goldstone26

As a free-market proponent who isn't 100% sold on all of the democratic socialism stuff, I don't understand how anyone can deny that having your literal physical well-being tied to your employment is not an enormous problem for anyone who values the efficient allocation of labor/capital (which should hopefully be everyone?)

It's literally just a cash-equivalent (in that nearly every employer is going to provide a plan, and you'll need to pay for health coverage somehow, whether it be in taxes or in premiums) part of your compensation that is also coincidentally an enormous arbitrary sticking point that makes moving jobs that much more of a pain and danger. But only for the employee, of course.

There is a non-trivial amount of the English language that has religious baggage that I suspect you'll have a difficult time first identifying and then avoiding.

Trades get canceled/rejected because the price moves away from their limit/immediate-or-cancel order all the time, even without any HFT involvement. And the reason those orders don't get filled is because they don't reflect a competitive bid or offer for the security. I don't think you're suggesting that we should accept less-competitive orders just because the market participant took the time to submit it.

The only difference with HFT's, and market makers, and all other high-speed/high-frequency participants in the mix is that these changes in price happen more often, which indicates that price discovery is more efficient (has better granularity, recency and accuracy). (Unless the market activity doesn't have 'economic merit', which the SEC devotes a significant amount of time to investigating).

One might argue: "do we need microsecond-level granularity on the price of Amazon?"

I'll take the Matt Levine route and ask: "Do you think quotes should update once per minute? (I suspect most people will say yes). How about once a second? (Yes?) Ten times per second? (?) Every millisecond? Microsecond?"

Now ask the flip side: "Should it be illegal to perform market activity every minute? Every second? Every...?"

It's hard to draw a line with any kind of solid reasoning. As an economy, we certainly reward people who can make these sub-second adjustments with a lot of money, and in general with the stock market, where every trade is, by definition, two consenting parties agreeing on a price, usually making money means you're improving market efficiency.

Also, I want to point out that it's not like HFT's are invincible magic money-stealing boogiemen. HFT profits are declining year-over-year (look at Virtu's recent earnings numbers and their current corporate strategy/direction) specifically because other market participants are responding to their existence and getting smarter about their own order execution.

Reading the article, it seems like the primary complaint is that, since the business has to pay things like social security, payroll taxes, worker's comp, etc. that they then have to withhold this money before they pay the workers, rather than have the workers withhold this themselves?

It sounds a lot more like the complaints are "I was making $X before because I was underreporting my income, but now that the business is on the hook for all this, I'm being forced to comply and am finding that the work isn't profitable enough anymore". Which translates to me as everyone else, who was paying into all these public tax pools, was essentially subsidizing the dancers.

I guess you could argue that some of the stuff, like workman's comp, some people might want to just pocket the money that otherwise would've gone to insuring the risk of being injured on the job. Which I think is maybe irresponsible, since otherwise the burden just ends up getting shifted, again, to the general public (worker injured without worker's comp then ends up on food stamps, or ends up getting their medical debt written off, etc). So we should probably require people to directly pay into these things, like we require people to maintain liability auto insurance.

And I suppose you could also say that maybe the businesses are taking the opportunity to pocket some extra profit, but hopefully the invisible hand of the free market would compete that back down as employees and customers move around based on new pricing/comp.

Flash Boys is written to entertain, though, not inform. It is littered with inaccuracies and dramatization to the point of lying.

Front-running, for the record, is illegal and nobody does it. Michael Lewis perverts the phrase to mean "using publicly available information and extremely expensive- though publicly available- radio technology to move stock information faster than competitors". Which you might still think is "unfair", though I would argue it's only unfair in the same sense that WalMart and Target make it hard for small shops to compete because they can't afford ultra-efficient trillion dollar supply chains. It's not illegal, it's objectively more efficient, and the only thing that prevents anyone from "just doing it too" is capital.

"Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson is a much more educated and in-the-know look at electronic trading.

I used a system76 gazelle professional during part of college. Ran Arch on it. Probably 2 years or so. 15". It was really solid. I think I bought it in 2013? The only drawback was the battery life. 45 mins tops, and the battery itself only lasted 2-3 years. I replaced it twice, once right before I gave it to my sister, and once for her after she'd had it for a similar period of time. I used it as a desktop replacement, so it was plugged in a good deal of the time. The specs were great, screen was great, etc. I still have it plugged in on a shelf in my homelab to use for random testing stuff (got it back from my sister eventually).

I only replaced it because I decided I wanted to go the "ultrabook" route and have an i5-xxxxU processor but get 12+ hours of battery life. I got a T440s, and ran linux on it, ofc.

Isn't that illegal in most places? In the US, High School is compulsory until you're 18 (so most people at least get 3 full years).