I notice how so many of the supposed examples of deregulation cited in this discussion are actually examples of government incompetence and malfeasance. Sure, you can deregulate in a way that is a disaster as you demonstrate. But just because California created a market which heavily favored Enron and then the governor of California deliberately forced those conditions to continue for about half a year until one of the three large electricity utilities were in bankruptcy and a second was about to file for bankruptcy, doesn't mean that there is anything inherently wrong with deregulation or markets,
Of course, they don't. Even the most anarchic of markets still have regulation else there is no support for trading, it's just regulation imposed by the traders instead of an external source like a government or powerful leader.
Um, producing trades that you do not intend to act on to manipulate prices is literally fraud and illegal. This will never be legal, nor should ever be legal.
I disagree. If someone had bought those book orders, the trader would have honored them. And if you act a certain way in a stock market just because someone places a large book order, then don't be surprised that someone places large book orders just to get you to act that way.
Game developers have a reason to create sentient free roaming machines? I was thinking more the US military who has both access to considerable funding for such things, has expressed interest in researching such stuff, and can keep a secret pretty well.
You don't think I should be able to cancel that buy order due to the new information?
Consider the following from the actual US Department of Justice press release (linked in the Slashdot story):
Sarao was charged in a federal criminal complaint in the Northern District of Illinois on Feb. 11, 2015, with one count of wire fraud, 10 counts of commodities fraud, 10 counts of commodities manipulation, and one count of âoespoofing,â a practice of bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution.
There is a specific meaning to "spoofing" which involves somehow canceling bids before execution (and somehow doesn't apply to current HFT). Rather than make that impossible to do in the various markets (or the other alternative, simply not caring), they make it illegal for anyone that falls afoul of the US government.
It wouldn't be, if spoofing weren't a crime. The US could have simply not made it a crime in this case and then it wouldn't be "blatantly illegal" for small traders to do.
And notice how the problem is due to poor market design. Instead of fixing markets so that it isn't possible to "cancel before execution", they implement ridiculous rules and laws instead.
Consider this analogy. How many people here think it's a good idea to modify US law just to protect the *IAA business models? So why is it acceptable to modify US law just to protect stock market business models?
"Spoofing" is a silly activity to make a crime. There are two reasons. First, any book order that you place has a chance of being bought. Thus, it doesn't matter if you "spoof" or not, it's something you can be called on and you have to honor the book order you placed. Second, it's very easy to conceal intent to spoof, especially with a computer program. Just don't brag about it in email while the feds are listening in.
It sounds like this guy got caught merely because he was the target of an investigation for something else and they found something to extradite him with in the emails they were reading. It'll be interesting to see if this actually goes to court and if some "parallel construction" happens.
My view is that spoofing should be quite legal and the authorities should be completely uninterested in it. The reason is that there are a lot of crappy traders out there, both human and computer. Spoofing is one of many ways to stress test these traders and weed out the ones who shouldn't be anywhere near a market.
before we start worrying about the sentient free roaming machines that don't exist yet and won't exist for many, many, years.
Unless, of course, they already exist. The problem with this field is both that we don't have any experience with it and much of it will remain secret. The biggest players are the national or supernational governments and they won't necessarily keep you informed of the state of the art.
Which doesn't change the fact that government had competition in the arena of force, meaning it didn't have a monopoly. And if your government is really that bad, it's not going to be over by putting down one rebellion. You'll constantly be competing for that monopoly on force instead of owning one.
It doesn't have competition in the US for the things I mentioned such as ownership and use of nuclear weapons or the legal right to wage war. The monopoly on force exists even if you choose not to recognize it.
It doesn't matter how sunny it is, how ideal for transport, or whatever if you don't have the water for the plants to grow.
And it does, when you do have enough water. There is no point to your argument. Lack of water has already been demonstrated to be something that can be overcome.
The original statement was monopoly on "force", not monopoly on a specific type of weapon.
