So it's not actually based on evidence? Two can play at that game.
There's the other side of the coin, namely, that a employee who wracks up a lot of debt is more likely to making bad workplace decisions (since they've already demonstrated an inclination for doing so) or engage in theft and embezzlement (because they have huge financial incentive to do so).
A degree from a state university is basically toilet paper as compared to, say, MIT or Harvard or any other prestigious college/university.
Prestige isn't worth that much. Sure, I occasionally see job ads for people with pretty degrees - especially in status driven fields like finance. But they don't pay that much of a premium for those people.
Employers like indebted fresh graduates, because they're 1) idealistic and enthusiastic, having not had their souls crushed yet, and 2) a $1000 student loan payment makes it harder to quit when they treat you like shit and make you do the work of 3 people.
While that is plausible, do you have any evidence of such a bias?
Here. Note that they are claiming that the WWF got $41 million in public funds for 2012. And WWF itself claims that it got $48 million in public funds in 2013.
I see that the World Wildlife Fund isn't piling climate change stories on their front page at the moment (the genre is notably absent with only one anti-oil story present) which is a big change from the last time I looked (November 14, 2013) where more than half of those stories were about climate change and/or anti-fossil fuel stuff. I guess they got word that they were overplaying climate change propaganda.
Wouldn't there be a simpler and safer way to reach the same goal?
Can't say there would be. It's get people scared for their own good so the parties responsible can get more money and power. It doesn't even require planning. Can't get much more simple than that.
It looks to me like a "conspiracy theory" that can check off all the boxes.
The crime you're accusing various government agencies of is not plausible without a motive.
Money and power. That's two motives.
They provide pretext for vast levels of public spending (I believe it is one or two hundred billion per year at present and increasing), more budget and scope for the organizations in question, and a means to acquire more political power for the politicians who oversee these organizations.
What I find remarkable is how ignorant people are about such conflicts of interest.
No, they don't. It's not at all hard for small investors to take advantage of increased price volatility. That's actually part of my current investment strategy, for example, (via selling covered options).
One of the notable things was that this group went from a mysterious and frustrating problem (getting sniped by HFT traders because they didn't understand the new changes) to a fix in two years (the Thor program) to a permanent fix for most HFT (the 350 microsecond delay of the IEX exchange) in four years. This is very fast innovation and its not unique in the financial world.
This is one of the reasons I support HFT. Because it's a source of innovation that will benefit the world. When one figures out how to move electronic money around really fast and make extremely fast decisions, those technologies can be applied to other things - say disaster management in the few seconds between detection of an earthquake and when it actually hits populated areas.
This is what you should have written in the first place. Having said that, in several of the examples, the corporation was fined "criminal" penalties in the legal sense, for example, the Valdez oil release. I think Enron got dinged as well for its part in the California electricity crisis which was part of the mess (including the set up of the shell corporations to hide losses) that eventually led to its bankruptcy.
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
Unless it's not there. The idea that there is missing heat is based on satellite observations which either may be missing heat flow in or out of the system or even be manipulated data. And water has a far higher heat capacity than air does. So a lot of heat going into water doesn't create a lot of temperature rise. Temperature is what is currently considered dangerous not energy content of heat.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so.
Complete bullshit. Our civilization may be doomed in the next 50 years, but it'll be from other causes like overpopulation, non-global warming caused desertification, really bad economics, or war. No one has come up with a mechanism by which global warming would cause that sort of harm in a mere 50 years.
If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%.
In the absence of a credible threat of death, like a global nuclear war, the developed world will come out fine with almost no deaths. That's at least15% survival rate right there.
We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
Except we don't actually know that. This is false certainty.
The alternative is to tether two stations together, but NASA have a history of serious problems with tethers.
It doesn't have much of a history with tethers. And the only one where they actually tried to generate a small amount artificial gravity (on the Gemini 11 mission in 1966), they did get to work after some tribulation.
