There are already too many jack-wagons where I live that drop someone off in front of the store and then STAY PARKED IN THE FIRE LANE waiting for that person to come out.
In one small town I lived in the main grocery store got tired of that and asked the cops to ticket people parked in the fire lane. Every few months a cop would grab a lawn chair, park it in the shade of the building, and just sit there. People would drive by him, park in the fire lane, and he'd write up the ticket, wander over, hand it to them, and then head back and sit down.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. And it didn't seem to make much difference in the long run.
I'm just wondering what size his tactical pants are. I mean, he obviously doesn't need them anymore, now that he's not fighting bad guys as the head of the EPA.
This doesn't mean there will be fewer cars on the road, especially at peak commute hours.
No. It means there will be double the number of cars during these times.
Normally, you drive to work and park there. One way trip. Now the automated rideshare drives you to work, then drives back to your neighborhood to get someone else, and repeats that cycle.
If people happen to be headed opposite directions, this is mitigated somewhat, but most cities have pretty one-way traffic flows that go in in the morning and out in the evening.
When my wife and I were just finishing up grad school and looking for our first house, we ran into the same thing. We looked at our current level of income and based buying a house on that. Knowing full well that it was likely we would be earning more soon, but that wasn't something we'd gamble a house on.
So we did up our monthly budget, figured out the max we could pay, backwards calculated a 30 yr fixed rate loan, and had our maximum house price. We scraped together the down payment, and were ready to go. First real estate agent we talked to immediately started showing us shit way over our budget, "Because you have plenty of money for the down payment if you get a FHA loan as first time buyers."
We explained very clearly that the down payment wasn't the issue - it was the monthly payment, and we had a maximum in our budget. After another "oh, since we're in the neighborhood" showing of a house 50% over our fucking budget we politely told them that they were not meeting our needs as clients and stopped answering any communications from them or their agency.
It's amazing to me that so many people just don't understand what a monthly budget is, and why it's important. Or wontingly try to destroy those who do have one.
This seemed pretty wacky, so I looked at the actual "study". It's a fluff piece with no grounding in reality.
The first major assumption is that a family pays $500/month to lease a car every month. Most sensible families have a $30k car paid off in 5 years and drive it another 5.
A second major assumption is that the cost of ride sharing currently covers the full purchase price, maintenance, and depreciation of the driver's vehicle. I do not know that this is the case.
So if you ignore the cost of owning the ride share car, and you inflate the cost of owning a car, it's cheaper to ride share!
I concur. The last TV I bought had no non-smart models in that price and size range. So I bought a "smart" one, and hooked it up to power and two HDMI cables. One to the cable box, and one to the streaming/media computer. (An Asus Chromebox running Ubuntu with extra memory and storage.) Given that most "smart" TVs still require you to type shit by arrowing around with the remote, I can't imaging even trying to use it as such. So much easier to have a desktop browser with wireless keyboard and mouse.
It's irritating that the TV needs to boot up and think for 4-5 seconds before it responds to remote commands, but other than that it's pretty much a dumb TV. I'm unclear why the GP has gone down the specific rabbit hole he has.
Because Google Play needs access to everything or it pops up complaints all of the time if you limit it. On a pretty regular basis I get a notice that Google Play is having issues because I haven't allowed it to use my phone, access my contacts, and whatever else stupid shit it wants access to. Instead of failing gracefully it's a constant nag, and they've been ignoring bug reports on this "feature" for 3-4 years now.
You can't even say "ahhh, but everyone will get UBI" because that still has to be financed from somewhere.
A big benefit of UBI that is very hard to quantify so everyone ignores is how much it would stimulate the economy. We fix recessions by stimulus funding. UBI would be the biggest stimulus funding ever, and it would be permanent.
Social Security, EBT, disability, and veterans benefits could pay for 1/3 of UBI in the US. That's about $1T. We'd still need about $2T more. Given that the US spends about $4T every year, we're looking at UBI costing 75% of the federal budget as it currently stands. Taxes would have to go up, by a lot. The good news is that provided we managed to tax the increase in economic activity, it wouldn't necessarily need to be as much overall taxation.
A related option is to move to single-payer health care. That would likely save us between $1T and $1.5T as a nation every year. If that reduction in health care cost was transferred to a tax for UBI, everyone would effectively have the same income they currently have, and UBI would be mostly funded.
And that's not even touching our defense spending.
