First, try to move up in your current job while your foot's in the door.
This is a great way to go. A friend of mine just did this, and couldn't be happier.
I think this can be easier at a small company than a large one, so if you're having trouble with the lateral move at your current company, find yourself a new QA job.
First, economic researchers are not deciding global economic policy. They are offering plenty of opinions, theories, and notions, it's true. But so is everybody else, and the decisions about what advice to accept is left to governments, many of which are, like the American one, "of, by, and for the people". We collectively choose what experiments to participate in when we pick our representatives.
Second, the people in the soft sciences don't have the power to demand anything. They could suggest that, I suppose. But the only personal action they could take would be to stop researching and publishing. Given that would reduce the likelihood of good decisions being made, that would seem unethical to me. At any rate it would be pointless, as both political leaders and citizens in general are unlikely to support mandatory mass migration every time somebody doesn't like an economic notion just because some guy on Slashdot has a personal obsession with ideological purity.
Third, like it or not, society and the economy will both keep going in some form or another. If some individual or group wants to opt out, godspeed; there's plenty of wilderness. But the rest of us have to keep up and deal with events. We can't stop deciding what to do; we can only make the best decisions possible.
Fourth, science doesn't have a point of view on ethics. Science is about what is; ethics are about what ought to be, and confusing them is sometimes known as the naturalistic fallacy. Individual scientists who experiment directly on humans do now have some very smart and sharply defined views on handling that research, especially in the medical field. But there's no reason to think that even those who develop those ethics think they apply the way you apply them.
I'm glad you have a personal view about how the world could be better, but bagging on economists who are doing their best to make things better isn't going to improve anything. Nor is your unwillingness to back any of your points with references or data. Maybe you're a genius with the next revolution in societal structure in your head, but nobody will pay any attention if you keep arguing like a loon.
You seem to understand that adverts are a massive source of income for many websites, yet don't seem to have a problem with using an ad-blocker on those very websites. That's fucked up.
Like the other guy, I refused to deal with the animated ads. I'm distractable enough without them.
Whenever possible, I subscribe. And I only block the blinky ads, so hopefully people choosing ads for their sites will get the hint and pick things that compliment their content, rather than detracting from it.
Sure, and if you look at enough writs by court astrologers, you'll find many a case where no one listened to them and it turned out they were right.
Don't be an ass. This isn't some wild-eyed nut on a streetcorner. The Economist is a publication with a circulation of 1.3 million copies a week, and they have been consistently warning of problems for years. If you've got a better source for the consensus views of mainstream economists and finance professionals, I'd love to hear it.
The problem wasn't that the mainstream view was wrong; it was that people didn't listen to it. And it was only some people who didn't listen, generally because it was in their short-term financial interest not to.
The point is that there was no consensus model adhered to by the vast majority of economists that produced a consensus prediction.
And? They're not collectively promising one, either.
Figuring out what is happening with a bridge is infinitely easier than a global economy. For example, a structure doesn't change its behavior under stress depending on your opinions of it. Atoms don't have opinions.
I know you'd like sociology and economics to be as simple and well-behaved as physics, but it isn't, at least not yet. If you can do better, then step up and show us. If not, then recognize that you're just ranting. There's nothing wrong with a good rant; it can be fun. But it shouldn't be mistaken for a sensible contribution to the discussion, especially by its speaker.
I know you Ayn Rand fanboys like the idea of a gold standard, but sorry it is just a really bad idea.
Ain't that the truth.
I feel for them in some ways; if you think about it too long, it gets a little spooky. To get past that requires a taste for subtlety.
If you're not good at subtlety then fleeing back to something apparently solid like gold is awfully appealing. Kinda like how they have trouble getting how functioning social organizations work, and so flee back to selfishness.
For those who find the Randites kinda annoying, I suggest checking out Matt Ruff's satiric novel Sewer Gas & Electric. I thought it was hilarious.
you have to start looking for the culprit in the "science" of economics.
Oh, please. As if anybody even listened to economists on this one.
For example, The Economist pointed out many of the upcoming problems in 2003. And probably before; they've been warning of a housing bubble and problems with Fannie Mae for ages.
: We borrowed too much money and spent it on non-productive consumption.
That may contribute a little, and it's certainly something I want to see fixed, but it's not the major deal right now. It's that when conceivably any bank or company could blow up at any time (due to hideen problems with over-leveraged MBSs or CDSs) nobody wants to lend anybody money. That's a problem because lending is to the economy what oil is to your engine.
