You might as well buy a netbook computer, because that's how big and clunky the thing will be. There's simply no room on a modern 5.5" screen cellphone to put a physical keypad; either it's going to be huge (5.5" screen plus fixed keypad or keyboard), or it's going to be a slider, which have proven to have mechanical problems plus they're super-thick
What a load of crap. My Samsung slider isn't even 12mm thick; that's considerably thinner than other things I carry in my pockets, and thinner than the feature-phones people happily carried for years. No, it doesn't have a 5.5" screen, but many of us don't see any need for a fucking 5.5" screen either - particularly not when we have a physical keyboard. And it has a removable battery and an SD card slot.
Physical keyboards may not be popular with smartphone buyers, but that's not because they make phones too large to be usable.
I was tempted to alter the final line of the chorus to something like "So be good for his profits!" to get a half-rhyme, but that really forces the meter.
While I like the reference to demographics, maybe change that line to something that rhymes with "sake"? Perhaps "He knows each choice you make"?
Completely wrong. First, the reliability ratings are broken down by category in the actual CR reports, even if news summaries for idiots condense them into "CU says not reliable". Yes, CR does provide an overall "predicted reliability", but anyone with an ounce of sense who cares about the distinction will look at the breakdown. Second, from their FAQ:
Problems with the engine-major, cooling system, transmission-major, and driveline are more likely to take a car out of service and to be more expensive to repair than the other problem areas. Consequently, we weigh these areas more heavily in our calculations of Used Car Verdicts and Predicted Reliability. Problems such as broken trim and in-car electronics have a much smaller weight. Problems in any area can be an expense and a bother, though, so we report them all in the Reliability History charts.
No, no, no. "Stop light racing teens" means you should obstruct the movement of fast-moving, low-mass teenagers. It's not great advice, to be honest, since kinetic energy is directly proportional to mass but proportional to the square of velocity. Better to try stopping heavy slow teens.
Considering the number of regional dialects that still exist in England (to say nothing of Scotland and the rest of the UK), and the much greater number of dialects of Middle and Modern English that flourished for a while and then disappeared, this is a remarkably silly position to take. But, hey, you go ahead and pick the hill you want to die on.
Right, it's always "Republicans" gerrymandering, and the poor, unblemished Democrats who are victims of it.
Of course not; after all, it was invented by a Democratic-Republican. (Elbridge Gerry was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, among other things. When I were a lad I used to forge his signature on various documents, because I liked the look of it and I was living in his hometown at the time.)
The GOP has just had more opportunity to practice it in recent years, thanks to demographics and chance, so they currently receive more of the finger-pointing. That's the price you pay for gerrymandering, and generally any party in a position to do the latter is more than happy to pay the former.
And, of course, there are people of both parties, and other political persuasions, who advocate for independent redistricting.
You've convinced me! Your fake check is in the fake mail.
Really, I can't see why people are so down on this story. "A bunch of people have decided to talk about a thing, and they're taking notes in a Google doc." Pretty remarkable stuff.
Certainly one can. In this case, though, it is (etymologically) plural; "news" is the plural of "new". It's just a plural that by convention is constructed as a singular noun, or arguably as a unitless mass plural one. English lets a word be etymologically and grammatically plural while enjoying singular usage, because English lets its speakers and writers do pretty much whatever they damn well please.
There are plenty of good reasons to minimize social media use, such as wasting time, but even there it is better than passive activities like watching TV.
Bullshit. Nothing makes "social media use" a priori superior in any way to experiencing any other form of cultural expression. There is plenty of enlightening, thought-provoking material available on television, and no shortage of mind-numbing rubbish on social media. Nor is production inherently superior to consumption (and I have a rhetoric degree and have taught college composition, so I'm invested in the production side).
It's this sort of abject failure in critical thinking that demonstrates just why expressing your sophomoric theories online doesn't automatically make you a better person. "Passively" consuming something someone's put effort into thinking about might help.
You are thinking too narrowly. You don't necessarily need to revive the flesh. You could slice the frozen brain, scan the neuron connections, and then duplicate them in-silico.
Pretty hilarious that someone who believes the complete human self - or even something that would appear to outside observers as such - inheres entirely in the structure of the CNS would accuse others of "thinking too narrowly".
