Front-running is already illegal and nobody cares about doing it for a bunch of small retail traders. Also buying stock requires funds to clear for 2 days while selling doesn't, that's why buying was restricted but selling wasn't.
Whether Robinhood should have had more capital or how those margin requirements were handled is a serious question but that's entirely separate than these accusations which seem to be made by people who have no idea how the system actually works.
Just to be clear: Robinhood claims that they prevented buying certain stocks because of increase collateral requirements by DTCC due to high volatility. Do you have any evidence that's untrue. Let's establish that before we move on to the claim that Citadel front-runs retail flow.
From my understanding, the reason the DTCC raised collaterals so heavily was mostly due to the risk on the short side. So they were protecting the hedge funds by protecting themselves, and it carried on to Robinhood. So Robinhood didn't really have a choice, but they still were protecting the shorts in the end.
And that's what happens when you play financial games you don't understand.
If your strategy for driving a short squeeze, or a pump-and-dump does not take into account counterparty risk, you are going to get taken to the cleaners. When you making money causes the brokerage you are using to be unable to execute that trade, this is 100% your fault.
As the saying goes, don't invest in financial instruments you don't understand. Entering a long position in a volatile, high-volume stock through a discount brokerage was a financial instrument that most of /wsb did not understand, and it blew up in its face.
What is not speculation is that they restricted the buying of stocks while not restricting the selling. The rest, though it may be speculation, has enough circumstantial evidence to allow most regular folks to make up their mind.
The people who will invest in the IPO aren't going to be the people who lost money due to RH locking the purchasing of stocks and stopping the price from sky rocketing.
But in terms of a customer base, in terms of a company, RH are dust.
>What is not speculation is that they restricted the buying of stocks while not restricting the selling.
Yes but RH didn't have the billions of $$$ deposited at the clearing house for their trades to be honored. Buying stock to settle a few days later requires collateral that RH didn't have.
RH does some questionable things but their "restriction of the buying" is an inevitable consequence of not having the billions to meet any margin calls. They were the tail not the dog.
> What is not speculation is that they restricted the buying of stocks while not restricting the selling. The rest, though it may be speculation, has enough circumstantial evidence to allow most regular folks to make up their mind.
Right, because sell orders would lower the clearinghouse margin requirements. If there are $100M GME buys on RH with 2 days to clear and $100M GME sells with 2 days to clear, their clearinghouse margin requirement is $0.
Robinhood has added millions of new accounts and the price of GME recently reached the same heights this past week for anyone that was still holding losses. A bunch of people gambling money isn't going to affect the company.
Sadly the law is written in a way that let’s the optional part be disregarded if the business considers the data that’s being shared necessary to run its business model... and advertising companies like Facebook will argue all data can help them sell ads better or for more money, hence all sharing of data shouldn’t need to be optional. This has yet to be tested in court, but both google and Facebook have taken this approach in their implementation of gdpr, leaving us wondering what the point was anyway... law without teeth :( the eu should have already slapped down google hard for their lack of an opt out, but it’s been years and still nothing. Seems the law makers aren’t really on the side of privacy after all.
Here all the kids use it as soon as they get a phone. If they can't write yet they'll send emojis (!!). The minimum age is just a meaningless smoke screen.
Yes, usage by kids is a real problem. My child is one of only two in the class that doesn't use WhatsApp. All the others do. They have what they call a "class group", even though not everyone is there.
When I try to tell parents how much Facebook learns about their kids (their friends, networks, and by merging data from different sources: habits, school, frequented locations, etc), they just roll their eyes. The response is "well everybody is tracking us, who cares".
All this even though there is Signal, which works JUST FINE.
Children luckily are much more flexible and chop and change with the wind. It's the older folks once something is established it ends up becoming bedrock and super hard to change. Parents/Adults are busy if something 'works', there's a lot of resistance to changing it.
I thought new evidence came to light that FB used illegally obtained metrics about IG and Whatsapp that allowed them inside information about the accusations.
Something about the FB mobile app siphoning off mobile data about other app usage
With millions of cases worldwide there will always be some statistical outliers. Those are individually tragic, but not very relevant to most of us. The best estimate for infection fatality rate in the 20 - 49 age group is only 0.02%.
They are still scary due to the way they are portrayed to people. You could probably inject a million people with medical grade saline and still see some crazy reactions.