Gordon's first EVA, planned to last for two hours, involved fastening a 100-foot (30 m) tether, stored in the Agena's docking collar, to the Gemini's docking bar for the passive stabilization experiment. Gordon achieved this, but as with previous Gemini EVAs, trying to do work for an extended period proved more fatiguing than in ground simulation, and the EVA had to be terminated after only half an hour.
The passive stabilization experiment proved to be a bit troublesome. Conrad and Gordon separated the craft in a nose-(Agena-)down position, but found that the tether would not be kept taut simply by the Earth's gravity gradient as expected. But they were able to generate a small amount of artificial gravity, about 0.00015 g, by firing their side thrusters to slowly rotate the combined craft like a slow-motion pair of bolas.
The bad guys at Enron did what they did for personal enrichment at a cost to the company (in fact, the ultimate cost. It imploded). HSBC's actions were for the enrichment of the corporate entity.
Again, that is irrelevant. But it is especially irrelevant given that there isn't such a neat dividing line between the two - both did it for personal gain and because they thought they were enriching the corporate entity.
Currently, the EU members allows the EU government to spend $30 billion per year on climate change stuff like renewable energy or R&D. Continued indefinitely and with a time value of money depreciation of 4%, that would still be a revenue stream valued at three quarters of a trillion in today's money. All major governments burn a lot of money on climate, renewable energy, and petroleum alternatives R&D. There are a bunch of carbon dioxide emission credit markets. And there was a call by the World Bank for $100 billion per year in "climate aid" to the developing world by 2020.
I imagine that sort of thing is where the "trillions of dollars" would come from.
In my view the answer is yes, but much in the same way that anti-tobacco lobbyists had propaganda machines supporting that tobacco was harmful against an onslaught of well funded research and arguments trying to questioning it.
Except that they're the ones outspending the evil oil companies propaganda machine. For example, there are major government agencies such as US's NASA and the UK's MET supporting climate change propaganda. Vast sums of public funds are burned on climate change issues such as roughly 30 billion euros per year by the EU.
And a number of private NGOs are on the gravy train such as the World Wildlife Fund which gets over $30 million per year just in public funds for its copious propaganda exercises. That's alone is well over any amounts alleged to be put into skepticism groups and propaganda.
Sure, the funding battle is uneven, but it's uneven in favor of climate change advocacy. It doesn't mean that climate change is wrong or even exaggerated, but I think it's healthy to consider all conflicts of interest, not merely assume they exist only for opponents.
One of them was the ability for people to see your trade and then cancel their own order, all before your trade was executed.
No. The trade was over multiple markets. The HFT trader(s) was hitting all the markets at once, faster than RBC's trade order could get to the slower markets. There is no way to see a trade before it executes otherwise.
Limit orders work fine for small investors - you end up ensuring that you get the worst possible price.
They work fine for those HFT traders too. And because they are limit orders, you don't end up getting burned by a large market move just before your order hits - which actually is a serious problem in the very scenario that the article described.
That is, you only get executed after the price has moved in the wrong direction.
They don't trade any slower than market trades and the price of any trade is limited by the limit.
I'm sure I'll be crucified on a cross of gold for saying this, but the silver mine owners of Nevada were the Koch brothers of that time and the the Greenbacks were their astroturf organization.
There's little reason to care about modest inflation or deflation. I would say that people tend to be more considerate of the future in a mild deflation situation since time value of money is higher. All those farmers were going out of business not because there wasn't enough inflation, but because they weren't productive enough. That's why over the past century, US farmers went from over a third of the workforce to around 2%.
So the banks on their own evolved a clearinghouse system that functioned essentially like a central bank, creating credit, using paper money. Eventually the private sector agreed it was better for the government to run a centralized clearinghouse, rather than let J. P. Morgan run it, because Morgan had no obligation to serve the public interest, and could help his friends and hurt his enemies.
The banks would have evolved additional clearinghouses and not just for this reason.
As long as the new services operate under the same constraints as taxi companies,
If you're going to do that, then you need to study those constraints as well. I wouldn't mind regulations that mandate the sorts of things you mentioned. But past that, those constraints provide barriers to entry and hence, are anti-competitive.
