I've said this here before, but it's worth repeating: regardless of whether or not AGW is true or not, it's probably not a good idea for us to be running an open-ended experiment of dumping as much carbon dioxide as we can into the atmosphere just to see what happens.
An "experiment" implies that we're changing at most a few variables at a time. We're not. We're building and running the most advanced society we know of with that CO2 emissions consequence.
If you need proof of why we need emissions standards, go have a walk around Beijing.
That just means Beijing needs emission standards.
In my book, all the money squandered on "real or not" problems could have been used for real problems that affect billions of people. I'd wager that we'll find out that the cost of addressing imaginary climate change problems has cost the lives of tens of millions of people.
Well, thank you for demonstratin that giant straw men are a great place for sinking a few gigatons of carbon and completely solving our climate change crisis.
Hi! Star Trek apologist here. It's worth noting that the original Star Trek bridge was designed for this sort of thing, a real time communications/command/control center. It's not that magical that one would want to duplicate the task with something that was designed to work the way they want things to work.
But if you look at the "Information Dominance Center", you can see violation of the Star Trek design right away. For example, The Chair is not positioned so that the commander can see every one at once and it has a ridiculous metal shell behind it creating a giant blind spot behind it. And it's built into a line of work desks, so that you can't easily walk around to behind The Chair.
The room is a monster too - it's over 10k square feet (roughly 100 sq meters). That weakens the case for having a Star Trek layout.
A Star Trek bridge (image may differ somewhat from the USS Enterprise bridge) had a very compact layout, the commander could see everyone, and it was easy for the commander to get up and walk to any workstation on the bridge. Spock discovers something "curious" and Kirk is outta that chair like lightning right beside him. Mr. IDC commander would have to walk/run around that maze in order to get to anything "interesting" which isn't in front of him or on the screen.
What I think is remarkable here is how the IDC takes the design elements of the Star Trek bridge and screws them up.
Instead of having one person doing a 75 hour job and 2 people doing nothing, you could have 3 people doing 25 hour jobs.
Where does this zero sum thinking come from? It's more like one person doing 75 hours and a couple of people doing 30 or 40 hours each versus three people doing 25 hours. Once you force people to work less than they want to, then you end up with all sorts of large labor inefficiencies.
For those asking where productivity gains go, they go to employing people more effectively not to employing them less.
I've always thought that the current presumption that a job is required and inherently a good thing was an artifact of scarcity of labor.
Yea, because otherwise you're in a situation where there isn't much reason to go out of your way to feed humans. I guess my take here is that people are like genes. They need to "express" or somehow affect the world, or they cease to exist. My take is that expression via fruits of labor is a more solid means than via some vague moral claim on those with wealth or the threat of breaking stuff.
There is a huge difference between an overconfident bomb disposal technician making a mistake when handling decades old abandoned munitions and active use of chemical weapons.
As noted before, here's a conventional weapon deployed or disposed decades before, yet it's still killing people.
For starters, when you are actively screwing around with something the fact that it was assembled decades before is irrelevant to it's current threat.
The obvious missing factor is why screw with something like that for a job? Because otherwise someone might accidentally screw with it, say kids on a playground or a farmer plowing a field.
In the case of chemical weapons, months after an attack someone a few villages away can drink the water from their local well, contract a horrible disease and die.
And they could have anyway. Contracting horrible diseases from wells is completely orthogonal to chemical weapon use.
And we still have that convention weapons are killing people decades after use.
As has been said before, the real problems of chemical weapons are that they can't be directed like conventional weapons and that they are far more effective against innocent bystanders than prepared military troops.
There might also be some nuclear and biological weapon proliferation concerns because should it become politically acceptable to use chemical weapons on the battlefield or on civilian targets, then that makes it easier to use nuclear weapons as well (especially given how much of an escalation that using chemical weapons on civilians is).
So in your world we should have stuck with the abacus and quill pens
And in your world, you'd be mocking people for complaining about the new abacus interface. Don't confuse UI thrashing with actual progress.
As to your comments on MS usability features, that just hasn't been my experience. And it appears I'm far from alone.