Many of the long term issues described for COVID already messed up my life as a result of Epstein-Barr 14 years ago (brain fog, fatigue). Post-viral syndrome is real and now it's getting some public attention for the first time.
Unless you're the person who has a second infection or the doctor who has to deal with this life and death situation, then yeah, fear mongering...
But the other side to this is that if the reinfection is due to the virus mutating into a more virulent state, then it's MORE likely to propagate as that virulent state, meaning more and more COVID19 infected people's will be open to reinfection over time.
I've noticed with Covid is that there is a lot of attention to edge cases with folks implying that the scenario is common. That's a very alarmist approach.
Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it. Not because they have a comorbidity, they just have a really bad reaction to the flu.
But we don't assume that those edge cases are the most typical course of disease. Yes, you may be one of those really unlucky ones that die from a normally non-fatal disease, but the risk of that is pretty low.
This is how social media works; keep people engaged and cause them to experience large swings in emotion.
So as with almost everything nowadays (e.g. look up police brutality statistics and compare to common perception re: pervasiveness), the formula is simple: paint an exciting/horrifying view of reality by sensationalizing rare events.
> Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it.
Way off! Tens of millions catch and tens of thousands die from the flu every single year in the US. And that's with a vaccine! You probably didn't know that though because news stations don't have rolling infection and death counters going 24/7 during flu season.
Why doesn't anyone question the ECMO machines? I'm definitely no doctor, but as a software engineer if my system failed 30-40% of the time I'd stop using it.
Last I read they have 30-40% instance of internal bleeding with many other TERRIBLE things as a side effect of all the blood thinners and other pharmaceuticals needed to use the machine.
I really find it hard to believe that COVID caused the PE, hemorrhage, etc. that ultimately put an end to that young man's life.
"Why doesn't anyone question the ECMO machines? I'm definitely no doctor, but as a software engineer if my system failed 30-40% of the time I'd stop using it."
ECMO is a hail-mary treatment for people who would almost certainly die otherwise. A 40% chance of death is better than a 99% chance of death.
What you're saying here actually happened with ventilators (though ventilators are nowhere nearly as invasive or complex as ECMO).
Tens of millions of cases, there are going to be a few outliers. Unless it starts happening at a statistically meaningful rate, these are just unfortunate one-offs.
Reinfected! and the reinfection becoming a bad case! No immunity... Article hints that you can expect to be relatively protected for up to 6mo after infection.. But there are no guarantees.
From the article: "There is still a lot for us learn before we have a full understanding of how immunity to COVID-19 works. (..) we all should still follow Government guidelines on social distancing to ensure we play our part in minimising the spread of COVID-19 within our communities." -Professor Paul Moss
At my last job, I ran about 50 servers running Oracle Standard Edition. (Enterprise Edition would have taken each $25k license to something like $600k for our dual core servers). I was Sysadmin, not a developer, so I have different pain points.
I will never look back. There were so many things that we wanted to do, but were 'enterprise only' features. Like rebuild/create indexes online. We had a DB with a 1TB table. rebuilding that, while locking the table, would mean something like a 14 hour outage. With postgresql, online index creation is right there.
Oracle didn't support a proper incremental backup, except in enterprise edition. (and RMAN was a pain in the ass of arcane commands and black magic). pgBarman makes backups so simple for us.
Standby's on Oracle are good for disaster recovery. But you have to manually ship the logs, apply them, monitor it, and delete old logs. There were multiple thousand line korn shell scripts we utilized, and lots of cronjobs. With Postgresql, its stream based, and my standby follows production by less than 100ms most of the time. Plus, I can connect to the standby, and run read-only queries on it (we run large reports on standby, so we don't affect production) That is also possible in Oracle, with 'enterprise' edition (data-gaurd).
We filed a few ticket with Oracle Support. We never got any answers. I don't think we ever got an support person at Oracle that had been there more than a year. Even when we escalated.
Pretty easy to find "support" for Postgres too and more convenient. e.g. submit a request on CodeMentor and you'll have you several solid devs willing to help you, live, in a matter of minutes.
Well, there's the old IBM adage, adapted: nobody has ever gotten fired for choosing oracle. And within some industries that might be true.
Anecdotally, I've met someone who said his interview with a startup went completely downhill when he suggested using oracle. Can't say I blame a startup for shutting down that idea immediately.
