Whilst this is true and is valuable, the service which was once provided by market-makers - provision of guaranteed liquidity in certain size, especially for smaller or less traded names - is rapidly declining into obsolescence (for reasons largely unrelated to HFT) and HFT is not a replacement for it. The negative impact of it not being there is likely to be felt more by small investors than large/institutional ones. Many markets - e.g. in fixed income - which once had at least some minimal trading activity supported by market makers are now effectively zero-volume markets/trade by appointment/etc as a result of post-financial crisis changes at the broker-dealers. In turn this limits the range of suitable investments and investment strategies for smaller investors and further entrenches the large institutional investors as it broadens the range of investments that they effectively have exclusive access to.

The differences between countries in terms of how banks charge are quite varied and what you are observing is a difference in the structure of charges more than anything - in some countries banks effectively subsidise the "day-to-day" banking for individuals (in the UK to the point of it being completely free) out of other parts of the operations - usually these days by charging business customers much more for payments, account maintenance etc. There are differences in cost structure but those aren't really a huge part of most banks' overall costs.

The largest costs they have, and the ones they really worry about are (1) how much it costs them to borrow money (deposits are the cheapest source but most banks don't fund themselves exclusively with deposits and the extent to which they do varies significantly) and (2) how much they lose on bad loans. Spanish banks face significantly higher costs than Nordic banks on both of those costs, which is why you observe Spanish banking being more costly to consumers.

France doesn't follow this model - it makes it almost impossible to fire people, to the extent that moving people to a different country for a couple of years in order to fire them at the end of that is actually a money-saving strategy which is used occasionally.

The Nordics (Sweden/Norway/Denmark) come a bit closer - it's easier to hire and fire (not quite at-will but nothing like Germany or France) but with generous social benefits paid for out of general taxation (ie not by the company hiring/firing). To pay for this though, income taxes are very high (although interestingly investment/capital are taxed lightly i.e. interest, dividends, capital gains, corporate profits). All in all I think it's better than France but does push people in some sectors to leave the country which is negative for the economy.

Perhaps not, but rarely you do see something approaching that. I've seen a couple of instances where people were fired effectively on that basis ("you're getting too big for your boots") and both times it turned out very badly for the company because it was a small market and noone else who could do the job wanted to go near it after seeing how the guy who got fired was treated. The individual filling the position may have been replacable but the cost to the company of having literally noone in the post for a long time was enormous.

I wonder if the more widespread relevant use case is in pools and the sea (on vacation). Kindles in particular have been marketed as great for taking on vacation because e-ink is visible in bright sunlight (unlike LCD etc displays) and the weight and bulk saving vs paper books is significant. With typical pulp fiction/vacation reading paper books you don't need to worry about reading them in the pool due to them being low-value so this was the "last" benefit they had over Kindles etc.

Having said all that, it's interesting they don't mention it being resistant to salt water - which is notoriously much worse for electronics than fresh water.

Arbitration has a huge advantage for individuals though - the cost is very low which significantly promotes access to justice. The downside is the lack of transparency (as cases are all confidential) which means its difficult to know if you really will get a "fair" result.

A few years ago, a former employer of mine treated a group of employees in a way which was a pretty clear breach of trust. Friends of mine who were based in New York went to binding arbitration which was stipulated by their contracts of employment. They got a decision in a matter of weeks and were awarded triple damages after a short hearing. Those of us unlucky enough to be in London had to go through the Court system instead (the Employment Tribunal was not available to us). It took us four years to get a final judgment and get paid and we had to cover significant legal expenses through something like five or six hearings at different courts in the mean time. If there had not been a large enough number of us, it would have been ruinously expensive to pursue them simply in terms of the funding cost during the case. We did get back a lot of these costs when they finally gave in and decided not to appeal but we were still left out by something like 20-25% of our costs despite England and Wales being a "loser pays" system (apparently this is normal). Punitive/exemplary damages like our New York colleagues got are effectively non-existent here so we still ended the day worse off than if the employer had behaved well to start with.

The fact is that any judicial process, whether arbitration or traditional courts, has some risk attached to it. Because of this, in any system where there is a meaningful chance that the small party pays - i.e. anything except where your legal advice is being provided pro bono or covered by insurance etc - cost is far more of a limiting factor in actually exercising your rights against a much better funded opponent. To the extent that arbitration gives smaller parties at least a shot at justice, it's MUCH MUCH better than a system which you won't ever use because it's too expensive.

