Are your seriously only counting american victims, again? What about the tens of thousands killed for such "crimes" as shaving their beards or allowing themselves to be raped? What about the ongoing civil wars between various muslim factions? What about the Taliban?
Excellent point. I was kind of wondering if people routinely bring rocket launchers to demonstrations in Libya. Or spontaneously buy them at the nearest 2nd hand shop when the need arises.
I'd rather describe it as "bent over massive external pressure". The changes were resisted strongly, for a long time, and a lot of people were killed over it.
The muslim world has never had a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, and that's why they are still stuck in a time in which I am sure Europe would also be if it weren't for those changes that forced religion out of the way of progress.
That's the problem with pacifists and why I don't identify as one even though I am a peace-loving guy who doesn't hurt people.
We need to kill those fuckers, for one simple reason: They are willing to kill us.
I am all for engaging in dialog and finding peaceful solutions with anyone who is willing to do the same. But we (as a culture) need to stop pretending that everyone can be talked to. We absolutely need to talk to everyone who is willing to engage us the same way - I am entirely opposed to wholesale invasion of countries, and Afghanistan and Iraq were horrible mistakes. But if someone shoots at you, shoot back and shoot to kill.
It'll be interesting to see if the libyan police will find the killer and bring them to justice.
Study after study has revealed that people are happier through experiences than through possessions.
So make a quick check how many good experiences those extra 10% can buy you and if that would compensate for the loss of a daily good work experience. My guess is: Hell no!
Finding meaning in a job and a feeling of really belonging to something bigger is one of the most important job satisfaction factors. So, again from that perspective: No.
The only thing that would justify a yes is if you really, really need the money. Either because of debt, or because it would make a real quality change in your life. In the IT world, that is unlikely. Beyond a certain income (studies have found the number, but I don't recall it) there is no added benefit if your income is slightly increased. It is when you can afford new things that you couldn't before that your life changes, not when you can afford a few more. Suddenly being able to make a holiday trip to another continent is an experience and worth the money. Being able to spend 3 weeks abroad instead of 2 is not going to make the same amount of difference.
It's not yet there, but approaching fast, IMHO. I know people who applied for a Green Card, and others who couldn't care less. It has definitely shifted from, say, the dot-com era when everyone wanted to go to the US. But companies still see it that way. A massively successful startup that a few friends of mine work for has recently opened offices in California. As have other companies I know about. It's still a "we need an office in the USA" situation, and often that's not a small marketing office, but the new headquarters.
Exactly, understanding the market is the point. This is where I make the distinction. To successfully trade in something, you need to understand the market, i.e. care about what you trade. You might not give much about pork bellies, but you need to understand what they are and how their market works.
The "gambling" picture is because that's essentially what it boils down to - you ignore all the external factors and just bet on whatever you think the next number up will be. It might not be a mathematical difference - both roulette and russion roulette have the same formula to calculate your chances - but it is a conceptual difference.
And we are in the crap we are in right now because some people came up with a strategy for roulette and applied it to russian roulette. Unfortunately, they ignored that while on paper a 1:20 pay off sounds like a killer deal when your chances are 1:6, there's a certain contextual factor that changes a few base assumptions if you play long enough...
The big deal is that there are future competitors in China that most of us don't even have on our radar. We all wonder if Apple will kill Nokia in the mobile market, or if Sun will survive.
Meanwhile, Huawei makes almost as much yearly profit as Cisco has in revenue.
For some reason, there are people who think the US is DOOMED if China should overtake it in any way shape or form. They have this idea that there is #1, and there is third world shithole, with nothing in-between. So if the US loses its place of primacy, even in some things, then it is fucked.
And they are not entirely mistaken.
The USA is sucking in goods and brains from all over the world, and what is left of its economy is largely the result of that #1 attitude. Imagine if there were a european Hollywood, and asian Silicon Valley and a south-american New York City.
There is a real danger of a domino effect once the US is no longer perceived as the #1 country, the "place to be".
It seems to me that there's always been a significant element of gambling in the stock market
There has been speculation, but that's not the same thing.
There have always been people buying and selling stuff (shares aren't the only things traded, the original stock exchanges were for goods with delay-delivery, i.e. pay the farmer today and get the wheat in autumn) who had no intention of actually owning said stuff, but intended to sell it to someone else for a higher price later.
That serves a purpose (liquidity, etc.)
Gambling is when not only you don't want to own the stuff, you don't even care what the stuff is at all, for all you care, it could be mining rights on Jupiter.
