartels are worse than an individual who chooses to take heroin... That is stupidity of the highest level.
> we can of course find bad tactics in fighting hard drugs, and we should
There are of course negatives associated with being addicted to drugs, even if they were medically pure and provided free of charge... We should help those addicts who chose of their own free will to seek help.
> addiction to hard drugs destroys lives. this is the primary and ultimate problem. if you don't understand that problem as the root cause of everything else, you're an idiot on the subject matter
My experience has been that being forced into prostitution and being controlled by criminal gangs with no morality to obtain your drugs to be far worse than the addiction itself.
My property being stolen to fund prohibition prices is worse than addiction.
Again... if you start with the axiom that addiction is the worst thing in the world, you will always end up with result that anything addictive is the worst thing in the world. Once you realise that addiction is easily satiated, then where are the real problems?
Remember, addiction simply means being willing to do anything to satiate that desire. You simply want addicts to crawl over more broken glass, then point to all the cuts and blood to prove the problems of addiction. Remove the glass and the problems of addiction become far less.
Some of my best friends are drug addicts, heroin, meth and crack... Their problems appear to come entirely from the current legal environment, that their suppliers are all criminal gangs, and the inflated prohibition prices requiring prostitution and theft to fund. When they have their drugs, they harm no one. If their drugs were available at pharmaceutical prices and purity, their problems would be diminished a thousand fold.
On the bright side, keeping drugs illegal keeps the illegal prostitutes desperate and cheap... This is what you want, right?
The drug war leads to the cartels in Mexico being stronger than the government. When the mexican drug cartels start overtaking the US, the way the British drug dealers overtook China... then you will wish that they had have been defeated by the simple economics of regulation.
The drug war leads to children having easier access to illegal substances like meth and heroin than legal substances like alcohol. Drug dealers don't check ID, and have there is no disincentive to sell to them... they're already breaking the law. The three drug addicts I know all started these drugs when they were 15 or younger.
Drug wars cannot work, because drug demand is inelastic. This simply means that demand does not change very much with regards to price (including other costs such as legal consequences)... Where there is demand, there is supply... All the drug war does is line the pockets of violent criminals. Drug use does not decrease significantly as price increases, and conversely, does not increase significantly when it decreases... You would not expect everyone to start using heroin if it was made legal. Only an hypocritical idiot like you would claim you would begin using heroin if it was legal. Truth is, I really doubt you would.
Philip K Dick wrote most of his books high on amphetamines... Your statements about these drugs destroying focus are provably false.
The problems of addiction are merely exacerbated by the legal environment, the high cost and illegality leads to greater crime, mostly acquisitionary. You understand that addiction, once satiated, is no longer the concern of an addict? You are addicted to food, for example, if food was hard to come by, you will do anything to get it, including theft and violence... when it is easy to obtain, you have the ability to focus on other things. This is why the Swiss harm reduction experiments (giving heroin addicts heroin) seem to work so well... Addicts were able to return to work and function once their addiction was satiated.
There is no drug that is safer under prohibition. There are no gangs that are weaker under prohibition. There are police less corrupt under prohibition. There are no fewer victims of theft and violence under prohibition.
No one should be denied the right to do with their own body as they desire... until they harm another. If you don't regulate the supply side, you still deny that right... Portugal is only a step in the right direction.
Your logic is circular... meth is bad, people who use meth are bad, and they make more people who use meth, which is bad, because meth is bad.
Desoxyn is prescribed... is it as bad as meth? Or are there problems with the process that creates the street version of desoxyn? Is it the chemical directly that causes the health problems, the impurities or the lifestyle required to obtain an outlawed substance.
The point the state has the right to intervene in the family is at the point of abuse, neglect or possibly suspicion or risk of abuse or neglect... Not general lifestyle choices, like what products they chose to consume. The crime is abuse or neglect, not smoking meth, drinking, gambling, or even being a workaholic who loses everything in a stock market crash and takes it out on his children. The abuse and neglect are all that matter.