Ironically, if you look at the Apple phones on that list, what springs out at you is that over time the repairability scores have been getting better for them!

When their auditors, audit committees, and (where relevant) regulators require them to then it will happen. There is a fair degree of lobbying going on behind the scenes to effect it via this route in the UK at least. This kind of cultural change takes some time, but there are plenty of examples of it happening - employee health and safety, corporate governance, etc

The thing is, the manufacturers aren't (in general) leaving hardware performance on the table simply so that they can upsell - because they live in a highly competitive market which wouldn't allow such tactics to persist for long. The reason this is possible is that they are making a complex trade-off between emissions, fuel efficiency and power (and to some distant extent engine longevity). Emissions and fuel efficency rules constrain their hands to a large degree and also influence what the market wants (via e.g. car tax policies) which is why it's possible to get more power by changing the software - it comes at the cost of lower fuel efficiency and worse emissions (and potentially worse longevity). As a case in point - the VW emissions "fix" for diesels lowers the power and torque output.

By the same token, how many people buy a Porsche for the interior? And yet, the difference between a (modern) Porsche interior and a Tesla one is night and day. This isn't a problem for them yet but I believe it will become one quite soon - when Mercedes/BMW/Porsche/Audi/etc bring EVs to market in the next couple of years, people will cross-shop Teslas with those cars, and the interiors will lose them a lot of sales. They'll be left competing largely in the Ford/Toyota/Nissan/etc market but with a price disadvantage.

I don't think the point is to make the information inaccessible. It's another way (amongst the many legal avenues created over the last 10-15 years) to enable the authorities to find a charge they can make stick to (in their view) "deal with" people who they "know" are terrorists when they don't have any real - or at least (if you want to be more charitable) any legally admissible - proof of actual terrorist plotting.

One could argue that this is exactly the same purpose banning books/possession of information has served in many authoritarian regimes over the years, from Nazi Germany to Communist China.

I'm sure they can send out the command whenever they want. But it's not hard to configure a phone to ignore that command.

In doing so Blackberry made their devices really painful to use for work because you can't, for example, copy a phone number from a work email and paste it into the dialer. It was a stupid idea, they should have stuck to them being "corporate-only" devices. This is a perfect illustration of why locking devices down in the wrong way is counterproductive, because when it gets in the way too much then actively work to circumvent the entire system and not just the bit which is getting in their way (at the simplest level by copying documents to USB sticks, forwarding emails to their personal accounts - I've been in workplaces where both of those were supposedly "banned" with some kind of enforcement but literally EVERYONE did it because otherwise the place would have ground to a halt).

The rather poorly-understood reality is that in a commercial context, the vast majority of information is not really sensitive or valuable. What's more, users will, in general, know which information is and isn't sensitive much better than IT admins - otherwise they wouldn't be trusted not to tell people who they might know socially working at a competitor for example! For information which is not sensitive, far and away the best policy is to be extremely permissive because this enables people to work in whichever way makes them most efficient and engenders trust by treating them like grown-ups.

For information which is sensitive, because almost all the focus is on "zero information leakage" type solutions, it is far too hard to then selectively ramp up controls around it because everyone's product is trying to solve the wrong problem ("keep work and personal information separate" for example). People do this instinctively (eg using encrypted Zip files) but technical support for doing this the "right" way should be far, far better.

Yes, of course. You must be thinking of some other country where there weren't allegations of a plot against the legitimately elected Prime Minister in the 60s and 70s.

No, that's not why people think the two situations are different. The hypothetical financial advisor (a) deprived people of money which they actually did have at some point, and (b) did so on a very large scale, seriously impoverishing the parents. If the financial advisor had stolen a much less meaningful amount, say $50, do you still think prison would be appropriate? I certainly don't. Even more so - if he merely deprived the parents of money they might have made but didn't by not investing quite as well as someone else could have done then I'm not even sure a fine would be an appropriate sanction (in other industries these sorts of practices are sanctioned by poor reviews/bad reputations, not through the law in any way).

They just made this up. See this which was written by an actual lawyer, not a press office: Is viewing a video a criminal offence under terrorism law? (may be paywalled).