Still, every time I see an article about somebody losing their home, it includes a mention of how they took out a home equity loan to pay "bills". When they specify, it's credit card bills, I presume run up by debt-fueled overconsumption. Personally, I've never owned a credit card, and intend to keep it that way.
When analyzing a disaster, "the problem" is not one of the things that, if changed, could have prevented it. It's all of those things.
There are a bunch of relatively dumb things that made this disaster possible. It only happened because people were looking at the system as if were static, and assuming that their change was the only change.
To create this crisis took venal lenders, dumb borrowers, shitty loans, sloppy packaging, too-cheap money, weak modeling, corrupt ratings agencies, excess leverage, poor transparency, unchecked greed, perverse compensation structures, rampant lobbyists, irresponsible government, and incompetent regulation.
We shouldn't fix just one of those. We should fix all of them.
The secondary money market (known as derivatives) in the US, is $500 trillion. This means that the primary lending source (banks) sells the loans to someone else. Who incidentally, unlike banks, are totally unregulated. Who in turn then sells it too, and so it goes...
Those numbers aren't directly comparable. The total derivatives contract values aren't real money. They're more like measuring your insurance policy by the size of your house. It may be a $250,000 policy, but the actual cash changing hands is a couple hundred bucks a month.
Whichever financial guru Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps were good ideas for people to invest was either a moron or crook
They're actually perfectly fine ideas. They're just shitty implementations.
The obvious problems I see:
There was no mechanism for checking up on actual mortgage quality; they were assumed to be as good as historical mortgages, so the added risk from dirtbags pushing mortgages to people who couldn't afford them was not priced in
The ratings agencies received fees from issuers of the securities; that unpoliced conflict of interest resulted in absurdly high ratings.
The writing of particular rating grades into law and regulation created an unpoliced incentive to cheapen ratings.
Financial regulators allowed many institutions to become too big to fail, while simultaneously vastly increasing their risk limits.
Regulators also allowed a lot of derivatives trading and position information to be private, decreasing transparency and laying the groundwork for this crisis of confidence between banks.
Saying they're a bad idea is like saying explosives are a bad idea. They're actually a good idea that merits very careful handling.
people assume and have been told for years that real estate will *always* increase in value
And you know who told them this?
real estate agents
mortgage brokers
home renovation contractors
home improvement loan vendors
people with a house to sell
people who own houses
Every one of those people had a clear financial interest in the general public believing that house prices always go up. The good news is that for the next 20-50 years, there will always be somebody handy to call bullshit when this lie gets trotted out.
Of course, nobody will actually learn the deeper lesson: to be skeptical of things that "everybody" believes, especially when they are appealing to you and lucrative for somebody else.
You brought the messenger into this. I pointed out that you lacked proof. You then justified your claim via your personal credibility.I'm just saying that, as a newly-minted account, you had none. And now, given that you're dodging the question, you have less than none.
I've never believed in a conspiracy in my life, but I've spent a great deal of time on this and I am convinced. So are a lot of other people, apparently including Christopher Cox.
You? Who's that?
You're some guy who has turned up on Slashdot precisely to push particular views in this one story. Views with no evidence, just blah-blah theory talk, and no real answers for key questions. If you've got a real name and background you'd like to own up to, maybe you've got some credibility. Otherwise, to me you're just another troll or fake.
And Christopher Cox was never convinced. He pushed this very temporary and limited regulation because he knew it didn't matter; it was just to give the appearance of action, while doing nothing. Because his entire SEC career has been marked by doing nothing, and when possible, doing less.
Sendmail is necessarily hard. Mail routing at the time was complicated. Now it's easier, which is why Postfix is a snap to configure for common cases, and why a lot of Sendmail admins never have to see the scary magic at the heart.
Nagios, on the other hand, is unnecessarily hard. Especially for simple setups and novice users, the pain is ridiculously out of proportion to the gain.
Oh please. It's NOT THAT HARD!!!! For what it does, it's fairly simple actually. Compared to any other package of similar capability, it's quite average in terms of difficulty actually. No worse than something like Exim or Apache.
The difference with something like Exim or Apache is that the tricky concepts you need to understand are mostly external constraints. SMTP is weird and complex. Serving files via HTTP and connecting to web apps is slightly less weird, but much more complex.
