samolang

Sure. All I was saying is that it's theoretically possible for a market order that a customer submits online to be front-run (as opposed to a market order submitted to a single exchange). No clue how often it happens in practice.

> What a broker does has nothing to do with how market orders work.

A market order submitted to a single exchange isn't the same as a "market order" submitted to e.g. Fidelity.com. He's talking about the latter.

> I'm pretty sure you misunderstand market orders because by definition they are only visible to the market after they have traded, so nobody can get ahead of you or do sonething irrational before your order lands.

Have you read Flash Boys? Dunno if the loop-holes have all been solved, but basically it was possible to front-run orders. There was a regulation requiring brokers to execute an order on the exchange that had the best current price. This rule gave no weight to size. So HFT firms could place a tiny, negative expectancy order on one exchange. Then they could see the result of that trade and cancel/place orders on the next exchange that your broker's matching algorithm was going to hit up before your order got there.

If bitcoin becomes 'the currency of the future' then renting 51% of the capacity at market rates will be prohibitively expensive.

I mean many people start bodegas, restaurants, etc. I imagine that's more akin to 19th century entrepreneurship and still is by far the most prevalent form of entrepreneurship today (only like 1.3% of businesses are created in the Bay area and 1.1% of the population lives there).

> The current way of doing things

Is there a realistic alternative? Sure, universal basic income eventually, but that's not practical at the moment.

> Middlemen, example Amazon, have never been stronger.

The strength of a middleman can be directly measured by how much they mark up prices. Does amazon really mark up prices more than the brick and mortar retailers it replaced?

That alternative to putting them in the desert is putting them in some non-desert area or putting them nowhere. If these people are objecting to putting them in a desert, they'll object to putting them in a non-desert area too.

I agree mostly. But there may also be a cyclical effect where women don't go into CS because they don't see women working in tech. In which case Google shouldn't necessarily have a legal obligation to hire more women, but there may be a moral argument or even a long-term self-interest argument (i.e. increase supply of good engineers) for it.

thanks for the recommendation

I'd rather own snapchat personally. Think it has more upside than the rest of those combined. Only one close is twitter. You don't buy a company like snapchat for a 20% return, it's 5-10x return or bust.