But clinging to the start menu just because you are used to it is absurd.
No, it's a very good reason. It's obvious that you don't get why. Not everyone wants to waste the time to learn a new interface every time MS decides to obsolete an old interface.
Does it really "impeded work" or is it just different?
Why ask dumb questions? Whenever you change the UI, you impede work until the user figures out how to do the things that changed. And a lot of UI changes just doesn't actually improve anything, like MS's ribbon interface in Office.
Further, you mention two separate cases aside from the current one where MS just shuffled the basic computer interface around for no particular reason. That's three times when everyone who upgrades has to relearn the interface. That's automatic impeding of work.
Now let's go back to your original analogy or comparison to war on drugs. How is a drug user, putting chemicals into his own body, a violation of somebody else's property?
As I said earlier, I consider consequences more important than minor violations of someone's property. Please stop wasting my time with irrelevant questions.
They see your order in the queue, then put their order in FIRST pushing your order back in the queue
They don't have the capability to do this. Your order processes first, possibly with a transaction occurring, before theirs gets to the point of transaction.
Remember you are slow as molasses, while they operate in ns.
I would be a fool to compete with them on their own ground without at least corresponding gear. Thus, I don't do that. The point of investing on a stock market isn't to beat armies of brilliant people with billions of dollars of gear. It's to both save assets for future use and to generate some decent growth and/or income of those assets. HFT doesn't threaten those goals.
HFT shops have (among others) an exception and can bid in increments of 0$.0001 to *ahem* provide liquidity.
And that's not the problem I was referring to. People were claiming that they were sniffing the transaction queue stream and placing their own orders in front.
Not everyone has bosses who live in the area. There's a difference between hearing that Colorado has some flooding (which is all that I had heard prior to reading this story) and hearing that there are currently a number of streams near or in Boulder with the flow rate of the Colorado river.
If you want accurate pricing of securities, you need someone who is willing to speculate on the price of stocks. If you want liquidity, that is the ability to buy stock for near its market price, then you need market markets and other short term traders to be there to cover the other side of your transaction.
The ecosystem comes with the territory. I've been in a number of markets, both real money and some play money experimental ones. This sort of behavior naturally comes out of having a market. And it provides significant benefits to those in the markets for the reasons that you want traders to be there for.
The current system gives an unfair trading advantage to those with resources/quote>
I think instead it's a fair trading advantage. If you too had those resources, you'd be able to get the same trading advantage. And I think it's fine that people with such things get such things. Keep in mind that it's just a volume discount on a service that has significant economies of scale. It's like claiming that it's "unfair" that someone with resources can get toilet paper for less per roll, because they're willing to buy them a million rolls at a time rather than half a dozen rolls at a time.
So, why should I vote for politicians that don't want to change the rules. How does this benefit me? Make your case.
An economy is not a zero sum game. HFT players do better and the services they provide help others, then that rubs off on the rest of society. Plus, otherwise you're setting up a precedent to interfere with other peoples' lives merely because you don't have any perceived skin in that game.
The actors in trading are the actors involved in making the market, so the signals and intentions are effectively public: or at least they are public to all of the major players in the market. One of the key behaviours that has been discussed is bots that try to identify arbitrage opportunities by leaping in to close bids before other actors, then hold the asset for microseconds before selling it in different sized parcels at different prices. They provide liquidity at the expense of widening spreads for traders. In the terms that you are described it these are middlemen, but in the case of markets like nasdaq they are also participants.
But then you're entering a realm where the transaction might not happen. For example, if I'm on market A and offer to buy at 10 and someone is on market B and offers to sell at 9. In theory that transaction should happen even without the connivance of HFT. But the problem here is that someone else on market B could get that order before I do or the seller could remove the order. Or maybe it just takes some time. The high frequency trader at least is closing the deal quickly for me by selling it in turn (within a minute fraction of a second) to me at a profit to themselves.
What naysayers have been doing is claiming that HFT is acting as a parasite in this case, even though their action also insures that the transaction happens promptly at the price both parties happened to desire at the time.