A basic install of Nagios, on the other hand, is doing something pretty simple and straightforward. But at least with the 2.x series it was an unnecessarily giant pain in the ass to configure because you had to understand the Nagios-specific way of looking at the world and handling configuration. It may be easy once you know it, but there's a steep learning curve to get you that far.
Now I'm not griping. It is free. Although I was tempted a couple of times, I never quite got around to fixing it or building a competitor. But if I had to talk somebody through setting up Apache or Nagios over the phone, I'd rather do 5 of the Apache calls than 1 of the Nagios calls.
First, there's no evidence that the recent restrictions on naked shorting mattered at all.
Second, if options traders could hedge major positions for free, they would do it all the time, and you wouldn't have a few stocks with some amount of failure to deliver, it would be massive quantities of all of them.
Third, no sane clearing firm would put up with somebody taking a position that could trigger a short squeeze all on its own. It's too risky, even if a clearing firm was willing to take a risk on the unlimited downside of the short sale of a large part of a company.
I think Hanlon's razor yields a more plausible explanation. Most people do it properly, through a mix of non-idiocy, fear of regulatory or exchange enforcement, and sheepdogging from clearing firms. Some people screw it up from time to time. And very rarely, somebody tries a stunt like this, they get hammered.
As you say, if it can be done, it would be done. Lots. If it were, we'd see the effects of it all over the place. It would be obvious when somebody pulled it off, and even more obvious if they screwed it up. Since we don't see that, the simple assumption is that it isn't really happening, and that we just don't have the details on why.
And regulation is the only method ( other than a 'free' market ) to set prices.
You can set prices through regulations, but most regulations don't set prices. For example, take nutritional label regulations. Or health code regulation. Ditto car safety laws, building codes, accounting standards, electrical codes, pharmaceutical regs, and the raft of generally helpful rules on treatment and payment of workers. All of these may affect prices, in that they change costs. But they don't set prices; people are still free to charge what they want.
The only big US intervention in prices I can think of are in agricultural products, and I think those are foolish and wasteful. If we want to give money to small farmers, I think we should just give them the money, or make it tied to ecological maintenance, rather than paying them for not growing food, or growing too much and dumping in the third world.
Under a planned economy, there is no need for speculation - the concept of liquidity doesn't exist. I realise this offends capitalist apologists. The point is that the liquidity argument won't phase a socialist at all.
I'm not offended. I agree that in theory, a planned economy doesn't need that. However, even if they work in theory (which I'm skeptical of), they have never worked in practice at scale.
The closest thing we have today to planned economies are either a) the various state-run enterprises in China, or b) the internal structures of some relatively large, old companies. Both are horribly inefficient.
No. It's there to maximize profits.
Your evidence for this?
As a counter-example, consider the selection of market mechanisms for allocation of pollution credits. They weren't chosen to maximize profits; they were chosen to find the most efficient way to cut emissions. They do take advantage of the common urge to maximize profits, but that's not what they're for.
Under a free market, whatever will maximize profits is exactly what people will do. If that means horrific waste of resources, then that's what will happen.
First, profit maximization isn't necessarily bad. In a typical small business, My income is related to the amount of value I deliver to my customers. I subtract from that the costs. So one very common cause of profits is doing something valuable for other people. Another way to increase profits is to minimize the resources used. As far as I can tell, both of those are good behaviors.
Yes, various douchebags try to maximize profits other ways. Often they sacrifice long-term value generation for short-term cash extraction. Or they shift costs inappropriately to other people. These are known problems, and they are often solved through government regulation. And their are unsustainable behaviors, so companies that do too much of that eventually go out of business.
But in practice, try actually achieving them in a capitalist society. You'll find massive resistance. If you still manage to push ahead, you'll find business fleeing the country to pursue more 'productive' environments.
Do you have data to back that? From what I've seen, the citizenry in the west is hugely in favor of investment in education; the only real argument is about the best way to do that. And many businesses flock to be near universities. E.g., Silicon Valley, or Boston. The Small Business Administration lends circa $30 billion a year.
Sure. But how do we intervene? Do we give them a trillion dollars and a pat on the back? Do we buy all their shit investments and let them keep all the good ones? Or do we actually invest in them... ie nationalize them?
We effectively nationalized AIG, and I'm fine with that. We'll sell it off again later and probably turn a profit on it.