You are wasting my time.
The history of asymmetric warfare has shown us that one does not need the biggest and fanciest weapons to contest the government's ability to establish a monopoly on force.
And the history of asymmetric warfare shows that the weaker side usually loses.
What was the point of your post? Are you trying to claim that two thirds less land area on Earth wouldn't be important? That a "what if?" situation, like opportunity costs of our choices (to name one that happens all the time), isn't important?
Of all the governments in the world, the US government is the one that is farthest away and least capable of having a monopoly on force.
I don't consider the Second Amendment to be even remotely as powerful in this regard. Where's the US citizen's right to own and operate a nuclear weapon, for example? That's a important example of the monopoly right there. And it is illegal for a US citizen to wage war on another country without express legislative approval from US Congress.
It doesn't solve the issue of them wanting to grow crops in a dessert.
First, most of California agriculture is not in desert. Those areas tend to be rather low on rainfall, but not low enough to qualify as a desert. Second, presence of water is not the only reason to grow something in a particular region. Southern California happens to be famous for a pleasant climate and a lot of sunny days. It's also easy to ship to the global market from there. They're already in the middle of a large market, the US rail system and several of the better ports in the world.
Corporations are no different from governments,except they are not even remotely tied to the wishes of the country as a whole.
Sure, the US government is indistinguishable from any other corporation with a monopoly of force over 350 million people. But let's consider your statement in detail.
First, the usual use of the term, corporation is with respect to a legal creation of a limited liability organization. The vast majority of those have no relevance. They were created as a legal means for a single person to organize their business efforts or a shell company that enables some business or tax avoidance task. Another significant group aren't intended for business, but are rather to organize a charity or similar organization. The remaining include a fair number of labor unions and co ops.
Moving on, we still have vastly more small business corporations than the big private and public corporations which have you worked up in a lather. It is worth noting here that that the US has more governments than it does have publicly traded corporations. I see that there are at least 20,000 townships, counties, and higher levels of government, while there are something like 5000 publicly traded corporations.
So sure, if we treat them as just organizations with a budget, there isn't that much different between businesses with a fair number of employees and governments of similar scale.
But scale and power are the final stumbling block here, it's worth stating the obvious, that the FBI is not run by a business corporation, but by the US government which is several times larger than the largest of corporations (Saudi Aramco, a Saudi Arabia-owned corporation) in terms of revenue and which has legal advantages and power that no business corporation can touch. That makes the FBI case very different than if say, Walmart tried the same thing.
It is commonly taught they took to hunting with much stewardship. Did they treat the land and environment as modern civilization does now, pushing the limits and then collectively realizing time to back off a little?
Lot's of things are taught. That doesn't make them true. The only real difference between then and now is that humanity has a larger impact on its environment.
Go take a couple of graduate level courses in paleotaxonomy. Then perhaps an introductory course in logic.
You need to have scraped your beak against the rock of Svithjod (which is currently a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide) once every thousand years and wear it down to a nub before you are allowed to make the above argument.
The developed world already solved the problem of overpopulation. Make people wealthy and allow women to have equal opportunity to men rather than be relegated to baby-makers. Most of the native populations of the developed world reproduce at below replacement rate and continued population growth comes from immigration from the rest of the world and the higher fertility of those immigrants.
Further, if humanity has die-offs, those die-offs will be concentrated in the areas that are having the most trouble with population growth. Even enormous mass migrations or the developed world partially sharing in the pain will not change that. The disease will be the cure, if those areas which suffer from overpopulation don't do anything about it.
He's not saying that the extinctions aren 't happening. He's saying that we don't know that they're comparable to the big extinctions of the past. It's worth remembering here that there is a huge problem with comparing modern world extinctions with extinctions in the geological past. First, it is vastly easier to see and catalog species today than in the past where fossilization is an extremely rare event. We can't know what didn't get fossilized.
