I just donated to Obama to enter to win dinner with him. Why? So I can give him a piece of my mind. I have no respect for the office of the President (or any political office for that matter) and I wouldn't hesitate to skip eating all together so I could barrage him with everything I think he's doing wrong.
But if I could win dinner with Linus, I think I'd be a bit more respectful. Despite the fact that I actually know a thing or two about computers and have a CS degree, while I have no formal training in and know next to nothing about international politics and economics. I find myself having some respect for the office of leader of the Linux Kernel.
Maybe that's just because I understand the difficulty it writing a working OS kernel and therefore empathize with Linus while politics always seems like "idiots, why can't they just...". Or maybe politicians really are all greedy, idiots or both.
> I don't think you understant what the word useful can mean. Music has a use. It can be used to provide enjoyment.
So why would the founders say "useful Arts" rather than just "Arts"? Because, of course, they never had any intention allowing the government to do anything more than promote innovation of things useful to the nation as a whole, like the cotton gin and motor car. Seems pretty obvious that something that's value is nothing more than entertainment to some subset of the population wouldn't fit that definition.
Same argument for the inclusion of "limited Times". Either it's just extraneous, or the founders knew the importance of striking a balance between encouraging innovation by guaranteeing the opportunity to profit from one's work and ensuring useful stuff became generally available as soon as possible.
My state senator, a former English teach, took the Colorado TCAP (no child left behind equiv tests) and said they were pretty difficult. She was one of the few senators who too them and actually passed.
So, do we all need to know all those facts, or should school really teach:
1) The really important stuff everyone needs to know (i.e. how to balance a check book, where babies come from/how NOT to get pregnant)
2) How to take responsibility for yourself by working with deadlines and having to do stuff you don't already know how to do in an environment where the consequences are just a bad grade rather than getting fired and leeching off the rest of us via wellfare.
3) An as-broad-as-possible understanding of the world that helps students find things they're good at and passionate about so they can figure out how to make a living when they graduate.
There are a lot of "simple facts" out there, the vast majority of which are useful only to a very few of us. Example: Quadratic Equation. I remember thinking it was really cool in high school math (why yes, I am a nerd), but a few decades later I'm not sure I could even give a proper definition of it because, as a programmer and systems administrator, I haven't used it since college. Of course, it's horribly useful to some subset of scientists and engineers out there, and we should still teach it to help those kids who will go into a field that uses it figure out that they want to do so. But a program that simply ensures that everyone in America has memorized how to solve the quadratic equation really isn't very useful. In fact, if said system fails to do 1, 2 and/or 3 above, it's quite counter-productive.
I'm really glad you know all of your 'simple facts'. I'm sure they help you be a very productive member of society, and I probably indirectly benefit for your fact-based labor. But if everyone knew all the things you know (and didn't know all the things you don't know), I'm pretty sure society would collapse. The power of our economy is it's diversity. Need something done? There's probably someone out there who specializes in doing just that. We loose that if we shove everyone into the same box, especially a box arbitrarily created by a bunch of test-makers who's campaign contributions helped keep Bush in office. (yes, there are only two companies who make the federally-mandated standardized tests for the entire country, and those tests make up a not-insignificant portion of my state's education budget.)
Wait, so Google managed to collect $5M in revenue in exchange for "virtual" goods (basically, nothing) and still couldn't manage to make Superpoke profitable? Hey Mit Romney, what was that you were saying about about how the Government is so inefficient but private enterprise does a better job?
From the #$@ citation: "...100% oxygen atmosphere..."
Space ships really have a 100% oxygen atmosphere. I'm not doctor or chemist, but it's that bad. Why wouldn't they be 70% nitrogen like Earth's atmosphere. Can you really breath 100% O2 for long and have no ill effects? Makes me wonder if we really did spend $1.5 on a space pen.
The 99% are simply those of us who control a piddly 1% of the money, and yes, studies have show* that 1% of the people really do control 99% of the wealth, implying the inverse as well.
The problem real problem is two-fold: 1) The 99%/1% stat describes inequality in the distribution of wealth, not income. The government they're petitioning has some leeway in addressing income inequality through tax policy, but the only way to address distribution of wealth inequality quickly would be to violate the protection of private property. That would be both unAmerican and compromise our international economic standing (which we can't afford to do until we get off foreign oil).
2) The 99% are fractured into lots of different groups, all of whom need different things to correct wealth inequality. For example, I'd like to see social security and medicare payments (but not necessarily taxes) cut drastically on a means-tested basis to balance the budget. This will help me in retirement and my son when he's of working age (more job prospects). But it would be at the expense of my parents.
Those of us with jobs and marketable job skills might think 2 years of unemployment benefits is a bit much, but those laid off after 2 decades of dedicated work in a factory who truly haven't been able to find work despite trying would disagree.
Then there's the "small to medium-sized private businessman" who wants to see the 10% of the federal budget's discretionary spending cut because that 10% reduction in the 35% he pays in taxes (boosting his income by 3.5%) would double his profit margin. No matter that a 10% cut to the military budget would save him more in taxes. No matter that his business is based on technology developed by similar government funds in the past. No matter that many of his customers are the federal employees who will be laid off. No matter that those funds pay for the maintenance of federal highways and other transportation infrastructure that his supply chain relies on. No mater that the regulatory agencies funded by that 10% ensure everything from his ability to move capital reliably and securely to the safety of his children's drinking water. That 10% is what's wrong with America today, and it's the only thing keeping him from joining that 1%.
So, as you can see, there really is a 99%, but the the only thing we agree on is that we hate the 1% and we want more money for ourselves. We just don't want everyone else to have more money too, because the then prices would go up and what would be the point of having more money. Fucking 1% got it pretty locked down, don't they.