As far as buying mortgage-backed securities, as long as we're buying at something approaching a cur
You are confused about what the 'free' in 'free market' refers to. It refers to regulation, or lack thereof.
And your source for that is?
As far as I know, and as far as Wikipedia thinks, it has to do with a free price system. That's in contrast to a planned economy, where a central authority sets prices.
. Is it there to maximize profits? Are there more fundamental reasons for it to be there?
It's to maximize efficient allocation of resources.
Clearly speculation does nothing to increase real production.
Clearly? That's not clear to me. Speculators are valuable in a variety of ways. The biggest one is through increasing liquidity, and they also are good at rooting out imbalances and inefficiencies. All of those aid in smooth economic functioning.
And clearly the market doesn't distribute equitably.
Did you expect it to? That's not what it's good at, and it's not what you should use it for. There are other mechanisms that are much better at that, like progressive taxation, and spending that on opportunity-increasing activities, like education, small business loans, and aid to people who for whatever reason can't keep up.
Why does big business get to go directly against their own non-interventionist 'free market' ideology, yet individuals must bear the full brunt of the collapse, with no bail-out of their mortages?
Everybody wants bailouts when something goes wrong. Generally, they shouldn't get them.
The reason to intervene in the markets now isn't for the bankers; they can go fuck themselves. It's to prevent a systemic collapse that would devastate the economy for years to come.
Note that even now with the government actively involved, a lot of bankers are getting the short end of the stick.
Sure, but that doesn't count as an asset, does it? If it did, then you could increase your assets infinitely just by issuing new shares and buying them back.
And for the balance sheets I looked at, nobody has much in the way of treasury stock, certainly not enough to cause a big balance sheet problem even if you did call it an asset. So I think the notion that a naked short spree could cause a bankruptcy this way is still pretty implausible.
most companies (with stock) hold a decent percentage of their own stock (an asset).
Do you have any evidence for that? On the balance sheets I just looked at, nobody held more than a couple percentage of total assets in their own stock, and it was not counted as an asset.
Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing. If a company goes bankrupt, then creditors get paid before shareholders. So lending somebody money against their own shares seems crazy.
If things get ugly, then as a secured creditor, you get to seize the assets, which are worthless. I'm no expert, but it seems like at best you'd turn into an unsecured creditor, which you could have been had you just lent them the money outright. And at worst, you'd be given the probably-worthless stock, which you could have had just by buying equity.
It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't first conspired to cause the crash and did so secretly.
I see. And was this before or after they planned the 9/11 attacks?
now that the free market has been shown to be utter rubbish.
Oh, please. I grant you that the free-market fundamentalists are just as crazy as creationists, biblical literalists, Maoists, Randites, astrologers, and the Heaven's Gate wackos.
However, free markets are very effective tools in the right circumstances, especially when well regulated. Sensible people in finance have been bitching for years about the problems that have been building up. See, for example, this 2003 article from The Economist saying that we were in a bubble:
the sheer size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which at the end of 2002 accounted for 44% of all mortgage debt) could pose a risk to the whole financial system. [...] If the housing bubbles burst, the economic consequences will be much more severe than those of the recent stockmarket crash.
And they've been pointing out this and other risks frequently in the years since.
What we have here is at least as much as a political failure as a financial one. US regulators stopped regulating. Partly because we had idiotic, ideology-driven government. And partly Washington is hip deep in lobbyists and their money. If regulators had regulated and the overseers had overseen, there still might have been problems, but not ones that risks a global crash.
The only financial companies that have been anywhere near okay are deposit banks.
That's hardly the case. I used to work for derivatives traders, and I still have plenty of pals in the industry. The ones I've talked to aren't worried at all. They're certainly irritated that they have to help pay for bailouts of people who are worse risk managers than them, but they aren't particularly worried.
No, the fed and treasury need to get out of the way and let the markets correct.
Correction is swell, and I'm all for it. As a guy who has chosen to sit the housing market out for the last 6 years because I thought the prices were foolish, I'm with you on that. And there are certainly ways people could intervene that would be idiocy.
But there's a risk of systemic failure that goes well beyond what a normal correction would bring. Winding things down gracefully is a lot less traumatic (and a lot less expensive) than doing it all in one go because credit suddenly evaporates. That was the lesson learned in the Great Depression, and although we one day might have to re-learn it, I doubt it will be under Bernanke.