Sure, just recreate the synaptic connections from the brain (modulo any damage from death, freezing, the passage of time, etc.) in a completely different medium. Surely nothing else has any influence on cognition or personality.
So Levy's penned yet another masturbatory hagiography of technology? (Well, at least this one is short.) Now that's news!
"Earth-shattering", eh? Please. "Significant economic and social consequences" would be fine, but the earth remains unshattered, people continue to be people, and overall for the vast majority of humanity life continues pretty much as it has for most of the modern era, even if quality of life is gradually inching upward.
For the most part we continue to live ordinary lives filled with mundane concerns and ephemeral diversions, in insular communities of mostly like-minded folk, bundled up into squabbling nation-states. Peasant or president, willfully ignorant or cosmopolitan intellectual - our lives would still be highly recognizable to members of some number of previous generations, depending on how recently modernity has swept us up into its arms. The (admittedly huge) changes in information and communication technology of the past half-century[1] certainly affect everyday life, but they haven't really transformed in any fundamental way. Sure, the telegraph is a lot more convenient now, and we have a lot fewer horses on the roads. But for everyone but the poorest, things like window screening and refrigeration and electric lighting have had a far greater impact on both the nature and quality of life.
[1] And yes, I lived through most of them too. I'm a little younger than Levy, but not enough to matter in this case. And unlike him, I actually work with those technologies.
Some years ago, Phil Carlton said: "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
Obviously, that qualifies as a wry observation, but not full-on nerd hilarity. So variations started making the rounds.
In 2014, Jeff Atwood tweeted this one: "There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." I don't know if he coined it, but his was extensively retweeted, so at least he helped propagate it. Note how it follows Carlton's formulation and doesn't belabor the point.
Indeed. The whole list can be summarized as "these are things that you have to understand and think about if you're going to use them, and, gosh, that seems like a lot of work".
Honestly, if you don't understand closures (and not knowing where they come from is a good sign you don't understand them, Mr Wayner), then don't try to use them. Work on applications and in languages where they don't offer any particular advantage. The same goes for security (security features, that is - all practitioners are responsible for understand the common security flaws of the platforms they're using; anything less is inexcusable), cryptography (really, "encryption"?), and the rest.
It's a bunch of vague handwaving toward some of the aspects of computer science that are more directly applicable to programming. Yes, we get it, computer science is hard. Sometimes you need to understand technical concepts. Mathematics might even make an appearance! Probably best to just write HTML.
If he had paid the right people and bought a seat on the exchange, they'd have called it HFT and it wouldn't have been an issue.
No, they wouldn't have, because what he was doing was nothing at all like HFT.
I swear, HFT has become the shibboleth of finance. Anything anyone doesn't like in the markets is automatically "HFT". Maybe folks should learn a bit about the thing they're claiming they see everywhere.
"Only we get to fuck with the integrity of US financial markets." - Wall Street Bankers
That's how regulation works - or, at any rate, how it's supposed to work. We want the financial system to supply liquidity and pool risk. We'd like it to be fair (for some value of "fair") and mostly transparent - but not entirely transparent, because if everyone has exactly the same information, then the only basis for trading is irrational preference.
So regulators try to achieve a balance between restricting clearly-abusive activity while allowing a certain amount of slipperiness, so the markets continue to pay well enough to attract capital. That's not easy, and it's made much more difficult by the problems of defining illegal activity, and by heavy-handed and often conflicting input from various branches of government, and, yes, by the considerable pressure, legal and otherwise, that can be exerted by well-heeled existing players.
Does that mean the markets are, in practice, fair? Of course not. The much-maligned HFT (which was not what Sarao was doing, contra many of the other people commenting on this story) is certainly a game for making the rich richer; there's no entry-level HFT. Some educated observers argue that HFT is simply abusive and should be corrected by regulation; others disagree, and while many people might not find their arguments compelling, there are such arguments. But some other abusive practices are banned. Pump-and-dump (manual or automated) is one, and that's what Sarao was doing.
If Sarao had been working on Wall Street, doing the same thing, and gotten caught, would he have been prosecuted similarly? We can only speculate. But sometimes "Wall Street Bankers" do get prosecuted when they fall foul of regulations. In any case, that's a different problem from not having an ideal set of regulations in the first place.