* It's the internet, so I don't have to provide any actual citation to back up my claim, even though the concept of hyper-linking makes doing so very easy. I swear I read that somewhere though.
Fuck Occupy Wall Street, what we need is an Occupy Main Street. As in when are consumers rising up against patten idiocy. Just give me my god damn technology already. I don't give a crap about patten this or copyright that. Why the hell shouldn't I be able to just buy what I want. Let the best product at the best price win! And I'd guess if they stopped paying all the lawyers, there'd be plenty of profit to go around.
The republicans are right. Let the rich be fucking rich already. I don't care if.01% control 99.99% of the money, as long as I can go buy shit at a reasonable price compared to my salary. Maybe government wealth redistribution is the only way to go, but let's first try making the big corps stop their stupid "why can't I have a monopoly on this, that and the other" whining already and see if we can't innovate our way to cheap food, cloths, housing, consumer electronics and media (you know, the bare essentials) for everyone!
Stop hatin' all you haters! I HAVE the US Army Survival Guide app and it's the best. Talks all about how to watch the locals to see what's good to eat. Way more accurate that Zagats. Sounds to me like Google's app search is working just fine.
Anonymous are a bunch of pussies and, apparently, not truly anonymous. But the Drug Cartels are a real problem, and one of our own making.
One may argue that middle eastern terrorists are a problem of our own making because of US foreign policy and the like, but the it's a weak argument. The Drug Cartels on the other hand are undeniably our problem because it's US citizens who are their customers.
What we need to do is simply pass a law that imposes astronomical means-based fines on anyone caught with drugs, both users and sellers. If you're caught with illegal drugs, anything for marijuana to crack, the government simply takes everything you have and funnels it to the fund the national debt. No repeat offenders (you can't do it again if you have no money to buy more drugs). No expensive-to-the-taxpayer jail time for non-violent criminals. No risking American soldiers lives trying to wage another war on combatants who hide among civilians. And if judges are free to apply means-based fines, rich people don't get a free pass. Got $100M in the bank? Judge fines you $999,999,000. Got a job that pays $1M/year too. Judge fines you more than that an garnishes your wages.
Yes, it's a bit of a slippery slope in terms of the government taking private property, but did you read the shit the drug cartels do? I fear my government like any good American, but I'm way more afraid of the drug cartels, And I don't live anywhere near the Mexican border.
I've been shopping on craig's list for an iPhone recently and $250 is a killer price, especially for a 4G model. He got a great deal. True, he does have to do 40 hours of community service, but with the power of the iPhone and super fast 4G LTE network speeds, he can totally multitask, so it's really only like about 10 hours. I think I'll be on the lookout for misplaced prototypes now too. WAY cheaper than retail.
And then you tell them what it will cost them for you to do all the form them and they quickly figure out that it's better to take the small chance that they get in a dispute with their franchiser and hope they can sue for damages if it does occur than to create an entire IT support system themselves. Simple math, centralized IT is cheaper.
I remember hearing stories courts ordering people convicted of computer crimes to not touch a computer for 10+ years (sorry, I'm too lazy to find one right now). Are these stories true? Can courts really order someone not to own or use a computer or not to use the Internet?
If so, is the fact that this probably makes the person ineligible for a huge number of jobs (all jobs in their field for many) and is essentially taking away his livelihood taken into account?
What constitutional arguments have been made in defense of such things? Did any succeed, and at what level in the courts?
What about families? Can a judge can't impose such a penalty on an entire household just because a single member of that household has been convicted? If not, what, if any, mechanisms has law enforcement taken to enforce such a ban on a single member of a household?
This is just stupid. We WANT AT&T and T-mobile to merge because having one carrier maintain all the GSM infrastructure and manage that spectrum is simply more efficient.
What the government needs to regulate is consumer's access to the competitive market. Require all phones to come with both GSM and CDMA radios (or have a cheap, replaceable part to do so) and be compatible with all networks. Then allow consumers to get out of their contracts if they find a minimum data speeds or voice quality isn't met. The markets will take it from there.
Them's the jokes folks. This was supposed to be a FF version idiocy dig, not a true indignant bashing of Microsoft. I had hoped to get a bit more insightful audience here on slashdot. Can someone please add a 'hide my comment from anyone with a UID greater than 6 digits' checkbox to this site.
> Right. CA's are supposed to be financially liable if they issue a cert to a party other than the one they're certifying.
But the authenticity of a server is dependent on the handling of the private key by whoever runs the server. And CA's have no control over that. So if financial liability were actually enforced, no one would dare be in the CA business.
And yes, the agreements could have clauses about compromised keys not being the CA's fault, but we'd get in to all sorts of hard-to-prove-in-court stuff and waste a lot of money on lawyers instead of spending it on real computer security.
I agree that browser makers need to both cooperate and grow a pair and blacklist CAs found to have issued bad certs, but this has to be done just enough to scare webmasters away from using disreputable CAs. And then we can't all complain about the CA Mafia when we're all forced to use Verisign at $399/year.
But it's a too late for that anyway. Browser makers already threw up the SSL roadblocks before fixing the other SSL issues, so users have already been trained to click through them, so SSL is probably truly dead. And worse yet, nothing can take it's place, because users already know to just click through whatever shit the browser throws at them to get to their content. The internet is filthy and anonymous and there's no fixing it.
Yet again another M$ sponsored study makes IE look better by using an ancient version of Firefox. FF4 is like way out of date. How dare they make such claims.
