Stock market is a zero-sum game (wealth transfer vehicle).

That doesn't make sense. Suppose a simple stock market with only a single share of a single company. Alice buys it at $1, holds it for a year, and then sells it to Bob for $2. After another year Bob sells it to Carol for $3. Alice made $1 profit, Bob made $1 profit, and Carol has an asset that is worth $3. Where's the zero sum? Is Carol's stock really worth $-2?? You seem to accept that the economy can grow overall. If companies can grow, then so can the stock market.

It sounds to me like they are using satellite sensors to detect elements on the ocean surface, perhaps using spectroscopy and nuclear physics.

I have three of them: B.Sc.(CS), M.Sc.(CS), Ph.D.

I remember choosing between eating, living in bad neighborhoods, putting gas in the car, etc.

A starving student with a car?! I think we've isolated the problem.

You cannot eliminate it when you create an endless suppy.

According to environmentalists, we have already accidentally engineered the climate a few times completely accidentally. I'd say have a pretty good chance of doing it *intentionally*.

even if its as simple as stopping the massive amounts of emissions

In what way would deindustrialization and the attendant five-billions deaths be considered "simple". Heck, I'd bet there'd be some political push-back on your idea after as few as one-billion deaths.

Considering that climate engineering would cost us only a tiny fraction of cost of deindustrialization -- and has a chance in hell of actually working -- it's the approach we should be taking the most seriously.

The way I see it, you can eliminate the advantages of HFT while keeping the markets highly responsive by imposing a "clocking" scheme on exchanges. When an order is received by an exchange, it is not executed immediately but stored in a queue to wait for the next clock tick. When that comes, the order queue is shuffled into random order and then executed sequentially. Make the clock ticks wait a random period between 40ms and 50ms and any timing advantage of HFT or geography is nullified. The exchanges are still highly responsive; they just do randomized batch processing. All of the requests they receive in the previous clock period ought to be processed within the new clock period (with perhaps some occasional spill-over, in which case the new clock tick is stretched).

Firing missiles is North Korea's method of begging for hand-outs. It usually works.

I don't understand why people want their $3000 fridges to be bricked by Chinese hackers. Could someone please explain it to me?

that it is a nice idea that cannot be realized with current levels of technology

Technology? It cannot be realized because of human nature. We're going to need a transformative upgrade to that before any -ism that requires everyone to "play nice" can be realized in practice.

Just delete the humans and you're all set.

I think you're drastically overstating it. If Russia were to unload its $100B in reserves, it could depress the value of the USD by perhaps a couple percent for a couple of days, but it would do way more damage to itself. The global foreign exchange market is measured $5.3-*trillion* *per day*(!) and there are lots of aggressive players desperately trying to profit from arbitraging a few hundredths of a penny. If they figured out that Russia was dumping $100B at a deep discount for purely political reasons, the buyers would go into a huge feeding frenzy, mitigating the decline on the USD. Immediately after Russia finished unloading, the USD would jump right back up to its true value. The main result would be that Russia would have donated billions or tens of billions of dollars of value to speculators for a very temporary impact on the value of the USD. I wouldn't even call this a Pyrrhic victory; it'd be an unmitigated loss for Russia. China could do the same thing and have a bigger impact with its $1.3T, but also a bigger loss to itself.

Since the collapse of civilization will happen in a few decades, there is absolutely no reason to give a second thought to Anthropogenic Global Warming Caused Specifically And Exclusively By Anthropogenic Carbon Emissions And Curable By Donating Trillions Of Dollars To Genocidal Dictators For Some Reason (AGWCSAEBACEACBDTODTGDFSR). I'll bet these ultra-leftist alarmists didn't think about the implications of anybody taking their work seriously!

Because he may be in possession of millions of bitcoins? I'm sure some unscrupulous people would like to unlawfully acquire them.