If this description does not convince you that the signals are public then I have a question for you: why do you think that firms pay so much to reduce latency to the exchange?
There's big money in being the first to trade on newly released information. First order gets best prices.
Latency is only an issue in reaction times for deciding whether to trade or not, and the model that you've described so far with synchronous actions is non-interactive...
I disagree. It's just a particularly fast scheme for getting market information. It doesn't prevent the usual means of interacting with the market.
but that anything with potential to cause serious harm should be treated with some degree of caution and confirmation before "going live" with it.
In that case, why are you concerned here with HFT? It's being treated with some degree of caution and confirmation. For example, the main exchanges (at least in the US) maintain very detailed records of every action done on the exchange. That's an extremely high level of confirmation.
They also maintain the ability to "rollback" transactions so a wayward HFT system can be shut off and transactions reversed to a point prior, greatly reducing the degree of harm possible from HFT (or any other sort of short term trading issue).
All that seems irrelevant to most concerns about HFT mentioned here on Slashdot in the past which either aren't related to HFT or attribute abilities to HFT which it doesn't have.
In other words, normal market systems seem to be more than adequate for your concerns mentioned here.
And finally, it's worth noting that the greatest degree of harm possible to any given party from HFT is to owners of automated computer trading programs that have exploitable weaknesses. I don't see that we're better off collectively for letting bad programming build up in the markets.
Now this is bizarre. I make an analogy to free speech. Then lo and behold, a former US Department of Homeland Security official makes the case for me, abet with a different civil liberty. Privacy advocates are forcing the US Transportation Security Administration to conduct billions of intrusive searches every year. Obviously, relinquishing privacy is the only way to deal with an abusive instrument of the state.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said this here before, but it's worth repeating: regardless of whether or not AGW is true or not, it's probably not a good idea for us to be running an open-ended experiment of dumping as much carbon dioxide as we can into the atmosphere just to see what happens.
An "experiment" implies that we're changing at most a few variables at a time. We're not. We're building and running the most advanced society we know of with that CO2 emissions consequence.
If you need proof of why we need emissions standards, go have a walk around Beijing.
That just means Beijing needs emission standards.
In my book, all the money squandered on "real or not" problems could have been used for real problems that affect billions of people. I'd wager that we'll find out that the cost of addressing imaginary climate change problems has cost the lives of tens of millions of people.
Well, thank you for demonstratin that giant straw men are a great place for sinking a few gigatons of carbon and completely solving our climate change crisis.
Hi! Star Trek apologist here. It's worth noting that the original Star Trek bridge was designed for this sort of thing, a real time communications/command/control center. It's not that magical that one would want to duplicate the task with something that was designed to work the way they want things to work.
But if you look at the "Information Dominance Center", you can see violation of the Star Trek design right away. For example, The Chair is not positioned so that the commander can see every one at once and it has a ridiculous metal shell behind it creating a giant blind spot behind it. And it's built into a line of work desks, so that you can't easily walk around to behind The Chair.
The room is a monster too - it's over 10k square feet (roughly 100 sq meters). That weakens the case for having a Star Trek layout.
A Star Trek bridge (image may differ somewhat from the USS Enterprise bridge) had a very compact layout, the commander could see everyone, and it was easy for the commander to get up and walk to any workstation on the bridge. Spock discovers something "curious" and Kirk is outta that chair like lightning right beside him. Mr. IDC commander would have to walk/run around that maze in order to get to anything "interesting" which isn't in front of him or on the screen.
What I think is remarkable here is how the IDC takes the design elements of the Star Trek bridge and screws them up.
Kristen Vaughness' "office in the basement" is much closer to how serious hacking is done.
Any link to that? I'm not having much luck with Google.
Instead of having one person doing a 75 hour job and 2 people doing nothing, you could have 3 people doing 25 hour jobs.
Where does this zero sum thinking come from? It's more like one person doing 75 hours and a couple of people doing 30 or 40 hours each versus three people doing 25 hours. Once you force people to work less than they want to, then you end up with all sorts of large labor inefficiencies.
