131–140 of 187 posts
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant. Now sure you can arg…
> You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant. And that lead to establishing a whole new field of social sciences that is philosophy. Yes, i am aware that middle-age debates and musings like that were not solely responsible for philosophy as a field of study,…
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that term "“bug” in capitalism". I have always felt the "bug" is basically incorrectly pricing externalities. We don't properly charge you for the carbon you put into the atmosphere or the mental health strain you put on workers and so on. If societal costs were also real costs the allocation of resources could be more optimized.
It's an interesting of reasoning but comes with a caveat - Reducing externalities to a price figure allows you to trade them away on a balance sheet as nothing more than a price figure. This is fine if pricing accurately reflects value, but that's not the same as allowing a market to set the price. You lose a huge amount of detail in the process that can't simply be captured in a price signal moving up or down. You m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant. Now sure you can arg…
> You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. Agreed. Modern economics encourages waste, such as multi-level marketing, payday loans, advertising, etc. Hell, I'm sure most people's jobs here, indeed, most jobs would fall under David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". > You migh…
Correct in one sense, but assumes we know in advance what will be waste and what won't be. Central planning has shown itself to be far less effective, both in overall quality of life and in meeting specific demands, than more wasteful competitive economies. So although its easy to point to retrospectively wasteful activities, life without them would be objectively worse.
Tangentially, when covid was in early days and people were beginning to develop vaccines, I saw someone comment asking who was going to coordinate the many disparate development efforts to make sure resources were being effectively used. I can't think of a more starkly absurd idea - it's only by allowing free activity, incentivized by some external, real forcing function, that we can expect to see consistent success. Any central definition and sanction of what should and shouldn't be done instantly distorts incentives towards pleading some central arbiter, and fails.
So all the scuzzy businesses and pursuits that the GP thinks are wasteful, are part of the rich tapestry that overall feeds us and keeps lifting us up. The only way we'd should be signaling they are not helpful is by not using them (and just for greater certainty I'm not talking about tolerating things that are exploitive, harmful, etc, just "wastful")
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What altitude would you have to be at to have line of site to Tokyo and London from Chicago? They're probably aimed somewhere above and in between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave
Assuming the same tower height at both ends, and ignoring refraction due to the atmosphere, I get that you would need 1500 mile tall towers for Chicago to Tokyo. (I did miles rather than meters because my Google for the distance between them came back in miles and I was too lazy to convert). For Chicago to London I get 560 mile tall towers.
Two towers add 1120 miles (and ignoring extra length of straight line transmission compared to great arc) then a fibre optic cable on great arc would be faster than straight line if light signal within fibre travels at > 85% of speed of light (also ignoring slowdown by atmosphere for radio).
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
What about the advertising industry, making up slogans and jingles that you can't get out of your head?
I think you might misunderstand the mechanisms behind the stock market and thus the value provided by the HFT industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saving one microsecond is rewarded the same as saving one millisecond, as long as you beat out the next best guy. There are vast diminishing returns to society but the winner is still rewarded the same so incentivized to make it faster and faster, ultimately burning away energy and misallocating capital until the reward is exhausted, and then repeating each time a new generation of hardware is out.
Not quite, you're forgetting the T in HFT. If everyone was just buying securities a microsecond vs a millisecond might not matter much. What happens is a lot of HFTs act as market makers. They arbitrage positions they create which screws over any non-HFTs. It also moves the price of securities for no reason which affects everyone holding that security. There's also been plenty of cases of HFTs doing front-running and…
Not true. The HFTs are often market makers and are PAID to be in the market by the exchanges at all times so that others have something to trade.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
What about race cars and the insane amount of money spent improving them? There is no social benefit in the sense you are talking. What about the advertising industry, making up slogans and jingles that you can't get out of your head? I think you might misunderstand the mechanisms behind the stock market and thus the value provided by the HFT industry.