But creatures which weren't easy to drive extinct, due to numbers, longevity of the species, or widespread habitat, would also be more likely to leave fossils. So we also have that the fossils of the geological past come from species which are more likely to not be threatened by extinction than the usual species today.
Third, species have different meanings in modern and geological terms. Today, we can classify species based on subtle distinctions like behavior, coloration, habitat, and most important, DNA which usually are impossible to determine from fossil records. Fossil species on the other hand, are determined by rather crude morphology traits which can be fossilized. A fossil species is a much bigger grouping than a modern species.
So when you combine all these aspects, you get that extinction of a fossil species is a much bigger deal just on its own than extinction of a modern species and may represent in some cases the extinction of dozens of modern species.
I think a better measure here is extinction at the genus level. Genuses are more likely to have fossil records and we can speak of the relative decline of the number of genuses in a proposed extinction event.
When you do that, I don't think there is a serious comparison at the present between human-caused extinction and geological extinction events. I suspect most genus-level extinctions would be in large terrestrial animals, amphibians, and any genus of organisms particularly susceptible to local habitat destruction. You don't have large scale declines in the number of all land and sea genus-level organisms (which can be fossilized) as are present during major extinction events of the past.
I have no trouble with people pooling resources and having their First Amendment rights maintained as group. However, if they want limited liability, then I have a problem with that.
It's a standard application of the First Amendment. The whole point is to allow it no matter how much of a problem you or the powers-that-be have with it.
you can STILL restrict corporate political spending WITHOUT intruding on ANYBODY'S freedom
Of course that is wrong. As ScentCone noted, the law in question was preventing people from pooling their resources (via a corporation, a very common organizational structure for non-profits) to distribute a political message, which is a legitimate application of the First Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice how so many of the supposed examples of deregulation cited in this discussion are actually examples of government incompetence and malfeasance. Sure, you can deregulate in a way that is a disaster as you demonstrate. But just because California created a market which heavily favored Enron and then the governor of California deliberately forced those conditions to continue for about half a year until one of the three large electricity utilities were in bankruptcy and a second was about to file for bankruptcy, doesn't mean that there is anything inherently wrong with deregulation or markets,
I'll just point out markets do not equal anarchy.
Of course, they don't. Even the most anarchic of markets still have regulation else there is no support for trading, it's just regulation imposed by the traders instead of an external source like a government or powerful leader.
I'll just point out that markets are an ancient solution to the distributed control problem.
Um, producing trades that you do not intend to act on to manipulate prices is literally fraud and illegal. This will never be legal, nor should ever be legal.
I disagree. If someone had bought those book orders, the trader would have honored them. And if you act a certain way in a stock market just because someone places a large book order, then don't be surprised that someone places large book orders just to get you to act that way.
The biggest players are game developers.
Game developers have a reason to create sentient free roaming machines? I was thinking more the US military who has both access to considerable funding for such things, has expressed interest in researching such stuff, and can keep a secret pretty well.
You don't think I should be able to cancel that buy order due to the new information?
Consider the following from the actual US Department of Justice press release (linked in the Slashdot story):
Sarao was charged in a federal criminal complaint in the Northern District of Illinois on Feb. 11, 2015, with one count of wire fraud, 10 counts of commodities fraud, 10 counts of commodities manipulation, and one count of âoespoofing,â a practice of bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution.
There is a specific meaning to "spoofing" which involves somehow canceling bids before execution (and somehow doesn't apply to current HFT). Rather than make that impossible to do in the various markets (or the other alternative, simply not caring), they make it illegal for anyone that falls afoul of the US government.
What they were doing was so blatantly illegal
It wouldn't be, if spoofing weren't a crime. The US could have simply not made it a crime in this case and then it wouldn't be "blatantly illegal" for small traders to do.
And notice how the problem is due to poor market design. Instead of fixing markets so that it isn't possible to "cancel before execution", they implement ridiculous rules and laws instead.
