If you cross your boarders they may not pay the rent, then where will you be?

Or if you like, Coke v. Pepsi is not a good analogy because those products are substitutes for each other. A hydrogen fuel cell car is not a substitute for a gas car, people will not simply switch from one to the other due to price concerns. There are a lot of other factors, such as availability of fueling stations, proximity to qualified service providers, and so on. So the people who will buy the fuel cell car are going to buy one regardless. all this handout will do is add the $20k to the price for the manufacturer to profit. Now if the supporting infrastructure for both types of cars were identical, the analogy might be more apt. But in that case there would be no supposed need for the handout would there? Perhaps the money might be better spent building out fuel stations instead of just effectively handing it out to a politically favored car manufacturer.

An excellent point. But what do you think the business will do when someone else is handing out money to buy their new product? At the very least, any incentive they have to control costs or reduce prices just went out the window. The Coke analogy isn't quite right since that price is long established by market competition, and coupons are typically backed by the manufacturer or the reseller, i.e. someone in the sales chain, as opposed to some third party whose only involvement is handing out money. In other words, the coupon is in business terms indistinguishable from a price cut. Whereas the $20k handout is simply more profit to be made from customers who would have bought it for $50k but can now 'afford' to pay $70k

Why not? Because if you hand out $20,000 to buy a car, you just increase the price of every car by $20,000. It is basic economics. We can see the same effect in housing prices, health care, and college tuition.

In the land line days you could get a dongle that did exactly that, played a recording that said 'Press 5 to proceed', and just stuck it inline with your phone. I wonder how hard it would be to get a smartphone to do the same thing?

It used to be the "handshake" on phones was: Hello (SYN) Hello (SYN/ACK) What's up? (ACK). Now, thanks to human nature it is: Leave message and call back number = SYN, Call back and leave message (SYN/ACK), return call again and person answers since number is known (ACK). I understand this isn't always possible thanks to business needs and circumstance, but most people I know will simply never answer an unknown number on their phones, instead they let the caller leave a message to determine who the number really is. Any legitimate call will leave a message (and a few non-legits) and all the others can go to hell.

A good point about the WARN act and similar statutes. I do not agree that my point was backwards, though, in fact you made my point for me. The WARN act and its sisters are a much safer situation since it is well defined. If the company lays off people in dribs and drabs, they are leaving themselves open to all sorts of wrongful dismissal and discrimination lawsuits case by case. I understand the "at will" employee, but by no means is any company free to fire anyone at anytime without cause. I've seen plenty of cases where someone was fired with a whole heck of a lot of cause and the fired person STILL sued. They must have known there was a huge pile of documentation. Anyway, that is one of the barriers to simply firing people piecemeal since you need to document everything six ways from Sunday to defend against the lawsuits. If you are making a global decision to lay off some percentage, it is a lot easier.

It makes it a lot safer. "We laid off 18k and you were one of them" is more defensible from lawsuits than having to individually justify 18k layoffs.

Not really. Look at the vicious atrocities of the Mongols. They were hardly what we would call nationalistic. Sadly, it is human nature that devalues the Other and makes it possible to rationalize anything.

If you review the details, the attackers were on one specific non-trading application owned by Nasdaq and had some access to their internal network. There is no evidence that they had any access to the exchange's systems, which are on a segregated network. In other words "the exchange" was not hacked at all.

Yes, and also after quite a few similar smaller incidents. Remember the scene from the recent Batman movie where Bane stole all of Bruce Wayne's money by forcing him to put his finger on the scanner? A crock. The financial institutions would just undo the whole transaction as soon as Bane left. This is one reason why there is surprisingly little security in certain aspects of the financial system. it isn't like Bitcoin where if someone steals your key file done is done and there is no going back. In the financial world, a whole slew of transactions can simply be reversed and often are. Why spend the money and effort on security when the potential impact is relatively low?

I would be there is no HFT in the world that is encrypting FIX traffic. Why bother? All the links are cross connects within the exchange's data center.

They should start a Burning Man style festival there.

The summary says "giant". So there you have it.

You are right, these cars are a looming economic disaster and need to be outlawed immediately. For the children!