Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.
This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would ever try to confiscate all guns
> Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.
Are you serious? I can't determine if you're being sarcastic or not.
Sure the idea has never been formally proposed, because no politician will ever get elected in America if they proposed such idea.
But here's Hillary Clinton for you:
> I do not know enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how it would work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.<
Now you may say that Hillary Clinton didn't mean gun confiscation by 'Australian example', but it's clear she clearly isn't appalled by Australian gun confiscation.
Why Australian example? Why not Canadian example? Why not French example? Sure maybe this is not a strong correlation.
But then Democrats get caught all the time talking about complete elimination of guns when they think they are not on Camera:
I have a similar list of useful concepts. My goal so far this year was to expose myself to those concepts as often as possible. I made an app for my phone that displays the concept of the day on my home screen (right now it's the rhetorical concept of periodic sentences). I also made images for each of the concepts that I use as my chromecast backdrop. I've seen each of them dozens of times by now, mostly unconsciously.
So far, mixed results. I would like to say that I think of "Bayes Theorem" at the perfect time because I wrote it on a list, but that never happens. I guess I've benefitted from thinking about these concepts more, but that's almost impossible to measure. A list of 100 useful mental models has limited value if you can't hold all of them in memory at once and retrieve them at the right time. I'm still trying to come up with a solution for this. Unfortunately I think this might be a fundamental limitation of human learning.
I don't think this is true at all. 10,000 people are just going to have more ideas and better individual ideas than 100 experts. The impact of that much creativity and perspective can be exponential, and it's hard to duplicate.
When I'm designing a system, I hate to have to try to out think everyone on the internet. If you have a known set of opponents you can predict what they might do. When you're up against anybody from anywhere, you never know what you're going to get. Global scale collaboration is a very powerful thing because it allows a complete exploration of the solution space, and it's difficult to stop.
The interesting factor here is strategy sizing. The 100 experts need to manage portfolios of a certain size. The amateurs don't. There are people who can carve out a living of a strategy that has sustainable alpha but would not be attractive to hedge funds due to the capacity of the strategy.
This is absolutely true. Many, many strategies that are viable at small portfolio sizes fall off very quickly when millions, tens of millions of dollars start to be used for them.
Although the world's financial markets are massive, the little inefficiencies that can be exploited for profit often aren't.
"This is absolutely true. Many, many strategies that are viable at small portfolio sizes fall off very quickly when millions, tens of millions of dollars start to be used for them."
I've thought this for nearly a decade now, yet have never seen or thought of such a thing. Of course I'm just an idiot so the fact that I didn't think of any means nothing; but you'd think that in all that time looking for it, someone somewhere would have described such a thing, even if only to make money on 'how to find small-portfolio investment strategies' ebooks and seminars.
So I'm curious what makes you say 'absolutely true' rather than 'I think so too'.
Well to start with people running small capacity strategies tend to be just as secretive as running a large capacity strategy. Strategy capacity is something that professionals talk about and doesn't get as much play when talking to a retail audience.
As for the approach, its not any different than finding a high capacity strategy. It requires some piece of information or insight that other market participants don't have. Consider a scalping strategy that trades a few different futures contracts. If on average we trade 200 times per day with an expected profit of $5 per trade with are making $5,000 per week with our strategy. If we say we spend $5,000 per month on the tech to run our business (a risk system, market data, compute time, etc...) we are making $15,000 of profit each month.
If we are a large hedge fund or prop operation the $15,000 per month (assuming the same costs) may or may not be worth running. As a trader say I am making $250K base plus some percentage of my P&L I would definitely need to be running more than that strategy to justify my job. Depending on how much attention it requires it might not be worth the company running it. If I have two other strategies that each make $100,000 per month for the business am I better of in investing in those strategies or one that makes a lot less money? The answer could be yes (like maybe I could add a hundred more instruments to trade) but just like any other business the investment will be evaluated versus the expected returns of my other options.