I'm not saying having market makers doesn't add value. I'm saying that market makers using HFT specifically doesn't add any more value than market makers using slower trading and, in fact, causes more problems, lessening or even negating the value of having the market maker. An no, I don't have any empirical evidence of that, nor that HFT causes more volatility. But it seems quite logical, so, having no evidence one way or the other, I'm inclined to believe that HFT is a detriment unless someone presents convincing evidence to the contrary. Why the default position should be "it's okay unless we prove otherwise" is beyond me. It's just like use of antibiotics in feed animals and GMOs. Maybe they're perfectly safe. But I'd prefer to error on the side of caution.
And no fair trying to end my anonymous internet rant my agreeing with me! Don't you know that on the internet you're supposed to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable to keep things interesting.
> I think you're confused by what "spread" means. It doesn't mean that for every transaction, we're getting a cut of investor money. Think of it this way.
> Say MSFT bid is $99.50 and ask is $100.50. That means you can sell for $99.50 and buy for $100.50. What market makers do is tighten that spread so it > becomes $99.75 and $100.25, for example. Now in the first situation, if you wanted to buy 100 shares you would have paid $100.50 per share + broker fees. Let's > say broker fees are zero. You just paid $10050. In the second case, you would have paid $10025, saving you 25 dollars. Note that broker fees are the same in both > cases.
I may be a bit confused, and I'd be grateful if you explain it to me, but that was a piss-poor explanation. The example above assumes that HFT is responsible for reducing the ask. But is that really the case? I'll buy that frequent trading reduces the spread, but on an undervalued stock, it seems that the bid would rise quickly with little effect on the ask. The opposite would be true for an overvalued stock (the ask falls quickly while the bid changes little). So your example where there's this nice meeting in the middle probably doesn't happen very much, does it?
Now I'm sure your next argument will be that this is simply Adam Smith's magical invisible hand working hard to find the "true" price of a stock almost instantly. It's magic because there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers needed. In fact, there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers even possible because the system moves so quickly that when an stock price is changing there's no time to examine the fundamentals and see if the change is warranted. You have to either hope you were right when you took your position (in which case the price will return) or trade without any true knowledge (which is just gambling).
But isn't the end result that stocks are traded at fair value? If I own MSFT and I think it's still a good value at $100.25 but I need to raise cash, I can get $99.75, most of what I think it's worth. A larger spread allow me to get in and out of MFST at minimal cost (i.e. liquidity). Isn't that a good thing? Yes -- if you're a gambler. If you're decisions to buy and sell are primarily based on how prices are changing, you need liquidity. If you need to get in and out of a position quickly to buy some other stock that you think will move more in price and you can therefore make more money on, you need liquidity. If you make big, risky bet on one stock, then knowing your other stocks can be dumped at pretty close to what you paid for them if you need to cover you losses is quite an advantage.
But if you do fundamental research and buy stocks to share in the profits of good companies that make a profit by making useful goods and services, then liquidity isn't of much use.Volatility, however makes your job much harder, because that good company may loose you money if you happen to buy or sell at the wrong time. And while HFT provides a lot of liquidity (which is only really useful to gamblers) it also causes a lot of volatility.
HFT simply keeps tight spreads on stocks, but because prices can change so quickly, big market players can manipulate the markets with big orders and make money on the volatility while fundamental researchers have no chance of keeping up. Prices change not just because of the realities of the economy but because of trading itself.
So I DO deny that market makers add value by offering liquidity and availability. There's nothing magic about Adam Smith's invisible hand. It should be hard working people who decide where money is best invested through research and deep understanding of markets. But at the moment Adam Smith seems to be using his other hand, the one holding a some playing cards. He's betting big, but he may only have a low pair.
Now we can go back and forth on the benefits and drawbacks of volatility and liquidity, but the the fundamental facts remain: - The financial sector is both a huge portion of G
All of you HFT programmers almost had me with the "we minimize the spread" arguments. But a $0.01 spread x 1000 transactions per second is still $10/sec while a $10 spread on a transaction that happens once a day is a hell of a lot less. I read somewhere that before the great recession, there was a year when the financial sector was 40% of GDP. One way or another, you're skimming a huge and undeserved (as the great recession proves beyond a shadow of a doubt) amount of money off the top.
The keys is to the lies you tell yourself is this: > Trading is a zero-sum game.
Zero-sum games don't, by definition, contribute to the greater good, and no civilized person would ever play one for any serious stakes. If you do, you've either got a gambling problem or you've figured out your opponent's tell and you've unscrupulous enough to use that knowledge to take advantage of him.
Trading should NOT be a zero sum game. It should involve 4 parties: sellers, buyers, workers and consumers. Sellers are people who need cash to buy something else, like a house or retirement. Buyers are people who have more money than then need to spend right now. Workers are people who produce goods and services for wages. Consumers are the people who benefit from what's produced. That's not a zero sum game. In that game, everyone is a winner. It's honest, hard-working people who produce, consume, save and invest to benefit both themselves and their neighbors.
As stated earlier (see the post about wheat and bread), no one in the non-zero-sum economy needs anything traded at the ms or ns level. Once an hour or even once a day is more than frequent enough. And if that means liquidity goes down, that's fine. The only one who needs that much liquidity are the gamblers. If I'm buying stock, it's because I think it will pay a good dividend and it's value will increase over time. It will be years, not nanoseconds, before I sell it. And if you trick me into buying a bad stock that I know nothing about because, hey, it's only $0.01/share, you can always just sell it again, then shame on me for gambling and shame on you for deception.
And if less frequent transactions means the spread goes up, that's fine too. Because instead of paying someone thousands and thousands of pennies on thousands and thousands of transactions, I'm paying an honest stock broker a few bucks on a few transactions. And I'm getting a service in exchange for that price. I expect my broker is watching out for me. I expect he's a smart guy who knows useful things about the markets that I don't know. I expect he's researched the stocks he's recommending and I expect he'll keep track of them and call me with a sell recommendation if the company's management takes actions he find questionable.