Personally, I think MySQL died when Oracle got involved with it. The momentum was sucked right out of the project.
The great think about Postgres is it has huge momentum and the team are delivering new features. Maybe Apache has less momentum because it's matured and doesn't need much momentum.
From a momentum point of view I see Postgres as the biggest FLOSS project. I see no point in choosing another RDBMS right now. Time to short ORA stock
> Personally, I think MySQL died when Oracle got involved with it. The momentum was sucked right out of the project.
This statement is completely baseless, and you clearly haven't followed the MySQL developments of the last 10 years. It's ironic that around the time Sun was acquired, MyISAM was still a thing; MySQL has gone a long way since then.
Independently of a value judgement of "how good PGSQL/MySQL are" (I'm not making any implication in this sense), MySQL's development has been proceeding steadily, with no particular change (on the engineering side, at least). Oracle has actually put considerable effort both on the engineering and marketing side, of the 8.0 release (but again, I don't make any implication about the value of the products per se).
As much as I vastly prefer PostgreSQL, I will tell you that MySQL is much more preferred in enterprise settings, probably 8 to 1 in the environments I've seen.
> As much as I vastly prefer PostgreSQL, I will tell you that MySQL is much more preferred in enterprise settings, probably 8 to 1 in the environments I've seen.
That's largely because enterprises often have big investments in SQL server, OracleDB, and/or DB2, and are only using open source engines for more lightweight purposes, and/or as part of cloud transitions where they are just taking vendor default options or whatever options was supported when they came on or longest.
At least, that's my experience working in enterprise and being literally the single voice urging even considering pros and cons before using MySQL-by-default with no particular rationale in a transition effort (which resulted in us using Postgres.)
I work as a consultant in the enterprise space, and I've seen a shift in recent years towards Postgres.
I believe this has largely been driven by cloud - developers are now more able to choose the components they want to work with, instead of being told what to work with. There are of course plenty enterprises that are strict here, mandating cloud hosted SQL Server for example, but the general relaxation of constraints has struck me as a very pleasant surprise.
I've yet to come across MySQL being used in a cloud-based system, but I'm seeing Postgres more and more. When I do see MySQL, it's part of on-prem services that are considered "legacy".
> That's likely a holdover from when mysql had a better replication story than postgresql.
What is the Galera-equivalent in the Postgres world? There's BDR, but the latest versions are closed source.
We use Galera in a bunch of places because it's fairly straight forward to get an HA cluster going, and with keepalived, we can point a front-end to a vIP that fails over automatically if one system goes sideways.
afaik, MySQL never had a better replication story than PostgreSQL, you've always had to use Percona's add-ons to get something workable. Even then (many years ago), we had multiple data loss incidents that were precipitated by widespread internal confusion over the bizarre intricacies of `binlog_format`.
Like most software that gains adoption, MySQL made some very broad claims about their software's capabilities and never really delivered on them, at least not in a way that would be considered production-ready by Serious Persons(TM).
That's the crux of MySQL v. PgSQL, Linux v. BSD, etc. Good engineers spend their time building good software and are generally too focused on that to spend much time going around and making outlandish promises. Postgres has benefited from Oracle's intentionally-bad stewardship over MySQL, but it doesn't usually work that way.
I've experienced this as well, and it's almost always because the tooling for MySQL is "better." I don't necessarily agree, but Sequel Ace (formerly Sequel Pro) is hard to beat.
The DB support in Jetbrains IDEA is awesome, they also have it as a stand alone IDE called Data Grip, could be woth a shot? https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/
Do people ever look at how much more they're paying for Aurora? I've saved companies thousands of dollars per month just by switching them to standard RDS instances for systems that see tiny load and were only on Aurora because that's "the super good AWS-optimized version, duh".
The added benefit of this is that you then know what software you're running, instead of Amazon's fly-by-night hackjob. We've hit several real-world bugs that were either incorrect backports of something that had been patched years before upstream, or wholly new issues caused by whatever they're doing to make Aurora auroar.
ORA is a services/consulting company, now. The DB is important but company will easily survive its death (which will never happen) look at IBM big iron for similar story.
RH is a front for organised crime, selling data to Citadel so the can front run retailers trades. Hope to see Senate action on it at some point.