And the problem with that is? If they get it right, it's a faster responding market. And if they get it wrong, it's free money for everyone else.

This is a variation of insider trading. Your act of "reaching" is not public knowledge. And HFT programs aren't trying to "rape" the small investor. There's no money in it.

Plus, you get around the "rape" issue via limit orders. That's like only reaching for milk that costs no more than $3.99. So if the program raises the cost of my milk to $4.50, then the milk disappears and I don't grab anything.

No. If it were true, then we'd have never gotten around to building a civilization. Cooperation helps everyone involved. Stock markets are a fairly limited, but very efficient form of cooperation.

I really don't get the point of your arguments. They're not hard to deflate once you have an understanding of how markets work and who's on them.

Further, you're not trying to outwit or outmaneuver HFT and other traders with ridiculous advantages. Instead, you're trying to lend money to relatively honest businesses in exchange for some sort of return, such as a dividend or an increase in the price of the stock.

Well, HFT is legal. But if that weren't so, then it wouldn't be better than insider trading.

Well, what are they doing where they need that kind of speed? If they're outwitting human traders, then latency can be seconds to minutes and they'd still get in ahead of most small time traders.

And "trillions of dollars" "stolen"? Hasn't happened yet. Sounds like you're confusing the real estate crisis with HFT. They aren't the same.

What's the basis for that belief? Sure, if you're speaking of the largest data centers in the world, with rather low margins which cooling costs can cut into, then you have considerable incentive to come up with ways to reduce that. Simultaneously, you have huge economies of scale while simultaneous swamping the local energy providers.

But if you're a small IT department providing a high value product (say, making sure a company's servers work is far more important than shaving dollars off of PUE), then the incentive to play the PUE game isn't there. Nor are the benefits.

If you're in an urban environment, then the infrastructure is there to provide a lot of cheap megawatts - at least outside of California which is special.

What is an "assault weapon"? Most such "assault weapons" are cosmetic variations of normal semi-automatic rifles. I think it'd help if the people advocating gun control showed some understanding, such as the near trivial differences between a hunting rifle and an "assault weapon".

I personally don't see a problem with widespread ownership of military weaponry. It's still illegal to commit murder.

Also as the other replier noted, "regulated" in the UK sense, means it is very difficult to have available a firearm for self-defense.

Why? We stopped aping UK law a couple of centuries ago.

[...]

I don't see that. There was a problem - the AC was broken due to lots of ants. It got fixed. You have to pay the AC techs.

But if it isn't man-made, then we may not have the tools to do anything about it. This is a very weak argument because of the conditional. You suppose we don't have a significant influence on the climate, but we should try to do something anyway.

Why would we want to do that? Last I checked, our civilizations weren't about making sure the climate is the same as it was in 1850. That's not a particularly high priority. If it were, then just killing a bunch of people and controlling reproduction thereafter would do the trick.

So what do you think his point was in saying that? To claim that if we go far enough (which I take to be a lot less than using up every scrap of fossil fuel), we'll end up with a lethal, venus-like climate. And he's pretty certain of that.

Yet another tangential problem blamed on global warming. Restricting global economic activity so that one falls under a certain level of carbon dioxide production can also contribute to a global nuclear war via the usual destabilizing mechanisms of poverty, hunger, economic dysfunction, and centralization of power.

At this point, we still need to decide what approach is better. For example, it's not clear that AGW mitigation is better than doing nothing.

Let's look at what he actually said here.

Due to that language, I'll act like he said that was a certainty too.

I think we can say that if we burn "all" the fossil fuels and that excess carbon dioxide doesn't get sinked by something, then it'll be at a high enough concentration that it'll be toxic to humans - not necessarily lethal levels, but something of a problem. Whether that's sufficient to melt enough of the Antarctica ice cap remains to be seen.

I seem to recall that when the foundation was originally created, it wasn't intended to last forever (though I could remember that wrong or plans might have changed). And Buffet is making significant contributions to the foundation on the condition that they be used for charity that year and matched by the foundation.

Of course. I don't expect you'd get a mere 3% from actual consideration of the larger budget items.

Sure we can. It's worth remembering that economic activity is not a good measure of economic benefit. Most government spending hinders the economy. It takes from someone productive and gives to someone less productive. So not doing the transaction is an instant economy boost. But the government transaction can result in short term increased economic activity because the productive person might not throw it immediately into the economy like the other would.

I consider the two synonymous. It's not materially different if you spend $3 million to see if teens are likely to have sex than you spend $3 million to make rich elderly or a megacorp richer.

Social Security is 21% of the budget (and a significant portion of the unfunded liabilities). Most of that is for retirees. That's foolish spending right there - above 3%. There's military spending of almost 17%. Most of that is for pointless procurements for wars the US will never fight or privating contract at triple the cost of the military doing it themselves. I bet we can find another 3% (if not much more) there. Global war on terror is only about 5%, but that combined with the war on drugs probably has 3% of foolish spending in there somewhere.

I believe we can find similar problems in each Medicare or the other "mandatory" spending (merely creating a distinction between "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending is a sign of foolish spending, especially when those terms don't mean anything). And I think there's enough foolish spending out there to have generated more than a third of past debt that we still owe. So there's another 3% in interest payments due to foolish spending. See where I'm going with this?

My take is that foolish spending is probably on the wrong side of two-thirds of the US federal budget. I would count the entirety of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, at least half of other "mandatory" spending, at least half of military spending, and the entirety of interest. That's just shy of two thirds right there.

That freedom leads to other freedoms. For example, the freedom to manufacture things, such as guns.

Opportunity costs, the costs from paths not taken, are invisible. I believe high taxes have stopped plenty of people from succeeding. And have inhibited those who do manage to succeed anyway. But those could have beens are invisible to us. I can't show you a person who succeeded because the private world retained another ten percent of collective income. There's no repeatable test here.

And success from milking public funding or protective regulation is just as successful for the person doing it as success from a useful private endeavor. So there are a number of successes that wouldn't have happened in the advent of lower taxes.

Everything is debatable. That is the fundamental lesson of the sophists from ancient Greece.

Sure. That doesn't mean opportunity is positively correlated with such things. For example, labor in the developed world has to compete with cheaper labor throughout the world for decades. So how did the developed world respond to this challenge? They made their labor much more expensive with a variety of social security programs. I think such things only make sense, if they provide more value than they lose.