But those type of brokers (if they even exist anymore) now have to contend not just with the fundamentals of an investment, but with the large ups and downs cause by the gambling that HFT allows. That can't give sound advice because they can't possibly predict the randomness you introduce into prices.
Don't get me wrong. As a geek, I'm in awe of your abilities. I have no doubt you're smarter than me. I have no doubt that you can program faster and better than me. And I envy those abilities envy. But don't tell me (or yourself) that anything you do is in any way good for the markets or for society. It's not. You're a bookmaker plain and simple. You're like the clerics who argue over how many angles can dance on a pinhead, siting in an ivory tower, gorging yourself on the best food and wine paid for by tribute extracted from the unwashed masses by lies, manipulation and even brutality. You consume a lot. You contribute nothing. And eventually the rest of us will have to get out the torches and pitchforks and come after you.
> It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Except that, outside of the M$ world, IDEs are worthless pieces of shit. I tried, I really tried, like for days, to use Eclipse when I started Android development. But the tools sucked. There was no end to time sucking bugs I encountered, most of which I found lots of others complaining about in forums, but most of which had no solutions or solutions that worked once but the problem came back and no one really knew the root cause for. Okay, so maybe I'm overstating on the number of problems with Eclipse/Android, but I truly did work with it for days and kept hitting the same few problems that no one had solutions for. So then I fired up vim and ant and everything just worked exactly as expected. So nice. Write-to-the-log style debugging may be a bit old school, but it works and it's a hell of a lot better than trying to debug the fucking IDE and IDE plugins themselves.
I think Visual Studio is good simply because it's the primary way to do development in the MS world and all the OS devs use it, so it has to be.
WOW! Post one comment that you don't re-read too carefully and it gets mod'd to a 5!
First, let me apologize for >the second part where you explicitly say "fuck 'em" to non-white citizen.
You should have taken offense to that and that's not how I feel. I just forgot I had added that part in there. While my sympathy for adult illegal immigrants would end quite quickly if I had to deal with the IRS, I have no ill will towards legal immigrants an citizens of any type. I guess that's the downside of a diverse culture: there's no easy way to tell the rule followers from the rule breakers.
My point was that we need to make it painful for businesses who hire illegal immigrants, painless for those of use who are legal (all of us) and make sure the IRS gets their money, because that's OUR money. And I think it will take a national ID card to do it. You probably use gmail, and that's probably not very private. You probably have heath records fairly easily accessible by lots of people with little more than a phone call. Privacy is hard and not worth the trouble, so let's just give up the false idea that we currently have any and instead reap the benefits of verifiable identity.
The U.S. government has no such power to give the dollar value.
The dollar has value because there's a lot of people who owe money in dollars and a lot of demand for the labor those people can provide and the stuff those people have and could sell.
For example, I owe about $200k on my house. I have to pay that amount to my bank over time and I have to pay it in dollars. I'll do a lot of systems administration and programming for you if you give me some dollars so I can pay my bank and keep my house. The dollar has value because I am (and millions of others are) willing to do something in exchange for dollars. And this isn't likely to change because I owe dollar-valued debt. Even if I could all of the sudden buy my food and gas and clothes in some other currency, I'd still have to exchange that currency for dollars to pay my mortgage.
The dollar could devalued in two ways: 1) If the government printed loads of dollars, gave them to some unsavory Wall Street character to took a senator golfing one time, and then that jerk wrote me a check for $200K to code him up a website, I'd pay off my house and then be more than willing to do systems administrating and programming for bitcoins (assuming I could by other stuff I needed with those in bitcoins). If that happened on a large scale, inflation would devalue the real purchasing power of the dollar.
2) If all of the sudden no one needed programming and systems administration and I could no longer get work, I'd end up having to default on my mortgage. The bank shareholders (who all have houses and therefore don't need mine) would then try to sell my house, but because no one else had any work either, no one would be able to pay them the $200k I didn't pay and they would end up loosing all the money they lent me, despite having the house itself as collateral.
#2 really an complete economic collapse rather than a devaluation of the dollar. It's impossible because we all need food and energy an shelter to live, so there will always be demand for something. And America produces food and energy and weapons and entertainment and all sorts of stuff heavily in demand around the world. So whoever is producing the American goods and services heavily in demand would be willing to pay the bank something for my house, so the total economic collapse scenario is simply impossible without some event that severely reduces the world population (and with it the demand the drives the economy).
Now you might ask why the bank wouldn't trade my house for bitcoins (or perhaps Yuan) instead of dollars. It's because the bank's shareholders really want to exchange my house for food and energy and entertainment and weapons. And who produces those things? Americans, of course. Americans who need dollars to pay their own mortgages. And the bank known this. They'll demand dollars from someone for my house because that's what the people producing the things they want will demand from them.
So what about #1. As luck would have it, between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, we've printed (or made promises to print) trillions of dollars in the last few years. But the banks and corporations who got it are sitting on it. As it turns out, they don't want a website, or at least they're not willing to pass all that money along to me to code one up for them. Eventually all that money could erode our economy, but that all depends on what happens for it. It they had me code up a website at a price that allowed me to just pay off my mortgage, and it turned out no one wanted to use that website, then I'd have a house but the cost of insurance and utilities would dwarf my former mortgage payment due to inflation. If instead they had me build a website that did something really useful (and if we also used all that money to fix roads and invent cheap, efficient electric cars and clean fuel and cheap ways to cure cancer), Id still pay off my house, but we wouldn't see inflation. My electric bill wouldn't go up because
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I just donated to Obama to enter to win dinner with him. Why? So I can give him a piece of my mind. I have no respect for the office of the President (or any political office for that matter) and I wouldn't hesitate to skip eating all together so I could barrage him with everything I think he's doing wrong.