At best, the state should tax the drugs enough to cover health care issues and rehab programs... these are the negative externalities of the drugs that can be paid with pigovian taxes... the current system creates a hell of a lot of problems for people that shouldn't have them... gangs, etc...
> You are right, but if the 'free market' were an argument for making something legal, then we should make assassinations and corporations that dump poison into rivers legal, because they are going to anyway.
These are not examples of free market because participants in the transaction do not choose the transaction. The assassination victim does not to choose to be assassinated, and people who enjoy the rivers did not choose for them to be poisoned. These are called negative externalities, and a free market is defined to be free of them. They can be corrected through taxation and legal punishment.
Drug use, by itself, is not a negative externality... and drug users who generate negative externalities (theft and other crime) would be just as guilty of those crimes whether they were using drugs or not.
This is a strawman argument against legalisation and a false comparison.
A trade on an exchange is NOT a trade on the bitcoin blockchain.
An exchange holds your bitcoins for you... The only transactions that occur on the blockchain are when you fund your account with bitcoin, and when you withdraw bitcoin from your account.
All trades on an exchange occur on that exchange only... There is plenty of room for faking trades at this point.
You need to learn the difference between things that harm other people and things that only cause harm to the consentor.
In economics, harm to others not involved in the transaction are called negative externalities. You can see that murder, rape, theft and violence are negative externalities.
However, if someone consents to violent sex, the harm is done to one who is willingly involved in the transaction... There should be no crime. Maximisation of economic decision utility occurs when people are allowed to willingly enter into these transactions. There is not harm to others from the act of taking drugs alone.
Controlling other people's behaviour always leads to lower economic utility. There is an inevitable cost of the drug war... and mostly it's in the violence and crime of gangs that form and are empowered by being handed the black market drug trade. These same people, now wealthy (as a network) then go on to traffic in sex slaves and other things that do cause harm... they become efficient at it... because drugs are so overwhelmingly profitable. (highly demand inelastic -- use does not depend greatly on price / availability).
He means that cocaine is not physically addictive. Cocaine is psychologically addictive, because it enhances the mood when taken, and leads to depression during withdrawal.
Cocaine withdrawal cannot kill you, the body does not physically depend on it for its continued functioning... Compare to alcohol, which is physically addictive, the changes your body undergoes to compensate for it mean that sudden withdrawal can cause death.
Neither cocaine, meth or heroin are physically addictive substances. Benzodiazepine and alcohol are though.
Again, no... I'm pretty sure work and energy are exactly the same thing... or rather work is the change in the energy of the system between two states... so the work you do is exactly equal to the energy you put in.
Power is just the change in energy over time, or the work over time... or the rate at which you are working or creating energy. P = dE/dt.
So, what I said before about generating power applies to generating energy or work, and gears cannot do that, or otherwise you would have a perpetual motion device.
Now, as I said, gears can be used to trade speed and torque... the reason this is confusing I think, when you think about say gears on a bike, it isn't the amount of work you are doing that changes but instead there is an optimal speed and torque at which your muscles produce work most efficiently... similarly with car engines having an optimal speed/torque range and why we gear them.
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> Your "last weeks newspaper" analogy is very misleading and insulting. Why not just be honest and admit it's a still legal loophole used to fleece people via being able to complete more actions in the same time?
No, the analogy is apt. It's the normal operation and actual purpose of an exchange... If you're too slow to act, the information from the news release, represented in the price on the exchange, gets absorbed into that price, and you can no longer profit from it... The faster you can react, the more opportunity you have to 'correct' the price AND profit.
That is the way it SHOULD work.
HFTs do that every millisecond... I don't think you do it all.
Many HFTs not only decrease volatility, there are AI systems that 'read' the news and respond to it... Sure, Berkshire Hathaway Industry stock prices might temporarily become overvalued every time Anne Hathaway stars in a new movie, but those who know that can profit from it, and by profiting from it, fix the price... but the AI is profitable ON AVERAGE.. and therefore good... and a better AI that can solve this problem generally will be more profitable still!