Since we don't, and almost certainly can't, have an ideal set of regulations, sometimes people will, within the bounds of the law, "fuck with the integrity of US financial markets". When that happens we can try to improve regulations; that's essentially what happened with Enron et alia and SOX. Personally, I'm largely a fan of this process - I'm pretty happy with fairly strong regulatory regimes - but conversely I don't think there's much justification for slinging mud at those who stay within them. (Sure, there are ethical questions beyond the law, but that's another whole ball of hair, and this post is already much too long.)
No, it's not "the basis of high frequency trading". Sarao was not engaged in HFT. No one can conduct HFT against the Chicago Mercantile from London (if the orders are actually being made from London, as Sarao's were). The latency is much, much, much too high.
Sarao was manipulating simplistic HFT and other automatic-trading algorithms by placing and cancelling large volumes of trades in a particular direction. HFT systems place a lot of trades, but they're hedged positions, not all going in the same direction; then most of them are cancelled as soon as the price moves. In fact, it's likely real HFT systems were less vulnerable than non-HFT automatic-trading ones to Sarao's manipulations, since HFT trades are hedged and operate on a much finer time grain.
Just look at this typical story on Sarao, which claims that his process operated "hundreds of times per hour". That's not HFT. That's barely even automation speed. Even if they're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still not HFT. (And it couldn't be, unless Sarao was running a C&C locally but the actual trading-terminal software was running in Chicago.)
A lot of people seem to have rather a rather simplistic understanding of HFT based on sources like Flash Boys or Automate This, which no doubt are fine middlebrow popular treatments; but for technical accuracy, it's much better to consult journal articles such as this piece from CACM.
all of the polling organizations that got everything 100% wrong for the last 18 months
The polls weren't far off, generally speaking. There are any number of actual analyses of the recent polls that demonstrate this. The US Presidential election system - with most states being winner-take-all and the Electoral College - amplifies small differences. That's exactly what happened here. The good polls were close to the actual outcome, even if many fell on the wrong side of the line.
The problem is people who think "ahead within the margin of error" means "definitely gonna win".
And, of course, we'd love a polling organization that was always completely wrong, since you could simply invert their results. A maximally bad poll would be statistically random.
Yes, though she also didn't do quite well enough in Florida. Florida was achievable, with just a little more turnout for the Democrats. But Florida alone wouldn't have saved her; it would just have been insurance against losing one of the three "defectors" (as ultimately she did).
But the three defecting states - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (still not officially called, but it no longer matters) - would have been enough to put her over the top (228 + 46 for 274 total). And those three hadn't voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in 28 years.
Now, various people have been saying for a long time that the Democrats' "firewall" was much weaker than popularly believed. But given the very, very close totals in those states, it should have been possible to retain them with better campaigning. For the most part (and particularly with Wisconsin, a state the Clinton campaign basically ignored - though voter-impeding by the state Republican government hurt too), the Democrats didn't do a good job of maintaining their constituencies there, or reaching out to undecided voters. And the last-ditch scramble in Michigan looked desperate and seems to have fired up rural Republican voters much more than urban Democrat ones.
US elections were very different before TV. When voter made a decision based on mostly written information and the candidates actual policy positions
Care to provide any evidence that this is something more than a prelapsarian fantasy?
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of US Presidential elections knows that, after the first two (where no one really dared challenge the Washington hagiography), they've generally been pretty vile. It's conceivable that back in some Golden Age before Great Devil Television corrupted us, a majority of voters decided things based on "candidates [sic] actual policy positions", since it's difficult to prove otherwise, but it seems highly implausible. Certainly people at the time didn't seem to think that was the case, given the vast amount of invective and innuendo they spread.
(If you're not familiar with the history, Kevin Underhill has an entertaining summary.)
New media certainly make it easier and faster to spread misrepresentations and illogical arguments, but I've seen no credible historical arguments that anything beyond that has changed.
What are you talking about? Reagan was in no way a "political outsider" by any reasonable definition, by the time he started holding any significant office. As far back as the '40s, he was visibly active in politics. Before he was governor of California he'd been SAG President, which is certainly a political position, just not a public-sector one. In the early '60s he was a prominent political commentator and policy wonk (and we've known for years now that he did, in fact, do his own research and analysis). He was elected Governor in '66, so by the time he became US President in '80 he'd been a major politician for over a decade.
