While we are doing correlations like that, I blame football!

I'd say both mental illness and investigate what leads males to want to take rash actions like that (but that 98% shouldn't really be a surprise).

Correlation != exclusion and all that.

- Toast

What he (and many others are) is probably more concerned about politics under the guise of science being passed off as facts and distorted by special interests in order to appease an expected emotional viewpoint of the nation to the detriment of more reality based problems.

Not like that has never happened before or anything...

- Toast

Wow, that's rather cynical. I happen to think that self worth is the most important thing to hold onto dearly throughout life. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. If you don't value yourself then you will find it very difficult to really give a shit about the work you do, the family you raise, the people you know, etc. This attitude has consequences much more far reaching than most people realize and is exactly how you get in a position of "I do a good job but nobody gives a fuck about me". Or conversely can lead you down the path of mental illness where you set yourself up for the failure you think you will get.

You can have self-worth and do your job well and get paid. Those things are not mutually exclusive, but I can tell you for a fact that if you don't have self worth it doesn't matter how good of a job you do... you will not move up and you will not get a good return on "investment" because you are only ever half present mentally at work and no body will have any incentive to socialize with or depend on you. Two of the things you will need to be successful (in general) is the willingness of your peers to socialize and depend on you (there are plenty of others too).

Advocating for an utter disconnect between your "self", your "life", and your "job" is a really, really, really stupid piece of advice. Keep priorities separate for sure, and understand thoroughly the work/life balance you and your family need (or want), but don't relegate yourself to mundane stupid jobs with mundane stupid people who don't have any self worth. That job will be like working in a pit of hell. If you are there, in that job, then GET OUT.

You can't tell me convincingly that people should just "suck it up" and work at a mind numbing job (with other people who have no self worth) simply to pay bills. It IS work, and you WILL hate it from time to time, but if that becomes a regular feature you should pay yourself the respect you deserve and move on.

I've been fired a couple of times for telling the company I work for to go stuff themselves (in only slightly kinder terms) when they made unreasonable demands (tried to wrap me around their corporate finger) that didn't respect ME as a person, ME as a father, or ME as a husband with other responsibilities that didn't revolve around their profit margins. I am PROUD of that. I ADVERTISE that. Every time I stood up for myself and the interests of myself and my family I ended up finding a better job, with better hours, more flexible schedule, and almost doubling my salary. Don't be an asshole, but don't take shit either.

I went into interviews after those couple of incidents fully expecting a question about what I did at my previous job and a question about whether they can contact previous employers. I laid it all out on the table. I told them my previous employer was unwilling to respect me or my family and I was not willing to compromise myself, my family, or my ethics just to retain employment with them for a paycheck (leaving any hint of animosity or anger at the door). Then I gave them a bunch of ex-coworker contacts to call if they wanted to evaluate my work result. I have a very long resume of coworkers and managers who very much like me and my work simply because I never stooped to lowest-common-denominator thinking and wore my mind on my sleeve (in all of its harshness). I straight-up told the interviewers point-blank that I will give infinite professional loyalty to the company only on the grounds that I get the same in return, and if they breach the contract first then they should expect nothing from me other than a resignation or a middle finger on my way out (and they will know it is coming ahead of time). I've only had to turn down offers since I changed my attitude to be more honest, insistent, and forthright. It does a body, mind, life, and pocketbook good.

Settling for less is still settling for less after all.

- Toast

Apologies to Strother Martin...

What we've got here is failure to communicate.

- Toast

You are right to an extent. The moon is tidally locked with the earth. However, the Earth is not tidally locked to the moon (yet). There is no "suddenly" about this. Were the moon not tidally locked then it would freely rotate about its own axis as it moved away from us; and as the rotational speed got out of whack from the orbital speed we would get to see more than just the one side... as you were saying. However, what is actually happening is the Moon is slowing Earth's rotational speed towards tidally locking with the moon, and the distance to the moon is still increasing towards equilibrium with that. But while it is moving away from us its own rotational speed is decelerating to maintain its own tidal lock. The minute differences between the rates that these things happen at is "liberation" (where we get to see small slivers of the moon we wouldn't normally get to see) but the physics of it fight to keep the two bodies "locked". Once both bodies rotate around their own axis in the same amount of time it takes for them to rotate around each other at that point the distance will be relatively static between them (the moon doesn't have enough energy for escape velocity from our gravity well). IIRC this would be considered orbital resonance.

Eventually the earth and the moon will lock with each other, and always face each other from the same sides, but that is a really long way off from now. For now, only the moon is tidally locked with Earth, eventually that will change to be true in the reverse as well. The estimates I've seen around and about indicate that this will likely take around 50 billion years, so it's mostly academic since the sun will die long before that (and that is also longer than the current age of the universe).