> So everyone wins according to you - of course ignoring the sucker that paid more for the shares than if they had time for direct contact and the sucker that sold at a lower price than if they had time for direct contact.
If you studied exchanges, from a game theoretic point of view, or especially a free market theory point of view, the answer is clearly yes.
If there was some rule that somehow we could make the guy who bought too high last week, and the guy who sold too low today get together and come to an agreement at better prices for both of them... we would have punished the guy who, last week, at the right time, realised that the price was too high and sold, and we would have punished the guy who today, at the right time, realised the price was too low and bought! You can't help the first two EXCEPT by removing the opportunity for the latter two to have traded.
And we want more the of the latter two guys trading and less of the former ANYWAY... and this is actually what the market does...
So yes... everyone wins.
> And, 5% daily swings in a market that only makes an average of 5 to 10% forward progress per year isn't just a gambler's opportunity, it's also a gambler's risk. Invest for 10 years, but, depending on whether or not you got lucky on the day of investment and the day of withdrawal, you might get 11 years worth of planned returns, or 9. I thought that Las Vegas was the place to gamble....
And if you actually knew about investment you could profit everyday from the 5% daily swing... AND play a small role in dampening that swing...AND do better than just the base growth rate.
You need to learn Modern Portfolio Theory.
> Circle back to the French Revolution, if you bothered to pay attention in classes like History.
> Big money dumps a whole lot more than 'two shits' on the little people, and sooner or later, the sheer number of little people who are getting dumped on tips the balance against the small number of people who are holding the big money.
> If big money can present at least a reasonable illusion of fairness, the backlash can be forestalled. When the masses of people are told "work all you lives, save money in the market where it can grow" and then see how their money shrinks in the market while big money grows...
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH...
Yes, the rich get richer, the poor get the picture...
These are problems with WEALTH INEQUALITY... you deal with that problem DIRECTLY... but not by making markets less efficient.
Let markets do their job, solve wealth inequality (free markets can't solve this... it requires political will)... the free market is a distributed information signalling system... let it do its job.
I'm saying you're complaining about the wrong problem.
Because the mathematics of an exchange state that every order is an improvement to what was available without it or it is irrelevant.n
The co-lo's allow them to act faster on the market book than those without... that efficiency means trades get matched faster, or at better prices.. for at least one party... the other only loses in that they didn't get the trade they wanted... and they shouldn't... because someone else actually made a better offer.
It's like arguing that you should be able to read last weeks newspaper and now is a good time to sell malaysian airways, you'll tell your stock broker via a letter and get the trade next week... and be disappointed that all these people with their new fangled internet trading got better prices when they got the news earlier...
HFT is just that exact same efficiency turned up several notches.
This is meant to be a technology website, where people see the value of applying technology to problems... but economics seems to be a really poorly understood subject here... it's a shame, because any understanding of economics shows that this is very good application for it.
5% swings sound like a great opportunity to profit which also stabilises the market.
Either way, the game theory of exchange operation clearly shows that all orders are of value... that each additional order can only improve on prices, or have no effect at worst.
People like you just complain that the market doesn't operate as you want it to... where prices are always fixed or increasing and the bid/ask spread always available in your favour.
No... the market should (and is) really be designed to serve the most money... because money is information... the most money provides the most information. It doesn't give two shits for a 'big time' trader like yourself.
No, you're misrepresenting the situation.
Do you understand how an exhange works?
Every single order added to a queue must be an improvement to the current available price if is to be matched or it is irrelevant.
No order can ever make an exchange LESS efficient. Therefore, all HFT is good.
You are speaking pure FUD.
Because the can only ever mathematically improve the bid/ask spread over them not existing at all.
You clearly don't understand the operation of an exchange, you just hear buzzwords like HFT and think oooohhh scary unknowns are bad!
Maybe you should understand how an exchange works... I've doubt you've ever traded, and don't really understand the system in the first place.