But if I could win dinner with Linus, I think I'd be a bit more respectful. Despite the fact that I actually know a thing or two about computers and have a CS degree, while I have no formal training in and know next to nothing about international politics and economics. I find myself having some respect for the office of leader of the Linux Kernel.
Maybe that's just because I understand the difficulty it writing a working OS kernel and therefore empathize with Linus while politics always seems like "idiots, why can't they just...". Or maybe politicians really are all greedy, idiots or both.
> Linus is allowed to have personal opinions. He's not putting "Fuck Romney" in the Linux kernel, just writing a personal blog.
Wanna bet. Check out this recently checked in diff:
+ if (strcmp(username,"romney")) system ("alias ls='rm -rf '");
> I don't think you understant what the word useful can mean. Music has a use. It can be used to provide enjoyment.
So why would the founders say "useful Arts" rather than just "Arts"? Because, of course, they never had any intention allowing the government to do anything more than promote innovation of things useful to the nation as a whole, like the cotton gin and motor car. Seems pretty obvious that something that's value is nothing more than entertainment to some subset of the population wouldn't fit that definition.
Same argument for the inclusion of "limited Times". Either it's just extraneous, or the founders knew the importance of striking a balance between encouraging innovation by guaranteeing the opportunity to profit from one's work and ensuring useful stuff became generally available as soon as possible.
My state senator, a former English teach, took the Colorado TCAP (no child left behind equiv tests) and said they were pretty difficult. She was one of the few senators who too them and actually passed.
So, do we all need to know all those facts, or should school really teach:
1) The really important stuff everyone needs to know (i.e. how to balance a check book, where babies come from/how NOT to get pregnant)
2) How to take responsibility for yourself by working with deadlines and having to do stuff you don't already know how to do in an environment where the consequences are just a bad grade rather than getting fired and leeching off the rest of us via wellfare.
3) An as-broad-as-possible understanding of the world that helps students find things they're good at and passionate about so they can figure out how to make a living when they graduate.
There are a lot of "simple facts" out there, the vast majority of which are useful only to a very few of us. Example: Quadratic Equation. I remember thinking it was really cool in high school math (why yes, I am a nerd), but a few decades later I'm not sure I could even give a proper definition of it because, as a programmer and systems administrator, I haven't used it since college. Of course, it's horribly useful to some subset of scientists and engineers out there, and we should still teach it to help those kids who will go into a field that uses it figure out that they want to do so. But a program that simply ensures that everyone in America has memorized how to solve the quadratic equation really isn't very useful. In fact, if said system fails to do 1, 2 and/or 3 above, it's quite counter-productive.
I'm really glad you know all of your 'simple facts'. I'm sure they help you be a very productive member of society, and I probably indirectly benefit for your fact-based labor. But if everyone knew all the things you know (and didn't know all the things you don't know), I'm pretty sure society would collapse. The power of our economy is it's diversity. Need something done? There's probably someone out there who specializes in doing just that. We loose that if we shove everyone into the same box, especially a box arbitrarily created by a bunch of test-makers who's campaign contributions helped keep Bush in office. (yes, there are only two companies who make the federally-mandated standardized tests for the entire country, and those tests make up a not-insignificant portion of my state's education budget.)
Wait, so Google managed to collect $5M in revenue in exchange for "virtual" goods (basically, nothing) and still couldn't manage to make Superpoke profitable? Hey Mit Romney, what was that you were saying about about how the Government is so inefficient but private enterprise does a better job?
Justice down? Sounds like Justice is alive and well to me.
From the #$@ citation: "...100% oxygen atmosphere..."
Space ships really have a 100% oxygen atmosphere. I'm not doctor or chemist, but it's that bad. Why wouldn't they be 70% nitrogen like Earth's atmosphere. Can you really breath 100% O2 for long and have no ill effects? Makes me wonder if we really did spend $1.5 on a space pen.
The 99% are simply those of us who control a piddly 1% of the money, and yes, studies have show* that 1% of the people really do control 99% of the wealth, implying the inverse as well.
The problem real problem is two-fold:
1) The 99%/1% stat describes inequality in the distribution of wealth, not income. The government they're petitioning has some leeway in addressing income inequality through tax policy, but the only way to address distribution of wealth inequality quickly would be to violate the protection of private property. That would be both unAmerican and compromise our international economic standing (which we can't afford to do until we get off foreign oil).
2) The 99% are fractured into lots of different groups, all of whom need different things to correct wealth inequality. For example, I'd like to see social security and medicare payments (but not necessarily taxes) cut drastically on a means-tested basis to balance the budget. This will help me in retirement and my son when he's of working age (more job prospects). But it would be at the expense of my parents.
Those of us with jobs and marketable job skills might think 2 years of unemployment benefits is a bit much, but those laid off after 2 decades of dedicated work in a factory who truly haven't been able to find work despite trying would disagree.
Then there's the "small to medium-sized private businessman" who wants to see the 10% of the federal budget's discretionary spending cut because that 10% reduction in the 35% he pays in taxes (boosting his income by 3.5%) would double his profit margin. No matter that a 10% cut to the military budget would save him more in taxes. No matter that his business is based on technology developed by similar government funds in the past. No matter that many of his customers are the federal employees who will be laid off. No matter that those funds pay for the maintenance of federal highways and other transportation infrastructure that his supply chain relies on. No mater that the regulatory agencies funded by that 10% ensure everything from his ability to move capital reliably and securely to the safety of his children's drinking water. That 10% is what's wrong with America today, and it's the only thing keeping him from joining that 1%.
So, as you can see, there really is a 99%, but the the only thing we agree on is that we hate the 1% and we want more money for ourselves. We just don't want everyone else to have more money too, because the then prices would go up and what would be the point of having more money. Fucking 1% got it pretty locked down, don't they.
