franticpedantic

You have absolutely zero evidence or basis for your assumption. The truth is that nobody has any idea what people's motivations were for upvoting it, but it deserved to be upvoted. The only person who has made this conversation sexist is you and those who brought the topic up.

He learned new market information, negotiated the cost of his services (not re-negging because it's at-will employment), and when he couldn't strike a deal, he did so with another party. This is the free-market at work, while you are going on a non-sequitur political rant that doesn't make any sense since what he did is pretty much the opposite of unionizing.

Many people actually really enjoy playing slots. It's fun to win money, and it's fun to enjoy the dramatic moment before you know if you've won money. Some people get addicted to it, just like some people have gotten addicted to immersive PC games or really anything enjoyable. The distinction you're trying to draw is basically non-existent, except perhaps that social games and slots are simpler and revolve entirely around the unknown-reward mechanic.

Based on my extra-curricular time learning Portuguese for the last year, I think Skype and Google Translate (as a slightly more useful dictionary) are a thousand times the transformational language learning tool than any of these apps are. No app or comprehensive program really impresses me too much (and I've tried most, including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur) because most are boring, inhuman, and lack enough content. The most useful app I've used is Anki, but that's just a general purposes SRS rote learning tool for drilling.

The ability to get on Skype with someone from another country though is really a game changer, because there is no app that comes close to the ability to communicate with another human being, which is ultimately what language learning is about. There seems to be a fight or flight mechanism that forces you to adapt and try your best to understand the bare minimum of what the person's saying that just isn't there with software. I started Skyping with people from sharedtalk (based on a comment here) knowing very little Portuguese but just memorizing "can you type that?" and "can you repeat that?" and I felt I moved a lot more quickly than I did with Rosetta Stone. It did help that many Brazilians are eager for an English practice partner.

While I try to combine a wide variety of learning techniques, my experience and the experience of various other's that I've read is that "apps" to teach you a language are a lot less useful than books, native podcasts, TV shows, music, and Skype. So while I think that the internet has totally transformed language learning, I'm less convinced that any software explicitly for that purpose has.

No, your friend is not left holding the bag. He's left holding the money you paid him for the equity. You were the one in the red at first, but since the value of your stake could grow and pay you in dividends you overcame that loss. Both of you gained money - that's the point. He didn't even lose the opportunity for more money, because he needed the initial investment to even grow the company in the first place.

Here's the key point you're missing. In order for it to be zero sum, if you make a million dollars off of this company, he needs to LOSE a million dollars. Not the opportunity to make a million dollars, an actual million dollars. Clearly this does not happen. You are totally and entirely wrong here.

The market doesn't grow because new money flows in. This is mercantalism and your understanding of economics is hundreds of years old. The market grows because companies create REAL (not nominal) value that didn't exist before. I can explain this in more depth, clearly your financial friends aren't very good at their jobs (it's quite common).

The reason your oil trader friend agrees it's zero sum is because the futures market is zero sum. The stock market is not.

Men are as likely to be raped, but their (prison) rapes are considered funny in our society, whereas female rapes are considered a grave crime. Men are generally considered more disposable in dangerous situations ("let the women and children go"). Stereotypes and gender roles regarding men are much more rigid, and challenging them has much less cultural buy-in than challenging gender roles with women. Men are much more likely to be assaulted. I told my very feminist sister a story about a guy who punched another guy that his girlfriend was cheating on him with. At first she misheard me and thought he punched the girl, which was considered horrible. When I clarified that it was the guy he hit, she immediately made a comment that indicating that it was less serious. She has internalized the sexism that it's much less serious to assault a male.

I could go on and on, but you're so brainwashed by a movement that has overall very good intentions (empower women in a society that disempowers them) that you have internalized it and don't even see the blatant sexism on the other side of the coin. Even this piece contains so many generalizations about men, geeks, tech workplaces that are blatantly unfair.

It's so ironic that so many feminists/liberals are so guilty of what they accuse others of - being unaware of their own prejudices.

Men are as likely to be raped, but their (prison) rapes are considered funny in our society, whereas female rapes are considered a grave crime. Men are generally considered more disposable in dangerous situations ("let the women and children go"). Stereotypes and gender roles regarding men are much more rigid, and challenging them has much less cultural buy-in than challenging gender roles with women. Men are much more likely to be assaulted. I told my very feminist sister a story about a guy who punched the guy his girlfriend was cheating on him with. At first she misheard me and thought he punched the girl, which was considered horrible. When I clarified that it was the guy, she immediately made a comment that it was less serious. She has internalized the sexism that it's much less serious to assault a male.