I understand the last paragraph, my question is more: what makes strategies not scale. Should you go looking in very niche sectors, where the transaction volume limits the scalability? Or are there particular classes of market insights that by their nature only allow (relatively) small profits? Or are there areas where one can exploit particular technical skills? Or maybe focus on geographically small areas somehow, which by their nature limit the potential profit and thus might keep out big players?
I'm not a trader and the level of my questions probably shows that; still despite my (amateur) research for years, I haven't found evidence of people successfully deploying such strategies. And while particular strategies of big players are secret, there is a lot of information on the general principles; for small setups, nothing (afaik). So that leads me more and more to the conclusion that it's simply not viable.
Looking at it another way: a trader who got his experience in a big fund, and who goes solo (a documented scenario), do they go after such inherently small markets, or do they do the same they'd do at a big fund only with less money or with less sophistication? In other words, if they'd have more money, could they scale up or not?
So if you think about any opportunity in the market you are bounded by how much liquidity is available at a price level that is mispriced. In many cases the size (or capacity) is correlated pretty closely this what the expected duration of a trade is and the size of the mis-pricing. In my example of a futures contract that is not very liquid as you move into the market and buy contracts you will naturally move the price such that the price moves to the level you were expecting it to. This limits how much capital can be deployed in an single trade.
I run a strategy currently which consistently is profitable. I know others that do as well. What I run currently is work that came out of starting an automated trading shop so my partner and I have a considerable amount of infrastructure at our disposal that others just starting might not. I currently work elsewhere in finance but may return to it full time when what I am working on now either succeeds or fails. There have been a proliferation of 2 - 5 person shops that are typically pretty secretive about what they do. Several people I know in different ones don't even say that they have a job on linked in.
That being said there is a lot more available off the shelf things available now (Quantopian,etc...) then there was 5 years ago when I tried.
To your last point going to different markets is not just something that individuals can do. There are for instance HFT firms that started trading in places like brazil given the competitiveness of US markets. Markets are only long run efficient.
OK, but how many physicists support the moon landing conspiracy? How many aerospace engineers support the moon landing conspiracy? What credentials do the experts of the moon landing conspiracy have that I should trust?
I think he has a valid point if you have bias in which experts you place trust. There are, in fact, a lot of experts -- and even academically tenured, credentialed, published experts -- that I agree, don't have much of anything worthwhile to say.
Ya, true. There are particular areas though where 'wisdom of the crowds' works much better than any expert, and then there are obviously areas where it does not.
I'm not sure exactly what the properties of each type of problem are, but it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that stock picking is not one in which a sort of herd optimization approach might be very effective.
They stand to lose a lot for relatively little gain. Hedge fund non-competes are very, very carefully enforced. Making money trading on the side would get you sued.
You're the expert, but I don't see the harm of "maintenance". If Boella was wronged legally, he should be made whole. Whether he uses his own money to make his case doesn't change the correctness of the ruling.
People use the courts to get payback all the time, in a variety of ways. It's not about what's right, its about what's allowed. People with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard. If we try to change that, we'll have to redo a lot of the legal system.
Thiel can do whatever he wants with his money, including using it on legal cases. The key rule that Gawker broke here was "Don't make powerful enemies"
It is right in front of your nose. Whatever your views of Gawker, Thiel destroyed a news company out of spite. That seems like maybe a little bit of a problem.
> It's not about what's right, its about what's allowed. People with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard. If we try to change that, we'll have to redo a lot of the legal system.
Or, you know, revert to making maintenance/champerty illegal, which appeared to work for the intended purpose[1] for rather longer than the US has existed.
> The key rule that Gawker broke here was "Don't make powerful enemies"
In a thread discussing what can be done about the rich hijacking the justice system to destroy a news company out of spite, you (apparently normatively) (1) don't see the harm and then (2) essentially declare "Don't talk back to your betters". Please correctly where I'm wrong, but it sounds like you don't see any problem at all with the rich buying vengeance through the courts.
