If trading at a speed faster than some arbitrary limit you just made up is such a bad thing, why don't you start an exchange that operates under these conditions? Seems like a definite win to me. "Individual investors" would apparently find your market model more lucrative and flock to your solution. More money for you, more money for "individual investors" and less money to HFTs. Seems like a huge win for society.
So why don't you start such an exchange? This question isn't rethorical. There are literally hundreds of exchanges/trading facilities being started every year all over the world. Have you stopped to consider for even one second why almost none of them were operated along your ideas, and why every single one of those that were failed miserably? Could it, just possibly, be that you don't quite understand how HFT works and exactly who they are extracting money from?
You could argue that "the free market gave a dumb corporation a 400 million dollar bitch slap in less than a hour" is funny, but actually it,s insightful. It's the perfect example of how companies could and should be punished for doing stupid things.
And here's an even better example: the flash crash of three years ago. In a few minutes some algorithms went haywire and stock prices dropped dramatically, in some cases down to 1 cent. Clearly that was wrong. The free market fixed this issue in six minutes. That's pretty fast, if you ask me. The government is still, three years later, thinking about what to do about it. Really!?
It is factually incorrect to say that taxes in Sweden are 30%. They are way over 50% for everyone, and the marginal rate is way over 70%. This is partially hidden in "employer fees", so you can't see them on your pay slip. However, they are obviously paid for by the employee in the end, in exactly the same way that VAT is ultimately paid by the consumer, not the retailer, even though the retailer is the one transferring the money to the state.
We do pay more for services in Sweden, but it is true that when tuitions and health insurance are included the difference shrinks.
That's such a wonderful idea. I bet it would work in other places as well. In fact, I bet it works in most places. It clearly deserves a name. I will henceforth refer to this concept as a "tekram". But I may have it backwards.
Could it just possibly be a combination, i.e. higher taxes and better knowledge about the ill effects both contribute to decreasing smoking? On the one hand you seem to argue that the idea that people are sheep who couldn't survive without government is nonsense, but on the other hand you also seem to argue that price doesn't affect demand. This does not strike me as a coherent world view.
All government activities are enforced, eventually, at gunpoint.
True. But unless you are an anarchist, you will probably agree that there are cases where it's preferable to have a democratic government pointing the gun at you, compared to some random criminal or, worse, a king (i.e. a criminal with high standing in society.) This isn't an argument for big government, but it is an argument for some government.
Some day, some policy that you don't like is going to be enforced by a governmental gun pointed at you.
Think twice before saying that the government should be doing something.
That day happened a long, long time ago. That's why it's important that government is small. But given some form of government and some forms of taxes, we should strive to tax stuff that has negative externalities, not stuff that has positive externalities. Coming back to the subject at hand, energy use has negative externalities and should be taxed. Light bulbs have no or very minor negative externalities, and shouldn't be taxed except to the extent that they use energy.
IMO, the "we shoudl prefer to tax stuff we want less of" statement is awful. It includes a morality/judement call that shouldn't be handled with taxes.
You're right, that was sloppy wording on my part. What I should have written is that we should tax things that have proven negative externalities. Alcohol, tobacco and energy clearly fall into that category. Bibles and tofu, as much as I hate both of them, don't. The judgement should be based on science, not on morals.
See, the point isn't to ban it outright. That was tried, you know. Failed pretty miserably. The point is that given that we must tax some things in order to have a society, we should prefer to tax stuff we want less of, as opposed to stuff we want more of.
What do you think we should tax more and less, compared to today? (Let's not discuss the overall level of taxation, though. That's a separate matter.)
No, only if you're not an anarchist. If you are not, you agree that there must be some taxes. And given that there should be some taxes, it should be on stuff we want less of, not on stuff we want more of.
No, the same should be true for "energy use", not "incandescent light bulbs". It's energy we should tax, not one particular thing that consumes energy but has other positive effects that the replacements don't have. (And, for the nitpickers, energy should be taxed high enough to regulate behaviour, but not "into oblivion", obviously.)
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense. High taxes on labor makes no sense.
In this case, taxing energy should be enough to make cheaper sources of light preferrable for consumers.
I know you were joking, but for the record, I would like to point out that the twins wouldn't help. 138 yes and 70 no is still not 2/3. You need 140 yes if no nays are changing their minds. So quadruplets FTW!
Indeed. It could be that you need more than twice as many yes as no votes depending on how abstains and absent voters are handled, but it should be *completely* obvious to *anyone* that no matter what method you use, if you do not even have twice the number of yes votes as the number of no votes, it doesn't pass. The fact that someone whipped out a calculator in this situation saddens me. The fact that the moran who thought he needed a calculator failed to use it properly doesn't surprise me all that much. If you know no maths at all, why would using machinery help?