Slashdot Mirror
First, try to move up in your current job while your foot's in the door.
This is a great way to go. A friend of mine just did this, and couldn't be happier.
I think this can be easier at a small company than a large one, so if you're having trouble with the lateral move at your current company, find yourself a new QA job.
That's ridiculous on several levels.
First, economic researchers are not deciding global economic policy. They are offering plenty of opinions, theories, and notions, it's true. But so is everybody else, and the decisions about what advice to accept is left to governments, many of which are, like the American one, "of, by, and for the people". We collectively choose what experiments to participate in when we pick our representatives.
Second, the people in the soft sciences don't have the power to demand anything. They could suggest that, I suppose. But the only personal action they could take would be to stop researching and publishing. Given that would reduce the likelihood of good decisions being made, that would seem unethical to me. At any rate it would be pointless, as both political leaders and citizens in general are unlikely to support mandatory mass migration every time somebody doesn't like an economic notion just because some guy on Slashdot has a personal obsession with ideological purity.
Third, like it or not, society and the economy will both keep going in some form or another. If some individual or group wants to opt out, godspeed; there's plenty of wilderness. But the rest of us have to keep up and deal with events. We can't stop deciding what to do; we can only make the best decisions possible.
Fourth, science doesn't have a point of view on ethics. Science is about what is; ethics are about what ought to be, and confusing them is sometimes known as the naturalistic fallacy. Individual scientists who experiment directly on humans do now have some very smart and sharply defined views on handling that research, especially in the medical field. But there's no reason to think that even those who develop those ethics think they apply the way you apply them.
I'm glad you have a personal view about how the world could be better, but bagging on economists who are doing their best to make things better isn't going to improve anything. Nor is your unwillingness to back any of your points with references or data. Maybe you're a genius with the next revolution in societal structure in your head, but nobody will pay any attention if you keep arguing like a loon.
You seem to understand that adverts are a massive source of income for many websites, yet don't seem to have a problem with using an ad-blocker on those very websites. That's fucked up.
Like the other guy, I refused to deal with the animated ads. I'm distractable enough without them.
Whenever possible, I subscribe. And I only block the blinky ads, so hopefully people choosing ads for their sites will get the hint and pick things that compliment their content, rather than detracting from it.
Sure, and if you look at enough writs by court astrologers, you'll find many a case where no one listened to them and it turned out they were right.
Don't be an ass. This isn't some wild-eyed nut on a streetcorner. The Economist is a publication with a circulation of 1.3 million copies a week, and they have been consistently warning of problems for years. If you've got a better source for the consensus views of mainstream economists and finance professionals, I'd love to hear it.
The problem wasn't that the mainstream view was wrong; it was that people didn't listen to it. And it was only some people who didn't listen, generally because it was in their short-term financial interest not to.
The point is that there was no consensus model adhered to by the vast majority of economists that produced a consensus prediction.
And? They're not collectively promising one, either.
Figuring out what is happening with a bridge is infinitely easier than a global economy. For example, a structure doesn't change its behavior under stress depending on your opinions of it. Atoms don't have opinions.
I know you'd like sociology and economics to be as simple and well-behaved as physics, but it isn't, at least not yet. If you can do better, then step up and show us. If not, then recognize that you're just ranting. There's nothing wrong with a good rant; it can be fun. But it shouldn't be mistaken for a sensible contribution to the discussion, especially by its speaker.
I know you Ayn Rand fanboys like the idea of a gold standard, but sorry it is just a really bad idea.
Ain't that the truth.
I feel for them in some ways; if you think about it too long, it gets a little spooky. To get past that requires a taste for subtlety.
If you're not good at subtlety then fleeing back to something apparently solid like gold is awfully appealing. Kinda like how they have trouble getting how functioning social organizations work, and so flee back to selfishness.
For those who find the Randites kinda annoying, I suggest checking out Matt Ruff's satiric novel Sewer Gas & Electric. I thought it was hilarious.
you have to start looking for the culprit in the "science" of economics.
Oh, please. As if anybody even listened to economists on this one.
For example, The Economist pointed out many of the upcoming problems in 2003. And probably before; they've been warning of a housing bubble and problems with Fannie Mae for ages.
: We borrowed too much money and spent it on non-productive consumption.