And a number of those do because they provide more benefit in some way than harm. For example, the recessive gene for sickle cell anemia provides protection from malaria when it isn't paired up with itself.
No, limited liability corps limit the financial liability to the company, and prevent the owners from being personally responsible for DEBT the company racks up.
Liability is not just debt. And I already agreed otherwise with what you said here.
It is hard to sue individuals in companies for criminal acts because it is generally very hard to determine which individual is responsible. Who knew, who decided? It can be very hard to prove.
This has nothing to do with corporations. As I note, it's also a problem in large non-corporation businesses.
Hold the phone--you mean there are ways to solve disputes between nations that *don't* involve firing artillery, invasion or threatening sanctions? Has anyone told North Korea, South Korea, Russia, Ukraine or the United States?
Nations aren't ignorant of other means of settling disputes. They just believe the dispute is more likely to be settled in their favor if they break out the artillery.
For example, Russia would risk the loss of Sevastopol as a naval port, if they were to resort to a UN court. By merely taking over the Crimea, they don't have that risk. It's simply the better move for them.
Part of the reason for a corporation is that you dissociate financial liability between the corporation itself and its employees.
No, it's dissociate financial liability between the corporation and its shareholders. Employees don't have less liability than employees in non-corporation businesses.
So despite your assertions to the contrary, the conviction of Enron executives is a good example. WorldCom is another with Bernard Ebbers being convicted in 2005.
I see two people here for a rather large case of Medicare fraud for which their company "plead guilty".
Captain Joseph Hazelwood was convicted of negligent discharge of oil in 1990 with respect to the Valdez oil spill of 1989.
There's an actual summary (see page 5) of individual convictions for violating antitrust law in the US.
Over the past decade, from FY 1999 through the end of the second quarter of FY 2009, a total of 246 individual offenders were convicted of Sherman Act violations, the vast majority under section 1 and seven under section 3.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's not actually based on evidence? Two can play at that game.
There's the other side of the coin, namely, that a employee who wracks up a lot of debt is more likely to making bad workplace decisions (since they've already demonstrated an inclination for doing so) or engage in theft and embezzlement (because they have huge financial incentive to do so).
I thought April 15 was Happy Obama Day.
A degree from a state university is basically toilet paper as compared to, say, MIT or Harvard or any other prestigious college/university.
Prestige isn't worth that much. Sure, I occasionally see job ads for people with pretty degrees - especially in status driven fields like finance. But they don't pay that much of a premium for those people.
Employers like indebted fresh graduates, because they're 1) idealistic and enthusiastic, having not had their souls crushed yet, and 2) a $1000 student loan payment makes it harder to quit when they treat you like shit and make you do the work of 3 people.
While that is plausible, do you have any evidence of such a bias?
Here. Note that they are claiming that the WWF got $41 million in public funds for 2012. And WWF itself claims that it got $48 million in public funds in 2013.
I see that the World Wildlife Fund isn't piling climate change stories on their front page at the moment (the genre is notably absent with only one anti-oil story present) which is a big change from the last time I looked (November 14, 2013) where more than half of those stories were about climate change and/or anti-fossil fuel stuff. I guess they got word that they were overplaying climate change propaganda.
Wouldn't there be a simpler and safer way to reach the same goal?
Can't say there would be. It's get people scared for their own good so the parties responsible can get more money and power. It doesn't even require planning. Can't get much more simple than that.
It looks to me like a "conspiracy theory" that can check off all the boxes.
The crime you're accusing various government agencies of is not plausible without a motive.
Money and power. That's two motives.
They provide pretext for vast levels of public spending (I believe it is one or two hundred billion per year at present and increasing), more budget and scope for the organizations in question, and a means to acquire more political power for the politicians who oversee these organizations.
What I find remarkable is how ignorant people are about such conflicts of interest.
No, they don't. It's not at all hard for small investors to take advantage of increased price volatility. That's actually part of my current investment strategy, for example, (via selling covered options).
