I was talking at the conceptual level of the stock market, e.g. when regular people are sold on the idea of allowing it to exist. The stock market is good because you can own a piece of a company even if you're a middle class wage slave, so we are told. HFT though aren't interested in owning, they're interested in making money on the process of buying and selling. They're middle men. Middle men can be OK if they're provide a service. That's why stock brokers exists. HFT don't provide a service (otherwise they'd just be stock brokers). They're leaches. Parasites really. In a just society we'd treat them as such, but these days the Parasite's bigger than the host it feeds off of.
that say this stuff spells the end to high freq trading. The trouble is HFT is less about investment and more about skimming off the top. HFT Traders take a percentage of a company w/o ever actually owning it. The increase in liquidity is so small that legitimate investors don't even notice it (who cares if my stock sells in.1 milliseconds vs 5 minutes if it was an investment). No real money was lost for the HFT'ers because they were never actually creating anything productive in the first place. They'll recover from this and continue to be yet another bloated tick on the face of capitalism.
from you and me to them (well, assuming you're not an Astroturfer working for them). It's not possible to accumulate that sort of wealth through honest means. If you trace their wealth it's mostly government contracts and (as others have pointed out) buyouts. Take Paul Ryan. He used social security to pay for school while his family had millions from a road paving business that made it's money filling potholes.
the liberal mindset of my neighbor claims ownership of 999 out of 1000 bicycles, and me and the other 999 people in my neighborhood have to fight over the one left.
Better: A rich man, a Union man and a Blue Collar man sit at a table. There are 10 cookies on the table. The rich man grabs 9 cookies, sticks 'em in his pocket and turns to the Blue Collar man and says: "Hey, I think he's gonna steal your cookie".
paying for services is what poor people do, not rich patent attorneys. To paraphrase Gore Vidal: Socialism for the rich, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor....
if they are already demons. Even the Catholic Church campaigns against Paul Ryan's Economic plans. Meanwhile the 1% has 2 or 3 times the national debt tucked away in offshore accounts. You want to know where our debt comes from, there's your answer.
it's just that the ones that aren't are a very, very vocal minority. Most of them are fabulously rich, which helps make them more vocal. It's easy to be a vocal minority when you own the media, and the media is only liberal on social issues, not economics
You know, that's the funny thing. Let them go, but don't let them take everything with them. You don't want to do business in my state? Fine. Go. Good riddance. You want to claim ownership of everything because your great great granddaddy was rich enough to buy it from desperate people trying to survive? Not so much. One of the coolest things I ever saw was the president of Valenzuela going to a bunch of wealthy landowners who were under reporting the value of their land to avoid paying taxes and then buying the land from them for what they claimed it was worth.
I just don't get it. Why does 99% of the population trade everything for vague promises of amazing wealth.
California has some of the best farm land in the world. The only question is how to get water to it. You know, it takes more than water to grow food, right?
The problem you're having is that you're trying to solve a problem that's too big for the free market. It's like going into space (which is why you have Satellites and Internet btw). It was just too expensive for private enterprise to do. Socialism was needed. We got it, and it worked.
BTW, before you trot out the USSR and/or China (like your kind always does), they we not ever socialist. Canada is socialist. France is socialist. The USSR & China were fascist dictatorships that happened to borrow 'ole Karl's books. Christ, for want of a good (government enforced) copyright law...
she required a lot of convincing to take aid late in life, and left alone she probably would have died in a gutter. Literally. Her friends intervened and convinced her to accept what help there was. That's sort of the trouble with people like Ayn. Very low self esteem, they feel they deserve what they get, and in their favored economic systems that's less than nothing unless you're 1%...
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
it's mostly the gov't that allows you to have meat, specifically farm subsidies that a) make grain cheaper than the market would normally allow and b) stabilize the market so that people don't just grow one really profitable crop and fsck up the soil. You owe most of your stable food supply to the government programs. This isn't to say a sufficiently corrupt gov't can't screw it up, but it usually takes a dictatorship (e.g. China), which at that point isn't so much government as it is everyone doing what a one mad man says because they're expecting the be the ones that profit by it. I think we're calling it Kleptocracy these days.