Yes it is, you're context was "fascist dictator" which I expanded to encompass another murderous totalitarian. [...] Unless these people are married to their daughter, the two are not mutually exclusive. Even then, sex is not love.
And "fascist dictator" and "animal lover" are not mutually exclusive, either. Just like you admit further down for psychopaths.
Where we do see logical inconsistencies we can and do make assumptions about a persons psyche. We're a social species, we evaluate people on availiable evidence all the time and did so long before the advent of what you term "pop psychology".
Both true. The point is that our evaluations do not always make sense. We evaluate based on our experiences. Other people do not have to agree, nor function according to our model of the world.
Here's what most magazines and newspapers discussing the topic are missing:
A definition of what we want the stock market to be like.
Everyone is focussing on what they don't want. But that's not how you build a resilient system. Basically, that's using default-allow for your firewall. You'll be spending the rest of your life adding rules of what you don't want.
Once you switch around your mind, the questions become a lot easier. Decide what you want the stock exchange to be, and you get your answers almost for free.
If you want the stock exchange to be a place where companies can meet investors and get capital raised, then everything that doesn't serve that purpose directly or indirectly is out. You define how the process should work and allow only that, done. Everyone who wants to play games will have to do it within the parameters you have defined.
The whole problem here is that too many people still believe the old nonsense about the invisible hand. Yes, to some extent you can build a sandbox and people will come and build their sand castles. You can provide a market place and have the participants sort out how everything works. But you will get scammers, fraudsters, thieves, HFTs and all the other scum as well. If your sandbox is an MMO, you will get gold farmers and scammers and spammers. If your sandbox is a stock exchange, you will get HFTs and stock fraud and insider trading.
Letting chaotic self-organization create the rules of the game through emergence is an interesting experiment, one that I enjoy quite a bit when it comes to games or small settings (book a weekend with friends in a summer cottage and something will happen, no need to set up a schedule beforehand).
Allowing corrupt idiot politicians to base the world economy on chaos theory was one of the dumbest ideas we as a species ever had. Read some catastrophy theory first (at least check out the graphic if the article is tl;dr). There's a reason we call it chaotic systems, you know?
When it ceases to be trading and becomes gambling instead.
Basically, if you are looking at numbers and not meaning, you aren't trading anymore. Here's a suggestion for a totally impractical test: If you call up the trader in question and ask him what the company behind the shares does (i.e. which business it is in) and he has no clue, then he's not a trader, he's a gambler.
Oh please! Protests to the contrary, such people only support art as an extension of their own ego, political or narcissitic needs.
I refuse these generic, bland statements.
If you are talking about one particular person, we can evaluate the evidence and make an informed guess. But saying that all "such people" do things "only" because of (insert favourite pop psychology nonsense) is not a supportable statement.
All of us have good and bad sides. People can be loving fathers and yet cheat on their wife. Or they can be animal loving, charity-giving, very civilized guys who hit their kids or enjoy BDSM in the bedroom. People can hate porn and violence and yet support gun laws, or the other way around. People can do drugs while objecting to smoking.
We are complex creatures, and simple statements covering large groups of people are at best a rough approximation of an average quality.
What this actually proves is that humans are more complex creatures than pop psychology allows.
We find it difficult to not label things and people. And we prefer simple categories. A fascist dictator who murders people and yet has a thing for the arts and supports starving artists just isn't something we have a category for, so we focus on the one and either forget or re-label the other.
Of course it can't be that a good person does a bad thing - he was lead by circumstances into a situation he couldn't control. Of course it can't be that a bad person has redeeming qualities - they are only a front to cover up his crimes.
First, yes as someone pointed out, Google not only has offices in Germany (more than one, I think), it actually has a german subsidiary. Yes, that could be moved, however, it is almost certainly the legal partner of all existing contracts, which makes things quite a bit more complicated than moving a few small offices.
Second, Germany is part of the EU which has a common market and quite a bit more. If you think you can move just across the border and you're out of reach, you are very mistaken.
Could you imagine the uproar the German government would face from their own companies because now they are at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world?
How much of that is dependent on Google advertisement? Which, btw., makes up at best 10% of the German advertisement business, so let's not pretend it would make such a huge difference. Google would suffer more than Germany.
Why should Germany's first lady receive special treatment?
She shouldn't. This isn't about special treatment, it's about whether or not Google needs to abide by the local laws. If the courts agree with her, then it's not special treatment because anyone in the same position would have the same right.
