This is a good point, but if they try to game the system stuffing a large batch of orders for very small numbers of shares to in order to as you describe stuff the box increasing their odds of acquiring or selling at least some shares over other peoples complete orders, any advantage they gain should be lost in increased commission fees; (hopefully)

Honestly I don't think it would do any harm to implement something like this. I don't think it will do much good personally, but I would not be opposed to it.

3 Days is a looong loooong time. I don't think minimum holding periods are fair to anyone, at least not above intervals of more than a few seconds. At three days imagine this situation.

On the 1st Joe buys 100 shares of $OIL_COMPANY at $10 a share. On the 3rd Jim buys 100 shares of $OIL_COMPANY for $11 a share. On the night of the third Joe and Jim are sitting at the bar watching the news, and discover $OIL_COMPANY just had a tanker run aground and its probably going to destroy a major fishery, the damages are almost certain to bankrupt $OIL_COMPANY.

Joe should be allowed sell his shares at the open on the fourth leaving Jim and everyone like him holding the bag? Joe has owned the company longer, possibly collected more dividends, paid less for the shares, he should be allowed to keep his profits at the expense of Jim and others like him? even though he and Jim both have the same quality information?

I don't see any justice or stabilizing effect to be gained with such long hold times, it will just discourage investing over all because anyone who makes a new purchase has to take the risk of sitting in a burning building while everyone else heads for the exists, until their hold period expires.

I can see doing trades in baskets of orders entered in say 60 second intervals and processed in random order inside the interval. That prevents a class system where guys with access to HFT have a shot at the getting in or out first all the time and moves it to where anyone with an Internet connection, a E-trade account, and a willingness to sit with three or four of the major news networks on a few tvs has a fair chance of transacting on whatever securities they are playing as quickly as anyone else. That seems okay.

This solution does more or less solve that problem as well. Nobody but the exchange will have a view of the orders for at least a 250ms but possibly as long as a half second under the parents scheme. That will anyone selling or buying in enough volume to be a market mover on anything but the smallest of micro caps likely has the technology to submit orders to each exchange they mean to trade on inside that window where the HFT guys will not have the opportunity to do any new price discovery.

That should effectively thwart the front running ( if its really happening on the scales many claim ). It will help the retail level investor who owns funds, that may have been themselves victims of front running. It will also minimally impact the operation of the market and price discovery behaviors for not HFT trading. This may help prevent a flash crash type situation as well because the HFT machines will have to wait to see if an exchange is really dropping before the open up their sales and short sales on other exchanges. I think its a good solution in those terms; but I remain unconvinced that HFT is really the problem many say it is; the evidence just isn't there.

As an American I am okay with that. I would not expect USAID to provide material support to groups the rest of the State Department wants to see go away.

Its one thing for USAID to give money in an overt and legal way to group some foreign regime might not like much, but tolerates within its boarders.

Its quite another for our aide organization to violating the laws for foreign countries, which at least in this case with Cuba they must have been because otherwise why the shell companies and secrecy.

USAID is suppose to be an aide organization. The moment they have to start laundering money they have gone off the reservation and entered CIA territory.

There is a place for clandestine operation to work against regimes we don't like, that is why we have a foreign intelligence agency, CIA. Our government is completely out of control and way to large this is just more proof!

Not only that it completely undermines the mission of USAID to have it associated with these type of shenanigans; its supposed to be about soft power, its supposed to be about building trust. Here we have one more department with in the government demonstrating laws don't matter, not ours and certainly not any other sovereigns. Shameful...

How exactly are industries on life support. Under the current model certainly. Things like sugar get taxed specifically to create a market corn syrup.

On the other hand if you apply a single fixed rate to broad classes of things, like the four or five classes total than you are not favoring and specific product or industry. Yes you create some advantage for domestic producers against foreign produces selling to domestic consumers, but we want that. Sure abandoning the idea of free trade will cause other nations to do the same and they will tax imports reducing our exports; again not sure that is a problem if what you are seeking is to stop this race to the bottom.

Because that is what free trade among peers(nations) with different environmental laws, different social welfare requirements, different education levels, etc is. It becomes a quest to do it as cheaply as possible. Any society that elects to have higher standards in these areas usually does so at the cost of people having fewer material goods, that does not change but with free trade you also get this aggressive worker displacement; yes better education etc allows them to compete for a while be having greater productivity but that only goes so far.

You don't have to get overly specific. Today we have huge volumes of tarried schedules, rather than pick winners and loosers and try and prop up specific industries, I'd argue the tarried schedule should be limited to a few broad categories; commodities, hard goods, labor, and everything else. One tax rate for each category.

Never for specific products like sugar.

Want to quit harping about that already. The H1B program existed long before that decision was handed down and it IS A FREE SPEECH issue. I don't think anyone should be barred using their property to promote a cause. Why should some Union be allowed to basically steer unlimited monies to a politician but a corporation not? It makes no sense. As far as campaign finance goes requirements should be for real disclosure, something we don't have today. That would make difference.

If you are tiny country or have small population yes it makes sense to bring in talent. When you are the 21st century USA with a plenty big population to fill most roles and a University system that is still considered among the worlds best, no I don't think it makes much sense at all.

How do reconcile a pro-education social policy with labor and economic policies that are opposed to developing your own talent?

The idea the USA *needs* to import tech workers is pure farce. If anything USA needs to put much tighter controls around the use of foreign labor. We should treat labor like any other import, wages paid to foreign workers ought to be taxed heavily. So if a company really really does *need* to bring someone in they *can* but would be heavily discouraged from doing so in other cases. There should be payroll taxes on foreign workers working for US companies in foreign countries as well, although these should be a much lower rate.

Real Immigration on the other hand isn't a problem. If people want to come here, have families here, live here as residents and be citizens; great! Then they are our people, attracting good talent is an investment in our own country.

Its pretty rare that I advocate taxing anything, but imports are an exception, I think we should go back to funding the operation of government primarily through import tariffs and foreign labor should no exception.

Interesting thought, what if we rested people for ignorance and sentenced them to school.

You make different rules for different types of things, you'll just end up with in this litigation about whether this is "computing" or etc. if you actually want a system of people are going to just game, you need a simple set of rules possible.

I did not make the management mistake, I specifically said "Someone who understands wood working" in other words someone else with knowledge and skill in that trade, not just any fool who happens to walk by.

There certainly are situations where sand paper is not the right tool but in the general sense if you smooth something with a large belt sander and years later the wood has twisted I can true it up with an electric plane, if that seems like the best approach to me.

On the other hand while another programmer might be able to pretty quickly get a sense of how your struts web application works over all, his Rails expertise is not going to enable him to quickly add features.

Could we also get it in Libraries of Congress by volume not weight of course.

The trouble is the computer really does not fit the model of a carpenter. There are only so many ways one can shape and join wood. Whatever tools you pick the desired outcome is the same, its the degree of success that varies. Someone who understands wood working is going to be able to come along later and quickly understand the intent, he will be able to maintain or repair the work, and he isn't forced to use the same tools you did. His sandpaper is not going to be incompatible with the wood or finish you chose.

Computers just manipulate symbols. If you pick a radically different symbol set, and heap of frame works its impossible to just switch. You can't just grab any programer and more to work on stuff. Sure most can pick up a language quickly, but it takes time to get up to speed on the tooling and frameworks around it. So if you would have a serious staffing problem if you let everyone use the best fit tool set for each project.