I'm no fan of Reagan, but it's completely unfounded to claim he was an "outsider", or politically naive, or inexperienced, or incapable of or unwilling to grapple with complex policy issues (at least until the tail end of his career when evidence suggests his intellectual capacities had been significantly compromised).
After you actually read that article, then we can have a proper discussion. Our view of "Our World" is distorted by our view of "our world".
Jason "David Wong" Pargin is a smart and insightful guy, and a good writer,[1] and that is a pretty good article (I'd read it before, not long after he posted it). But:
- Many of the "liberals"[2] in the "big cities" (I'll skip the scare caps, thanks) know small-town midwest America well. I've lived in the Midwest or the Plains almost all my adult life. My wife was raised on a farm in the Midwest and has lived nearly all of her life in rural districts, small towns, or small cities, in the Midwest and West. Most of our friends grew up in the Midwest.
- The "big cities" are far from homogeneous too. Lumping places like Hammond, Palo Alto, San Antonio, Atlanta, and Dorchester into one vague "big cities" blob is arrant nonsense.
- Pargin, like many (well-intentioned and insightful) commentators who have sought to describe the conditions of Trump supporters in low-density America, discounts the sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and general small-mindedness that has characterized this election. No, it's not universal; there are a great many open-minded folks of goodwill in middle America. But it is rampant. That's been demonstrated over and over again in public, and it's readily apparent on social media. Those of us with middle-America roots have heard plenty from family, friends, and acquaintances. Yes, people outside the cities are hurting, and that deserves sympathy and attention. That doesn't mean they're saints.
Of course labor tensions in the US have always tended to become organized on racial and gender lines rather than class ones. Anyone with a passing familiarity with American cultural history knows that. This election is really not so different.
[1] His portrayal of small-city Indiana in John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders is also very accurate. Well, aside from the supernatural invasion. Maybe.
[2] A meaningless term. There's "liberal" as a term of art in political science, which describes nearly everyone in the US; and then there are millions of individual political ideologies which include one or more of the components vilified, at one time or another, by some commentator as "liberal". As a noun describing a kind of person it refers only to some bugbear of the writer's imagination. For the moment, though, let's pretend there is such a group.
Hard to say. Trump's addicted to relieving his own debts; he might enjoy waving other people's away, as long as they're properly fawning about it.
And while the Republican Party is notionally opposed to the idea, most of the individual politicians like buying influence and votes just as much as anyone else. Some will stand on principle (for some value of "principle"), and some will be taking revenge or counting coup. But few, I'd wager, will spend much time considering whether a proposed bailout (of whatever failing entity) is good public policy.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Yes. And China artificially delays the problem by restricting migration to the cities, hiding a huge part of the underemployed poor in its vast rural territories. The US, of course, also has a great deal of rural space with low population density, high un- and under-employment, low incomes and poverty - which is why so much of the election map is red - but because we make migration easier, the lack of entry-level manufacturing jobs is more evident.
Unfortunately, the service sector doesn't scale either. Entry-level service jobs (things like food and cleaning) are limited by population density and require other upstream wealth-generating industries. So in small-town America, there will never be a lot of those jobs, by definition. White-color service jobs, everything from data-entry to financial and legal, is less local, and so in theory could move out to the small cities and towns; but it generally doesn't, because it's more convenient to keep those jobs near corporate HQ or locate them in the medium-size cities, where there's a glut of cheap commercial real estate and an educated but still cheap workforce (all those fresh college grads, second-career parents, etc.). And the mobility of those white-color jobs also means they're prone to going to other countries or being automated.
Service-sector industries that are both local and bring in outside dollars, like medical care and tourism, aren't going to get big enough to help much. And of course they tend to be regionally specific ("Tour the cornfields of Illinois!") and/or heavily dependent on government support, which means you're just reallocating GDP.
I don't know that there's a solution for the red counties in middle America. Trump (or rather whoever's pulling the strings in his administration; the man's never done a lick of honest work in his life, so it won't be him making the real decisions) sure as hell won't find one, even with a Republican Congress to rubber-stamp whatever the Executive branch tries. The economics that made it feasible to spread across the continent are no longer in place. It's more efficient now, particularly for the oligarchs, to concentrate the wealth; and concentrate it will.
Slashdot Mirror
What is needed is a free device that can magically create whatever part you need. And unicorns.