Consider this analogy. How many people here think it's a good idea to modify US law just to protect the *IAA business models? So why is it acceptable to modify US law just to protect stock market business models?
"Spoofing" is a silly activity to make a crime. There are two reasons. First, any book order that you place has a chance of being bought. Thus, it doesn't matter if you "spoof" or not, it's something you can be called on and you have to honor the book order you placed. Second, it's very easy to conceal intent to spoof, especially with a computer program. Just don't brag about it in email while the feds are listening in.
It sounds like this guy got caught merely because he was the target of an investigation for something else and they found something to extradite him with in the emails they were reading. It'll be interesting to see if this actually goes to court and if some "parallel construction" happens.
My view is that spoofing should be quite legal and the authorities should be completely uninterested in it. The reason is that there are a lot of crappy traders out there, both human and computer. Spoofing is one of many ways to stress test these traders and weed out the ones who shouldn't be anywhere near a market.
before we start worrying about the sentient free roaming machines that don't exist yet and won't exist for many, many, years.
Unless, of course, they already exist. The problem with this field is both that we don't have any experience with it and much of it will remain secret. The biggest players are the national or supernational governments and they won't necessarily keep you informed of the state of the art.
Which doesn't change the fact that government had competition in the arena of force, meaning it didn't have a monopoly. And if your government is really that bad, it's not going to be over by putting down one rebellion. You'll constantly be competing for that monopoly on force instead of owning one.
It doesn't have competition in the US for the things I mentioned such as ownership and use of nuclear weapons or the legal right to wage war. The monopoly on force exists even if you choose not to recognize it.
It doesn't matter how sunny it is, how ideal for transport, or whatever if you don't have the water for the plants to grow.
And it does, when you do have enough water. There is no point to your argument. Lack of water has already been demonstrated to be something that can be overcome.
The original statement was monopoly on "force", not monopoly on a specific type of weapon.
You are wasting my time.
The history of asymmetric warfare has shown us that one does not need the biggest and fanciest weapons to contest the government's ability to establish a monopoly on force.
And the history of asymmetric warfare shows that the weaker side usually loses.
The key word there is SUSTAINABLE. We already divert massive amounts of water to California and other ludicrous places like Las Vegas and Phoenix
Water diversion is sustainable. Pumping ground water at well above replacement rate is not.
You do realize that lots of fiction book writers have science degrees and that these degrees do help their fiction writing?
What was the point of your post? Are you trying to claim that two thirds less land area on Earth wouldn't be important? That a "what if?" situation, like opportunity costs of our choices (to name one that happens all the time), isn't important?
Of all the governments in the world, the US government is the one that is farthest away and least capable of having a monopoly on force.
I don't consider the Second Amendment to be even remotely as powerful in this regard. Where's the US citizen's right to own and operate a nuclear weapon, for example? That's a important example of the monopoly right there. And it is illegal for a US citizen to wage war on another country without express legislative approval from US Congress.
It doesn't solve the issue of them wanting to grow crops in a dessert.
First, most of California agriculture is not in desert. Those areas tend to be rather low on rainfall, but not low enough to qualify as a desert. Second, presence of water is not the only reason to grow something in a particular region. Southern California happens to be famous for a pleasant climate and a lot of sunny days. It's also easy to ship to the global market from there. They're already in the middle of a large market, the US rail system and several of the better ports in the world.
Who is "we"?
Corporations are no different from governments,except they are not even remotely tied to the wishes of the country as a whole.
Sure, the US government is indistinguishable from any other corporation with a monopoly of force over 350 million people. But let's consider your statement in detail.
First, the usual use of the term, corporation is with respect to a legal creation of a limited liability organization. The vast majority of those have no relevance. They were created as a legal means for a single person to organize their business efforts or a shell company that enables some business or tax avoidance task. Another significant group aren't intended for business, but are rather to organize a charity or similar organization. The remaining include a fair number of labor unions and co ops.
