bankruptcy scales very well, actual value moves to other companies, very simple
Not past a certain point. At a certain point, a billion dollars tomorrow is worth less than 100 million dollars today. Simply because once you don't pay the 100 million today, you don't exist at all anymore. In banking, contracts are structured on multiple conditions (legs). If any of the legs doesn't make a payment, the whole contract is worthless. There was one fund which went bankrupt (CIT I think) a few months after the bail out. The only reason it didn't cause ripples is that everyone was preparing for their bankruptcy months in advance. So the logistics for it were in place when it actually happened.
So you keep saying it's *all* the government's fault. That's just ridiculous
Why? They are the only party who didn't play the part that they are supposed to play in the the whole system. Banks structured debt obligations and lent money around. Government was supposed to either cut back the supply of money or liquidate a bankrupt bank in time for the creditors to survive. They weren't able to do that. So instead they handed the creditors a blank check.
But the the logistics are straight-forward, even for large bankruptcies.
Nonsense. It takes months to do a simple foreclosure. A bank the size of Lehman would enter into BILLIONS of obligations every day. It's not even possible to tally their positions at any one time without massive programming endeavor. If someone owe Lehman 50 dollars two weeks from now and Lehman owes them 100 dollars two hours from now, do they get paid or does the money go to those whom Lehman owes 70 dollars 2 days from now? Time and trust is the only real commodity banks trade. Bankruptcies of corporations are much much simpler.
And "nothing to do with psychology" - well, I think you missed the point.
No, I didn't miss it. I disagreed with it.
but the rest of the world still wants to know what the hell people were thinking.
You honestly believe the world wants to know what they were thinking more than it wants to know what they were doing?
And personally, I'm fascinated that everyone involved got away with it.
They didn't just get away with it. They won 2 elections in the process. The amount of money stolen through "stimulus" spending dwarves TARP. AND TARP administration, despite TARP having been repaid by the banks, still exists and administers the same amount of money. No one wants to psychoanalyze the politicians who voted for the stimulus spending. Meanwhile, they steal at (literally) 100 times the rate that the banks are even accused of stealing.
I'll give you that the statement would be helped by citation. But I won't give you the BS. I would agree with the gp post. I heard it from other sources (which I trust). The sources were academic. This type of inquiry was within their field of academic interest. But I too don't have a citation. The causal link seems to be that to cut into a human being and not be repulsed by it takes a certain sadistic inclination. So, while these people are not your mobster type psychopaths, a good fraction of surgens tortured animals for pleasure (or did something to that effect) as kids.
and not the ingenuity and well-intensined planning by the few.
Sometimes, it's ingenuity, and sometimes planning. But sometimes it's blind stumbling in the dark. But those are the prophets of progress. It takes the system for the new advances to gain wide adaptation. I pretty much covered this here http://slashdot.org/~superwiz/journal/169837 5 years ago. Pardon the typos.
The problem is that in any system, regardless of the incentives for actions that benefit everyone, the psychopaths will always look for other ways to gain only for themselves.
I am not sure I see this as a problem though. You are meant to try to gain advantage when you on a job. Otherwise, it's a dead end job. Progress happens because people find subversive ways to work inside the system. The system either gets patched to prevent the problem from happening again or it recognizes it as the new and better way of doing things. Creative destruction is there by design. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated that it is a disability. Once again, computers have NO empathy. And yet, in many case, they make great bankers.
Did they? You often hear breakdowns of donations by party and organization within a profession. But you rarely hear breakdown by profession. I don't think (not certain though) that bankers are the top donors. I think doctors and lawyers are. Doctors donate to Republicans to advocate limits on law suits (doctors' largest cost) and lawyers donate to Democrats to expand law suit opportunities.
They bail out didn't happen because the bankers cried. No one gives a damn about the bankers. It happened because there is no logistics for such a bankruptcy. And due to interconnected nature of the system, without bankruptcy resolution, all debts governing the world finances would be defaulted on. If the logistics for bankruptcy existed, the banks would be forced to accept 70 cents on the dollar and move on. This has nothing to do with psychology. It has everything to do with the government's inability to handle a large scale bankruptcy proceeding... and this is a responsibility of the government.