Can anyone then demand google censor their results if something "bad" is said about them? Yeah, that's a slippery slope that I expect they'd be willing to not want to step on.
Which is why we have courts that are willing to do so, because someone has to. We can't all go around our lives avoiding any slipperly slopes that may or may not be there.
You have no idea how business and laws work, do you?
Offices don't matter one bit. If Google wants to do business in Germany, it needs to abide by german law. And trust me, Google wants to do business in Germany. Google keeps the numbers secret, but estimates say it's roughly 2 billion $ per year, that's 1/8th of Google's world-wide revenue.
Big players like this don't play chicken. Google will never pull out of Germany and Germany will not block Google. There will be talks and negotiations and some compromise.
To be fair, there'd be quite a few more Jews if your relatives hadn't murdered them.
One, yes, though not as many as you probably assume. The official number is 570.000 - most of those murdered were in Poland and other invaded countries.
Two, my grandfather was murdered by the Nazis for being a member of the german resistance. So shut the fuck up.
One, she has just "written" (no idea how much is ghostwritten) a book that is just coming out. The "discussion" about her past pretty much died down when her husband left office. Strange how it apparently got started with just the perfect timing, isn't it?
Two, so what? I know several people who either have been or still are sex workers. For most of them you'd never guess, and the ones I'm close with are good people. It's one of those "scandal! scandal!" topics that have no reason going for them other than sensationalism and a desire to sell more newspapers.
Slashdot Mirror
and a handful here and there ever since.
You, Sir, are an asshole.
Are your seriously only counting american victims, again? What about the tens of thousands killed for such "crimes" as shaving their beards or allowing themselves to be raped? What about the ongoing civil wars between various muslim factions? What about the Taliban?
Excellent point. I was kind of wondering if people routinely bring rocket launchers to demonstrations in Libya. Or spontaneously buy them at the nearest 2nd hand shop when the need arises.
Christianity changed.
I'd rather describe it as "bent over massive external pressure". The changes were resisted strongly, for a long time, and a lot of people were killed over it.
The muslim world has never had a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, and that's why they are still stuck in a time in which I am sure Europe would also be if it weren't for those changes that forced religion out of the way of progress.
That's the problem with pacifists and why I don't identify as one even though I am a peace-loving guy who doesn't hurt people.
We need to kill those fuckers, for one simple reason: They are willing to kill us.
I am all for engaging in dialog and finding peaceful solutions with anyone who is willing to do the same. But we (as a culture) need to stop pretending that everyone can be talked to. We absolutely need to talk to everyone who is willing to engage us the same way - I am entirely opposed to wholesale invasion of countries, and Afghanistan and Iraq were horrible mistakes. But if someone shoots at you, shoot back and shoot to kill.
It'll be interesting to see if the libyan police will find the killer and bring them to justice.
Why do I have mod points a felt 90% of the time - just not when I really, really want them?
Both of those comments deserve a +6 Funny.
Yeah, I'm also kind of "meh".
I own an iPhone 4. I was fully intending to get an iPhone 5 (skipping the 4s, as I almost always skip a generation).
I'm not so sure anymore. Siri is about the only thing that my 4 doesn't have that I feel like it might be useful, but I can live without it.
Study after study has revealed that people are happier through experiences than through possessions.
So make a quick check how many good experiences those extra 10% can buy you and if that would compensate for the loss of a daily good work experience. My guess is: Hell no!
Finding meaning in a job and a feeling of really belonging to something bigger is one of the most important job satisfaction factors. So, again from that perspective: No.
The only thing that would justify a yes is if you really, really need the money. Either because of debt, or because it would make a real quality change in your life. In the IT world, that is unlikely. Beyond a certain income (studies have found the number, but I don't recall it) there is no added benefit if your income is slightly increased. It is when you can afford new things that you couldn't before that your life changes, not when you can afford a few more. Suddenly being able to make a holiday trip to another continent is an experience and worth the money. Being able to spend 3 weeks abroad instead of 2 is not going to make the same amount of difference.
I was about to write a witty remark regarding how long it would be until someone breaks it. You beat me even to that, kudos.
It's not yet there, but approaching fast, IMHO. I know people who applied for a Green Card, and others who couldn't care less. It has definitely shifted from, say, the dot-com era when everyone wanted to go to the US. But companies still see it that way. A massively successful startup that a few friends of mine work for has recently opened offices in California. As have other companies I know about. It's still a "we need an office in the USA" situation, and often that's not a small marketing office, but the new headquarters.