I could go on and on, but you're so brainwashed by the feminist agenda that you have internalized it and don't even see the blatant sexism in our society. It's so ironic that so many feminists/liberals are so guilty of what they accuse others of - being unaware of their own prejudices.

I didn't downvote you, but you're wrong for a huge variety of reasons.

Firstly and most importantly, the stock market is not zero-sum.I don't know why you think it is.Equities in companies ideally (and historically) grow in real value.This is basic common sense.If your friend sells you a stake in his company, you have an ad-hoc stock market (a buyer and a seller for company equity). Is one of you destined to lose in this deal? Or can the company do well and you both succeed?

What's going on with HFT is not a novel way to exploit the system. Financial pros will always get the information sooner and be able to act on it more quickly/efficiently than retail investors. People who suggest otherwise are deluding people for political purposes. Before computers existed, people on Wall Street still got the information first and acted on it first.

What computers have done is made the whole thing quicker and more convenient. If you want to fill an order you are much more likely to be able to. Those advanced algorithms help make sure things are correctly priced which is good for buyers and sellers. The companies looking for investment benefit from this. The smaller investors aren't hurt by this at all from this, assuming they are trying to invest in value and not take advantage of arbitrage opportunity.

Contributing liquidity and pricing information to the market is valuable. Some people do it faster and better than others and so they profit from it. It's unclear to me why they need to do a worse job of it so that other people can share in this value. Should Google be limited to only providing so many search results a day so that other small(er) search engines can get some of the wealth too? What exactly is the problem, besides the general popularity of banking fear-mongering recently?

You argue that intelligence and tenacity are more important than luck, but then it follows that since China and India have the most entrants, the only explanation for their lack of proportional success is lack of intellence and tenacity relative to Americans(I'm not saying you think this, I'm just noting it follows from your argument).

I would argue luck does play a big role, and that they weren't lucky enough to be born into a country with the standard of living, educational resources, and number of tech jobs that Americans have is the major differentiating factor.

I'm sure they will do fine, but are we maximizing their potential? I don't think I was especially gifted, but I did feel like my school pandered overwhelmingly to the worst students. I had an interest in programming and made some QBasic games, but got stuck while transitioning to C and I lost interest until college where I got the mentorship I needed. My school's only computer class taught Microsoft Word. In college, I met people who had family in software or better schools and I can see how it helped them develop their interest better.

Now, I'm a professional programmer so of course I'm just fine. But I think I might be even more accomplished if I had a little more help in high school (today's internet might have also sufficed). I think the real super geniuses might not be held back, but I think there are lot of cases like me where you have less than genius but above average intelligence that could accomplish a lot more if challenged a little more.

I think your attitude highlights a big part of the problem nicely as well. Whether or not women are more, less, or as interested in tech on average than men due to biological predisposition should be treated as a scientific question, not outright rejected as absurd because it could hurt someone's feelings. Maybe it's not a worthwhile question to examine, but to say it's wrong because it's offensive is incredibly unscientific, and geeks often are more interested in truth than getting along.

This attitude is totally different than harassing people, being disrespectful towards people, or discriminating against an individual. But when advocates of women's rights or whatever cause group these two separate attitudes as the same, there will be backlash from would-be sympathizers.

I am not a linguist, but I have been working on learning Portuguese, and based on what I read the conventional wisdom among laymen is that native language acquisition is different for children, but the research actually shows the opposite. The only thing I've seen research suggest children are different at is accents. Furthermore, I think many of us know Americans who immigrated in their teens and have been here for a long time and really are indistinguishable from native speakers.

I also am highly skeptical of your claim you are more native in programming, but I started when I was in my early teens so I'm not sure I can comment.

I think your skill at learning languages rises when you are very young, and you face diminishing returns after that, so adults never get that much better at learning a language than when they were young. With other things you begin later in life, you start at the bottom of the learning curve and improve much more. So adults and kids are usually about as good at language learning, unlike most things, so people think kids are magically gifted at learning languages because they are about as good as adults. And of course, adults are actually much better because they already know all the real world concepts from their L1. I've also seen it asserted many times that children learn languages faster, and I've only seen research supporting the opposite, so I think your claim is just the programming version of that fallacy.