Actually, I am not even sure I buy that premise. The current financial situation is 100% the fault of the government. So it's hard to make the argument that bankers were guilty of anything. Sometimes different customers have different needs. So you can tell customer A that they need to buy rainy day insurance (because they own a fleet of trucks) and tell a customer B that they need to buy a it's-not-going-to-rain insurance (because they own a farm). So bankers could be made look like psychopaths because they tell customer A that a product is good and customer B that the opposite product is good. But they are doing their job in both cases. Government, however, has no accountability. Given the last election, not even to the voters.
The problem is that a psychopath can game the system by achieving the reward through carefully constructed investments that will collapse inevitably, but after the reward has been gained. In some cases, those rewards appear to have been gained simply by lying (various iterations of cooking the books), and thus catching the cooking takes longer than the reward cycle.
Then the system is badly designed. Increase the reward cycle. Everyone employed is familiar with vesting rewards. Those are there to promote employment longevity. So you can't tell me no such mechanisms exist. If the system is designed for chasing short-term gains, don't expect psychologists to fix it. Change the system.
Even where systems like that have been implemented (ie. paid in shares rather than in cash or perks), it seems there are still ways for a sufficiently nasty person to grasp the reward that ultimately they did not deserve.
Ok, so something is broken. Fix it. But psycho tests? Those are appropriate only when people might be ask to receive no reward for their work (for example because their work requires risking their lives).
Greed unmoderated by any sense of responsibility to anyone but one's self is not a good thing.
That makes no sense. A is good. But only if A is not A. That's the gist of this argument. Bankers should understand banking. It's not their job to get in touch with their emotions. They are not playing bankers on TV. They are actually being bankers. If there is a need to change their job objectives in order to better serve bank's clients, you change the banker's incentive structure. You don't say they must first ask themselves what's the right thing to do. It's a job, for God's sake. It has as much to do with their "sense" of anything as a job of someone at McDonald's. They need to do some very narrowly-defined work and do it proficiently. Yes, even the high-level traders. The keystone of all efficient endeavors is specialization (because of limited human attention span). If their specialization needs to change somewhat because it has destructive incentives built it, ok change them. But don't expect them to second guess their job.
The problem isn't their attraction to money, it's their medical inability to give a shit about anyone else.
But does that make them worse bankers? You can structure incentives in such a way that in order to help themselves they have to help the bank's clients. My point is that this "article" falls in the trap which is common nowadays -- failing to separate function from the form. Most trading nowadays is done by computers. They, too, don't give a crap about anyone else. But so what? They are good traders. Rather than requiring that only extreme extroverts rise to the top (which is really what this movement seem to be about), why not concentrate on structural changes which realign motives through changing incentives? Oh, I know why. Because the authors don't know shit about management. It's written by psychologists who are essentially seeking to expand employment reasons for psychologists.
it should probably pick less karma-whore targets for it. First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable. They are essentially in the same business. But to answer the actual question, why wouldn't you want a banker to be attracted to money? Not everyone should be socially conscious as a job requirement. Only if it is in fact part of the job. I mean I wouldn't want a nurse or doctor who were sociopaths. But a banker? Why not? If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
No, I didn't get the order wrong. Weapons WERE smuggled into Gaza. That's why attacks out of Gaza are so prolific. So yeah, they blockade a territory used to attack them in order to prevent weapons from coming in. The odd part is that they still supply their electricity. I mean, I can't think of any other nation which out of humanitarian reasons would supply electricity to their active enemy in war. Can you?
In this situation Israel and Israel alone has the power to stop this. Period.
Actually, no. No one does.
The Israelis are in the Hell they created.
No. This particular brand of hell on the heads of the British. It is they who fractured the middle east and put dictators in charge. Democracies don't fight wars with each other. Dictatorships fight everyone to maintain their relevance.
Go ahead and rationalize the treatment of the Palestinians.
Anyone who demands that Israel commit suicide doesn't get to have a high moral ground. And that is exactly the alternative to what they are doing.
Why? Did I encourage my son to blow up a shopping mall? Did I provide my neighbor with the bombs to do it? Did I myself shoot up a movie theater? Or did call the police and tell them that someone was going to do those things? Because, you know, in Palestine you get a death sentence for turning in mass murderers of civilians.
Do you tell a rape victim to win the heart and mind of the rapist? Or do you tell her to use an overwhelming force of a spray or a gun? Israel was getting raped. It struck back.. It won. I am pretty sure all normal people would blame the situation on the rapists.
Pray tell, what did they do to squander it the way they did?
It's not what did. It's what they failed to do -- progress. They have not developed rational thought and discourse. They had the skill and tools for it, ie the components required, but they didn't put it together to create the whole -- the Renaissance.