For those asking where productivity gains go, they go to employing people more effectively not to employing them less.
I've always thought that the current presumption that a job is required and inherently a good thing was an artifact of scarcity of labor.
Yea, because otherwise you're in a situation where there isn't much reason to go out of your way to feed humans. I guess my take here is that people are like genes. They need to "express" or somehow affect the world, or they cease to exist. My take is that expression via fruits of labor is a more solid means than via some vague moral claim on those with wealth or the threat of breaking stuff.
Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks.
Per year. It isn't orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks, even if one leases the textbooks like one is leasing the tablets.
There is a huge difference between an overconfident bomb disposal technician making a mistake when handling decades old abandoned munitions and active use of chemical weapons.
As noted before, here's a conventional weapon deployed or disposed decades before, yet it's still killing people.
For starters, when you are actively screwing around with something the fact that it was assembled decades before is irrelevant to it's current threat.
The obvious missing factor is why screw with something like that for a job? Because otherwise someone might accidentally screw with it, say kids on a playground or a farmer plowing a field.
In the case of chemical weapons, months after an attack someone a few villages away can drink the water from their local well, contract a horrible disease and die.
And they could have anyway. Contracting horrible diseases from wells is completely orthogonal to chemical weapon use.
And we still have that convention weapons are killing people decades after use.
As has been said before, the real problems of chemical weapons are that they can't be directed like conventional weapons and that they are far more effective against innocent bystanders than prepared military troops.
There might also be some nuclear and biological weapon proliferation concerns because should it become politically acceptable to use chemical weapons on the battlefield or on civilian targets, then that makes it easier to use nuclear weapons as well (especially given how much of an escalation that using chemical weapons on civilians is).
So in your world we should have stuck with the abacus and quill pens
And in your world, you'd be mocking people for complaining about the new abacus interface. Don't confuse UI thrashing with actual progress.
As to your comments on MS usability features, that just hasn't been my experience. And it appears I'm far from alone.
But clinging to the start menu just because you are used to it is absurd.
No, it's a very good reason. It's obvious that you don't get why. Not everyone wants to waste the time to learn a new interface every time MS decides to obsolete an old interface.
Does it really "impeded work" or is it just different?
Why ask dumb questions? Whenever you change the UI, you impede work until the user figures out how to do the things that changed. And a lot of UI changes just doesn't actually improve anything, like MS's ribbon interface in Office.
Further, you mention two separate cases aside from the current one where MS just shuffled the basic computer interface around for no particular reason. That's three times when everyone who upgrades has to relearn the interface. That's automatic impeding of work.
I'll defer to this gentleman for the explanation.
Now let's go back to your original analogy or comparison to war on drugs. How is a drug user, putting chemicals into his own body, a violation of somebody else's property?
As I said earlier, I consider consequences more important than minor violations of someone's property. Please stop wasting my time with irrelevant questions.
They see your order in the queue, then put their order in FIRST pushing your order back in the queue
They don't have the capability to do this. Your order processes first, possibly with a transaction occurring, before theirs gets to the point of transaction.
Remember you are slow as molasses, while they operate in ns.
I would be a fool to compete with them on their own ground without at least corresponding gear. Thus, I don't do that. The point of investing on a stock market isn't to beat armies of brilliant people with billions of dollars of gear. It's to both save assets for future use and to generate some decent growth and/or income of those assets. HFT doesn't threaten those goals.
HFT shops have (among others) an exception and can bid in increments of 0$.0001 to *ahem* provide liquidity.
And that's not the problem I was referring to. People were claiming that they were sniffing the transaction queue stream and placing their own orders in front.
Not everyone has bosses who live in the area. There's a difference between hearing that Colorado has some flooding (which is all that I had heard prior to reading this story) and hearing that there are currently a number of streams near or in Boulder with the flow rate of the Colorado river.
I already answered the question in my previous post. Because I think we end up with a system that works instead of one that doesn't.
If you want accurate pricing of securities, you need someone who is willing to speculate on the price of stocks. If you want liquidity, that is the ability to buy stock for near its market price, then you need market markets and other short term traders to be there to cover the other side of your transaction.
