t1lthesky

No one is saying its ok to drink while pregnant, there are many things that you can normally do that you shouldn't do when you are pregnant. Fly for example, or engage in extreme sports like skiing. Similarly, you should not drink prior to driving, in the same way that you shouldn't be texting on the phone, or be sleep deprived when driving.

You can be gainfully employed and meet your social responsibilities while having a beer or two on a Friday evening, as the majority of people are able to do.

I've never heard of this myth about the alcohol evaporating during dinner, so I won't comment on that - when I drink alcohol, I do so because I intend to consume said alcohol.

As for the potential for addictiveness, there are many things in life that certain people are not able to handle well, with ruinous effects on those people's lives. Unhealthy junk food for example, or even something seemingly innocuous like the ability to invest in the stock market. I tend towards the philosophy that we should not have the government ban those things, especially when the vast majority of people are able to enjoy those things responsibly. Certainly we can provide additional resources as a society to help those people, but lets not ban it for everyone else.

I think we can all agree that heavy alcohol consumption is bad for your health. However I'm pretty skeptical that a moderate amount of alcohol consumption, say 1-2 drinks per week, is any higher risk to your health than the many other activities we engage in to live a happy and engaging life, as other commentators have pointed out.

Anecdotally it seems that the people who take these things to the extremes (i.e. never have even a single drink because drinking alcohol is bad for you) tend to stress out about a lot of other things as well. Obviously if someone doesn't drink because they find the effects unpleasant that's different, but I'm talking about the kinds of people who for example are overly concerned about microplastics (to the point of not eating any food that has been stored in a plastic container), or air quality (co2 monitors in every room, etc), or diet (will not touch anything with nitrates, only eat unprocessed foods, etc).

To a point, yes all of these things are legitimately harmful to your health, but having this kind of mentality is also not great for your well-being. Really perhaps the highest health-yield lifestyle change they could make is to relax a bit more and try not to get stressed out as much through meditation/mindfulness

Not sure why, but SV in particular seems to attract a lot of people with this kind of mentality.

I think at this point the benefits of HFT to markets (lower spreads, more liquidity, faster incorporation of information into prices) is pretty undisputed. I'll let you do your own research, but just to address your point about spreads:

When you participate in the market, the spread is the "price" you have to pay to transact. When this goes down, it benefits all participants in the market, and especially the ones that are doing "long-term capital allocation" you are talking about. Rather than take my word for it, here's a quote from the CEO of Vanguard: “From a data perspective, we can see what’s happened to our fund shareholders over the last 20 years, and they’ve benefited by that reduction in transaction costs.” [1]. If you're managing trillions of dollars of 401ks, pension funds, etc, and you are constantly rebalancing your assets, buying new allocations, etc, any tiny reduction in average spread is a huge savings on net. A big part of the reason why there's been an almost universal reduction in fund management fees, saving retirement savers an enormous amount of money over the last 10 years or so is this reduction in spreads. This is absolutely a huge benefit to society, and its almost entirely attributable to HFTs.

You're correct that it HFT is a zero-sum arms race, and maybe you could make the argument that in an optimal allocation of society's resources, perhaps you could have less than the current number of participants. But I think you could actually make this argument about almost all lucrative & highly competitive fields. If anything, HFT is more productive per unit of labor, relative to other sectors of society - that's why the compensation is so high!

The total number of programmers and quants that work in HFT, at least for the 5-10 significant players, is probably less than the number of programmers Google alone employs (last I checked, there are about 30k programmers working at google. There's almost certainly less than 30k quants and programmers working at the main HFT firms). How many programmers do you "need" to optimize ads for eyeballs? Or how many programmers do you "need" to make mobile phone games? Or work on social networks? etc etc.

HFT is a small, niche, industry, and I think extremely productive per employee relative to most other industries. It replaced the tens of thousands of manual traders that used to be responsible for arbitrage and market making with automated robots, dramatically increasing market efficiencies while reducing the amount of human capital required to provide those services. It seems pretty misguided to make the argument that HFT is somehow "bad" or a "waste" of resources, given how much of an improvement it was to what there was before, and also given how small the industry really is.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-...

Ha I remember doing the same thing when I was ~6 years old in South Korea. There would be these trucks that went around spraying mosquito killing fog in the apartment complexes and all the little kids from the neighborhood would run behind them.

Well now I'm 30 and so far things seem to be ok! Fingers crossed

I think this is a misguided sentiment, and this article sums up the reasons why pretty well: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-14/want-t...

Even supposing that HFT adds no value to society (which is an incorrect assumption as many commenters have already pointed out), this particular argument is pretty inane in my opinion.

