More like "ankle grabbing" for the lovers of the NSA and water boarding. Going back as far as Napoleon, torture was already dismissed as ineffective, so its sad to me that some people are glad to regress a few centuries. And the "everybody does it" theme neglects that few others countries, ie none, have 30,000 employees and a $10 billion a year budget.

I'm switching to Google Drive since their theme of "do no evil" is still intact enough to avoid high publicity idiocy like politicising their business. Why the fuck do these companies think their political agenda is a part of their business plan? Part of this idiocy alone is a good reason to switch.

Oh, yeah? Then, please, tell me in your infinite wisdom how long I should wait? Ten years? Twenty?

The fact is that ANY delay in a feedback system tends to destabilize it. In mechanical systems this is called "backlash" and there is extensive research on how to eliminate it and cope with the problems it causes. Anyone who proposes to artificially introduce backlash in a feedback system know nothing about what he is talking about.

In a market it would be trivially easy to manipulate prices if an artificial delay were involved, especially for the bigger traders. Put a buy order for a million shares and watch the prices rise, then sell at the higher price that would result a half second later. The same principle would work no matter how long the delay is.

Markets work so well because there is negative feedback in many different loops all over the economy. Some of these loops have shorter response times, other are slower to respond. If you invent an artificial delay that overlaps everything, this creates a well defined eignevalue that anyone with the proper technical knowledge could exploit.

Imposing a tax only means the profit threshold is raised. That creates the market distortion called "arbitrage", where the relative costs between different transactions are not symmetric.

A .01% tax per transaction would mean that for me, a small trader, there would be a net loss unless my own profit per trade is lower than .01%. For a bigger trader, the cost per trade is lower, therefore they would gain and advantage over us, the smaller guys.

The true solution? Let it be, do not change anything.

Apart from some guys who get a lot of profit selling books claiming HFT is bad, no one actually makes very much on HFT. The margins are very low, extremely low, so you need to invest a lot of capital to get any profit from it.

Getting a small profit from economy of scale is something that hurts no one, it happens in every sector of the economy. As a small investor, I have an indirect gain from the higher liquidity when the big investors go into HFT.

The economy is not a zero-sum game, there are situations where everyone profits and situations where everyone loses. With HFT everyone gains, with taxes everyone loses.

The US didn't need to use the bomb again, the mere knowledge that it existed was enough.

Anyhow, it was several years until the Soviets got their own bomb, and even longer until they had some way to deliver them. Until the mid-1950s at least the Soviets had no bomber planes or missiles capable of dropping atom bombs on the USA.

That's how we define what is called "history". If it happened before writing existed, it's not part of history.

Although, to be fair, Catholic missionaries destroyed a lot of written records from pre-Columbian America. They literally deleted Inca history.

No, of course not. They will sit around and watch TV.

How many people have the ability and the inclination to write poetry or music or code anyhow?