Yeah, it's not like an NFL game in London would sell out or anything. And I hear that baseball is pretty big in Japan and Korea. And while basketball can't compete with football in Europe, it is still wildly popular in most countries. Suggesting that only people from the US care about these sports is silly and wrong.
So that link gave me ~16K hits. Searching for LeBron james gave me ~1.6M hits. I'd still say the guy who suggested this guy is a bigger celebrity to Koreans than LeBron is to Americans exaggerated just a tad.
Almost no government actually cares if you as a single person remain as their citizen
Completely false, unfortunately. Loads of countries do not allow any citizens to leave. Or do you think the idea of the Berlin wall was to stop westerners from entering? It is thankfully far fewer countries now than just 25 years ago, but it's still far from uncommon.
Meanwhile, if we look at how many people voluntarily move from the Scandinavian countries to the US, and how many people move in the other direction, a slightly different pattern emerges. Why do you think that is?
I'll actually spell it out for you. The standard of living in the US is ridiculously much higher, on average, than it is in Scandinavia, assuming we meassure what people actually buy for themselves, with their own money. Note that Scandinavian countries rank highly in HDI beacue that meassures stuff that the government buys.
If some random academic study tells you that people are happier in place A than in place B, yet more people want to move from A to B than the other way around, don't you think that should tell you something about the study?
Not true. See, for instance Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter". Most people in fact vote altruistically.
and since the poor and sick who need financial help is a minority the system is gradually changing to "take from the poor, give to the rich".
No, it is gradually changing to "take slightly less from the rich, give slightly less the the poor". It's not like low income earners are net payers of tax in the Nordic countries. Not by a long shot.
Surely "pendantic" is a proper word. It must mean "having the attributes of a pendant". Exactly what that does have to do with being picky about someone else's use of language is quite unclear, though, I'll give you that.
Huh? I didn't know that the only two options were "spend billions on space research" and "spend billions on particle acceleration". Somehow, I figured there were more possible options. Silly me, I guess.
You think he's typing on Velcro? Myself, I am typing on a keyboard. They were around before the space race.
The idea that space exploration is giving us (humanity as a whole) good value for money is, frankly, ridiculous. The billions and billions of dollars spent has of course brought some benefits and some cool inventions. But spending that same money on other kinds of research would with a very high probability have yielded more benefits. But I do agree that it would have yielded less fame to the old whiners from TFA.
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If trading at a speed faster than some arbitrary limit you just made up is such a bad thing, why don't you start an exchange that operates under these conditions? Seems like a definite win to me. "Individual investors" would apparently find your market model more lucrative and flock to your solution. More money for you, more money for "individual investors" and less money to HFTs. Seems like a huge win for society.
So why don't you start such an exchange? This question isn't rethorical. There are literally hundreds of exchanges/trading facilities being started every year all over the world. Have you stopped to consider for even one second why almost none of them were operated along your ideas, and why every single one of those that were failed miserably? Could it, just possibly, be that you don't quite understand how HFT works and exactly who they are extracting money from?
You could argue that "the free market gave a dumb corporation a 400 million dollar bitch slap in less than a hour" is funny, but actually it,s insightful. It's the perfect example of how companies could and should be punished for doing stupid things.
And here's an even better example: the flash crash of three years ago. In a few minutes some algorithms went haywire and stock prices dropped dramatically, in some cases down to 1 cent. Clearly that was wrong. The free market fixed this issue in six minutes. That's pretty fast, if you ask me. The government is still, three years later, thinking about what to do about it. Really!?
We do pay more for services in Sweden, but it is true that when tuitions and health insurance are included the difference shrinks.
That's such a wonderful idea. I bet it would work in other places as well. In fact, I bet it works in most places. It clearly deserves a name. I will henceforth refer to this concept as a "tekram". But I may have it backwards.
After about 300 years. No, not a joke, unfortunately.
Could it just possibly be a combination, i.e. higher taxes and better knowledge about the ill effects both contribute to decreasing smoking? On the one hand you seem to argue that the idea that people are sheep who couldn't survive without government is nonsense, but on the other hand you also seem to argue that price doesn't affect demand. This does not strike me as a coherent world view.
All government activities are enforced, eventually, at gunpoint.
True. But unless you are an anarchist, you will probably agree that there are cases where it's preferable to have a democratic government pointing the gun at you, compared to some random criminal or, worse, a king (i.e. a criminal with high standing in society.) This isn't an argument for big government, but it is an argument for some government.
Some day, some policy that you don't like is going to be enforced by a governmental gun pointed at you.
Think twice before saying that the government should be doing something.