You don't think their population would distance themselves from the crazies for a chance at a good life?
Islam was spread by the sword. So no. As long as the crazies are in charge, it would take a lot of blood before the population would the crazies out. And most people prefer a limited diet and shelter than watching their daughters and sisters raped and murdered as a lesson in what it means to disavow Islam.
What would you do if the Canadians surrounded your town, marched you out of your home at gunpoint, bulldozed it flat, and told you to get the hell out of Canada?
Doesn't take Canadians. Chinese do it to their own people. In the US, you can lose your land to eminent domain. Sometimes the world moves. You can go on, or you can go on slaughtering women and children and pretend it makes you feel better. If it actually makes you feel better, you have it coming.
Yes, both parties are at fault for continuing this ridiculous feud. But is America blockading and occupying Canadian land to begin with? No.
No, but America did blockade Cuba. Was it at fault that Soviets were trying to place missiles in Cuba? No. The Soviets were at fault. Just as the Arabs are at fault for electing Hamas to lead Gaza. If Hamas wasn't smuggling weapons in order to commit terrorist acts against Israel, Israelis would do what they with everyone else who doesn't shoot at them -- trade and cooperate.
I condone the actions of Hamas but Israel's actions are very heavy-handed in proportion to Hamas' attacks/
You misspoke, but your misstatement is actually the truth. You DO condone the attacks by Hamas simply because you call Israel's actions heavy-handed. Saying that Israel overreacts in self-defense gives too much deference to the attackers.
Go ahead and spew something about propaganda. That's what everyone else who hates Israel seems to do when hear plainly stated facts.
Here's the exact problem. There is no way to know if copycat AC was you or not. While this is clearly a parody, there is no way to tell if the 2nd post was something you cleverly posted to create a satire or if someone derived on your work and made a satire out of it.
ANY law is only as potent as the enforcement mechanism. How many students can afford to sue to enforce contract laws and start their careers with a law suit demanding the right to slur casually?
Slashdot Mirror
bankruptcy scales very well, actual value moves to other companies, very simple
Not past a certain point. At a certain point, a billion dollars tomorrow is worth less than 100 million dollars today. Simply because once you don't pay the 100 million today, you don't exist at all anymore. In banking, contracts are structured on multiple conditions (legs). If any of the legs doesn't make a payment, the whole contract is worthless. There was one fund which went bankrupt (CIT I think) a few months after the bail out. The only reason it didn't cause ripples is that everyone was preparing for their bankruptcy months in advance. So the logistics for it were in place when it actually happened.
So you keep saying it's *all* the government's fault. That's just ridiculous
Why? They are the only party who didn't play the part that they are supposed to play in the the whole system. Banks structured debt obligations and lent money around. Government was supposed to either cut back the supply of money or liquidate a bankrupt bank in time for the creditors to survive. They weren't able to do that. So instead they handed the creditors a blank check.
But the the logistics are straight-forward, even for large bankruptcies.
Nonsense. It takes months to do a simple foreclosure. A bank the size of Lehman would enter into BILLIONS of obligations every day. It's not even possible to tally their positions at any one time without massive programming endeavor. If someone owe Lehman 50 dollars two weeks from now and Lehman owes them 100 dollars two hours from now, do they get paid or does the money go to those whom Lehman owes 70 dollars 2 days from now? Time and trust is the only real commodity banks trade. Bankruptcies of corporations are much much simpler.
And "nothing to do with psychology" - well, I think you missed the point.
No, I didn't miss it. I disagreed with it.
but the rest of the world still wants to know what the hell people were thinking.
You honestly believe the world wants to know what they were thinking more than it wants to know what they were doing?
And personally, I'm fascinated that everyone involved got away with it.
They didn't just get away with it. They won 2 elections in the process. The amount of money stolen through "stimulus" spending dwarves TARP. AND TARP administration, despite TARP having been repaid by the banks, still exists and administers the same amount of money. No one wants to psychoanalyze the politicians who voted for the stimulus spending. Meanwhile, they steal at (literally) 100 times the rate that the banks are even accused of stealing.
I'll give you that the statement would be helped by citation. But I won't give you the BS. I would agree with the gp post. I heard it from other sources (which I trust). The sources were academic. This type of inquiry was within their field of academic interest. But I too don't have a citation. The causal link seems to be that to cut into a human being and not be repulsed by it takes a certain sadistic inclination. So, while these people are not your mobster type psychopaths, a good fraction of surgens tortured animals for pleasure (or did something to that effect) as kids.
and not the ingenuity and well-intensined planning by the few.