You might as well buy a netbook computer, because that's how big and clunky the thing will be. There's simply no room on a modern 5.5" screen cellphone to put a physical keypad; either it's going to be huge (5.5" screen plus fixed keypad or keyboard), or it's going to be a slider, which have proven to have mechanical problems plus they're super-thick
What a load of crap. My Samsung slider isn't even 12mm thick; that's considerably thinner than other things I carry in my pockets, and thinner than the feature-phones people happily carried for years. No, it doesn't have a 5.5" screen, but many of us don't see any need for a fucking 5.5" screen either - particularly not when we have a physical keyboard. And it has a removable battery and an SD card slot.
Physical keyboards may not be popular with smartphone buyers, but that's not because they make phones too large to be usable.
I was tempted to alter the final line of the chorus to something like "So be good for his profits!" to get a half-rhyme, but that really forces the meter.
While I like the reference to demographics, maybe change that line to something that rhymes with "sake"? Perhaps "He knows each choice you make"?
They count every problem equally
Completely wrong. First, the reliability ratings are broken down by category in the actual CR reports, even if news summaries for idiots condense them into "CU says not reliable". Yes, CR does provide an overall "predicted reliability", but anyone with an ounce of sense who cares about the distinction will look at the breakdown. Second, from their FAQ:
Problems with the engine-major, cooling system, transmission-major, and driveline are more likely to take a car out of service and to be more expensive to repair than the other problem areas. Consequently, we weigh these areas more heavily in our calculations of Used Car Verdicts and Predicted Reliability. Problems such as broken trim and in-car electronics have a much smaller weight. Problems in any area can be an expense and a bother, though, so we report them all in the Reliability History charts.
No, no, no. "Stop light racing teens" means you should obstruct the movement of fast-moving, low-mass teenagers. It's not great advice, to be honest, since kinetic energy is directly proportional to mass but proportional to the square of velocity. Better to try stopping heavy slow teens.
Considering the number of regional dialects that still exist in England (to say nothing of Scotland and the rest of the UK), and the much greater number of dialects of Middle and Modern English that flourished for a while and then disappeared, this is a remarkably silly position to take. But, hey, you go ahead and pick the hill you want to die on.
Right, it's always "Republicans" gerrymandering, and the poor, unblemished Democrats who are victims of it.
Of course not; after all, it was invented by a Democratic-Republican. (Elbridge Gerry was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, among other things. When I were a lad I used to forge his signature on various documents, because I liked the look of it and I was living in his hometown at the time.)
The GOP has just had more opportunity to practice it in recent years, thanks to demographics and chance, so they currently receive more of the finger-pointing. That's the price you pay for gerrymandering, and generally any party in a position to do the latter is more than happy to pay the former.
And, of course, there are people of both parties, and other political persuasions, who advocate for independent redistricting.
You've convinced me! Your fake check is in the fake mail.
Really, I can't see why people are so down on this story. "A bunch of people have decided to talk about a thing, and they're taking notes in a Google doc." Pretty remarkable stuff.
A word can end in s without being a plural.
Certainly one can. In this case, though, it is (etymologically) plural; "news" is the plural of "new". It's just a plural that by convention is constructed as a singular noun, or arguably as a unitless mass plural one. English lets a word be etymologically and grammatically plural while enjoying singular usage, because English lets its speakers and writers do pretty much whatever they damn well please.
There are plenty of good reasons to minimize social media use, such as wasting time, but even there it is better than passive activities like watching TV.
Bullshit. Nothing makes "social media use" a priori superior in any way to experiencing any other form of cultural expression. There is plenty of enlightening, thought-provoking material available on television, and no shortage of mind-numbing rubbish on social media. Nor is production inherently superior to consumption (and I have a rhetoric degree and have taught college composition, so I'm invested in the production side).
It's this sort of abject failure in critical thinking that demonstrates just why expressing your sophomoric theories online doesn't automatically make you a better person. "Passively" consuming something someone's put effort into thinking about might help.
You are thinking too narrowly. You don't necessarily need to revive the flesh. You could slice the frozen brain, scan the neuron connections, and then duplicate them in-silico.
Pretty hilarious that someone who believes the complete human self - or even something that would appear to outside observers as such - inheres entirely in the structure of the CNS would accuse others of "thinking too narrowly".
Sure, just recreate the synaptic connections from the brain (modulo any damage from death, freezing, the passage of time, etc.) in a completely different medium. Surely nothing else has any influence on cognition or personality.