That may contribute a little, and it's certainly something I want to see fixed, but it's not the major deal right now. It's that when conceivably any bank or company could blow up at any time (due to hideen problems with over-leveraged MBSs or CDSs) nobody wants to lend anybody money. That's a problem because lending is to the economy what oil is to your engine.
Still, every time I see an article about somebody losing their home, it includes a mention of how they took out a home equity loan to pay "bills". When they specify, it's credit card bills, I presume run up by debt-fueled overconsumption. Personally, I've never owned a credit card, and intend to keep it that way.
When analyzing a disaster, "the problem" is not one of the things that, if changed, could have prevented it. It's all of those things.
There are a bunch of relatively dumb things that made this disaster possible. It only happened because people were looking at the system as if were static, and assuming that their change was the only change.
To create this crisis took venal lenders, dumb borrowers, shitty loans, sloppy packaging, too-cheap money, weak modeling, corrupt ratings agencies, excess leverage, poor transparency, unchecked greed, perverse compensation structures, rampant lobbyists, irresponsible government, and incompetent regulation.
We shouldn't fix just one of those. We should fix all of them.
The secondary money market (known as derivatives) in the US, is $500 trillion. This means that the primary lending source (banks) sells the loans to someone else. Who incidentally, unlike banks, are totally unregulated. Who in turn then sells it too, and so it goes...
Those numbers aren't directly comparable. The total derivatives contract values aren't real money. They're more like measuring your insurance policy by the size of your house. It may be a $250,000 policy, but the actual cash changing hands is a couple hundred bucks a month.
Whichever financial guru Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps were good ideas for people to invest was either a moron or crook
They're actually perfectly fine ideas. They're just shitty implementations.
The obvious problems I see:
Saying they're a bad idea is like saying explosives are a bad idea. They're actually a good idea that merits very careful handling.
people assume and have been told for years that real estate will *always* increase in value
And you know who told them this?
Every one of those people had a clear financial interest in the general public believing that house prices always go up. The good news is that for the next 20-50 years, there will always be somebody handy to call bullshit when this lie gets trotted out.
Of course, nobody will actually learn the deeper lesson: to be skeptical of things that "everybody" believes, especially when they are appealing to you and lucrative for somebody else.
You're stupid.
Well, now you've persuaded me of your position!
And wounded me grievously, to boot. Some anonymous troll with conspiracy theory and a fake account has called me dumb! Oh noes!
You can attack the messenger if you like.
You brought the messenger into this. I pointed out that you lacked proof. You then justified your claim via your personal credibility.I'm just saying that, as a newly-minted account, you had none. And now, given that you're dodging the question, you have less than none.
I've never believed in a conspiracy in my life, but I've spent a great deal of time on this and I am convinced. So are a lot of other people, apparently including Christopher Cox.
You? Who's that?
You're some guy who has turned up on Slashdot precisely to push particular views in this one story. Views with no evidence, just blah-blah theory talk, and no real answers for key questions. If you've got a real name and background you'd like to own up to, maybe you've got some credibility. Otherwise, to me you're just another troll or fake.
And Christopher Cox was never convinced. He pushed this very temporary and limited regulation because he knew it didn't matter; it was just to give the appearance of action, while doing nothing. Because his entire SEC career has been marked by doing nothing, and when possible, doing less.
Sendmail is necessarily hard. Mail routing at the time was complicated. Now it's easier, which is why Postfix is a snap to configure for common cases, and why a lot of Sendmail admins never have to see the scary magic at the heart.
Nagios, on the other hand, is unnecessarily hard. Especially for simple setups and novice users, the pain is ridiculously out of proportion to the gain.
Oh please. It's NOT THAT HARD!!!! For what it does, it's fairly simple actually. Compared to any other package of similar capability, it's quite average in terms of difficulty actually. No worse than something like Exim or Apache.
The difference with something like Exim or Apache is that the tricky concepts you need to understand are mostly external constraints. SMTP is weird and complex. Serving files via HTTP and connecting to web apps is slightly less weird, but much more complex.
A basic install of Nagios, on the other hand, is doing something pretty simple and straightforward. But at least with the 2.x series it was an unnecessarily giant pain in the ass to configure because you had to understand the Nagios-specific way of looking at the world and handling configuration. It may be easy once you know it, but there's a steep learning curve to get you that far.