Sometimes, it's ingenuity, and sometimes planning. But sometimes it's blind stumbling in the dark. But those are the prophets of progress. It takes the system for the new advances to gain wide adaptation. I pretty much covered this here http://slashdot.org/~superwiz/journal/169837 5 years ago. Pardon the typos.
The problem is that in any system, regardless of the incentives for actions that benefit everyone, the psychopaths will always look for other ways to gain only for themselves.
I am not sure I see this as a problem though. You are meant to try to gain advantage when you on a job. Otherwise, it's a dead end job. Progress happens because people find subversive ways to work inside the system. The system either gets patched to prevent the problem from happening again or it recognizes it as the new and better way of doing things. Creative destruction is there by design. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated that it is a disability. Once again, computers have NO empathy. And yet, in many case, they make great bankers.
Did they? You often hear breakdowns of donations by party and organization within a profession. But you rarely hear breakdown by profession. I don't think (not certain though) that bankers are the top donors. I think doctors and lawyers are. Doctors donate to Republicans to advocate limits on law suits (doctors' largest cost) and lawyers donate to Democrats to expand law suit opportunities.
They bail out didn't happen because the bankers cried. No one gives a damn about the bankers. It happened because there is no logistics for such a bankruptcy. And due to interconnected nature of the system, without bankruptcy resolution, all debts governing the world finances would be defaulted on. If the logistics for bankruptcy existed, the banks would be forced to accept 70 cents on the dollar and move on. This has nothing to do with psychology. It has everything to do with the government's inability to handle a large scale bankruptcy proceeding... and this is a responsibility of the government.
Actually, I am not even sure I buy that premise. The current financial situation is 100% the fault of the government. So it's hard to make the argument that bankers were guilty of anything. Sometimes different customers have different needs. So you can tell customer A that they need to buy rainy day insurance (because they own a fleet of trucks) and tell a customer B that they need to buy a it's-not-going-to-rain insurance (because they own a farm). So bankers could be made look like psychopaths because they tell customer A that a product is good and customer B that the opposite product is good. But they are doing their job in both cases. Government, however, has no accountability. Given the last election, not even to the voters.
The problem is that a psychopath can game the system by achieving the reward through carefully constructed investments that will collapse inevitably, but after the reward has been gained. In some cases, those rewards appear to have been gained simply by lying (various iterations of cooking the books), and thus catching the cooking takes longer than the reward cycle.
Then the system is badly designed. Increase the reward cycle. Everyone employed is familiar with vesting rewards. Those are there to promote employment longevity. So you can't tell me no such mechanisms exist. If the system is designed for chasing short-term gains, don't expect psychologists to fix it. Change the system.
Even where systems like that have been implemented (ie. paid in shares rather than in cash or perks), it seems there are still ways for a sufficiently nasty person to grasp the reward that ultimately they did not deserve.
Ok, so something is broken. Fix it. But psycho tests? Those are appropriate only when people might be ask to receive no reward for their work (for example because their work requires risking their lives).
Greed unmoderated by any sense of responsibility to anyone but one's self is not a good thing.
That makes no sense. A is good. But only if A is not A. That's the gist of this argument. Bankers should understand banking. It's not their job to get in touch with their emotions. They are not playing bankers on TV. They are actually being bankers. If there is a need to change their job objectives in order to better serve bank's clients, you change the banker's incentive structure. You don't say they must first ask themselves what's the right thing to do. It's a job, for God's sake. It has as much to do with their "sense" of anything as a job of someone at McDonald's. They need to do some very narrowly-defined work and do it proficiently. Yes, even the high-level traders. The keystone of all efficient endeavors is specialization (because of limited human attention span). If their specialization needs to change somewhat because it has destructive incentives built it, ok change them. But don't expect them to second guess their job.
The problem isn't their attraction to money, it's their medical inability to give a shit about anyone else.