UBI is doable, but it's unlikely because too many people are scared of change, especially social change. They'd rather make sure someone else is more miserable than they are than make everyone's lives better.
That's the #1 issue with social welfare in the US right now, and a major issue that UBI is designed to fix. Please learn something about UBI before trying to talk about it. It will be better for everyone involved.
People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.
No, I think automation killing jobs has happened, and it's still happening. It's just that people are looking at the wrong metrics to see it.
If you look at the productivity of US workers, it's been steadily going up for the last 40 or 50 years. We are something like an order of magnitude or more more productive as a whole now as we used to be. But if you look at wages, they're flat or declining. If you look at wealth inequality, the middle class is about gone, and the gulf between the poor and the rich has been widening at a rather insane pace.
We aren't Marxist, so the workers don't own the means of production. When production becomes more efficient, the benefit goes to the owners. Looking at the cost of goods, nothing has gone down in price, while real wages have. When I look at these things, I see the impact of automation. No, it's not causing half of the population to be out of work. It's doing something more nefarious than that. It's siphoning wealth out of the poor and middle class and transferring it to the upper class. That's harder to see than 20% unemployment, and it causes less outrage, in part because we've baked success as a badge of honor into our culture.
earning a commission equal to a few months' salary if a company decides to hire an applicant......No affiliation with the company....
So engaging in a contractual business relationship with a company where they pay you for a service you provide them is "no affiliation" to you?
There wouldn't be recruiters if employers didn't pay them. The blame lies directly on companies who would rather outsource their dirty work than do it themselves.
I can understand the harried HR person not responding - they probably went through a thousand candidates and it can be dizzying to figure out which one y ou were of them.
That sounds like they're understaffed and/or nobody has designed a proper system to handle tracking applications. It's trivial to set up an automated system that sends out form rejection emails to the people you know 100% you won't be hiring, which is most of them. The ones you might consider you can send personalized emails to, because that shouldn't be too many people.
I have an expectation that if a company wants me to do quality work for them, that they will do quality work for me. That includes not having shit processes that prevent them from engaging in basic communication activities.
I know, right? If you want it done right, you need to do it yourself, I guess.
As we add more renewables to the grid, it seems likely that we'll be compounding grid instability as the number of connected cars go up. Think of the times that millions of people all hit the road at once, and imagine what that demand on the electric system is going to look like!
Everyone drives to grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner, plugs in, and that day is overcast with little wind. Suddenly the demand for power is huge from all those cars, in an area where the grid isn't quite so built up for them. Then brownouts, the turkey doesn't cook, can't watch the football game, and everyone is angry, miserable, and drunk. Then they all head home, and when they get there their battery is on E. They all plug in, and boom, the power goes out across the city.
Now all the angry hungry drunk people are even angrier, and as the grid comes back to life, the tens of thousands of hungry cars will just down it again.
If we don't slow down with our renewable energy deployment and electric car sales and tackle some of the fundamental grid issues, this sort of scenario is going to play out all of the time in the coming years. It's time to put the brakes on, pause and think these things through, and then invest in the underlying infrastructure to ensure that our transition to electric cars and renewables goes smoothly.
Ok smart guy. Show us how brilliant your financial analysis is. Prove your case.
Sorry, but if you're not willing to even learn a tiny bit about the company on your own, I'm not willing to spend my time teaching you. Search bar is up at the top of the page. I'll give you a hint: These two companies are not at the same stage of their lives.
If you're bored, go look up how much concrete is used in a wind turbine footing and compare it to how much is used for a dam or nuclear power plant. Wind turbines are far greener than either of those, by a long shot. And they tend to have much smaller environmental footprints. The downside, of course, is that they can't really function as baseline, at least not without storage or country-scale distribution networks.
That's where the arguments for HFT fall really flat on their face. "But you'd have to pay more for stocks!" ignores the fact that that might be true, but only if you're the buyer. From the seller's point of view, that argument becomes, "But someone might end up paying more for your stocks!", and that doesn't really make you want to support HFT.
HFT minimizing this differential at the cost of extracting wealth from the system doesn't make anyone richer but the HFTer. It's like insurance, I guess. Except insurance generally is for unlikely events which would have a significant negative financial impact, not very likely events which might be good or bad for you.
I certainly don't want it to go back to the way it was years back where every buy and sell operation had to take into account the fees and potential delay costs associated with the transaction.