Moving on, we still have vastly more small business corporations than the big private and public corporations which have you worked up in a lather. It is worth noting here that that the US has more governments than it does have publicly traded corporations. I see that there are at least 20,000 townships, counties, and higher levels of government, while there are something like 5000 publicly traded corporations.
So sure, if we treat them as just organizations with a budget, there isn't that much different between businesses with a fair number of employees and governments of similar scale.
But scale and power are the final stumbling block here, it's worth stating the obvious, that the FBI is not run by a business corporation, but by the US government which is several times larger than the largest of corporations (Saudi Aramco, a Saudi Arabia-owned corporation) in terms of revenue and which has legal advantages and power that no business corporation can touch. That makes the FBI case very different than if say, Walmart tried the same thing.
It is commonly taught they took to hunting with much stewardship. Did they treat the land and environment as modern civilization does now, pushing the limits and then collectively realizing time to back off a little?
Lot's of things are taught. That doesn't make them true. The only real difference between then and now is that humanity has a larger impact on its environment.
Go take a couple of graduate level courses in paleotaxonomy. Then perhaps an introductory course in logic.
You need to have scraped your beak against the rock of Svithjod (which is currently a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide) once every thousand years and wear it down to a nub before you are allowed to make the above argument.
The developed world already solved the problem of overpopulation. Make people wealthy and allow women to have equal opportunity to men rather than be relegated to baby-makers. Most of the native populations of the developed world reproduce at below replacement rate and continued population growth comes from immigration from the rest of the world and the higher fertility of those immigrants.
Further, if humanity has die-offs, those die-offs will be concentrated in the areas that are having the most trouble with population growth. Even enormous mass migrations or the developed world partially sharing in the pain will not change that. The disease will be the cure, if those areas which suffer from overpopulation don't do anything about it.
He's not saying that the extinctions aren 't happening. He's saying that we don't know that they're comparable to the big extinctions of the past. It's worth remembering here that there is a huge problem with comparing modern world extinctions with extinctions in the geological past. First, it is vastly easier to see and catalog species today than in the past where fossilization is an extremely rare event. We can't know what didn't get fossilized.
But creatures which weren't easy to drive extinct, due to numbers, longevity of the species, or widespread habitat, would also be more likely to leave fossils. So we also have that the fossils of the geological past come from species which are more likely to not be threatened by extinction than the usual species today.
Third, species have different meanings in modern and geological terms. Today, we can classify species based on subtle distinctions like behavior, coloration, habitat, and most important, DNA which usually are impossible to determine from fossil records. Fossil species on the other hand, are determined by rather crude morphology traits which can be fossilized. A fossil species is a much bigger grouping than a modern species.
So when you combine all these aspects, you get that extinction of a fossil species is a much bigger deal just on its own than extinction of a modern species and may represent in some cases the extinction of dozens of modern species.
I think a better measure here is extinction at the genus level. Genuses are more likely to have fossil records and we can speak of the relative decline of the number of genuses in a proposed extinction event.
When you do that, I don't think there is a serious comparison at the present between human-caused extinction and geological extinction events. I suspect most genus-level extinctions would be in large terrestrial animals, amphibians, and any genus of organisms particularly susceptible to local habitat destruction. You don't have large scale declines in the number of all land and sea genus-level organisms (which can be fossilized) as are present during major extinction events of the past.
I have no trouble with people pooling resources and having their First Amendment rights maintained as group. However, if they want limited liability, then I have a problem with that.
It's a standard application of the First Amendment. The whole point is to allow it no matter how much of a problem you or the powers-that-be have with it.
you can STILL restrict corporate political spending WITHOUT intruding on ANYBODY'S freedom
Of course that is wrong. As ScentCone noted, the law in question was preventing people from pooling their resources (via a corporation, a very common organizational structure for non-profits) to distribute a political message, which is a legitimate application of the First Amendment.