I predict that humanity will go extinct before I finish this sentence.
They did. I guess the simulation was good enough to fool you, though. Personally I find it a little implausible, but then that's how I'm coded.
So Levy's penned yet another masturbatory hagiography of technology? (Well, at least this one is short.) Now that's news!
"Earth-shattering", eh? Please. "Significant economic and social consequences" would be fine, but the earth remains unshattered, people continue to be people, and overall for the vast majority of humanity life continues pretty much as it has for most of the modern era, even if quality of life is gradually inching upward.
For the most part we continue to live ordinary lives filled with mundane concerns and ephemeral diversions, in insular communities of mostly like-minded folk, bundled up into squabbling nation-states. Peasant or president, willfully ignorant or cosmopolitan intellectual - our lives would still be highly recognizable to members of some number of previous generations, depending on how recently modernity has swept us up into its arms. The (admittedly huge) changes in information and communication technology of the past half-century[1] certainly affect everyday life, but they haven't really transformed in any fundamental way. Sure, the telegraph is a lot more convenient now, and we have a lot fewer horses on the roads. But for everyone but the poorest, things like window screening and refrigeration and electric lighting have had a far greater impact on both the nature and quality of life.
[1] And yes, I lived through most of them too. I'm a little younger than Levy, but not enough to matter in this case. And unlike him, I actually work with those technologies.
It's funnier in the original formulation.
Some years ago, Phil Carlton said: "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
Obviously, that qualifies as a wry observation, but not full-on nerd hilarity. So variations started making the rounds.
In 2014, Jeff Atwood tweeted this one: "There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." I don't know if he coined it, but his was extensively retweeted, so at least he helped propagate it. Note how it follows Carlton's formulation and doesn't belabor the point.
Indeed. The whole list can be summarized as "these are things that you have to understand and think about if you're going to use them, and, gosh, that seems like a lot of work".
Honestly, if you don't understand closures (and not knowing where they come from is a good sign you don't understand them, Mr Wayner), then don't try to use them. Work on applications and in languages where they don't offer any particular advantage. The same goes for security (security features, that is - all practitioners are responsible for understand the common security flaws of the platforms they're using; anything less is inexcusable), cryptography (really, "encryption"?), and the rest.
It's a bunch of vague handwaving toward some of the aspects of computer science that are more directly applicable to programming. Yes, we get it, computer science is hard. Sometimes you need to understand technical concepts. Mathematics might even make an appearance! Probably best to just write HTML.
If he had paid the right people and bought a seat on the exchange, they'd have called it HFT and it wouldn't have been an issue.
No, they wouldn't have, because what he was doing was nothing at all like HFT.
I swear, HFT has become the shibboleth of finance. Anything anyone doesn't like in the markets is automatically "HFT". Maybe folks should learn a bit about the thing they're claiming they see everywhere.
"Only we get to fuck with the integrity of US financial markets." - Wall Street Bankers
That's how regulation works - or, at any rate, how it's supposed to work. We want the financial system to supply liquidity and pool risk. We'd like it to be fair (for some value of "fair") and mostly transparent - but not entirely transparent, because if everyone has exactly the same information, then the only basis for trading is irrational preference.
So regulators try to achieve a balance between restricting clearly-abusive activity while allowing a certain amount of slipperiness, so the markets continue to pay well enough to attract capital. That's not easy, and it's made much more difficult by the problems of defining illegal activity, and by heavy-handed and often conflicting input from various branches of government, and, yes, by the considerable pressure, legal and otherwise, that can be exerted by well-heeled existing players.
Does that mean the markets are, in practice, fair? Of course not. The much-maligned HFT (which was not what Sarao was doing, contra many of the other people commenting on this story) is certainly a game for making the rich richer; there's no entry-level HFT. Some educated observers argue that HFT is simply abusive and should be corrected by regulation; others disagree, and while many people might not find their arguments compelling, there are such arguments. But some other abusive practices are banned. Pump-and-dump (manual or automated) is one, and that's what Sarao was doing.
If Sarao had been working on Wall Street, doing the same thing, and gotten caught, would he have been prosecuted similarly? We can only speculate. But sometimes "Wall Street Bankers" do get prosecuted when they fall foul of regulations. In any case, that's a different problem from not having an ideal set of regulations in the first place.