Why would you need to do all of that work for transactions binned by the second or minute? In that much time, the price is not going to substantially change. If you're not buying and selling millions of shares a day, a $0.02 difference in share price isn't going to change your mind or impact your finances.
If I go out and drop $1000 on stocks every couple of months, the fact that I could have gotten them $3 cheaper is pretty immaterial. I'm planning to hold them for months or years, and in that time their value is going to change by a whole lot more than $3.
The only arguments for HFT seem to be made by those engaging in HFT. And I get that - they've found a way to make money as a parasite in the system, and they'd have to do something productive if that flow gets cut off. But it's definitely parasitic, and not serving a useful function for anyone who doesn't buy and sell constantly.
that's a nice way of saying 'instability'. Good luck with your pension investments.
Why would that change anything? Pension investments don't get updated every nanosecond of every day. They tend to pick a large portfolio of stable companies that have some safe growth potential and hold on to them for a year at a time. Instability doesn't impact that portfolio at all - net value and net growth potential is what's important. If all of the stocks lose money, yeah, that's an issue, but it's not an instability issue.
Instability is what day traders care about. Index funds don't notice.
To offset the risk, they would have to increase their margin, making the stock more expensive for you.
Without a magnitude of impact, this is a meaningless statement. If it's 1% more expensive, most regular investors aren't going to know or care. My guess is that it's less than that much, given that HFT is often done on a couple cents difference.
So I, the regular investor, end up spending $1010 on stock the HFT could have purchased for $1000 and sold to me for $1005. In that scenario, the HFT gets $5, and I and the seller exchange $1000. But without HFT, who gets that extra $10? The guy selling that stock. And when I go to sell, and the same thing happens, I get that $10. Your everyday, average investor does not need HFT, and is harmed by it.
We can wait a few seconds for an order. Hell, we can wait a minutes or even hours. When your livelihood isn't relying on the stocks, there's no time pressure.
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There are already too many jack-wagons where I live that drop someone off in front of the store and then STAY PARKED IN THE FIRE LANE waiting for that person to come out.
In one small town I lived in the main grocery store got tired of that and asked the cops to ticket people parked in the fire lane. Every few months a cop would grab a lawn chair, park it in the shade of the building, and just sit there. People would drive by him, park in the fire lane, and he'd write up the ticket, wander over, hand it to them, and then head back and sit down.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. And it didn't seem to make much difference in the long run.
I'm just wondering what size his tactical pants are. I mean, he obviously doesn't need them anymore, now that he's not fighting bad guys as the head of the EPA.
This doesn't mean there will be fewer cars on the road, especially at peak commute hours.
No. It means there will be double the number of cars during these times.
Normally, you drive to work and park there. One way trip. Now the automated rideshare drives you to work, then drives back to your neighborhood to get someone else, and repeats that cycle.
If people happen to be headed opposite directions, this is mitigated somewhat, but most cities have pretty one-way traffic flows that go in in the morning and out in the evening.
When my wife and I were just finishing up grad school and looking for our first house, we ran into the same thing. We looked at our current level of income and based buying a house on that. Knowing full well that it was likely we would be earning more soon, but that wasn't something we'd gamble a house on.
So we did up our monthly budget, figured out the max we could pay, backwards calculated a 30 yr fixed rate loan, and had our maximum house price. We scraped together the down payment, and were ready to go. First real estate agent we talked to immediately started showing us shit way over our budget, "Because you have plenty of money for the down payment if you get a FHA loan as first time buyers."
We explained very clearly that the down payment wasn't the issue - it was the monthly payment, and we had a maximum in our budget. After another "oh, since we're in the neighborhood" showing of a house 50% over our fucking budget we politely told them that they were not meeting our needs as clients and stopped answering any communications from them or their agency.
It's amazing to me that so many people just don't understand what a monthly budget is, and why it's important. Or wontingly try to destroy those who do have one.
This seemed pretty wacky, so I looked at the actual "study". It's a fluff piece with no grounding in reality.
The first major assumption is that a family pays $500/month to lease a car every month. Most sensible families have a $30k car paid off in 5 years and drive it another 5.
A second major assumption is that the cost of ride sharing currently covers the full purchase price, maintenance, and depreciation of the driver's vehicle. I do not know that this is the case.
So if you ignore the cost of owning the ride share car, and you inflate the cost of owning a car, it's cheaper to ride share!