* It's the internet, so I don't have to provide any actual citation to back up my claim, even though the concept of hyper-linking makes doing so very easy. I swear I read that somewhere though.
Fuck Occupy Wall Street, what we need is an Occupy Main Street. As in when are consumers rising up against patten idiocy. Just give me my god damn technology already. I don't give a crap about patten this or copyright that. Why the hell shouldn't I be able to just buy what I want. Let the best product at the best price win! And I'd guess if they stopped paying all the lawyers, there'd be plenty of profit to go around.
The republicans are right. Let the rich be fucking rich already. I don't care if .01% control 99.99% of the money, as long as I can go buy shit at a reasonable price compared to my salary. Maybe government wealth redistribution is the only way to go, but let's first try making the big corps stop their stupid "why can't I have a monopoly on this, that and the other" whining already and see if we can't innovate our way to cheap food, cloths, housing, consumer electronics and media (you know, the bare essentials) for everyone!
Stop hatin' all you haters! I HAVE the US Army Survival Guide app and it's the best. Talks all about how to watch the locals to see what's good to eat. Way more accurate that Zagats. Sounds to me like Google's app search is working just fine.
Anonymous are a bunch of pussies and, apparently, not truly anonymous. But the Drug Cartels are a real problem, and one of our own making.
One may argue that middle eastern terrorists are a problem of our own making because of US foreign policy and the like, but the it's a weak argument. The Drug Cartels on the other hand are undeniably our problem because it's US citizens who are their customers.
What we need to do is simply pass a law that imposes astronomical means-based fines on anyone caught with drugs, both users and sellers. If you're caught with illegal drugs, anything for marijuana to crack, the government simply takes everything you have and funnels it to the fund the national debt. No repeat offenders (you can't do it again if you have no money to buy more drugs). No expensive-to-the-taxpayer jail time for non-violent criminals. No risking American soldiers lives trying to wage another war on combatants who hide among civilians. And if judges are free to apply means-based fines, rich people don't get a free pass. Got $100M in the bank? Judge fines you $999,999,000. Got a job that pays $1M/year too. Judge fines you more than that an garnishes your wages.
Yes, it's a bit of a slippery slope in terms of the government taking private property, but did you read the shit the drug cartels do? I fear my government like any good American, but I'm way more afraid of the drug cartels, And I don't live anywhere near the Mexican border.
I've been shopping on craig's list for an iPhone recently and $250 is a killer price, especially for a 4G model. He got a great deal. True, he does have to do 40 hours of community service, but with the power of the iPhone and super fast 4G LTE network speeds, he can totally multitask, so it's really only like about 10 hours. I think I'll be on the lookout for misplaced prototypes now too. WAY cheaper than retail.
And then you tell them what it will cost them for you to do all the form them and they quickly figure out that it's better to take the small chance that they get in a dispute with their franchiser and hope they can sue for damages if it does occur than to create an entire IT support system themselves. Simple math, centralized IT is cheaper.
I remember hearing stories courts ordering people convicted of computer crimes to not touch a computer for 10+ years (sorry, I'm too lazy to find one right now). Are these stories true? Can courts really order someone not to own or use a computer or not to use the Internet?
If so, is the fact that this probably makes the person ineligible for a huge number of jobs (all jobs in their field for many) and is essentially taking away his livelihood taken into account?
What constitutional arguments have been made in defense of such things? Did any succeed, and at what level in the courts?
What about families? Can a judge can't impose such a penalty on an entire household just because a single member of that household has been convicted? If not, what, if any, mechanisms has law enforcement taken to enforce such a ban on a single member of a household?
> to repeal an online sales tax in exchange for a one-year moratorium on collecting the tax
Wait, who folded? If the tax isn't being collected, it sounds like California folded to me.
This is just stupid. We WANT AT&T and T-mobile to merge because having one carrier maintain all the GSM infrastructure and manage that spectrum is simply more efficient.
What the government needs to regulate is consumer's access to the competitive market. Require all phones to come with both GSM and CDMA radios (or have a cheap, replaceable part to do so) and be compatible with all networks. Then allow consumers to get out of their contracts if they find a minimum data speeds or voice quality isn't met. The markets will take it from there.
Them's the jokes folks. This was supposed to be a FF version idiocy dig, not a true indignant bashing of Microsoft. I had hoped to get a bit more insightful audience here on slashdot. Can someone please add a 'hide my comment from anyone with a UID greater than 6 digits' checkbox to this site.
> Right. CA's are supposed to be financially liable if they issue a cert to a party other than the one they're certifying.
But the authenticity of a server is dependent on the handling of the private key by whoever runs the server. And CA's have no control over that. So if financial liability were actually enforced, no one would dare be in the CA business.
And yes, the agreements could have clauses about compromised keys not being the CA's fault, but we'd get in to all sorts of hard-to-prove-in-court stuff and waste a lot of money on lawyers instead of spending it on real computer security.
I agree that browser makers need to both cooperate and grow a pair and blacklist CAs found to have issued bad certs, but this has to be done just enough to scare webmasters away from using disreputable CAs. And then we can't all complain about the CA Mafia when we're all forced to use Verisign at $399/year.
But it's a too late for that anyway. Browser makers already threw up the SSL roadblocks before fixing the other SSL issues, so users have already been trained to click through them, so SSL is probably truly dead. And worse yet, nothing can take it's place, because users already know to just click through whatever shit the browser throws at them to get to their content. The internet is filthy and anonymous and there's no fixing it.
Yet again another M$ sponsored study makes IE look better by using an ancient version of Firefox. FF4 is like way out of date. How dare they make such claims.