Again, a few isolated mad man. But without rampant poverty their attempts to radicalize fall on deaf ears. At the risk of Godwining this thread I'll point out that Hitler only got to power because of the extreme reparations imposed on German people after WWI. Recognizing this the allies choose not to punish Germany, and instead help them rebuild.
I know this is Conservatard trolling, but I'll bite. What happens when a woman doesn't get enough vitamins and food during pregnancy. Google it, I'll wait. Now, you're a child born to that Mother. Your brain doesn't work as well, and you have lots of health problems. If that isn't the deck stacked against you I don't know what is.
The difference is OSX users are prime marketing real estate. They generally have a lot of money, and don't mind spending it. This isn't to say Linux users are the opposite, but the population isn't as flush with cash on the whole.
meanwhile there are people down south without them. People who depend on a medical outreach program Modeled after Iran.
Yes, I know I have it relatively good. But I also know there is virtually no safety net for me and I can slip into third world poverty. I know that kind of poverty exists and is tolerated in America. Did you?
But another way, just because things could be worse doesn't mean they SHOULDN'T be better.
you don't have to steal from them, you just never let them have anything in the first place. I guess you can call that 'stealing', but it's not stealing in the traditional sense, so it's too difficult an idea for people to understand. This is why R Money and Billy G have billions and 46% of the rest of us don't make enough money to be worth taxing...
People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
Why those Mayors discuss feeding their city's poor but are silent on starvation in Africa. Come off it people, you fight battles you can win. I'm sure they'd love to spread tolerance throughout the world, but their Mayors, not God-Kings.
Speaking of religion, have you ever actually read the Christian Bible? You can do all sorts of things to people you don't like and it's A-OK. And don't forget, blacks weren't people until the last 1970, so says Mitt Romney (or at least his religion). Every religion that's existed for any length of time has terrible things in it's dogma.
We're not pretending Islam is just fine. But we're rationalists. Give people enough food, shelter and some discretionary income for hobbies and they mellow out. Ever wonder why terrorists don't send deep cover moles over here? It's because give them a taste of good life and they stop being psychotic extremists. The challenge is giving that life to everybody. Not just the vague promise that you might have a chance at it that economic conservatives and 'libertarians' favor, but the real thing.
why you pay a low flat rate for 6GB/hr they push at you but through the nose if you want to pick and choose yourself. I find it hard to believe they need bandwidth caps to manage the limits when every receiver is digital....
I've got cleaner water, better health care. Laws that make sure my food isn't poison. I've got a social safety net that keeps bands of thieves and kidnappers to a minimum. My air is also much, much cleaner. Sure, 80% of Indians never have these problems, but for the other 20% life just sucks. America put a lot of effort into closing that gap. For those of us that don't just live a charmed life we want that.
Not really. Coming out of a proper college they come out better. They have new skills and abilities. Ones that are useful outside of their current employers work environment. What these mills do is one of two things: a) teach a useless skill or b) teach a highly, highly specialized skill only relevant to the current employer.
I'm not going to argue the intangible benefits to society of traditional College because I think the phrase 'intangible benefits' is shorthand for 'I'm too lazy to quantify the benefits so I'll just call them intangible".
Apprenticeships look good in theory, but that assumes we need that many full time workers. Automation and productivity increases mean we need less full time workers, not more. The filler will keeps students out of the work force, and properly applied give them better baseline thinking skills. They then contribute more to society as a whole (if only by virtue of being better citizens). Also, it's too easy for apprenticeships to devolve into free, borderline slave, labor. We're already seeing this with unpaid interns being made to do productive work.
True, but what I find so terrible about this situation is that there isn't one single facet that doesn't benefit Amazon to the detriment of their employee and society. Amazon gets tax breaks, kick backs and profits from the school, and the employee gets debt, an increased workload and made to pay for their own job training. Some of these programs are even tailored to skills Amazon happens to need. You are quite literally paying them to be taught how to work their systems. Like I said, this is the most awful thing I've seen come out of the free market besides callous loses of life.