There are perhaps 4-8 significant players in the HFT space, all employing anywhere between a few hundred to a thousand people. Probably less than 5000 people total, and if you only include programmers and quants, maybe less than 2000. Google alone has 30000 programmers. How many of them are optimizing ads for eyeballs vs “benefiting the country/society/humanity”? What about the thousands of programmers making video games mechanics more addictive for children? I think it’s silly to focus on one tiny industry, and demand that those people should be working on things for the good of humanity, when the fact is the vast majority of humans just work for their own livelihood. I mean, what do you think 95% of the people in SV are doing? Not every company is trying to cure cancer or explore space...

HFT is such a small, niche, industry, and also extremely productive per employee relative to most other industries. (the primary reason for comp being so higher). It replaced the thousands of manual traders that used to be responsible for arbitrage and market making with automated robots, dramatically increasing market efficiencies while reducing the amount of human capital required to provide those services. I find all the virterol towards hft from SV very puzzling, as it seems to exemplify all the things that SV espouses!

By online communities do you mean hacker news/reddit, places like that?

The authors viewpoint would be that the “American Empire” is the large amount of political, military, and economic influence that America wields internationally. You can infer from the article that he believes this empire is what keeps regional powers in check. This is a good thing because a lot of those nations (China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia just from the article) are much more autocratic and illiberal compared to the USA. Additionally, even if you believe that’s not true of these societies, growing regional ambitions in the absence of the “American Empire” leads to destabilization and more conflict.

It seems as though you read only the article title and made a snap judgement of the author based on your preconceptions.

Here’s the first three sentences from the actual article:

“So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off.”

Americans spend too much on nearly all government provided services. Anyone who thinks that more government spending is the solution really doesn’t understand the underlying issues at all.

When it costs 5x as much to build a new subway line in NYC compared to Paris [1], spending 20% more on infrastructure isn’t going to do anything. Arguably it will make things worse, allowing the existing inefficiencies to continue.

This problem occurs in all the areas where America lags behind other first world countries. Education, healthcare, infrastructure - spending is equal or greater than comparable nations, but the returns on each dollar spent is much smaller.

People try to simplify this issue in a partisan manner to having bigger government (Democrats) vs having more free markets (Republicans), but when you look at each of these areas in greater depth you realize that it’s not that simple. There are a multitude of causes unique to America that contributes to costs being so high, as exemplified in this thread’s article. In the case of health care, elsewhere in the world there exist both free market and government provided solutions that deliver better outcomes than the American system.

For a more in depth coverage on this topic, I highly recommend: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

That's strange, I spent a month in Japan this past winter and had the opposite experience. My diet in America consists mainly of lean meats and veggies. It's nearly impossible to find veggies in the amounts that I want to eat in Japanese restaurants. All meals come with a large portion of rice - in fact the primary source of calories seems to be rice, with small side dishes for flavor. To contrast, in NYC you can find tons of meals for under 15 dollars with a lot of veggies and good proteins.

Come on are you really making this argument? That we cant know if it was better for the USA or Nazi Germany to have nuclear weapons? Like, say you have to go back in time and give nuclear weapons to Nazi Germany or the USA during ww2.. you would throw up your hands and say we can't know who the weapons should go to?

There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is training to not make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no reason

I dont know about this. I've used uber in multiple cities in the US and taken cabs in multiple cities across the EU, and the uber experience beats cabs hands down. Everything is more convenient - some cities you can only get cabs in certain areas, or its really hard to find a cab, or some cab drivers are very unfriendly, and if you dont know the city the ability to specify a destination on the map is great. Not to mention the price is usually cheaper, but even if it was the same price I'd still say hands down uber wins in terms of customer experience.

As a guy in his mid-20s working in a high-pressure, high-paying 9-8 job...

Its all a tradeoff. Yeah I'm working very hard during the week - I don't really have time for anything besides work+gym during weekdays, and some weekends I need to work as well. BUT I'm able to provide for my single mother, live in a very nice area in my city, travel wherever I want to go on vacation, eat at nice restaurants, buy expensive toys, etc etc. Coming from a family where the the nicest place we ever went out to eat was hometown buffet, this financial freedom is pretty damn great.

Plus I would argue that I actually have more freedom to do what I want to do during my free time, despite having less of it. I went to NYC for a weekend last week, was in vegas 2 weeks before, and I'm traveling to Japan over Christmas and NYE to snowboard in Hokkaido. You just cant do stuff like that if you don't have any money, especially when you need to help support your family.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Every job has a varying degree of intensity, and mine, despite the long hours needed, is still pretty flexible in terms of when I can take time off and such.