Either one or both of them will get their trade matched either faster or at a better price with S involved. These are the only mathematically possible outcomes of having more orders placed on a system.
Faster matching is generally considered value too... the fact that you don't value it is not anyone's problem... Would you wait a day, 10 days or 10 years for a match? Well then... you can see that going the other way is marginal improvement on value too.
Absolutely correct... and I have argued this many times before... on a fair and open exchange you literally cannot place a bid or ask that decreases the efficiency of the market.
Except the bit about front running... front running is illegal... because then the front runner could always guarantee that they were at the front of the queue regardless... but this is not the case, otherwise the HFT algorithms would be far simpler.
Exactly right, HFT is NOT front running...
People just have a hard time understanding that HFT brings efficiencies to the system and they get paid to do it.
They can't understand the algorithms, see stuff happening on the millisecond time scales and assume that something like algorithmic front running is occurring, when it is not.
If you have proof they can see the queue of pending orders and the ability to jump those orders in the queue, I would like to see it.
My understanding of HFT is that they have very fast access to the market book, and ability to place orders based on that information very quickly, but don't actually have access to the pending order queues or the ability to have their orders prioritised with in it.
The former is fully legal and expected out of an efficient trader, the second is probably illegal.
> They are ACTING BEFORE Alice or Bob can which is why it is a TIME BASED man in the middle attack.
Everybody is acting before the next order comes in... Kind of the definition of a QUEUE.
They get to see the state of the order book first and act on it faster because of their colo deals with the stock exchanges --- again, this changes nothing.
Only if they see Bob's order, then make the order, and it is on the queue before Bob's order, and therefore in the market book before Bob's order, are they doing anything that would actually damage the market and should be banned from.
Ie, they would have to have prioritised access to the QUEUE, not the MARKET BOOK.
And I'm 95% sure this is NOT the case. If you have proof otherwise, now is the time to show it.
> Nice euphemism for a timing based man in the middle attack.
> Alice asks for shares. Bob has shares for sale. Speedy buys shares from Bob and sells them to Alice before Bob can get the message that Alice is buying and before Alice can get the message that Bob is selling. Of course it can be argued that it's just a "sharp" business practice, the "American Way you commie" or whatever and that a man in the middle attack that adds zero value to the market is perfectly fine.
That's not how it works... unless they are intercepting Alice and Bob's orders before they hit the exchange and placing their orders before Alice or Bob, they are taking a (tiny but existent) bit of risk and doing arbitrage in time, because the exchange is still processing the orders in the order they are received.
If they are intercepting Alice and Bob's orders I would agree with you, this should not be a legal practice... but if the exchange is genuinely processing orders in the order they arrived, you are wrong... they actually are making the markets more efficient, in some sense.
4x acceptable concentration would be only 2 half lifes... so it would be 58 years, not 116.
Just saying.
> ...is getting some hip new applications.
Shouldn't that be some new hip applications?
> the drug itself, not psychological factors, not social factors, nothing else except the chemistry of the drug itself, is the causative effect of the addiction
This is a statement of scientific fact, I presume? There are many animal models that prove this, correct? And the Rat Park study confirms your point of view? Hmmm... guess not.
> why are you so ignorant about this subject yet still speaking on it?
Good question... ask yourself.
You might have a point, except, that at the same time the current system actively attempts to destroy them, by forcing them into the black market, and threatening their freedom... sometime even their lives... independently of the drugs themselves.
So, if you wanted to advocate that approach... to leave them to their own devices, then remove the negative forces on their lives as well.
Finally... if it were to be legalised, it would be possible to tax them at a rate to cover their social costs, the costs for those who seek rehabilitation and costs associated with emergency help for overdoses and the like.
Mind you, in a legal context, substances like nalaxone would be available, which instantly neutralize the effects of heroin and overdosing would not be a problem (in a supervised setting).