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I was talking at the conceptual level of the stock market, e.g. when regular people are sold on the idea of allowing it to exist. The stock market is good because you can own a piece of a company even if you're a middle class wage slave, so we are told. HFT though aren't interested in owning, they're interested in making money on the process of buying and selling. They're middle men. Middle men can be OK if they're provide a service. That's why stock brokers exists. HFT don't provide a service (otherwise they'd just be stock brokers). They're leaches. Parasites really. In a just society we'd treat them as such, but these days the Parasite's bigger than the host it feeds off of.
that say this stuff spells the end to high freq trading. The trouble is HFT is less about investment and more about skimming off the top. HFT Traders take a percentage of a company w/o ever actually owning it. The increase in liquidity is so small that legitimate investors don't even notice it (who cares if my stock sells in .1 milliseconds vs 5 minutes if it was an investment). No real money was lost for the HFT'ers because they were never actually creating anything productive in the first place. They'll recover from this and continue to be yet another bloated tick on the face of capitalism.
from you and me to them (well, assuming you're not an Astroturfer working for them). It's not possible to accumulate that sort of wealth through honest means. If you trace their wealth it's mostly government contracts and (as others have pointed out) buyouts. Take Paul Ryan. He used social security to pay for school while his family had millions from a road paving business that made it's money filling potholes.
the liberal mindset of my neighbor claims ownership of 999 out of 1000 bicycles, and me and the other 999 people in my neighborhood have to fight over the one left.
Better: A rich man, a Union man and a Blue Collar man sit at a table. There are 10 cookies on the table. The rich man grabs 9 cookies, sticks 'em in his pocket and turns to the Blue Collar man and says: "Hey, I think he's gonna steal your cookie".
paying for services is what poor people do, not rich patent attorneys. To paraphrase Gore Vidal: Socialism for the rich, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor....
if they are already demons. Even the Catholic Church campaigns against Paul Ryan's Economic plans. Meanwhile the 1% has 2 or 3 times the national debt tucked away in offshore accounts. You want to know where our debt comes from, there's your answer.
it's just that the ones that aren't are a very, very vocal minority. Most of them are fabulously rich, which helps make them more vocal. It's easy to be a vocal minority when you own the media, and the media is only liberal on social issues, not economics
You know, that's the funny thing. Let them go, but don't let them take everything with them. You don't want to do business in my state? Fine. Go. Good riddance. You want to claim ownership of everything because your great great granddaddy was rich enough to buy it from desperate people trying to survive? Not so much. One of the coolest things I ever saw was the president of Valenzuela going to a bunch of wealthy landowners who were under reporting the value of their land to avoid paying taxes and then buying the land from them for what they claimed it was worth.
I just don't get it. Why does 99% of the population trade everything for vague promises of amazing wealth.
California has some of the best farm land in the world. The only question is how to get water to it. You know, it takes more than water to grow food, right?
The problem you're having is that you're trying to solve a problem that's too big for the free market. It's like going into space (which is why you have Satellites and Internet btw). It was just too expensive for private enterprise to do. Socialism was needed. We got it, and it worked.
BTW, before you trot out the USSR and/or China (like your kind always does), they we not ever socialist. Canada is socialist. France is socialist. The USSR & China were fascist dictatorships that happened to borrow 'ole Karl's books. Christ, for want of a good (government enforced) copyright law...
she required a lot of convincing to take aid late in life, and left alone she probably would have died in a gutter. Literally. Her friends intervened and convinced her to accept what help there was. That's sort of the trouble with people like Ayn. Very low self esteem, they feel they deserve what they get, and in their favored economic systems that's less than nothing unless you're 1%...
Any author considered too dark for the Russians gets my vote. Do yourself a favor and skip his books. Think of the money you'll save on therapy.
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
it's mostly the gov't that allows you to have meat, specifically farm subsidies that a) make grain cheaper than the market would normally allow and b) stabilize the market so that people don't just grow one really profitable crop and fsck up the soil. You owe most of your stable food supply to the government programs. This isn't to say a sufficiently corrupt gov't can't screw it up, but it usually takes a dictatorship (e.g. China), which at that point isn't so much government as it is everyone doing what a one mad man says because they're expecting the be the ones that profit by it. I think we're calling it Kleptocracy these days.