That day happened a long, long time ago. That's why it's important that government is small. But given some form of government and some forms of taxes, we should strive to tax stuff that has negative externalities, not stuff that has positive externalities. Coming back to the subject at hand, energy use has negative externalities and should be taxed. Light bulbs have no or very minor negative externalities, and shouldn't be taxed except to the extent that they use energy.
IMO, the "we shoudl prefer to tax stuff we want less of" statement is awful. It includes a morality/judement call that shouldn't be handled with taxes.
You're right, that was sloppy wording on my part. What I should have written is that we should tax things that have proven negative externalities. Alcohol, tobacco and energy clearly fall into that category. Bibles and tofu, as much as I hate both of them, don't. The judgement should be based on science, not on morals.
See, the point isn't to ban it outright. That was tried, you know. Failed pretty miserably. The point is that given that we must tax some things in order to have a society, we should prefer to tax stuff we want less of, as opposed to stuff we want more of.
What do you think we should tax more and less, compared to today? (Let's not discuss the overall level of taxation, though. That's a separate matter.)
No, only if you're not an anarchist. If you are not, you agree that there must be some taxes. And given that there should be some taxes, it should be on stuff we want less of, not on stuff we want more of.
What is your view on what should be taxed?
Yes, because price controls always work. No unintended consequences ever. No, sir, never happened.
No, the same should be true for "energy use", not "incandescent light bulbs". It's energy we should tax, not one particular thing that consumes energy but has other positive effects that the replacements don't have. (And, for the nitpickers, energy should be taxed high enough to regulate behaviour, but not "into oblivion", obviously.)
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense. High taxes on labor makes no sense. In this case, taxing energy should be enough to make cheaper sources of light preferrable for consumers.
I know you were joking, but for the record, I would like to point out that the twins wouldn't help. 138 yes and 70 no is still not 2/3. You need 140 yes if no nays are changing their minds. So quadruplets FTW!
Indeed. It could be that you need more than twice as many yes as no votes depending on how abstains and absent voters are handled, but it should be *completely* obvious to *anyone* that no matter what method you use, if you do not even have twice the number of yes votes as the number of no votes, it doesn't pass. The fact that someone whipped out a calculator in this situation saddens me. The fact that the moran who thought he needed a calculator failed to use it properly doesn't surprise me all that much. If you know no maths at all, why would using machinery help?
Yeah, it's not like an NFL game in London would sell out or anything. And I hear that baseball is pretty big in Japan and Korea. And while basketball can't compete with football in Europe, it is still wildly popular in most countries. Suggesting that only people from the US care about these sports is silly and wrong.
So that link gave me ~16K hits. Searching for LeBron james gave me ~1.6M hits. I'd still say the guy who suggested this guy is a bigger celebrity to Koreans than LeBron is to Americans exaggerated just a tad.
You would spend less time playing games. That would increase your productivity.
Almost no government actually cares if you as a single person remain as their citizen
Completely false, unfortunately. Loads of countries do not allow any citizens to leave. Or do you think the idea of the Berlin wall was to stop westerners from entering? It is thankfully far fewer countries now than just 25 years ago, but it's still far from uncommon.
Meanwhile, if we look at how many people voluntarily move from the Scandinavian countries to the US, and how many people move in the other direction, a slightly different pattern emerges. Why do you think that is?
I'll actually spell it out for you. The standard of living in the US is ridiculously much higher, on average, than it is in Scandinavia, assuming we meassure what people actually buy for themselves, with their own money. Note that Scandinavian countries rank highly in HDI beacue that meassures stuff that the government buys.
If some random academic study tells you that people are happier in place A than in place B, yet more people want to move from A to B than the other way around, don't you think that should tell you something about the study?
Most people vote what benefit themselves the most
Not true. See, for instance Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter". Most people in fact vote altruistically.
and since the poor and sick who need financial help is a minority the system is gradually changing to "take from the poor, give to the rich".
No, it is gradually changing to "take slightly less from the rich, give slightly less the the poor". It's not like low income earners are net payers of tax in the Nordic countries. Not by a long shot.
Surely "pendantic" is a proper word. It must mean "having the attributes of a pendant". Exactly what that does have to do with being picky about someone else's use of language is quite unclear, though, I'll give you that.
As MAD Magazine said years ago: "The best things in life are free. The expensive part is paying for the dinner and movie that comes first".
Huh? I didn't know that the only two options were "spend billions on space research" and "spend billions on particle acceleration". Somehow, I figured there were more possible options. Silly me, I guess.
You think he's typing on Velcro? Myself, I am typing on a keyboard. They were around before the space race.
The idea that space exploration is giving us (humanity as a whole) good value for money is, frankly, ridiculous. The billions and billions of dollars spent has of course brought some benefits and some cool inventions. But spending that same money on other kinds of research would with a very high probability have yielded more benefits. But I do agree that it would have yielded less fame to the old whiners from TFA.