Since we don't, and almost certainly can't, have an ideal set of regulations, sometimes people will, within the bounds of the law, "fuck with the integrity of US financial markets". When that happens we can try to improve regulations; that's essentially what happened with Enron et alia and SOX. Personally, I'm largely a fan of this process - I'm pretty happy with fairly strong regulatory regimes - but conversely I don't think there's much justification for slinging mud at those who stay within them. (Sure, there are ethical questions beyond the law, but that's another whole ball of hair, and this post is already much too long.)
No, it's not "the basis of high frequency trading". Sarao was not engaged in HFT. No one can conduct HFT against the Chicago Mercantile from London (if the orders are actually being made from London, as Sarao's were). The latency is much, much, much too high.
Sarao was manipulating simplistic HFT and other automatic-trading algorithms by placing and cancelling large volumes of trades in a particular direction. HFT systems place a lot of trades, but they're hedged positions, not all going in the same direction; then most of them are cancelled as soon as the price moves. In fact, it's likely real HFT systems were less vulnerable than non-HFT automatic-trading ones to Sarao's manipulations, since HFT trades are hedged and operate on a much finer time grain.
Just look at this typical story on Sarao, which claims that his process operated "hundreds of times per hour". That's not HFT. That's barely even automation speed. Even if they're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still not HFT. (And it couldn't be, unless Sarao was running a C&C locally but the actual trading-terminal software was running in Chicago.)
A lot of people seem to have rather a rather simplistic understanding of HFT based on sources like Flash Boys or Automate This, which no doubt are fine middlebrow popular treatments; but for technical accuracy, it's much better to consult journal articles such as this piece from CACM .
all of the polling organizations that got everything 100% wrong for the last 18 months
The polls weren't far off, generally speaking. There are any number of actual analyses of the recent polls that demonstrate this. The US Presidential election system - with most states being winner-take-all and the Electoral College - amplifies small differences. That's exactly what happened here. The good polls were close to the actual outcome, even if many fell on the wrong side of the line.
The problem is people who think "ahead within the margin of error" means "definitely gonna win".
And, of course, we'd love a polling organization that was always completely wrong, since you could simply invert their results. A maximally bad poll would be statistically random.
Yes, though she also didn't do quite well enough in Florida. Florida was achievable, with just a little more turnout for the Democrats. But Florida alone wouldn't have saved her; it would just have been insurance against losing one of the three "defectors" (as ultimately she did).
But the three defecting states - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (still not officially called, but it no longer matters) - would have been enough to put her over the top (228 + 46 for 274 total). And those three hadn't voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in 28 years.
Now, various people have been saying for a long time that the Democrats' "firewall" was much weaker than popularly believed. But given the very, very close totals in those states, it should have been possible to retain them with better campaigning. For the most part (and particularly with Wisconsin, a state the Clinton campaign basically ignored - though voter-impeding by the state Republican government hurt too), the Democrats didn't do a good job of maintaining their constituencies there, or reaching out to undecided voters. And the last-ditch scramble in Michigan looked desperate and seems to have fired up rural Republican voters much more than urban Democrat ones.
US elections were very different before TV. When voter made a decision based on mostly written information and the candidates actual policy positions
Care to provide any evidence that this is something more than a prelapsarian fantasy?
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of US Presidential elections knows that, after the first two (where no one really dared challenge the Washington hagiography), they've generally been pretty vile. It's conceivable that back in some Golden Age before Great Devil Television corrupted us, a majority of voters decided things based on "candidates [sic] actual policy positions", since it's difficult to prove otherwise, but it seems highly implausible. Certainly people at the time didn't seem to think that was the case, given the vast amount of invective and innuendo they spread.
(If you're not familiar with the history, Kevin Underhill has an entertaining summary.)
New media certainly make it easier and faster to spread misrepresentations and illogical arguments, but I've seen no credible historical arguments that anything beyond that has changed.
What are you talking about? Reagan was in no way a "political outsider" by any reasonable definition, by the time he started holding any significant office. As far back as the '40s, he was visibly active in politics. Before he was governor of California he'd been SAG President, which is certainly a political position, just not a public-sector one. In the early '60s he was a prominent political commentator and policy wonk (and we've known for years now that he did, in fact, do his own research and analysis). He was elected Governor in '66, so by the time he became US President in '80 he'd been a major politician for over a decade.