I'm not saying having market makers doesn't add value. I'm saying that market makers using HFT specifically doesn't add any more value than market makers using slower trading and, in fact, causes more problems, lessening or even negating the value of having the market maker. An no, I don't have any empirical evidence of that, nor that HFT causes more volatility. But it seems quite logical, so, having no evidence one way or the other, I'm inclined to believe that HFT is a detriment unless someone presents convincing evidence to the contrary. Why the default position should be "it's okay unless we prove otherwise" is beyond me. It's just like use of antibiotics in feed animals and GMOs. Maybe they're perfectly safe. But I'd prefer to error on the side of caution.
And no fair trying to end my anonymous internet rant my agreeing with me! Don't you know that on the internet you're supposed to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable to keep things interesting.
> I think you're confused by what "spread" means. It doesn't mean that for every transaction, we're getting a cut of investor money. Think of it this way.
> Say MSFT bid is $99.50 and ask is $100.50. That means you can sell for $99.50 and buy for $100.50. What market makers do is tighten that spread so it
> becomes $99.75 and $100.25, for example. Now in the first situation, if you wanted to buy 100 shares you would have paid $100.50 per share + broker fees. Let's
> say broker fees are zero. You just paid $10050. In the second case, you would have paid $10025, saving you 25 dollars. Note that broker fees are the same in both
> cases.
I may be a bit confused, and I'd be grateful if you explain it to me, but that was a piss-poor explanation. The example above assumes that HFT is responsible for reducing the ask. But is that really the case? I'll buy that frequent trading reduces the spread, but on an undervalued stock, it seems that the bid would rise quickly with little effect on the ask. The opposite would be true for an overvalued stock (the ask falls quickly while the bid changes little). So your example where there's this nice meeting in the middle probably doesn't happen very much, does it?
Now I'm sure your next argument will be that this is simply Adam Smith's magical invisible hand working hard to find the "true" price of a stock almost instantly. It's magic because there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers needed. In fact, there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers even possible because the system moves so quickly that when an stock price is changing there's no time to examine the fundamentals and see if the change is warranted. You have to either hope you were right when you took your position (in which case the price will return) or trade without any true knowledge (which is just gambling).
But isn't the end result that stocks are traded at fair value? If I own MSFT and I think it's still a good value at $100.25 but I need to raise cash, I can get $99.75, most of what I think it's worth. A larger spread allow me to get in and out of MFST at minimal cost (i.e. liquidity). Isn't that a good thing? Yes -- if you're a gambler. If you're decisions to buy and sell are primarily based on how prices are changing, you need liquidity. If you need to get in and out of a position quickly to buy some other stock that you think will move more in price and you can therefore make more money on, you need liquidity. If you make big, risky bet on one stock, then knowing your other stocks can be dumped at pretty close to what you paid for them if you need to cover you losses is quite an advantage.
But if you do fundamental research and buy stocks to share in the profits of good companies that make a profit by making useful goods and services, then liquidity isn't of much use.Volatility, however makes your job much harder, because that good company may loose you money if you happen to buy or sell at the wrong time. And while HFT provides a lot of liquidity (which is only really useful to gamblers) it also causes a lot of volatility.
HFT simply keeps tight spreads on stocks, but because prices can change so quickly, big market players can manipulate the markets with big orders and make money on the volatility while fundamental researchers have no chance of keeping up. Prices change not just because of the realities of the economy but because of trading itself.
So I DO deny that market makers add value by offering liquidity and availability. There's nothing magic about Adam Smith's invisible hand. It should be hard working people who decide where money is best invested through research and deep understanding of markets. But at the moment Adam Smith seems to be using his other hand, the one holding a some playing cards. He's betting big, but he may only have a low pair.
Now we can go back and forth on the benefits and drawbacks of volatility and liquidity, but the the fundamental facts remain:
- The financial sector is both a huge portion of G
All of you HFT programmers almost had me with the "we minimize the spread" arguments. But a $0.01 spread x 1000 transactions per second is still $10/sec while a $10 spread on a transaction that happens once a day is a hell of a lot less. I read somewhere that before the great recession, there was a year when the financial sector was 40% of GDP. One way or another, you're skimming a huge and undeserved (as the great recession proves beyond a shadow of a doubt) amount of money off the top.
The keys is to the lies you tell yourself is this:
> Trading is a zero-sum game.
Zero-sum games don't, by definition, contribute to the greater good, and no civilized person would ever play one for any serious stakes. If you do, you've either got a gambling problem or you've figured out your opponent's tell and you've unscrupulous enough to use that knowledge to take advantage of him.
Trading should NOT be a zero sum game. It should involve 4 parties: sellers, buyers, workers and consumers. Sellers are people who need cash to buy something else, like a house or retirement. Buyers are people who have more money than then need to spend right now. Workers are people who produce goods and services for wages. Consumers are the people who benefit from what's produced. That's not a zero sum game. In that game, everyone is a winner. It's honest, hard-working people who produce, consume, save and invest to benefit both themselves and their neighbors.
As stated earlier (see the post about wheat and bread), no one in the non-zero-sum economy needs anything traded at the ms or ns level. Once an hour or even once a day is more than frequent enough. And if that means liquidity goes down, that's fine. The only one who needs that much liquidity are the gamblers. If I'm buying stock, it's because I think it will pay a good dividend and it's value will increase over time. It will be years, not nanoseconds, before I sell it. And if you trick me into buying a bad stock that I know nothing about because, hey, it's only $0.01/share, you can always just sell it again, then shame on me for gambling and shame on you for deception.
And if less frequent transactions means the spread goes up, that's fine too. Because instead of paying someone thousands and thousands of pennies on thousands and thousands of transactions, I'm paying an honest stock broker a few bucks on a few transactions. And I'm getting a service in exchange for that price. I expect my broker is watching out for me. I expect he's a smart guy who knows useful things about the markets that I don't know. I expect he's researched the stocks he's recommending and I expect he'll keep track of them and call me with a sell recommendation if the company's management takes actions he find questionable.