The ecosystem comes with the territory. I've been in a number of markets, both real money and some play money experimental ones. This sort of behavior naturally comes out of having a market. And it provides significant benefits to those in the markets for the reasons that you want traders to be there for.
The current system gives an unfair trading advantage to those with resources/quote> I think instead it's a fair trading advantage. If you too had those resources, you'd be able to get the same trading advantage. And I think it's fine that people with such things get such things. Keep in mind that it's just a volume discount on a service that has significant economies of scale. It's like claiming that it's "unfair" that someone with resources can get toilet paper for less per roll, because they're willing to buy them a million rolls at a time rather than half a dozen rolls at a time.
So, why should I vote for politicians that don't want to change the rules. How does this benefit me? Make your case.
An economy is not a zero sum game. HFT players do better and the services they provide help others, then that rubs off on the rest of society. Plus, otherwise you're setting up a precedent to interfere with other peoples' lives merely because you don't have any perceived skin in that game.
The actors in trading are the actors involved in making the market, so the signals and intentions are effectively public: or at least they are public to all of the major players in the market. One of the key behaviours that has been discussed is bots that try to identify arbitrage opportunities by leaping in to close bids before other actors, then hold the asset for microseconds before selling it in different sized parcels at different prices. They provide liquidity at the expense of widening spreads for traders. In the terms that you are described it these are middlemen, but in the case of markets like nasdaq they are also participants.
But then you're entering a realm where the transaction might not happen. For example, if I'm on market A and offer to buy at 10 and someone is on market B and offers to sell at 9. In theory that transaction should happen even without the connivance of HFT. But the problem here is that someone else on market B could get that order before I do or the seller could remove the order. Or maybe it just takes some time. The high frequency trader at least is closing the deal quickly for me by selling it in turn (within a minute fraction of a second) to me at a profit to themselves.
What naysayers have been doing is claiming that HFT is acting as a parasite in this case, even though their action also insures that the transaction happens promptly at the price both parties happened to desire at the time.
If this description does not convince you that the signals are public then I have a question for you: why do you think that firms pay so much to reduce latency to the exchange?
There's big money in being the first to trade on newly released information. First order gets best prices.
Latency is only an issue in reaction times for deciding whether to trade or not, and the model that you've described so far with synchronous actions is non-interactive...
I disagree. It's just a particularly fast scheme for getting market information. It doesn't prevent the usual means of interacting with the market.
but that anything with potential to cause serious harm should be treated with some degree of caution and confirmation before "going live" with it.
In that case, why are you concerned here with HFT? It's being treated with some degree of caution and confirmation. For example, the main exchanges (at least in the US) maintain very detailed records of every action done on the exchange. That's an extremely high level of confirmation.
They also maintain the ability to "rollback" transactions so a wayward HFT system can be shut off and transactions reversed to a point prior, greatly reducing the degree of harm possible from HFT (or any other sort of short term trading issue).
All that seems irrelevant to most concerns about HFT mentioned here on Slashdot in the past which either aren't related to HFT or attribute abilities to HFT which it doesn't have.
In other words, normal market systems seem to be more than adequate for your concerns mentioned here.
And finally, it's worth noting that the greatest degree of harm possible to any given party from HFT is to owners of automated computer trading programs that have exploitable weaknesses. I don't see that we're better off collectively for letting bad programming build up in the markets.
Now this is bizarre. I make an analogy to free speech. Then lo and behold, a former US Department of Homeland Security official makes the case for me, abet with a different civil liberty. Privacy advocates are forcing the US Transportation Security Administration to conduct billions of intrusive searches every year. Obviously, relinquishing privacy is the only way to deal with an abusive instrument of the state.
If you want to drink the stuff fine by me, but don't expect that I want to drink it too.
How is that going to get into my drink?
So am I correct to say that you think consequences are more important than whether somebody has violated somebody else's property?
Definitely. Consider a once time trespassing versus a one time burning someone's house down. Both are violations of somebody else's property.