I don't see how anyone could reasonably reject a call for a higher tax burden on $1m+ individuals/corporations, if it is inflation-indexed so that the other 99.8% of earners aren't all paying this tax in 10 years. We don't need AMT 2.0

I've always wondered: why doesn't Biff meeting himself to give himself the almanac rip a hole in the space-time continuum?

The really interesting part of the paper was about "non-standard" analysis where there are infinite numerals between terminating numerals, eg "0.999...999" I'd never heard of that construction before. They mention how Leibnitz wrote of trying to imagine of a line whose length is longer than any finite line, but which also has end points. Mind bending.

So short the market, put your money where your mouth is. The more people do, the more accurate prices will be.

Right. Security through obscurity. Oh, wait...

No one is forced to trade in the continuous market. Auctions occur at close and open and in some venues throughout the day. "Oligopoly of the rich." Hilarious. Individuals have never paid less to transact in the stock market. It's the large institutional players that are hurt most when they have large orders and aren't sophisticated enough to dodge the HFTs.

Investing is gambling. Where do you draw the line? You can't. Brokerages win, because they provide a valuable service. How else would buyers meet sellers? Craigslist? Investors sometimes win, they sometimes lose. You get compensated for the risk. Why should anyone compensate you for a sure thing?

All these suggested "fixes" are just plain silly. Does anyone really think they can come up with a single stock tradihng solution better than the organic evolution of thousand years of human experience with exchanging financial claims?

All these markets - NYSE, NASDAQ, dark pools, etc. - have their own market microstructures which have evolved to satisfy the needs of participants of the capital markets. If participants or their agents are truly disadvantaged, they will trade at another venue, or simply stop playing the game.

A lot of the proposed "solutions" to imagined "problems" are simply political in nature, meant to benefit some at the expense of others, and will cause more problems than they solve.

Many different venues already have auction mechanisms so that all trades are executed simultaneously at a single clearing price. No one forces anyone to trade stocks in the continuous market. There are lots of pros and cons to auctions vs continuous trading and all other sorts of market microstructures.

Just be assured that any single "solution" you can come up with will leave something to be desired at best.

I should add: 1)present value is simply future discounted value. 2)companies figured out that buying back their own shares, functionally equivalent to dividends, is a more tax efficient way to pay you. Dividends are taxed when distributed, although those earnings were taxed when earned by the company you own. Dividends are subject to double taxation.

Um, no. A stock is a fractional ownership of a company. Just because shares don't pay dividends now don't mean they aren't worth anything. It's fundamentally worth the value of your voting rights plus the discounted value of any future payouts. In addition, the market functions to aggregate many estimates regarding (future) value into a single number, one which academic research supports as being more accurate than the vast majority of individual estimates.

Does this not give the gov't another way (with a limited time window) to peer into our personal affairs?

I've bought cables from them before, they always struck me as the perfect antidote to the snake oil industry. This only increases my respect for an already respectable company.