[1] Yes, money will always have an advantage. That doesn't mean throw your hands in the air and walk away.
Thiel is a billionaire, he could destroy many companies out of pure spite. If a startup founder looks at him wrong he could throw millions of dollars at one of their competitors, or pay someone to start a competitor purely for vengence. This may be petty, but it's entirely legal.
It seems like you're discussing a situation other than this case, but I can't figure out what it is. The court ruled that Gawker unlawfully invaded someone's privacy. They are clearly in the wrong no matter how you look at it. This isn't a case of rich people abusing the court system or using money to gain an unfair advantage. This is justice being done in the service of revenge, which is the usual way in which justice gets done.
I'm going to stick by the idea that people can use their money however they want within the boundaries of the law. The idea of not making powerful enemies is sound because there are countless ways that someone can use resources to make life difficult for someone else. It would be impossible to outlaw all of them, and you wouldn't want that even if it could be done.
I'd still love to hear how Thiel using his money to bring about a just outcome does harm to the integrity of the legal system.
Thiel enabled something which should have destroyed them but was unlikely to (because of one of the stupidest reasons to not uphold the law, "because one side doesn't have the funds") to actually destroy them.
Gawker pretty much brought it upon themselves expecting to get away with it (see their disorganized deposition where one of the plaintiffs was actually laughing at questions).
While I'm wary of letting money have any more influence over the courts, this could be seen as a way for it to actually have less influence - the situation of "A is right but can't fund their case."
The worst you could do with this situation with billions to spare would be to try and fund a side "in the wrong" to help someone get away with something, but if the case against them is that strong all the funded legal maneuvering shouldn't allow them to 'get away clean'... Though perhaps 'shouldn't' should be the operative word there.
... Did he? Cause it seems like the court did that. Everyone's talking as if judges are some passive entity that have no option but to allow money to dictate outcomes.
I'm not saying that this type of vengeance and cash driven attack on media outlets is a good thing but...
I've seen news companies destroy hundreds of people and companies to gain readership and/or for other more political motives. Seems fair that they should have the table turned on them from time to time no?
Perhaps the remaining media companies will now be more diligent about who and what they report on.
The courts have said that in this case the company's wrongdoing is literally larger than the value of their existence ($150mm vs $100mm IIRC?), so the company should justly be destroyed.
I see a problem with a potential result where justice would not have been served simply because one party run out of funds to pay the lawyers. That is a problem with a legal system.
The problem is that Thiel's intervention is just a one-off "workaround" that fixed one case but doesn't help other similar cases.
"people with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard" and as far as I understand, it's the exact reason why Gawker had gotten away with similar offenses multiple times already. A solution that aims to improve justice needs to ensure that a low-funded claimant can reasonably win against a multi-million company like Gawker - forbidding maintenance isn't a fix for that; it still leaves open the much, much more popular scenario where injustice is served simply because you can't afford to someone who is rich enough on their own.
This is a case that had an even playing field - before that it was a case of the rich (namely, Gawker) buying immunity through the courts.
> It is right in front of your nose. Whatever your views of Gawker, Thiel destroyed a news company out of spite. That seems like maybe a little bit of a problem.
Thiel didn't destroy Gawker, Gawker destroyed Gawker. They willfully broke the law. Even put up a self-congratulatory article about how they'd been told to take it down and weren't going to.
>It is right in front of your nose. Whatever your views of $x, Thiel destroyed a $y out of spite. That seems like maybe a little bit of a problem.
What's wrong with Thiel destroying things out of spite? Should he not be allowed to retaliate if someone attacks him? Why? Should anyone be allowed to retaliate when attacked?
Is the only problem here that Thiel used the courts to accomplish this, rather than other means?
That was inartfully worded. Respectable journalism organizations don't invade people's privacy in a way that would lose a lawsuit. Woodward and Bernstein were on Nixon's enemies list, but they weren't convicted of a crime or found liable for damages in any court.