Fucking genius!
I concur. The last TV I bought had no non-smart models in that price and size range. So I bought a "smart" one, and hooked it up to power and two HDMI cables. One to the cable box, and one to the streaming/media computer. (An Asus Chromebox running Ubuntu with extra memory and storage.) Given that most "smart" TVs still require you to type shit by arrowing around with the remote, I can't imaging even trying to use it as such. So much easier to have a desktop browser with wireless keyboard and mouse.
It's irritating that the TV needs to boot up and think for 4-5 seconds before it responds to remote commands, but other than that it's pretty much a dumb TV. I'm unclear why the GP has gone down the specific rabbit hole he has.
Don't feed the troll.
Don't feed the trolls.
You don't have an android then, do you?
Because Google Play needs access to everything or it pops up complaints all of the time if you limit it. On a pretty regular basis I get a notice that Google Play is having issues because I haven't allowed it to use my phone, access my contacts, and whatever else stupid shit it wants access to. Instead of failing gracefully it's a constant nag, and they've been ignoring bug reports on this "feature" for 3-4 years now.
You can't even say "ahhh, but everyone will get UBI" because that still has to be financed from somewhere.
A big benefit of UBI that is very hard to quantify so everyone ignores is how much it would stimulate the economy. We fix recessions by stimulus funding. UBI would be the biggest stimulus funding ever, and it would be permanent.
Social Security, EBT, disability, and veterans benefits could pay for 1/3 of UBI in the US. That's about $1T. We'd still need about $2T more. Given that the US spends about $4T every year, we're looking at UBI costing 75% of the federal budget as it currently stands. Taxes would have to go up, by a lot. The good news is that provided we managed to tax the increase in economic activity, it wouldn't necessarily need to be as much overall taxation.
A related option is to move to single-payer health care. That would likely save us between $1T and $1.5T as a nation every year. If that reduction in health care cost was transferred to a tax for UBI, everyone would effectively have the same income they currently have, and UBI would be mostly funded.
And that's not even touching our defense spending.
UBI is doable, but it's unlikely because too many people are scared of change, especially social change. They'd rather make sure someone else is more miserable than they are than make everyone's lives better.
Everything you're posting is a strawman attacking something that UBI is not.
You do not know what UBI is. Go learn.
Once the citizen gets any work the UBI stops.
That's the #1 issue with social welfare in the US right now, and a major issue that UBI is designed to fix. Please learn something about UBI before trying to talk about it. It will be better for everyone involved.
People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.
No, I think automation killing jobs has happened, and it's still happening. It's just that people are looking at the wrong metrics to see it.
If you look at the productivity of US workers, it's been steadily going up for the last 40 or 50 years. We are something like an order of magnitude or more more productive as a whole now as we used to be. But if you look at wages, they're flat or declining. If you look at wealth inequality, the middle class is about gone, and the gulf between the poor and the rich has been widening at a rather insane pace.
We aren't Marxist, so the workers don't own the means of production. When production becomes more efficient, the benefit goes to the owners. Looking at the cost of goods, nothing has gone down in price, while real wages have. When I look at these things, I see the impact of automation. No, it's not causing half of the population to be out of work. It's doing something more nefarious than that. It's siphoning wealth out of the poor and middle class and transferring it to the upper class. That's harder to see than 20% unemployment, and it causes less outrage, in part because we've baked success as a badge of honor into our culture.
Everything will get cheaper as a result of automation.
Right. Just like AT&T Promised Lower Prices After Time Warner Merger.
earning a commission equal to a few months' salary if a company decides to hire an applicant......No affiliation with the company....
So engaging in a contractual business relationship with a company where they pay you for a service you provide them is "no affiliation" to you?
There wouldn't be recruiters if employers didn't pay them. The blame lies directly on companies who would rather outsource their dirty work than do it themselves.
I can understand the harried HR person not responding - they probably went through a thousand candidates and it can be dizzying to figure out which one y ou were of them.
That sounds like they're understaffed and/or nobody has designed a proper system to handle tracking applications. It's trivial to set up an automated system that sends out form rejection emails to the people you know 100% you won't be hiring, which is most of them. The ones you might consider you can send personalized emails to, because that shouldn't be too many people.
I have an expectation that if a company wants me to do quality work for them, that they will do quality work for me. That includes not having shit processes that prevent them from engaging in basic communication activities.