But it is shifting.
Exactly, understanding the market is the point. This is where I make the distinction. To successfully trade in something, you need to understand the market, i.e. care about what you trade. You might not give much about pork bellies, but you need to understand what they are and how their market works.
The "gambling" picture is because that's essentially what it boils down to - you ignore all the external factors and just bet on whatever you think the next number up will be. It might not be a mathematical difference - both roulette and russion roulette have the same formula to calculate your chances - but it is a conceptual difference.
And we are in the crap we are in right now because some people came up with a strategy for roulette and applied it to russian roulette. Unfortunately, they ignored that while on paper a 1:20 pay off sounds like a killer deal when your chances are 1:6, there's a certain contextual factor that changes a few base assumptions if you play long enough...
What's the big deal about this?
The big deal is that there are future competitors in China that most of us don't even have on our radar. We all wonder if Apple will kill Nokia in the mobile market, or if Sun will survive.
Meanwhile, Huawei makes almost as much yearly profit as Cisco has in revenue.
For some reason, there are people who think the US is DOOMED if China should overtake it in any way shape or form. They have this idea that there is #1, and there is third world shithole, with nothing in-between. So if the US loses its place of primacy, even in some things, then it is fucked.
And they are not entirely mistaken.
The USA is sucking in goods and brains from all over the world, and what is left of its economy is largely the result of that #1 attitude. Imagine if there were a european Hollywood, and asian Silicon Valley and a south-american New York City.
There is a real danger of a domino effect once the US is no longer perceived as the #1 country, the "place to be".
I agree with you and the several other responses that pointed out that "gambling" is not the technically correct term.
It does make a nice catch-phrase, though, and has a negative connotation. And, sad as it is, politics isn't made by truth, but by headlines.
It seems to me that there's always been a significant element of gambling in the stock market
There has been speculation, but that's not the same thing.
There have always been people buying and selling stuff (shares aren't the only things traded, the original stock exchanges were for goods with delay-delivery, i.e. pay the farmer today and get the wheat in autumn) who had no intention of actually owning said stuff, but intended to sell it to someone else for a higher price later.
That serves a purpose (liquidity, etc.)
Gambling is when not only you don't want to own the stuff, you don't even care what the stuff is at all, for all you care, it could be mining rights on Jupiter.
Enjoy your overinflated ego and delusions of being right.
Why, thank you. That's why I am on /. - just like everyone else...
Yes it is, you're context was "fascist dictator" which I expanded to encompass another murderous totalitarian.
[...]
Unless these people are married to their daughter, the two are not mutually exclusive. Even then, sex is not love.
And "fascist dictator" and "animal lover" are not mutually exclusive, either. Just like you admit further down for psychopaths.
Where we do see logical inconsistencies we can and do make assumptions about a persons psyche. We're a social species, we evaluate people on availiable evidence all the time and did so long before the advent of what you term "pop psychology".
Both true. The point is that our evaluations do not always make sense. We evaluate based on our experiences. Other people do not have to agree, nor function according to our model of the world.
Here's what most magazines and newspapers discussing the topic are missing:
A definition of what we want the stock market to be like.
Everyone is focussing on what they don't want. But that's not how you build a resilient system. Basically, that's using default-allow for your firewall. You'll be spending the rest of your life adding rules of what you don't want.
Once you switch around your mind, the questions become a lot easier. Decide what you want the stock exchange to be, and you get your answers almost for free.
If you want the stock exchange to be a place where companies can meet investors and get capital raised, then everything that doesn't serve that purpose directly or indirectly is out. You define how the process should work and allow only that, done. Everyone who wants to play games will have to do it within the parameters you have defined.
The whole problem here is that too many people still believe the old nonsense about the invisible hand. Yes, to some extent you can build a sandbox and people will come and build their sand castles. You can provide a market place and have the participants sort out how everything works.
But you will get scammers, fraudsters, thieves, HFTs and all the other scum as well. If your sandbox is an MMO, you will get gold farmers and scammers and spammers. If your sandbox is a stock exchange, you will get HFTs and stock fraud and insider trading.
Letting chaotic self-organization create the rules of the game through emergence is an interesting experiment, one that I enjoy quite a bit when it comes to games or small settings (book a weekend with friends in a summer cottage and something will happen, no need to set up a schedule beforehand).
