You sound like a bitter restaurant owner.

If I went to apply for a job at google, and didn't get the job, it probably wouldn't occur to me to sue them, especially if I felt I was so talented as to deserve a job worthy of my high skill level. I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.

The last old person that my company hired (we actually hired him), threatened the company with an age discrimination lawsuit, and the company paid him a year's salary to avoid the lawsuit. It wasn't age discrimination. He was mentally unstable, he refused to obey instructions from managers, and his code was terrible.

It takes a certain kind of person to want to sue a company (without ever working for them), without considering the possibility that they may not want you for a reason other than your old age, and going through all the effort to sue this company rather than moving on and offering your amazing talents to a company that will actually appreciate you.

If I were Google, I would not be happy about being sued, but I would be relieved that he was not hired. If he were hired, no doubt Google would be sued by this person for age discrimination for not getting promotions or being fired, etc.

Who knows, maybe the person in charging of deciding to hire this person was discriminating against them based on age. But he doesn't know that, and he is probably a terrible hire because of his willingness to litigate.

You'd think that age discrimination would have hurt Google. They are losing out on all the potentially talented old people and all their experience. According to free market principles this should have put Google at a huge disadvantage in a highly competitive market.

The way I see it. Either Google is not really committing age discrimination, or age discrimination works, and old people really do suck at programming.

I would hire a young kid over an old person any day. Young kids can be molded to do what you want. Old people are stubborn and bitter. They will show up on time and leave on time. They want their health coverage. They won't learn anything knew, and they will demand respect that (they think) they've earned through experience, but rarely does this experience translate into anything resembling productivity.

For every old self taught programmer who thinks they are a genius, there is some new grad who is just as smart, willing to put more effort into everything they do, and willing to learn new things.

Most of the new grads we hire at my company turn out really well. Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code, or they can only write code (but only in their preferred language) and can't be bothered to learn or follow prescribed design patterns or coding standards.

I felt like your generalization needed a counter generalization.

That's how problems get fixed these days isn't it? Let's do what we always do, and publicly shame groupon until they do the right thing. Internet DEPLOY!

"The owners of the NYSE own the NYSE." is a tautology. It is true by definition. I think a lot of what I am saying is going over your head.

I probably did own some of those. I probably also owned some funds that had a "buy if it drops so much" order. On average they probably cancel out. As long as all your eggs aren't in one basket, it's not a problem.

Apparently I am everyone who's not a speculator.

It is still the claim.

And then it went back up.

If you invested only in procter and gamble or only in general electric, you are a speculator. If you had a diverse portfolio, the law of large numbers protects you.

Don;t be such a drama queen.

It's pretty easy to tell someone's argument lacks substance, when the best they can do is resort to name calling.

Yes, but allowing the anti-vax community to grow beyond the acceptable threshold is exactly the opposite of what my #4 was describing (i.e. limiting the number of philosophical exemptions).

I'm not saying we should do #4. All I am saying is that if we did #4 (allow anti-vaxers to exist but not flourish), it would have still been ok.

I owned stocks that crashed. They recovered again way before I had time to do anything about it. Is it possible that the value of some those stocks is slightly lower than it would have been without the flash crash? Certainly. It could also be higher. That difference is lost in the noise of the stock market fluctuations.

The people who it significantly affected were speculators. People/companies that bought or sold during the crash. Yes you could have been invested in one of those companies, but if you have a diverse stock portfolio, what are the chances that all the companies you invested in were the losers in this incident? If you only invested in companies that lost a lot of money in this flash crash, you are essentially a speculator (by virtue of only investing in companies that speculate).

Unlike other market/housing/banking crashes that really did affect lots of ordinary people, this one really didn't. I don't know a single person (ordinary or otherwise) who lost or gained anything (at least not anything they can recognize).

There are people who are not immune suppressed that are not protected, even if they were vaccinated. The number of immune suppressed people is small and tolerable, just like the people for whom the vaccine was ineffective. It is only when we start adding all the kids of people that have philosophical objections to the list that we get into the unacceptable risk territory.

1. We don't know whose vaccines were ineffective until the actually contract the disease.

2. While the number of people whose vaccines were ineffective and the number of immune suppressed people is known, the number of people with philosophical objections is a cultural phenomenon and can vary wildly.

3. The number of people with suppressed immune systems is small enough not to put us over the tipping point. We could ban them from schools too, but we don't have to.

4. If we could guarantee that the number of people with philosophical objections would be small enough, it would also be fine. We could implement a lottery for stupid people to try to be exempted and still keep numbers of unvaccinated people small, but it's just easier to remove this exemption for people who don't need it, and ultimately better for them.

Is it your job to follow traffic laws? Why should your right to drive how you want in your own car be infringed by the desire of some people for safe roads?

The owners of the NYSE own the NYSE. By "fixing the flaws" I don't necessarily mean "fix the NYSE". If a rival exchange usurp the NYSE and offer a fair platform for trading, I consider that to be a valid "fix" to the flaw. We don't even need everyone to switch. If enough companies offer stock on the new exchange, and if enough regular folks switch to the new exchange, there won't be enough suckers to mooch from in the NYSE. It will just be HFTs tryng to cheat eachother, rather than HFTs cheating humans.

In short, it's not required that the NYSE do anything. All that is required is for the people being cheated to opt out.

There are lots of variations that I think would work better than what currently exists. My only concern with your system is that companies with lots of money will have more information than. If the offer information is private, they can test the market by offering to sell and buy small amounts stocks at certain prices and if it is not accepted, they have information that no one else does. Firms like goldman, for relatively little money can build a better picture of the value of everything than the little guy.

You don't need to detect any patterns of trading. You simply have to remove the advantage that those patterns of trading provide.

For example: Let's say it's a big problem that some young people wake up super early and pick out all the best fruit at the super market before the old people can get there, and resell it at a higher price. Let's call them "fruit scalpers".

One way to solve the problem is to try to detect fruit scalpers and refuse to sell to them. Another way to solve the problem is to no longer allow people to select the fruit they buy before deciding to purchase it by putting the fruit in a package or having a randomly selected fruit provided after payment.

If you do this, then advantage fruit scalpers get by being first to the store is eliminated. The store doesn't have to figure out who is a fruit scalper or a real customer (potentially a hard problem).

Obviously this is just an example, and fruit scalping is not a real problem, and nobody would like the solution to this example in real life. It is just an example I came up with to illustrate how you can disincentivize a behavior without bothering to detect it.

Why not just disallow this practice (i.e. by forcing transactions on offers that are accepted) rather than making it illegal? Could it be because big companies also exploit these features (although maybe not so blatantly), to profit?