Now I'm not griping. It is free. Although I was tempted a couple of times, I never quite got around to fixing it or building a competitor. But if I had to talk somebody through setting up Apache or Nagios over the phone, I'd rather do 5 of the Apache calls than 1 of the Nagios calls.
I'm just not buying it.
First, there's no evidence that the recent restrictions on naked shorting mattered at all.
Second, if options traders could hedge major positions for free, they would do it all the time, and you wouldn't have a few stocks with some amount of failure to deliver, it would be massive quantities of all of them.
Third, no sane clearing firm would put up with somebody taking a position that could trigger a short squeeze all on its own. It's too risky, even if a clearing firm was willing to take a risk on the unlimited downside of the short sale of a large part of a company.
I think Hanlon's razor yields a more plausible explanation. Most people do it properly, through a mix of non-idiocy, fear of regulatory or exchange enforcement, and sheepdogging from clearing firms. Some people screw it up from time to time. And very rarely, somebody tries a stunt like this, they get hammered.
As you say, if it can be done, it would be done. Lots. If it were, we'd see the effects of it all over the place. It would be obvious when somebody pulled it off, and even more obvious if they screwed it up. Since we don't see that, the simple assumption is that it isn't really happening, and that we just don't have the details on why.
And regulation is the only method ( other than a 'free' market ) to set prices.
You can set prices through regulations, but most regulations don't set prices. For example, take nutritional label regulations. Or health code regulation. Ditto car safety laws, building codes, accounting standards, electrical codes, pharmaceutical regs, and the raft of generally helpful rules on treatment and payment of workers. All of these may affect prices, in that they change costs. But they don't set prices; people are still free to charge what they want.
The only big US intervention in prices I can think of are in agricultural products, and I think those are foolish and wasteful. If we want to give money to small farmers, I think we should just give them the money, or make it tied to ecological maintenance, rather than paying them for not growing food, or growing too much and dumping in the third world.
Under a planned economy, there is no need for speculation - the concept of liquidity doesn't exist. I realise this offends capitalist apologists. The point is that the liquidity argument won't phase a socialist at all.
I'm not offended. I agree that in theory, a planned economy doesn't need that. However, even if they work in theory (which I'm skeptical of), they have never worked in practice at scale.
The closest thing we have today to planned economies are either a) the various state-run enterprises in China, or b) the internal structures of some relatively large, old companies. Both are horribly inefficient.
No. It's there to maximize profits.
Your evidence for this?
As a counter-example, consider the selection of market mechanisms for allocation of pollution credits. They weren't chosen to maximize profits; they were chosen to find the most efficient way to cut emissions. They do take advantage of the common urge to maximize profits, but that's not what they're for.
Under a free market, whatever will maximize profits is exactly what people will do. If that means horrific waste of resources, then that's what will happen.
First, profit maximization isn't necessarily bad. In a typical small business, My income is related to the amount of value I deliver to my customers. I subtract from that the costs. So one very common cause of profits is doing something valuable for other people. Another way to increase profits is to minimize the resources used. As far as I can tell, both of those are good behaviors.
Yes, various douchebags try to maximize profits other ways. Often they sacrifice long-term value generation for short-term cash extraction. Or they shift costs inappropriately to other people. These are known problems, and they are often solved through government regulation. And their are unsustainable behaviors, so companies that do too much of that eventually go out of business.
But in practice, try actually achieving them in a capitalist society. You'll find massive resistance. If you still manage to push ahead, you'll find business fleeing the country to pursue more 'productive' environments.
Do you have data to back that? From what I've seen, the citizenry in the west is hugely in favor of investment in education; the only real argument is about the best way to do that. And many businesses flock to be near universities. E.g., Silicon Valley, or Boston. The Small Business Administration lends circa $30 billion a year.
Sure. But how do we intervene? Do we give them a trillion dollars and a pat on the back? Do we buy all their shit investments and let them keep all the good ones? Or do we actually invest in them ... ie nationalize them?
We effectively nationalized AIG, and I'm fine with that. We'll sell it off again later and probably turn a profit on it.
As far as buying mortgage-backed securities, as long as we're buying at something approaching a cur
You are confused about what the 'free' in 'free market' refers to. It refers to regulation, or lack thereof.
And your source for that is?
As far as I know, and as far as Wikipedia thinks, it has to do with a free price system. That's in contrast to a planned economy, where a central authority sets prices.