If you're going to cross that line, you'd better do so carefully. At the very least don't antagonize someone who can rightfully sue you into oblivion.
There will be no ceiling effect because real journalists stay within the bounds of the law. Equating a self proclaimed gossip website with real reporting is disingenuous and insulting to journalists.
If the National Enquirer broke the law and was sued, do you really think it would affect decision making at the NYT or Washington Post?
But if you haven't, you really ought to read Benedict Evans piece on this:
> Again, though, Thiel has already won. He is fabulously wealthy and extremely influential, and say what you will about Gawker, the liberal democracy that made it possible for the companies Thiel has built and invested in to emerge depends on a free press; driving a publication to bankruptcy via lawyer fees may be legal by the letter of the law, and even deserved on a personal level, but it is in absolute violation of the spirit of the law and, I might add, a rather hypocritical — or is it ironic? — use of government by the avowed libertarian Thiel. What are more concerning, though — and implicit in this concern is a critique of libertarianism — are the second and third-order effects of Thiel’s approach.
> The most obvious second-order effect is that, as Felix Salmon writes, Thiel is providing a blueprint for the suppression of the press by the wealthy. But what concerns me — and what ought to concern Thiel, and all of the Silicon Valley elites celebrating his actions — are the third order effects. Specifically, Thiel’s actions are bringing into stark relief the fundamental weakness of old analog businesses like journalism relative to the incredible power and strength of the technology sector, and if companies follow Thiel’s example, the freedom that makes the emergence of said companies possible could quickly come under threat — and deservedly so.
I see and understand where the author is coming from.
I just don't fully agree. I see a powerful person doing what nobody else was willing to do - hold a powerful and abusive media organization to account for their actions. It's far from ideal. However, no ideal answer was on offer. In an ideal world, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
To me, it is a stepwise improvement over the previous state of affairs. This reminds powerful people and organizations of something important - they are not the only ones with power.
I am trying to convince people at my work to move to GCP from AWS, but AWS truly has become the Microsoft of Cloud computing. Many people have no idea there are other providers like GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean etc.
Azure might be great in a year or so, but it makes me uneasy as is. Some of the services are great, but a lot of them are pretty fragmented. I've had so many instances where our billing/usage data has just "disappeared" for a few days, undocumented changes have been made to the formats of reports/exports/APIs, and official documentation is plain wrong that I just can't recommend Azure to anyone. Not to mention they have the most expensive infrastructure costs out of the major players (even with an EA and decent monetary commitment); their premium for Windows licensing is the lowest by far though (not surprising), so it does end up being a cheaper option for super windows heavy shops though.
Although I am quite optimistic about Azure, GCP seems like the best bet at the moment. I think of factors like Reliability, performance, availability, cost and longevity.
I don't know what Snowden expected. Was the NSA supposed to cancel its multibillion dollar program because it went against a contractor's interpretation of the Constitution? It seems to me that the system worked. He raised his concerns and they were duly noted. I don't think he presented any new information that the IG wasn't aware of.
I understand that the NSA is extremely unpopular here, but their actions had the implicit consent of every branch of the US government. I don't see anything in this lengthy article that makes me think they should have acted any differently than they did. The only person that has veto power is the president. Everyone else has to go through proper channels, and should do so with the expectation that nothing will change.
All branches of government, generally, at least in western democracies, are subject to the rule of law. The "implicit consent" of anyone does not, or should not at least, come into play.
He has stated that he expected that the people of the USA, from whom the NSA derives its significant power, would rope it in. And, to some extent, they have continued to fail to do that.
This happens now, all the time. There isn't a government office of "I need money because my car broke down". Soup kitchens will still give out food and the Salvation Army will still provide shelter. Perhaps even more so, because Basic Income will allow more people to donate time and money to charity in their communities.
This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would ever try to confiscate all guns