Just to point it out: The comments under Readers' Picks and NYT Picks are really worth reading as well.
For the Love of Money
51–60 of 291 posts
Re: For the Love of Money
#52TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
This is a perfect example of the cynic snarkiness for the sake of snarkiness that plagues Hacker News; the guy of the article only has written one article besides this one[0] and that's it. He doesn't even have a profile pic or a clickable profile as most journalist in the NYT have. And he seems to spend his time as the director of something called groceryships not creating support groups for money addicts or selling self-help books. So much for an attention-seeker.
[0]http://www.ocregister.com/articles/obesity-596818-food-stress.htmlRe: For the Love of Money
#53I find the finance world quite fascinating! Some of those guys are super wealthy even though they have what looks like regular technical office jobs. With the same skills in a different industry, they would have had "normal" salaries.
Re: For the Love of Money
#54Yay, more villifying "Wall Street" and fueling the "Wall Street vs. Main Street" fire, and suggesting that it's somehow noble or good to not want to be rich. I think everybody should want to be rich. I've tried poverty and in my opinion - it sucks. It sucks big, steaming donkey balls. The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. Because a few assholes go too far…
> The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing.
One of the key points of this essay is that making more money doesn't necessarily improve one's quality of life. The author clearly talks about at age 25 being financially secure and wealthy, so his pursuit of additional wealth wasn't really about an increase in quality of life.
> You can be rich and unhappy, or poor and unhappy. Given a choice, if I'm going to be unhappy, I'd rather at least be rich.
Wealth and class aren't about binary choices. There are levels of income that are wholly satisfactory for an individual's life that still classify that person as not rich.
> No one should feel any need to apologize or feel guilty about wanting to make money, even lots of money. If you want to be a fucking billionaire, go become a billionaire. Just feel guilty if you lie, or cheat or steal, or otherwise do unethical things to get there.
Is it even possible to be a billionaire without exploiting others? Even if so, is it right that you can be a billionaire while there are more empty homes each night in the US than the homeless population? Is it right that you can safely eat anything you like while others have to make sacrifices and choices because of political cuts to SNAP? The answer is clearly no. In this way, pursuing money for wealth's sake is unethical.
Re: For the Love of Money
#55TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
Well, you're partly right. I don't think he's using attention in the same way. Sure, it's a self reporting story but let's say that he has mostly handled the internal problems that made him an addict. He even admits he still buys lottey tickets. But in his case he's using his tendencies to help rather than hurt people.
Re: For the Love of Money
#56Yay, more villifying "Wall Street" and fueling the "Wall Street vs. Main Street" fire, and suggesting that it's somehow noble or good to not want to be rich. I think everybody should want to be rich. I've tried poverty and in my opinion - it sucks. It sucks big, steaming donkey balls. The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. Because a few assholes go too far…
> The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. One of the key points of this essay is that making more money doesn't necessarily improve one's quality of life. The author clearly talks about at age 25 being financially secure and wealthy, so his pursuit of additional wealth wasn't really about an increase in quality of life. > You can be rich and unhappy, or poor…
That is an interesting question about being a billionaire without exploiting anyone. I'm genuinely curious about that.
Not that I think being a Billionaire automatically makes you an asshole. I'm just curious if that is possible just from a logistical standpoint. Somewhere along the line someone gets screwed right?
Re: For the Love of Money
#57Yay, more villifying "Wall Street" and fueling the "Wall Street vs. Main Street" fire, and suggesting that it's somehow noble or good to not want to be rich. I think everybody should want to be rich. I've tried poverty and in my opinion - it sucks. It sucks big, steaming donkey balls. The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. Because a few assholes go too far…
It's also strange that this kind of hate is specifically focused on Wall Street types, much less so than against the Elon Musks, Steve Jobs's and Bill Gates's of the world, which could also easily be described as fanatical and addicted to wealth and success.
Re: For the Love of Money
#58“I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”
I wonder how many people really understand the system as whole. From the outside, it looks like a complex natural phenomenon that we don't really understand and don't control.
Re: For the Love of Money
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sorta up for debate. My understanding, which is tiny and very limited, is that you can think of the role of finance operators as "liquidity providers". They're the grease in the wheels of capitalism; by either providing access to capital (via loans, or investment) or by matching buyers with sellers. A classical example is you're a farmer that wants to hedge the risk that your crop will fail due to random weather…
HFT people will argue that they provide more liquidity in the market - it's easier to sell your stocks because HF traders increase the overall volume, etc. A problem with their argument, (one of many) is that HFTs are not regulated market makers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker HFTs provide liquidity when the market's good, but you always have plenty of liquidity when the market's good. You only really need…
HFTs are not any more a tax on stock transactions than previous market makers. In many settings they actually do lower transaction costs. Just ask other market participants such as L/S hedge funds, systematic traders, mutual funds etc. In particular, HFTs drove many of the old school manual market makers out of business, or at the very least reduced their margins significantly.
The non-populist argument these days seems to be less about fast, electronic market making and more about whether there should be a fixed, minimum trading time, e.g. by discretizing trading into intervals of a certain length.
Re: For the Love of Money
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hits the nail on the head for me. In the end these people make incredible amounts of money for doing what amounts to a job that is worthless to the society at large. As opposed to making incredibly amounts of money finding ways of getting Random Joe to click on ads? The only difference between him and most 20 something kids working their asses off in SV is a million dollars.
And the ability of the industry in question to crash an economy , requiring extensive public bailout... (at least so far!) :) Edit: Also this article isn't about that sort of occupation. I was focusing on the topic at hand.
> Edit: Also this article isn't about that sort of occupation. I was focusing on the topic at hand.
That is fair, I presumed you were making a moral judgement of the way they were spending their lives, apologies if that was not the intention.