You're missing the entire point here. If the buyer and seller agree on a price, the trade just happens, no market maker needed, the end. All done.

But after all possible trades like that are done you're left with the "bid" and "ask" prices, where the seller and buyer are willing to stand on their prices and not compromise. Any good financial tool will show you the bid/ask for any exchange - you can check it out and see I'm not making this up.

Where the market maker adds value is in making it cheaper for the weak trader, the guy like me who doesn't have the time to play the game, who just wants a stock or bond at a fair price (given today's market mood), and so you just buys or sells "at market". I, the little guy get a better price. I've seen real evolution over the past 15 years in this, and it's like a tax of a few % has been lifted. Inefficient markets suck.

Like I said, he hopes to balance buys and sells. If 100 people sell at his price, and 100 people buy at his price, he needs no bikes. If he's off by 1 or 2, he'll trade with Mr B or Mr S, and still do OK. But he does take a real risk.

Anyhow, that's how it really works. Remember, we're talking about markets that trade billions of shares a day, so the metaphor only stretches so far.

That's exactly backwards. In the US at least, you can lay off anyone without cause at any time in most states. However, a layoff of this size triggers the WARN act (originally written to soften the blow of closing The Factory in a factory town), requiring jumping through 17 flaming legal hoops to keep it all legal.

OTOH, I have no clue about Finland. Maybe you're right there.

You've got it completely backwards, is the thing. Don't worry, most people get this backwards, because they reason from "these guys must be evil" to "ahh, so it must work like this".

It works like this. You want a bike, you don't have time to research the right price, you just hope the market price is OK:
* Mr B posts "Bicycle wanted, will pay up to $500"
* Mr S posts "Bicycle for sale, $600"
* Special user says "OK, now buying bikes for $520, selling for $580"
* You post "buying 1 bike, best price".

You get the bike $20 cheaper. The market maker takes a risk here: that he can balance buys and sells, and not get left holding the bag when the price changes.

But the story gets better:
* Special user 2 says "Oh, I see you Special 1, I'm now buying bikes for $525, selling for $575, hey, $50 a bike is better than nothing.
* Special user 1 says "Oh no you didn, Buying for $530, selling for $570"
* Very quickly it's $550/$551.

You get the bike for $551, $49 cheaper. I've seen this happen over the past 15 years, where the bid-ask gap shrank by that much on options. Competition is so fierce you see sub-cent pricing now: you'll get filled at $550.0001 or $549.9999 sometimes, because in very active markets these guys can make a killing with less then 1 cent profit.

Do you see now why it adds value?

Detecting sarcasm often requires hearing the tone of voice, and the assumption that the other party is sane, neither of which is available on the internet. :)

The national average salary somewhere else goes up, though. It's hard to argue against jobs moving from your country to another without claiming that people in your country are somehow better, more deserving of those jobs; otherwise, why is it wrong?

You use it to make concrete predictions about future observations. There might be several such "negative matter" theories, each with a different model and each making different predictions. Much like we had WIMPs and MACHOs for dark matter.

Then you wait for new observations that fit the predictions (or, more likely, don't), and importantly that don't fit the null hypothesis. Something new, that accepted theory doesn't explain, but some hypothesis specifically and accurately predicted.

That's the scientific method. People don't seem to get that. It doesn't require some scientist contriving the scenario being measured - it's faster when you can do it that way, but it was never required.

Dark Matter certainly exists - as certain as anything in cosmology. We know a few things about it: it reacts normally to gravity, but it doesn't interact with light or electrons in any way (these things are true of neutrons as well, of course). Further, it has no analog to EM interaction that could produce friction in some other way - we know this because it doesn't clump like normal matter.

How do we know this? There were many theories for the galactic rotation rate anomaly, but only the WIMP (dark matter) theory accurately predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation results. About 80% of matter in the early universe fits the description of dark matter, and the % was just as expected from the dark matter explanation for galactic rotation. When a theory explains, out of the blue, a set of unrelated measurements (and does so in a way that makes sense), well, that's how the scientific method works! Other theories were falsified, dark matter made accurate predictions.

Dark Energy is just the latest name for the "Cosmological Constant". It has been well measured, but no one hypothesis has emerged for what it actually is - it remains the biggest mystery in cosmology.

Come on now, you're missing the key point here: those people who will be taking good American jobs have brown skin, and that's why it's evil. Threads like this reek of racism. (Nevermind it's Finland where any actual job-shifts here are likely to happen, you'll notice everyone banging on about India).

The world market for developers is pretty good, actually. For this skill set, there's no real cause for complaint about the competition. For a while it looked bad thanks to doubling of labor supply every few years, but pretty much every university CS program world-wide is tapped now, and so labor supply has stabilized (growing mostly linearly now with average worker age), while demand continues strong.

Most of these layoffs are around an acquisition. This is very common, and you're only hearing about it in advance from MS because they're laying off enough in the US to trigger the WARN act, or a similar law in Finland.

MS has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell.. Nokia has a bunch of people who make phones that don't sell. I'm guessing all the overlap will be jettisoned, along with a significant reduction to adjust to poor sales.

So far what we've heard is constrained to the failing mobile business - but we don't know yet. There are 6K jobs that could be anywhere (but given MS has over 100K employees, that might not be a big deal).

I don't know about those specific examples, but yeah, it was not a broad ruling. It was also key to the ruling that Hobby Lobby is self-insured. Both factors together were needed to make the argument that the owners would effectively be paying for (what they saw as) abortions out of their own pockets, against their religious convictions. Many (most?) closely held corporations don't self-insure, so it's pretty narrow.
 

Does man have some effect on climate? How could we not?

Does the effect overwhelm the natural feedback mechanisms? Certainly not, at a long enough time scale. So tiny details matter here, and we have a serious lack of understanding of the feedback mechanism that drives the 100K year cycle, or of why we're late for a return to glaciation. The climate was unnaturally stable for the past 10K years, and no one knows why. That's important. We don't have models that make better predictions than the null hypothesis yet, and that's important too.

More important, given stability is quite the anomaly, is "do we want it warmer or colder"? At my latitude, warmer is definitely less harmful. Anyone living north of the Med who doesn't get that doesn't understand ice ages.

You can pick time scales that show irrefutable evidence of global warming, or global cooling, or of nothing much happening of interest - just pick where you start. Not very interesting.

It's not so much that there have been errors in some models, it's that no models thus far have proven themselves more accurate than the null hypothesis. Climate is remarkably variable over history - a model would have to make pretty damn accurate predictions to be significant, and thus far we aren't there.

All of which is irrelevant with out the answer to the primary question: would we like it warmer, or colder? I live on the coast, at sea level, so you might think I'd vote colder, by where I'm sitting was under a couple kilometers of ice not all that long ago, so I vote for warming as least harmful.

That ... makes no sense at all. Again, no amount of code inspection (or unit tests) will find flaws in your assumptions. That's why end-to-end testing is indispensable: it's how you discover your flawed assumptions.

Wow, that's a non-sequitur (and, BTW, like most things on Slate, the argument fails: the SCOTUS ruling explicitly hinged on the fact that Hobby Lobby was a closely held corporation, and thus no different from a partnership It was not a broad ruling applicable to corporations in general, where the linked argument might have been relevant.)