Basically... if you advocate a personal responsibility point of view, you cannot also advocate a prohibitionist point of view. The 'free market' with pigouvian taxes covering rehabilitation could go a long way to improving people's lives.
> every single problem you can find with fighting hard drugs is smaller than the negative effects of hard drugs themselves (heroin, cocaine, meth)
Every single problem with hard drugs (heroin, cocaine and meth) is smaller than the negative effects of fighting them.
You actually think that bloggers murdered by mexican drug cartels are worse than an individual who chooses to take heroin... That is stupidity of the highest level.
> we can of course find bad tactics in fighting hard drugs, and we should
There are of course negatives associated with being addicted to drugs, even if they were medically pure and provided free of charge... We should help those addicts who chose of their own free will to seek help.
> addiction to hard drugs destroys lives. this is the primary and ultimate problem. if you don't understand that problem as the root cause of everything else, you're an idiot on the subject matter
My experience has been that being forced into prostitution and being controlled by criminal gangs with no morality to obtain your drugs to be far worse than the addiction itself.
My property being stolen to fund prohibition prices is worse than addiction.
This is worse than addiction.
> no, the hard drugs are the real problem
Again... if you start with the axiom that addiction is the worst thing in the world, you will always end up with result that anything addictive is the worst thing in the world. Once you realise that addiction is easily satiated, then where are the real problems?
Remember, addiction simply means being willing to do anything to satiate that desire. You simply want addicts to crawl over more broken glass, then point to all the cuts and blood to prove the problems of addiction. Remove the glass and the problems of addiction become far less.
Some of my best friends are drug addicts, heroin, meth and crack... Their problems appear to come entirely from the current legal environment, that their suppliers are all criminal gangs, and the inflated prohibition prices requiring prostitution and theft to fund. When they have their drugs, they harm no one. If their drugs were available at pharmaceutical prices and purity, their problems would be diminished a thousand fold.
On the bright side, keeping drugs illegal keeps the illegal prostitutes desperate and cheap... This is what you want, right?
The drug war leads to the cartels in Mexico being stronger than the government. When the mexican drug cartels start overtaking the US, the way the British drug dealers overtook China... then you will wish that they had have been defeated by the simple economics of regulation.
The drug war leads to children having easier access to illegal substances like meth and heroin than legal substances like alcohol. Drug dealers don't check ID, and have there is no disincentive to sell to them... they're already breaking the law. The three drug addicts I know all started these drugs when they were 15 or younger.
Drug wars cannot work, because drug demand is inelastic. This simply means that demand does not change very much with regards to price (including other costs such as legal consequences)... Where there is demand, there is supply... All the drug war does is line the pockets of violent criminals. Drug use does not decrease significantly as price increases, and conversely, does not increase significantly when it decreases... You would not expect everyone to start using heroin if it was made legal. Only an hypocritical idiot like you would claim you would begin using heroin if it was legal. Truth is, I really doubt you would.
Philip K Dick wrote most of his books high on amphetamines... Your statements about these drugs destroying focus are provably false.
The problems of addiction are merely exacerbated by the legal environment, the high cost and illegality leads to greater crime, mostly acquisitionary. You understand that addiction, once satiated, is no longer the concern of an addict? You are addicted to food, for example, if food was hard to come by, you will do anything to get it, including theft and violence... when it is easy to obtain, you have the ability to focus on other things. This is why the Swiss harm reduction experiments (giving heroin addicts heroin) seem to work so well... Addicts were able to return to work and function once their addiction was satiated.
There is no drug that is safer under prohibition. There are no gangs that are weaker under prohibition. There are police less corrupt under prohibition. There are no fewer victims of theft and violence under prohibition.
No one should be denied the right to do with their own body as they desire... until they harm another. If you don't regulate the supply side, you still deny that right... Portugal is only a step in the right direction.
Your logic is circular... meth is bad, people who use meth are bad, and they make more people who use meth, which is bad, because meth is bad.