One of the notable things was that this group went from a mysterious and frustrating problem (getting sniped by HFT traders because they didn't understand the new changes) to a fix in two years (the Thor program) to a permanent fix for most HFT (the 350 microsecond delay of the IEX exchange) in four years. This is very fast innovation and its not unique in the financial world.
This is one of the reasons I support HFT. Because it's a source of innovation that will benefit the world. When one figures out how to move electronic money around really fast and make extremely fast decisions, those technologies can be applied to other things - say disaster management in the few seconds between detection of an earthquake and when it actually hits populated areas.
This is what you should have written in the first place. Having said that, in several of the examples, the corporation was fined "criminal" penalties in the legal sense, for example, the Valdez oil release. I think Enron got dinged as well for its part in the California electricity crisis which was part of the mess (including the set up of the shell corporations to hide losses) that eventually led to its bankruptcy.
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
Unless it's not there. The idea that there is missing heat is based on satellite observations which either may be missing heat flow in or out of the system or even be manipulated data. And water has a far higher heat capacity than air does. So a lot of heat going into water doesn't create a lot of temperature rise. Temperature is what is currently considered dangerous not energy content of heat.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so.
Complete bullshit. Our civilization may be doomed in the next 50 years, but it'll be from other causes like overpopulation, non-global warming caused desertification, really bad economics, or war. No one has come up with a mechanism by which global warming would cause that sort of harm in a mere 50 years.
If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%.
In the absence of a credible threat of death, like a global nuclear war, the developed world will come out fine with almost no deaths. That's at least15% survival rate right there.
We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
Except we don't actually know that. This is false certainty.
The alternative is to tether two stations together, but NASA have a history of serious problems with tethers.
It doesn't have much of a history with tethers. And the only one where they actually tried to generate a small amount artificial gravity (on the Gemini 11 mission in 1966), they did get to work after some tribulation.
Gordon's first EVA, planned to last for two hours, involved fastening a 100-foot (30 m) tether, stored in the Agena's docking collar, to the Gemini's docking bar for the passive stabilization experiment. Gordon achieved this, but as with previous Gemini EVAs, trying to do work for an extended period proved more fatiguing than in ground simulation, and the EVA had to be terminated after only half an hour.
The passive stabilization experiment proved to be a bit troublesome. Conrad and Gordon separated the craft in a nose-(Agena-)down position, but found that the tether would not be kept taut simply by the Earth's gravity gradient as expected. But they were able to generate a small amount of artificial gravity, about 0.00015 g, by firing their side thrusters to slowly rotate the combined craft like a slow-motion pair of bolas.
The bad guys at Enron did what they did for personal enrichment at a cost to the company (in fact, the ultimate cost. It imploded). HSBC's actions were for the enrichment of the corporate entity.
Again, that is irrelevant. But it is especially irrelevant given that there isn't such a neat dividing line between the two - both did it for personal gain and because they thought they were enriching the corporate entity.
Currently, the EU members allows the EU government to spend $30 billion per year on climate change stuff like renewable energy or R&D. Continued indefinitely and with a time value of money depreciation of 4%, that would still be a revenue stream valued at three quarters of a trillion in today's money. All major governments burn a lot of money on climate, renewable energy, and petroleum alternatives R&D. There are a bunch of carbon dioxide emission credit markets. And there was a call by the World Bank for $100 billion per year in "climate aid" to the developing world by 2020.
I imagine that sort of thing is where the "trillions of dollars" would come from.
In my view the answer is yes, but much in the same way that anti-tobacco lobbyists had propaganda machines supporting that tobacco was harmful against an onslaught of well funded research and arguments trying to questioning it.
Except that they're the ones outspending the evil oil companies propaganda machine. For example, there are major government agencies such as US's NASA and the UK's MET supporting climate change propaganda. Vast sums of public funds are burned on climate change issues such as roughly 30 billion euros per year by the EU.