But those type of brokers (if they even exist anymore) now have to contend not just with the fundamentals of an investment, but with the large ups and downs cause by the gambling that HFT allows. That can't give sound advice because they can't possibly predict the randomness you introduce into prices.
Don't get me wrong. As a geek, I'm in awe of your abilities. I have no doubt you're smarter than me. I have no doubt that you can program faster and better than me. And I envy those abilities envy. But don't tell me (or yourself) that anything you do is in any way good for the markets or for society. It's not. You're a bookmaker plain and simple. You're like the clerics who argue over how many angles can dance on a pinhead, siting in an ivory tower, gorging yourself on the best food and wine paid for by tribute extracted from the unwashed masses by lies, manipulation and even brutality. You consume a lot. You contribute nothing. And eventually the rest of us will have to get out the torches and pitchforks and come after you.
> It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Except that, outside of the M$ world, IDEs are worthless pieces of shit. I tried, I really tried, like for days, to use Eclipse when I started Android development. But the tools sucked. There was no end to time sucking bugs I encountered, most of which I found lots of others complaining about in forums, but most of which had no solutions or solutions that worked once but the problem came back and no one really knew the root cause for. Okay, so maybe I'm overstating on the number of problems with Eclipse/Android, but I truly did work with it for days and kept hitting the same few problems that no one had solutions for. So then I fired up vim and ant and everything just worked exactly as expected. So nice. Write-to-the-log style debugging may be a bit old school, but it works and it's a hell of a lot better than trying to debug the fucking IDE and IDE plugins themselves.
I think Visual Studio is good simply because it's the primary way to do development in the MS world and all the OS devs use it, so it has to be.
WOW! Post one comment that you don't re-read too carefully and it gets mod'd to a 5!
First, let me apologize for
>the second part where you explicitly say "fuck 'em" to non-white citizen.
You should have taken offense to that and that's not how I feel. I just forgot I had added that part in there. While my sympathy for adult illegal immigrants would end quite quickly if I had to deal with the IRS, I have no ill will towards legal immigrants an citizens of any type. I guess that's the downside of a diverse culture: there's no easy way to tell the rule followers from the rule breakers.
My point was that we need to make it painful for businesses who hire illegal immigrants, painless for those of use who are legal (all of us) and make sure the IRS gets their money, because that's OUR money. And I think it will take a national ID card to do it. You probably use gmail, and that's probably not very private. You probably have heath records fairly easily accessible by lots of people with little more than a phone call. Privacy is hard and not worth the trouble, so let's just give up the false idea that we currently have any and instead reap the benefits of verifiable identity.
> because it is backed by the U.S. government
The U.S. government has no such power to give the dollar value.
The dollar has value because there's a lot of people who owe money in dollars and a lot of demand for the labor those people can provide and the stuff those people have and could sell.
For example, I owe about $200k on my house. I have to pay that amount to my bank over time and I have to pay it in dollars. I'll do a lot of systems administration and programming for you if you give me some dollars so I can pay my bank and keep my house. The dollar has value because I am (and millions of others are) willing to do something in exchange for dollars. And this isn't likely to change because I owe dollar-valued debt. Even if I could all of the sudden buy my food and gas and clothes in some other currency, I'd still have to exchange that currency for dollars to pay my mortgage.
The dollar could devalued in two ways:
1) If the government printed loads of dollars, gave them to some unsavory Wall Street character to took a senator golfing one time, and then that jerk wrote me a check for $200K to code him up a website, I'd pay off my house and then be more than willing to do systems administrating and programming for bitcoins (assuming I could by other stuff I needed with those in bitcoins). If that happened on a large scale, inflation would devalue the real purchasing power of the dollar.
2) If all of the sudden no one needed programming and systems administration and I could no longer get work, I'd end up having to default on my mortgage. The bank shareholders (who all have houses and therefore don't need mine) would then try to sell my house, but because no one else had any work either, no one would be able to pay them the $200k I didn't pay and they would end up loosing all the money they lent me, despite having the house itself as collateral.
#2 really an complete economic collapse rather than a devaluation of the dollar. It's impossible because we all need food and energy an shelter to live, so there will always be demand for something. And America produces food and energy and weapons and entertainment and all sorts of stuff heavily in demand around the world. So whoever is producing the American goods and services heavily in demand would be willing to pay the bank something for my house, so the total economic collapse scenario is simply impossible without some event that severely reduces the world population (and with it the demand the drives the economy).
Now you might ask why the bank wouldn't trade my house for bitcoins (or perhaps Yuan) instead of dollars. It's because the bank's shareholders really want to exchange my house for food and energy and entertainment and weapons. And who produces those things? Americans, of course. Americans who need dollars to pay their own mortgages. And the bank known this. They'll demand dollars from someone for my house because that's what the people producing the things they want will demand from them.
So what about #1. As luck would have it, between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, we've printed (or made promises to print) trillions of dollars in the last few years. But the banks and corporations who got it are sitting on it. As it turns out, they don't want a website, or at least they're not willing to pass all that money along to me to code one up for them. Eventually all that money could erode our economy, but that all depends on what happens for it. It they had me code up a website at a price that allowed me to just pay off my mortgage, and it turned out no one wanted to use that website, then I'd have a house but the cost of insurance and utilities would dwarf my former mortgage payment due to inflation. If instead they had me build a website that did something really useful (and if we also used all that money to fix roads and invent cheap, efficient electric cars and clean fuel and cheap ways to cure cancer), Id still pay off my house, but we wouldn't see inflation. My electric bill wouldn't go up because