But does that make them worse bankers? You can structure incentives in such a way that in order to help themselves they have to help the bank's clients. My point is that this "article" falls in the trap which is common nowadays -- failing to separate function from the form. Most trading nowadays is done by computers. They, too, don't give a crap about anyone else. But so what? They are good traders. Rather than requiring that only extreme extroverts rise to the top (which is really what this movement seem to be about), why not concentrate on structural changes which realign motives through changing incentives? Oh, I know why. Because the authors don't know shit about management. It's written by psychologists who are essentially seeking to expand employment reasons for psychologists.
it should probably pick less karma-whore targets for it. First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable. They are essentially in the same business. But to answer the actual question, why wouldn't you want a banker to be attracted to money? Not everyone should be socially conscious as a job requirement. Only if it is in fact part of the job. I mean I wouldn't want a nurse or doctor who were sociopaths. But a banker? Why not? If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
No, I didn't get the order wrong. Weapons WERE smuggled into Gaza. That's why attacks out of Gaza are so prolific. So yeah, they blockade a territory used to attack them in order to prevent weapons from coming in. The odd part is that they still supply their electricity. I mean, I can't think of any other nation which out of humanitarian reasons would supply electricity to their active enemy in war. Can you?
In this situation Israel and Israel alone has the power to stop this. Period.
Actually, no. No one does.
The Israelis are in the Hell they created.
No. This particular brand of hell on the heads of the British. It is they who fractured the middle east and put dictators in charge. Democracies don't fight wars with each other. Dictatorships fight everyone to maintain their relevance.
Go ahead and rationalize the treatment of the Palestinians.
Anyone who demands that Israel commit suicide doesn't get to have a high moral ground. And that is exactly the alternative to what they are doing.
Karma is a bitch, dude.
Tell that to the terrorists.
Why? Did I encourage my son to blow up a shopping mall? Did I provide my neighbor with the bombs to do it? Did I myself shoot up a movie theater? Or did call the police and tell them that someone was going to do those things? Because, you know, in Palestine you get a death sentence for turning in mass murderers of civilians.
Do you tell a rape victim to win the heart and mind of the rapist? Or do you tell her to use an overwhelming force of a spray or a gun? Israel was getting raped. It struck back.. It won. I am pretty sure all normal people would blame the situation on the rapists.
Pray tell, what did they do to squander it the way they did?
It's not what did. It's what they failed to do -- progress. They have not developed rational thought and discourse. They had the skill and tools for it, ie the components required, but they didn't put it together to create the whole -- the Renaissance.
You don't think their population would distance themselves from the crazies for a chance at a good life?
Islam was spread by the sword. So no. As long as the crazies are in charge, it would take a lot of blood before the population would the crazies out. And most people prefer a limited diet and shelter than watching their daughters and sisters raped and murdered as a lesson in what it means to disavow Islam.
What would you do if the Canadians surrounded your town, marched you out of your home at gunpoint, bulldozed it flat, and told you to get the hell out of Canada?
Doesn't take Canadians. Chinese do it to their own people. In the US, you can lose your land to eminent domain. Sometimes the world moves. You can go on, or you can go on slaughtering women and children and pretend it makes you feel better. If it actually makes you feel better, you have it coming.
I wonder what the cowboys would have to say about that and how much the world would dare to condemn them.
Yeah, war sucks. But Israel didn't start it. Doesn't mean they shouldn't try to win it.
Israel stole land from the Palestinians. They then allowed their people to build "settlements" on other people's land.
Israel completely withdrew from Gaza. But your argument would be wrong even if they didn't.
Yes, both parties are at fault for continuing this ridiculous feud. But is America blockading and occupying Canadian land to begin with? No.
No, but America did blockade Cuba. Was it at fault that Soviets were trying to place missiles in Cuba? No. The Soviets were at fault. Just as the Arabs are at fault for electing Hamas to lead Gaza. If Hamas wasn't smuggling weapons in order to commit terrorist acts against Israel, Israelis would do what they with everyone else who doesn't shoot at them -- trade and cooperate.
I condone the actions of Hamas but Israel's actions are very heavy-handed in proportion to Hamas' attacks/
You misspoke, but your misstatement is actually the truth. You DO condone the attacks by Hamas simply because you call Israel's actions heavy-handed. Saying that Israel overreacts in self-defense gives too much deference to the attackers.
Go ahead and spew something about propaganda. That's what everyone else who hates Israel seems to do when hear plainly stated facts.
Here's the exact problem. There is no way to know if copycat AC was you or not. While this is clearly a parody, there is no way to tell if the 2nd post was something you cleverly posted to create a satire or if someone derived on your work and made a satire out of it.
Or, to paraphrase a book which many on Slashdot claim has lost its relevance, and then came the Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.
ANY law is only as potent as the enforcement mechanism. How many students can afford to sue to enforce contract laws and start their careers with a law suit demanding the right to slur casually?