I know, right? If you want it done right, you need to do it yourself, I guess.
As we add more renewables to the grid, it seems likely that we'll be compounding grid instability as the number of connected cars go up. Think of the times that millions of people all hit the road at once, and imagine what that demand on the electric system is going to look like!
Everyone drives to grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner, plugs in, and that day is overcast with little wind. Suddenly the demand for power is huge from all those cars, in an area where the grid isn't quite so built up for them. Then brownouts, the turkey doesn't cook, can't watch the football game, and everyone is angry, miserable, and drunk. Then they all head home, and when they get there their battery is on E. They all plug in, and boom, the power goes out across the city.
Now all the angry hungry drunk people are even angrier, and as the grid comes back to life, the tens of thousands of hungry cars will just down it again.
If we don't slow down with our renewable energy deployment and electric car sales and tackle some of the fundamental grid issues, this sort of scenario is going to play out all of the time in the coming years. It's time to put the brakes on, pause and think these things through, and then invest in the underlying infrastructure to ensure that our transition to electric cars and renewables goes smoothly.
Ok smart guy. Show us how brilliant your financial analysis is. Prove your case.
Sorry, but if you're not willing to even learn a tiny bit about the company on your own, I'm not willing to spend my time teaching you. Search bar is up at the top of the page. I'll give you a hint: These two companies are not at the same stage of their lives.
No, they use more concrete than dams. This seems like something that anyone who has ever seen a nuclear power plant or a picture of one should know.
If you're bored, go look up how much concrete is used in a wind turbine footing and compare it to how much is used for a dam or nuclear power plant. Wind turbines are far greener than either of those, by a long shot. And they tend to have much smaller environmental footprints. The downside, of course, is that they can't really function as baseline, at least not without storage or country-scale distribution networks.
Yeah, but think of the airline miles!
That's where the arguments for HFT fall really flat on their face. "But you'd have to pay more for stocks!" ignores the fact that that might be true, but only if you're the buyer. From the seller's point of view, that argument becomes, "But someone might end up paying more for your stocks!", and that doesn't really make you want to support HFT.
HFT minimizing this differential at the cost of extracting wealth from the system doesn't make anyone richer but the HFTer. It's like insurance, I guess. Except insurance generally is for unlikely events which would have a significant negative financial impact, not very likely events which might be good or bad for you.
I certainly don't want it to go back to the way it was years back where every buy and sell operation had to take into account the fees and potential delay costs associated with the transaction.
Why would you need to do all of that work for transactions binned by the second or minute? In that much time, the price is not going to substantially change. If you're not buying and selling millions of shares a day, a $0.02 difference in share price isn't going to change your mind or impact your finances.
If I go out and drop $1000 on stocks every couple of months, the fact that I could have gotten them $3 cheaper is pretty immaterial. I'm planning to hold them for months or years, and in that time their value is going to change by a whole lot more than $3.
The only arguments for HFT seem to be made by those engaging in HFT. And I get that - they've found a way to make money as a parasite in the system, and they'd have to do something productive if that flow gets cut off. But it's definitely parasitic, and not serving a useful function for anyone who doesn't buy and sell constantly.
that's a nice way of saying 'instability'. Good luck with your pension investments.
Why would that change anything? Pension investments don't get updated every nanosecond of every day. They tend to pick a large portfolio of stable companies that have some safe growth potential and hold on to them for a year at a time. Instability doesn't impact that portfolio at all - net value and net growth potential is what's important. If all of the stocks lose money, yeah, that's an issue, but it's not an instability issue.
Instability is what day traders care about. Index funds don't notice.
To offset the risk, they would have to increase their margin, making the stock more expensive for you.
Without a magnitude of impact, this is a meaningless statement. If it's 1% more expensive, most regular investors aren't going to know or care. My guess is that it's less than that much, given that HFT is often done on a couple cents difference.
So I, the regular investor, end up spending $1010 on stock the HFT could have purchased for $1000 and sold to me for $1005. In that scenario, the HFT gets $5, and I and the seller exchange $1000. But without HFT, who gets that extra $10? The guy selling that stock. And when I go to sell, and the same thing happens, I get that $10. Your everyday, average investor does not need HFT, and is harmed by it.
We can wait a few seconds for an order. Hell, we can wait a minutes or even hours. When your livelihood isn't relying on the stocks, there's no time pressure.