Desoxyn is prescribed... is it as bad as meth? Or are there problems with the process that creates the street version of desoxyn? Is it the chemical directly that causes the health problems, the impurities or the lifestyle required to obtain an outlawed substance.
The point the state has the right to intervene in the family is at the point of abuse, neglect or possibly suspicion or risk of abuse or neglect... Not general lifestyle choices, like what products they chose to consume. The crime is abuse or neglect, not smoking meth, drinking, gambling, or even being a workaholic who loses everything in a stock market crash and takes it out on his children. The abuse and neglect are all that matter.
At best, the state should tax the drugs enough to cover health care issues and rehab programs... these are the negative externalities of the drugs that can be paid with pigovian taxes... the current system creates a hell of a lot of problems for people that shouldn't have them... gangs, etc...
> You are right, but if the 'free market' were an argument for making something legal, then we should make assassinations and corporations that dump poison into rivers legal, because they are going to anyway.
These are not examples of free market because participants in the transaction do not choose the transaction. The assassination victim does not to choose to be assassinated, and people who enjoy the rivers did not choose for them to be poisoned. These are called negative externalities, and a free market is defined to be free of them. They can be corrected through taxation and legal punishment.
Drug use, by itself, is not a negative externality... and drug users who generate negative externalities (theft and other crime) would be just as guilty of those crimes whether they were using drugs or not.
This is a strawman argument against legalisation and a false comparison.
This time, you fail...
A trade on an exchange is NOT a trade on the bitcoin blockchain.
An exchange holds your bitcoins for you... The only transactions that occur on the blockchain are when you fund your account with bitcoin, and when you withdraw bitcoin from your account.
All trades on an exchange occur on that exchange only... There is plenty of room for faking trades at this point.
You need to learn the difference between things that harm other people and things that only cause harm to the consentor.
In economics, harm to others not involved in the transaction are called negative externalities. You can see that murder, rape, theft and violence are negative externalities.
However, if someone consents to violent sex, the harm is done to one who is willingly involved in the transaction... There should be no crime. Maximisation of economic decision utility occurs when people are allowed to willingly enter into these transactions. There is not harm to others from the act of taking drugs alone.
Controlling other people's behaviour always leads to lower economic utility. There is an inevitable cost of the drug war... and mostly it's in the violence and crime of gangs that form and are empowered by being handed the black market drug trade. These same people, now wealthy (as a network) then go on to traffic in sex slaves and other things that do cause harm... they become efficient at it... because drugs are so overwhelmingly profitable. (highly demand inelastic -- use does not depend greatly on price / availability).
He means that cocaine is not physically addictive. Cocaine is psychologically addictive, because it enhances the mood when taken, and leads to depression during withdrawal.
Cocaine withdrawal cannot kill you, the body does not physically depend on it for its continued functioning... Compare to alcohol, which is physically addictive, the changes your body undergoes to compensate for it mean that sudden withdrawal can cause death.
Neither cocaine, meth or heroin are physically addictive substances. Benzodiazepine and alcohol are though.
Heroin addicts can't afford heroin (at prohibition prices) with welfare... They might spend $500+ a day on heroin.
Where does that money come from, who does it go to? How does that fit in with your concept that heroin stops people from functioning?
The MAJOR cost of those drugs to society all come from those imposed by prohibition, not the drugs themselves.
Imagine they paid retail price for it...
Again, no... I'm pretty sure work and energy are exactly the same thing... or rather work is the change in the energy of the system between two states... so the work you do is exactly equal to the energy you put in.
Power is just the change in energy over time, or the work over time... or the rate at which you are working or creating energy. P = dE/dt.
So, what I said before about generating power applies to generating energy or work, and gears cannot do that, or otherwise you would have a perpetual motion device.
Now, as I said, gears can be used to trade speed and torque... the reason this is confusing I think, when you think about say gears on a bike, it isn't the amount of work you are doing that changes but instead there is an optimal speed and torque at which your muscles produce work most efficiently... similarly with car engines having an optimal speed/torque range and why we gear them.