- Toast

This was exactly the definition I was going with... one rotation around the body's rotational axis. However, my actual major typo was to refer to the moon as a planet:

Oops!

- Toast

FTFY

And depending on employer: Frequently have to purchase their own rigs (~cost of a mortgage), frequently pay for their own fuel out of that "pay", spend ridiculous amounts of time away from family (or cannot really have one), and I dare say don't have ready access to health care amongst other things, and only typically make figures like that by barely skirting around maximum "safe" hours driving laws and picking up extra loads (sometimes against employer contracts) to deliver along the way...

So still a viable example I think...

- Toast

Tidally locked means that the same side of the moon is always facing earth, not that it is locked a specific distance from the earth. We always only see one side of the planet.

If the earth were tidally locked with the sun we would always have one side of the earth facing the sun. Our day and year would be the same duration.

The tides on the moon would be from the sun and not from earth. The moon is not spinning relative to the earth, but it is still spinning relative to the sun.

- Toast

[Citation Needed]

That is exactly why (s)he said (s)he doesn't care where yours is ASSEMBLED, it's largely irrelevant.

Ok, your post was already doing well... but that part just about got Mt. Dew sprayed on my monitor...

I'm going to put on a pair of Corvettes and drive my Nike home now. Nothing to see here, move along...

- Toast

My layman's understanding is this:

Because entanglement does not transmit state between the entangled pairs. It only allows you to, after separation, determine the state of the remote node by reading the local one.

If you change the first node nothing is projected or expected to happen to the other in the pair.

Believe me, if they find a way to transmit information FTL in any method it would be plastered all over the papers, the internet, and Slashdot, and would call into question many parts of science as it is understood at the moment.

- Toast

Ok, this is an old article by slashdot standards, so I'm not sure if anyone will see this, but the transactions you point out here simply cannot happen in the way you describe. What actually would happen is this:

        [GT1] Tells exchange, sell for as little as 21.10 (what is this, a market or stop limit order? Whatever, we will roll with that for now and assume the price is 21.10 too)
        [HFT] Places buy order with exchange for 21.35
        [Exchange] Tells HFT "Sold! at 21.10"
        [HFT] Tells exchange: "HaHa - only kidding. Cancel it."
        [Exchange] Tells HFT "Cannot Cancel - already filled at 21.10 dummy"

This is ignoring NBBO rules (by assuming there is no better bid or offer of course), and some exchanges will do price improvement for the market maker (resting order) so you could get matched at 21.23 or something as it is the mid-point. But you cannot back out of a matched trade unless you are a bank or other privileged broker dealer AND you are in a dark pool (not one of the major exchanges) offering such functionality (hint: you won't have any such functionality in the US equity, options, or futures exchanges which participate in the NBBO).

If you are an HFT trader and you get picked (matched / filled) on a quote you momentarily had on the market but did not intend to trade... well that just sucks to be you.... I hope you had a hedge bet or are prepared to take that risk because the stock/options/futures are now yours.

And yes, my jobs over the last few years have been at HFT shops. No we don't get to back out of trades just because we have buyers remorse.

Honestly the shit that boils up to insightful around here on slashdot is really pitifully inaccurate when it comes to trading. Everything from the mechanics of how trading happens to what liquidity does or doesn't do to the stock market or how "average" investors interact with the system.

Let's just start with the fact that the brokers backing places like Interactive Brokers and other online self-trade brokers (e-trade, etc) where "average joes" go to trade IS a place where you are basically free lunch for the HFT's but it wasn't necessarily bad for you (as a click-trader) either. One place I worked at LOVED to market make into one of those vendors because that was the only place we were allowed "last-look" functionality (cancel trade after making a match) and click-traders were wonderfully more lucrative than the standard exchanges due to the fact that our connections to the brokers were faster than the broker to the other exchanges. But, one of the services we offered (by being a broker to click-traders in the first place) was to make sure that if anyone wanted to execute their orders at any given time we would basically already be quoting into them for them to hit. We could match orders between click-trader and exchanges faster than the brokerage firm could in the first place... And if we used last-look we had to do it in less than 1/4 of a second so the broker could route the order elsewhere otherwise the trade was considered valid and stands "as-is" whether we liked it or not. In order to keep that functionality we also had to meet targets for percent of our orders which were matched, cancelled, filled, etc...

In other words we had to match a minimum of X% of our quotes by volume, we had to not cancel X% of our quotes within X time period, and only some miniscule % of our orders could be last-looked. If any of those fell out of line the broker agreement would have been terminated (because we would have been abusing them and their customers).

So yeah, take that as you will I guess...

  - Toast

The picture in the article thankfully had the URL on the PCB, so it's not like I had to play super sleuth to find it...