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I am replying in the context of the parent comment asking if opinions of Soros in Brazil match the rest of the world. Which, well... they do. You are allowed to call George Soros evil, greedy, what-have-you. However, antisemitism is a real thing, and his name has been commonly invoked as part of conspiracy theories pushing it.
The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craze where people just really, really liked the stock got threatened with charges of market manipulation, almost took out Robinhood, with contagion exposure to Citadel with system wide risk, and caused back door intervention by Fed authorities and even the Whiteh…
It's a bit silly to call someone "totalitarianist" when his whole career and wealth is from betting against bad governments and winning. But if you equate "wealthy" with "totalitarian", you are too far gone to debate with.
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I had thought poorly of George Soros based on other people's words, before reading all of the comments written thus far in this thread. Watching the video you linked, cemented my notion that Goeorge Soros is being treated as a scapegoat. Thank you for sharing the video, as I had never actually listened to him speak before. In that video, he seems like a logical and emotional person who can keep emotions in their prop…
He explicitly didn't say he was happy he developed. He said he was happy, and that happiness was possible because he was solipsistic and concerned only for his own position. And how can you congratulate someone for being logical, high IQ/EQ while being disappointed that they don't believe in God, which is an illogical idea and emotional crutch?
Being logical doesn't preclude someone from beleiving in a god, though it will probably preclude some beliefs or teachings of most organized religions.
(There are a few minor issues of the religion of which I am a part of, but religion is a man-made construct and thus inherently fallible. And I recognize that since there are multiple different religions, not all of them can be correct at the same time, and thus it's possible the one I am a part of is one of the incorrect ones.)
Believing in a god can be used as an emotional crutch by some people, but it does not mean it is always an emotional crutch for everyone that does believe in a god.
Many people have a problem of differentiating from what was actually said versus what they think someone meant. Sometimes I have a problem of understanding what was meant when people don't actually say what they mean. I think George Soros is a person who means exactly what he says.
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To be monsterous and justified, what a triumph of moral expedience. Soros experienced WWII as a teenager in Hungary(?) where growing up he saw the rise of the movements that would become NSDAP and Stalinsim, respectively. My view is that the most powerful thing he has ever experienced was that evil, but in seeing the power of them, he understood what was possible, and his intent is to use them for "good." Trouble is,…
If you believe that everyone is either evil or irrelevant, as you say, then why waste your time caring? You've proven that nothing matters. How is protesrint against police brutality, and supporting Israel-Palestine peace activists, totalitarian? How can you equate having nonzero will to power (resisting oppression) with infinite will to power? How can you claim that resisting rotalitarianism is equal to totalitarian…
If you do some reading on the topic, the necessary condition of the technical term of totalitarianism, as distinct from say, mere authoritarian ideas like fascism or communism, is that it is a movement that uses the nation state as a host, but whose intent is the absorption of nation states into its system of control, and that its key tactic is the dissolution of truth as a means to atomize and liquidate the individual.
"Resisting oppression" requires first that you identify as oppressed, and if you are a Daniel Dennet reader and use his (flawed but useful) model of self as an example, this very identity is the effect of language and narrative. The aim of these movements (and initially of marxism) was to create an identity ("consciousness") relative to a percieved material oppressor - that's the heavy lift, or leap of faith, and once you've convinced someone they are a victim, you can convince them of anything, because they have accepted the core axiom of the rest of the ideology, and the demagogue becomes the source of narrative truth for that identity.
You don't need to enslave people when you can just convince them they are slaves who must do what you ask to become free. It's a simple begged question and low rent street hustle. This grand deception that underpins Marx's whole system is about as sophisticated as a predatory pimp persuading a target she owes him the money he's forcing her to work for, except instead of monetary debt, he's selling you an inferior identity that you can redeem yourself by organizing and following some political huckster.
So, what do you think is more likely, that a few activists are enlightened and the rest of us live under a false consciousness of oppressive supremacy, or that a minority with an infinite will to power are selling a snake oil pseudo religion and they're no better than any other televangelists and demagogues?
Soros has not resisted totalitarianism at all, he has funded and co-opted movements against nation states as a means to subordinate and dissolve them.
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I have bad news for you, insider trading isn't about fairness. People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Adverse selection abounds in markets, so you have to be careful. Insider trading laws are rather about theft: did you illegally appropriate information owned by someone else to benefit yourself and/or a third party? That is insider trading. In the US, it can be even more relaxed than that, with th…
> People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Example?
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Interesting. In Canada you can only get up to 5 years fixed typically. Mortgage itself is 25 years but terms change every 5 usually. 30y fixed feels... Crazy. How much above market does it have to be for banks to take that risk??
The banks don't take the risk of offering such long-term fixed rates. The US government does through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, effectively subsidising the mortgage market. Other countries don't do this and don't have the same kind of long-term fixed mortgages as a result.
That's both awesome and insane
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Interesting. In Canada you can only get up to 5 years fixed typically. Mortgage itself is 25 years but terms change every 5 usually. 30y fixed feels... Crazy. How much above market does it have to be for banks to take that risk??
People with a low risk profile today get 2-4% fixed rate. What’s it like in Canada?
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You might even say forcing the prices of things to be accurate and exposing departures from reality is the purpose of financial markets and the thing an investor gets paid for. (How well that works is questionable; my completely amateur impression is that this view would force us to legalize insider trading while declaring HFT completely useless, for example.)
This is true. Speculators play a vital role in stabilizing the price of a commodity over time. All other forms of arbitrage are meaningless besides the biggest one of them all: temporal arbitrage. Buy low sell high. And with it, sell high buy low. Government employees, for instance for Codelco, Chile's state-owned mining corporation, value speculators because those speculations are the best predictions of the future.…
If there were zero external costs to having a minimum-latency market, no big deal.
But we're still short of that. So there's a lot of money and brainpower being thrown into marginal decreases in market latency. Do we want so many of our best engineers chasing HFT performance?
It also creates a new ecosystem of arbitrage-- the guy with 20ms ping can take advantage of price differences the guy with 40ms can't-- which isn't necessarily producing real value.
This also assumes that the goal of absolute price discovery is itself meritorious. Maybe we're better off not being able to correctly value assets with infinite precision, because it tends to encourage the mindset of chopping up businesses for parts.
I'm a fan of the old-line conglomerate model. By bundling so many diverse assets, they inherently block price discovery, which creates openings where risk hedges and long term plays can survive and pay out. But investors hate being unable to pull those components out of the stock price.
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You might even say forcing the prices of things to be accurate and exposing departures from reality is the purpose of financial markets and the thing an investor gets paid for. (How well that works is questionable; my completely amateur impression is that this view would force us to legalize insider trading while declaring HFT completely useless, for example.)
> declaring HFT completely useless, for example. Please do ! The amount of resources invested in making HFT possible and profitable is no where close to being justified by the benefits it brings to society as a whole. Making financial information move in days instead of week ? Sure !. In hours instead of days ? Yep !. In minutes instead of hours ? Why Not !. In seconds instead of minutes ? Mmmh yeah, I guess. In mill…
Anyone doing fiber is doing the wrong technology, if they want to minimize total end-to-end latency.