Again, a few isolated mad man. But without rampant poverty their attempts to radicalize fall on deaf ears. At the risk of Godwining this thread I'll point out that Hitler only got to power because of the extreme reparations imposed on German people after WWI. Recognizing this the allies choose not to punish Germany, and instead help them rebuild.
I know this is Conservatard trolling, but I'll bite. What happens when a woman doesn't get enough vitamins and food during pregnancy. Google it, I'll wait. Now, you're a child born to that Mother. Your brain doesn't work as well, and you have lots of health problems. If that isn't the deck stacked against you I don't know what is.
The difference is OSX users are prime marketing real estate. They generally have a lot of money, and don't mind spending it. This isn't to say Linux users are the opposite, but the population isn't as flush with cash on the whole.
meanwhile there are people down south without them. People who depend on a medical outreach program Modeled after Iran.
Yes, I know I have it relatively good. But I also know there is virtually no safety net for me and I can slip into third world poverty. I know that kind of poverty exists and is tolerated in America. Did you?
But another way, just because things could be worse doesn't mean they SHOULDN'T be better.
You say 'buying off', I say giving people a life worth living and something to lose.
you don't have to steal from them, you just never let them have anything in the first place. I guess you can call that 'stealing', but it's not stealing in the traditional sense, so it's too difficult an idea for people to understand. This is why R Money and Billy G have billions and 46% of the rest of us don't make enough money to be worth taxing...
People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
Why those Mayors discuss feeding their city's poor but are silent on starvation in Africa. Come off it people, you fight battles you can win. I'm sure they'd love to spread tolerance throughout the world, but their Mayors, not God-Kings.
Speaking of religion, have you ever actually read the Christian Bible? You can do all sorts of things to people you don't like and it's A-OK. And don't forget, blacks weren't people until the last 1970, so says Mitt Romney (or at least his religion). Every religion that's existed for any length of time has terrible things in it's dogma.
We're not pretending Islam is just fine. But we're rationalists. Give people enough food, shelter and some discretionary income for hobbies and they mellow out. Ever wonder why terrorists don't send deep cover moles over here? It's because give them a taste of good life and they stop being psychotic extremists. The challenge is giving that life to everybody. Not just the vague promise that you might have a chance at it that economic conservatives and 'libertarians' favor, but the real thing.
why you pay a low flat rate for 6GB/hr they push at you but through the nose if you want to pick and choose yourself. I find it hard to believe they need bandwidth caps to manage the limits when every receiver is digital....
I've got cleaner water, better health care. Laws that make sure my food isn't poison. I've got a social safety net that keeps bands of thieves and kidnappers to a minimum. My air is also much, much cleaner. Sure, 80% of Indians never have these problems, but for the other 20% life just sucks. America put a lot of effort into closing that gap. For those of us that don't just live a charmed life we want that.
Not really. Coming out of a proper college they come out better. They have new skills and abilities. Ones that are useful outside of their current employers work environment. What these mills do is one of two things: a) teach a useless skill or b) teach a highly, highly specialized skill only relevant to the current employer.
I'm not going to argue the intangible benefits to society of traditional College because I think the phrase 'intangible benefits' is shorthand for 'I'm too lazy to quantify the benefits so I'll just call them intangible".
Apprenticeships look good in theory, but that assumes we need that many full time workers. Automation and productivity increases mean we need less full time workers, not more. The filler will keeps students out of the work force, and properly applied give them better baseline thinking skills. They then contribute more to society as a whole (if only by virtue of being better citizens). Also, it's too easy for apprenticeships to devolve into free, borderline slave, labor. We're already seeing this with unpaid interns being made to do productive work.
True, but what I find so terrible about this situation is that there isn't one single facet that doesn't benefit Amazon to the detriment of their employee and society. Amazon gets tax breaks, kick backs and profits from the school, and the employee gets debt, an increased workload and made to pay for their own job training. Some of these programs are even tailored to skills Amazon happens to need. You are quite literally paying them to be taught how to work their systems. Like I said, this is the most awful thing I've seen come out of the free market besides callous loses of life.