And a number of private NGOs are on the gravy train such as the World Wildlife Fund which gets over $30 million per year just in public funds for its copious propaganda exercises. That's alone is well over any amounts alleged to be put into skepticism groups and propaganda.
Sure, the funding battle is uneven, but it's uneven in favor of climate change advocacy. It doesn't mean that climate change is wrong or even exaggerated, but I think it's healthy to consider all conflicts of interest, not merely assume they exist only for opponents.
One of them was the ability for people to see your trade and then cancel their own order, all before your trade was executed.
No. The trade was over multiple markets. The HFT trader(s) was hitting all the markets at once, faster than RBC's trade order could get to the slower markets. There is no way to see a trade before it executes otherwise.
Limit orders work fine for small investors - you end up ensuring that you get the worst possible price.
They work fine for those HFT traders too. And because they are limit orders, you don't end up getting burned by a large market move just before your order hits - which actually is a serious problem in the very scenario that the article described.
That is, you only get executed after the price has moved in the wrong direction.
They don't trade any slower than market trades and the price of any trade is limited by the limit.
There's little reason to care about modest inflation or deflation. I would say that people tend to be more considerate of the future in a mild deflation situation since time value of money is higher. All those farmers were going out of business not because there wasn't enough inflation, but because they weren't productive enough. That's why over the past century, US farmers went from over a third of the workforce to around 2%.
So the banks on their own evolved a clearinghouse system that functioned essentially like a central bank, creating credit, using paper money. Eventually the private sector agreed it was better for the government to run a centralized clearinghouse, rather than let J. P. Morgan run it, because Morgan had no obligation to serve the public interest, and could help his friends and hurt his enemies.
The banks would have evolved additional clearinghouses and not just for this reason.
So how is that different from Enron? They thought they would get away with it as well.
As long as the new services operate under the same constraints as taxi companies,
If you're going to do that, then you need to study those constraints as well. I wouldn't mind regulations that mandate the sorts of things you mentioned. But past that, those constraints provide barriers to entry and hence, are anti-competitive.
Lots of genetic disorders still persist.
And a number of those do because they provide more benefit in some way than harm. For example, the recessive gene for sickle cell anemia provides protection from malaria when it isn't paired up with itself.
No, limited liability corps limit the financial liability to the company, and prevent the owners from being personally responsible for DEBT the company racks up.
Liability is not just debt. And I already agreed otherwise with what you said here.
It is hard to sue individuals in companies for criminal acts because it is generally very hard to determine which individual is responsible. Who knew, who decided? It can be very hard to prove.
This has nothing to do with corporations. As I note, it's also a problem in large non-corporation businesses.
I posted not because there was too much sarcasm in your post, but because there was too much unicorn.
Hold the phone--you mean there are ways to solve disputes between nations that *don't* involve firing artillery, invasion or threatening sanctions? Has anyone told North Korea, South Korea, Russia, Ukraine or the United States?
Nations aren't ignorant of other means of settling disputes. They just believe the dispute is more likely to be settled in their favor if they break out the artillery.
For example, Russia would risk the loss of Sevastopol as a naval port, if they were to resort to a UN court. By merely taking over the Crimea, they don't have that risk. It's simply the better move for them.
You are confusing the acts of individuals against their employer's policies with criminal acts carried out as part of the company's business.
And you should too. Do you really believe any of that is company policy?
Part of the reason for a corporation is that you dissociate financial liability between the corporation itself and its employees.
No, it's dissociate financial liability between the corporation and its shareholders. Employees don't have less liability than employees in non-corporation businesses.
I see two people here for a rather large case of Medicare fraud for which their company "plead guilty".
Captain Joseph Hazelwood was convicted of negligent discharge of oil in 1990 with respect to the Valdez oil spill of 1989.
There's an actual summary (see page 5) of individual convictions for violating antitrust law in the US.
Over the past decade, from FY 1999 through the end of the second quarter of FY 2009, a total of 246 individual offenders were convicted of Sherman Act violations, the vast majority under section 1 and seven under section 3.
That's just for a narrow segment of business law.