I'm no fan of Reagan, but it's completely unfounded to claim he was an "outsider", or politically naive, or inexperienced, or incapable of or unwilling to grapple with complex policy issues (at least until the tail end of his career when evidence suggests his intellectual capacities had been significantly compromised).
After you actually read that article, then we can have a proper discussion. Our view of "Our World" is distorted by our view of "our world".
Jason "David Wong" Pargin is a smart and insightful guy, and a good writer,[1] and that is a pretty good article (I'd read it before, not long after he posted it). But:
- Many of the "liberals"[2] in the "big cities" (I'll skip the scare caps, thanks) know small-town midwest America well. I've lived in the Midwest or the Plains almost all my adult life. My wife was raised on a farm in the Midwest and has lived nearly all of her life in rural districts, small towns, or small cities, in the Midwest and West. Most of our friends grew up in the Midwest.
- The "big cities" are far from homogeneous too. Lumping places like Hammond, Palo Alto, San Antonio, Atlanta, and Dorchester into one vague "big cities" blob is arrant nonsense.
- Pargin, like many (well-intentioned and insightful) commentators who have sought to describe the conditions of Trump supporters in low-density America, discounts the sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and general small-mindedness that has characterized this election. No, it's not universal; there are a great many open-minded folks of goodwill in middle America. But it is rampant. That's been demonstrated over and over again in public, and it's readily apparent on social media. Those of us with middle-America roots have heard plenty from family, friends, and acquaintances. Yes, people outside the cities are hurting, and that deserves sympathy and attention. That doesn't mean they're saints.
Of course labor tensions in the US have always tended to become organized on racial and gender lines rather than class ones. Anyone with a passing familiarity with American cultural history knows that. This election is really not so different.
[1] His portrayal of small-city Indiana in John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders is also very accurate. Well, aside from the supernatural invasion. Maybe.
[2] A meaningless term. There's "liberal" as a term of art in political science, which describes nearly everyone in the US; and then there are millions of individual political ideologies which include one or more of the components vilified, at one time or another, by some commentator as "liberal". As a noun describing a kind of person it refers only to some bugbear of the writer's imagination. For the moment, though, let's pretend there is such a group.
Hard to say. Trump's addicted to relieving his own debts; he might enjoy waving other people's away, as long as they're properly fawning about it.
And while the Republican Party is notionally opposed to the idea, most of the individual politicians like buying influence and votes just as much as anyone else. Some will stand on principle (for some value of "principle"), and some will be taking revenge or counting coup. But few, I'd wager, will spend much time considering whether a proposed bailout (of whatever failing entity) is good public policy.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Yes. And China artificially delays the problem by restricting migration to the cities, hiding a huge part of the underemployed poor in its vast rural territories. The US, of course, also has a great deal of rural space with low population density, high un- and under-employment, low incomes and poverty - which is why so much of the election map is red - but because we make migration easier, the lack of entry-level manufacturing jobs is more evident.
Unfortunately, the service sector doesn't scale either. Entry-level service jobs (things like food and cleaning) are limited by population density and require other upstream wealth-generating industries. So in small-town America, there will never be a lot of those jobs, by definition. White-color service jobs, everything from data-entry to financial and legal, is less local, and so in theory could move out to the small cities and towns; but it generally doesn't, because it's more convenient to keep those jobs near corporate HQ or locate them in the medium-size cities, where there's a glut of cheap commercial real estate and an educated but still cheap workforce (all those fresh college grads, second-career parents, etc.). And the mobility of those white-color jobs also means they're prone to going to other countries or being automated.
Service-sector industries that are both local and bring in outside dollars, like medical care and tourism, aren't going to get big enough to help much. And of course they tend to be regionally specific ("Tour the cornfields of Illinois!") and/or heavily dependent on government support, which means you're just reallocating GDP.
I don't know that there's a solution for the red counties in middle America. Trump (or rather whoever's pulling the strings in his administration; the man's never done a lick of honest work in his life, so it won't be him making the real decisions) sure as hell won't find one, even with a Republican Congress to rubber-stamp whatever the Executive branch tries. The economics that made it feasible to spread across the continent are no longer in place. It's more efficient now, particularly for the oligarchs, to concentrate the wealth; and concentrate it will.