Allowing corrupt idiot politicians to base the world economy on chaos theory was one of the dumbest ideas we as a species ever had. Read some catastrophy theory first (at least check out the graphic if the article is tl;dr). There's a reason we call it chaotic systems, you know?
Key question: when is fast trading too fast?
When it ceases to be trading and becomes gambling instead.
Basically, if you are looking at numbers and not meaning, you aren't trading anymore. Here's a suggestion for a totally impractical test: If you call up the trader in question and ask him what the company behind the shares does (i.e. which business it is in) and he has no clue, then he's not a trader, he's a gambler.
Oh please! Protests to the contrary, such people only support art as an extension of their own ego, political or narcissitic needs.
I refuse these generic, bland statements.
If you are talking about one particular person, we can evaluate the evidence and make an informed guess. But saying that all "such people" do things "only" because of (insert favourite pop psychology nonsense) is not a supportable statement.
All of us have good and bad sides. People can be loving fathers and yet cheat on their wife. Or they can be animal loving, charity-giving, very civilized guys who hit their kids or enjoy BDSM in the bedroom. People can hate porn and violence and yet support gun laws, or the other way around. People can do drugs while objecting to smoking.
We are complex creatures, and simple statements covering large groups of people are at best a rough approximation of an average quality.
What this actually proves is that humans are more complex creatures than pop psychology allows.
We find it difficult to not label things and people. And we prefer simple categories. A fascist dictator who murders people and yet has a thing for the arts and supports starving artists just isn't something we have a category for, so we focus on the one and either forget or re-label the other.
Of course it can't be that a good person does a bad thing - he was lead by circumstances into a situation he couldn't control. Of course it can't be that a bad person has redeeming qualities - they are only a front to cover up his crimes.
Book hint: Out of Character.
I'm sorry, but you do have no idea.
First, yes as someone pointed out, Google not only has offices in Germany (more than one, I think), it actually has a german subsidiary. Yes, that could be moved, however, it is almost certainly the legal partner of all existing contracts, which makes things quite a bit more complicated than moving a few small offices.
Second, Germany is part of the EU which has a common market and quite a bit more. If you think you can move just across the border and you're out of reach, you are very mistaken.
Could you imagine the uproar the German government would face from their own companies because now they are at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world?
Pffft. Here's what Germany exports:
http://www.bpb.de/wissen/MVCEI4,0,0,Import_und_Export_nach_Waren.html
(if you don't speak german, the three big bars are cars, machinery and chemicals)
How much of that is dependent on Google advertisement? Which, btw., makes up at best 10% of the German advertisement business, so let's not pretend it would make such a huge difference. Google would suffer more than Germany.
Why should Germany's first lady receive special treatment?
She shouldn't. This isn't about special treatment, it's about whether or not Google needs to abide by the local laws. If the courts agree with her, then it's not special treatment because anyone in the same position would have the same right.
Can anyone then demand google censor their results if something "bad" is said about them? Yeah, that's a slippery slope that I expect they'd be willing to not want to step on.
Which is why we have courts that are willing to do so, because someone has to. We can't all go around our lives avoiding any slipperly slopes that may or may not be there.
You have no idea how business and laws work, do you?
Offices don't matter one bit. If Google wants to do business in Germany, it needs to abide by german law. And trust me, Google wants to do business in Germany. Google keeps the numbers secret, but estimates say it's roughly 2 billion $ per year, that's 1/8th of Google's world-wide revenue.
Big players like this don't play chicken. Google will never pull out of Germany and Germany will not block Google. There will be talks and negotiations and some compromise.
But Germany is part of the EU and one feature of the EU is the common market. It is quite difficult to pull out of one country and not the others.
To be fair, there'd be quite a few more Jews if your relatives hadn't murdered them.
One, yes, though not as many as you probably assume. The official number is 570.000 - most of those murdered were in Poland and other invaded countries.
Two, my grandfather was murdered by the Nazis for being a member of the german resistance. So shut the fuck up.
Not mentioned so far:
One, she has just "written" (no idea how much is ghostwritten) a book that is just coming out. The "discussion" about her past pretty much died down when her husband left office. Strange how it apparently got started with just the perfect timing, isn't it?
Two, so what? I know several people who either have been or still are sex workers. For most of them you'd never guess, and the ones I'm close with are good people. It's one of those "scandal! scandal!" topics that have no reason going for them other than sensationalism and a desire to sell more newspapers.