. Is it there to maximize profits? Are there more fundamental reasons for it to be there?
It's to maximize efficient allocation of resources.
Clearly speculation does nothing to increase real production.
Clearly? That's not clear to me. Speculators are valuable in a variety of ways. The biggest one is through increasing liquidity, and they also are good at rooting out imbalances and inefficiencies. All of those aid in smooth economic functioning.
And clearly the market doesn't distribute equitably.
Did you expect it to? That's not what it's good at, and it's not what you should use it for. There are other mechanisms that are much better at that, like progressive taxation, and spending that on opportunity-increasing activities, like education, small business loans, and aid to people who for whatever reason can't keep up.
Why does big business get to go directly against their own non-interventionist 'free market' ideology, yet individuals must bear the full brunt of the collapse, with no bail-out of their mortages?
Everybody wants bailouts when something goes wrong. Generally, they shouldn't get them.
The reason to intervene in the markets now isn't for the bankers; they can go fuck themselves. It's to prevent a systemic collapse that would devastate the economy for years to come.
Note that even now with the government actively involved, a lot of bankers are getting the short end of the stick.
Sure, but that doesn't count as an asset, does it? If it did, then you could increase your assets infinitely just by issuing new shares and buying them back.
And for the balance sheets I looked at, nobody has much in the way of treasury stock, certainly not enough to cause a big balance sheet problem even if you did call it an asset. So I think the notion that a naked short spree could cause a bankruptcy this way is still pretty implausible.
most companies (with stock) hold a decent percentage of their own stock (an asset).
Do you have any evidence for that? On the balance sheets I just looked at, nobody held more than a couple percentage of total assets in their own stock, and it was not counted as an asset.
Why would a creditor accept stock as collateral?
Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing. If a company goes bankrupt, then creditors get paid before shareholders. So lending somebody money against their own shares seems crazy.
If things get ugly, then as a secured creditor, you get to seize the assets, which are worthless. I'm no expert, but it seems like at best you'd turn into an unsecured creditor, which you could have been had you just lent them the money outright. And at worst, you'd be given the probably-worthless stock, which you could have had just by buying equity.
It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't first conspired to cause the crash and did so secretly.
I see. And was this before or after they planned the 9/11 attacks?
now that the free market has been shown to be utter rubbish.
Oh, please. I grant you that the free-market fundamentalists are just as crazy as creationists, biblical literalists, Maoists, Randites, astrologers, and the Heaven's Gate wackos.
However, free markets are very effective tools in the right circumstances, especially when well regulated. Sensible people in finance have been bitching for years about the problems that have been building up. See, for example, this 2003 article from The Economist saying that we were in a bubble:
the sheer size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which at the end of 2002 accounted for 44% of all mortgage debt) could pose a risk to the whole financial system. [...] If the housing bubbles burst, the economic consequences will be much more severe than those of the recent stockmarket crash.
And they've been pointing out this and other risks frequently in the years since.
What we have here is at least as much as a political failure as a financial one. US regulators stopped regulating. Partly because we had idiotic, ideology-driven government. And partly Washington is hip deep in lobbyists and their money. If regulators had regulated and the overseers had overseen, there still might have been problems, but not ones that risks a global crash.
You don't need conspiracy theories when the facts are on CNBC every day.
Why would you make it sound like a bad thing that, the government and major capitalists are conspiring to prevent a crash and are doing it openly?
Oh, and anybody who makes it this far should read EastCoastSurfer's "Molly" link. Whoa!
The only financial companies that have been anywhere near okay are deposit banks.
That's hardly the case. I used to work for derivatives traders, and I still have plenty of pals in the industry. The ones I've talked to aren't worried at all. They're certainly irritated that they have to help pay for bailouts of people who are worse risk managers than them, but they aren't particularly worried.
No, the fed and treasury need to get out of the way and let the markets correct.
Correction is swell, and I'm all for it. As a guy who has chosen to sit the housing market out for the last 6 years because I thought the prices were foolish, I'm with you on that. And there are certainly ways people could intervene that would be idiocy.
But there's a risk of systemic failure that goes well beyond what a normal correction would bring. Winding things down gracefully is a lot less traumatic (and a lot less expensive) than doing it all in one go because credit suddenly evaporates. That was the lesson learned in the Great Depression, and although we one day might have to re-learn it, I doubt it will be under Bernanke.