The purpose of any price-based system is to communicate knowledge, not necessarily insider knowledge.
There are actually two theories on insider knowledge. One states that allowing insider trading is beneficial, as it allows prices to better match the underlying reality, the other states that this discourages non-insider trading, which actually makes the prices worse. Stock markets lean heavily towards the second theory, while prediction markets seem to be leaning towards the first.
Why would encouraging non-insider training be desirable in the first place, other than to create a more high-status form of gambling, with higher spouse acceptance factor than smoke-filled room poker games? People with no inside knowledge[0] are just trading on vibes, how is that useful for the economy?
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[0] - Or external knowledge, but actual knowledge - thinking of hedge funds stalking CEOs as they fly in private jets, or counting cars in parking lots from satellite photos, to get some probability estimates on factors actually relevant to the performance of a business and possible future events.
The stock market wasn't designed to be gambling. You're buying a piece of a company. They want people to come so they can raise money for expanding businesses. If insider trading benefits some at the expense of others, people won't come.
Obviously it has come a long way from that, and the markets have become more like gambling. You could probably allow insider trading at this point and the system would continue just fine.
Hmm yeah it depends on your definition of insider. If you assume all raw information is public-ish, a market can reward those who can synthesize/operate on that knowledge to predict better. (The cars in the lot, etc. there is friction to this discovery; the knowledge can be communicated to others through the market after discovery to profit off the initial cost of discovery). There is symmetric competition to some degree. If you have true non public knowledge (I’m going to say something to tank the stock on this date) then you are purely extracting value from others because you will always win; they will never have that info and the incentive for anyone else to participate in price discovery would go away.
Stocks are a financing mechanism. They're useful for the economy independent of the price discovery aspect in the much the same ways that lending is, except that instead of receiving an obligation of future payment you're compensated on vibes.
Non-insider trading is liquidity. That’s why people pay for retail trading volume (payment for order flow). Not because of nefarious reasons. Just because it represents liquidity. With no liquidity it’s impossible to enter or exit trades efficiently.
Though at this point volume is far higher than needed for liquidity. We do not need companies holding stocks for a millisecond in order to squeeze out arbitrage, and we do not need day traders hoping to arbitrage noise.
The stock market would not be noticeably less liquid if people had to hold stocks for 24 hours, but volume would drop like a rock.
>the other states that this discourages non-insider trading, which actually makes the prices worse
This theory is fundamentally not credible, the other side of any trade you make on the stock market is essentially always going to be vastly more sophisticated than you. Insider trading makes zero difference to the end-user.
The credible argument against insider trading is that it's a form of theft. You are making trades based on information which does not belong to you, and which you have an obvious duty to protect. You are essentially stealing from the people you work for.
Stock markets also want to keep executives honest. When the insider can affect the outcome, it creates bad motives. They don't want the CEO selling a bunch of puts, then deliberately tanking the stock. Not for the other bettors, but because the institution is about business.
Prediction markets are doing a bit of that. Some won't take bets on an assassination.
You can bet on assassination. There are polymarket prediction markets for leaders of many countries where you can bet on if they will cease to be the leader by X date, for any reason.
If they get assassinated, those markets will resolve to yes. At least the rules don't specifically exclude that.
In the hypothetical Anarcho-Capitalist finance world, the remedy for a breach of fiduciary duty (corporate graft / insider tips) looks more like Jim Bell than Chuck Rhoades.
> When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.
i find this comical because it reads like a slightly-differently-worded POSIWID argument :)
>The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
>These are obviously false.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to exhaust the Russian army's materiel and test out our weapons. "Years-long stalemate with Russia? Yes, please." -the US. Seems like an overwhelmingly common Scott Alexander L.
In practice, always. It's similar to the claim that during the cold war, US basically controlled USSR economy, and vice versa, and that US won because USSR economy just couldn't keep up.
On smaller scale, this is the (in)famous "fire and motion"[0], which works in business as much as it does in military tactics. Make a move, forcing competitors to respond to it. If you're better at it than them (and lucky), you can choose your moves to make their responses go to your advantage.
People say this but I don't believe that it is true.
The original theoretical purpose was to incentivize the creation of new knowledge, not reward insider knowledge that already exists. For example, to fund research that helps answer some unanswered question.
Today, the purpose is obviously gambling. We can see that clearly from the marketing.
Not just insider knowledge. Being more willing to put in hard work than anyone else, being better at synthesizing public knowledge, or maintaining a more clear and unemotional outlook all can also lead you to superior outcomes.
To say the purpose of a market is to reveal insider information is how you say insider trading is a good thing without saying insider trading is a good thing.
There's a ton of scholarly debate about it, and at least most of the early stuff was pretty earnest. But rather than the debate becoming more refined and nuanced over time it seems to have bifurcated along partisan (or partisan adjacent) lines like everything else, similar to the Keynesian/Misesian divide.
The proof that free markets are efficient (even in the narrow sense economists use this word) relies on an assumption of perfect information. This has been known at least since Akerlof.
The Misesian folks are a lost cause, IMHO. They're hardcore rationalists, self-indulging in circular moral arguments from assumptions that don't apply in the real world.
That's what makes the insider trading argument so tantalizing--it's arguing that it helps move the market closer to perfect information. But, of course, the world is complicated and dynamic, and it tacitly depends on all kinds of assumptions and beliefs about the resulting costs and benefits. It would be nice if the debate shifted to pinning down those assumptions, quantifying them as best as possible, and then iteratively tweaking and adjusting regulatory models. But that's true of just about everything and probably too unrealistic an ask, especially at a time when one side is convinced markets are just a mechanism for unjust exploitation, and the other side is convinced regulation is what sustains inequity (to the extent inequity is something even worth caring about).
The CEO just has to have followership: the people who work there have to think that this is a good person to follow. Even they don't have to "like" him
Ramp is mostly their Python monolith. They have a blog post about their use of Elixir for one service but it's really not their core stack.
Brex was a lot more all-in on Elixir, including being one of the languages "stars," but moved to a more conventional stack (IIRC Java/Drop wizard microservices with Kafka to talk between them).
My wife had to have an emergency C-section the first time around when they lost the heartbeat on our first baby, so we've stuck with planned C-sections - so yes, we are somewhat constrained in terms of our choices there.
Maybe we're living in a failed society if we cannot provide the basic, bare minimum of pregnancy care for women. Like I assume you're the same kind of person that would be equally baffled as to why the fertility rate has been going down and can't connect the two dots. As well as the child mortality rate in the US skyrocketing.
Father of 3 here, first two were home births, the third had complications and ended up being a hospital birth. I was initially skeptical for the same reasons but the first meeting with the midwife convinced me that they were taking every precaution and had the training to deal with whatever might come up.
The majority of births are simple if you let them be and the midwives go to great lengths to make sure the conditions are right for a successful event. In the case of our third we hit some conditions leading up to the delivery date that disqualified us for a home birth so we seamlessly transitioned into the hospital system (where the midwife still delivered the baby)
Home birth is absolutely a rational choice in many cases. The author had a very strong reason to require hospital birth but in scenarios with lower risk it is safer in some respects to avoid the hospital.
It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.
Pain relief is a major reason to go to a hospital. There is no safe way to get pain relief in a home birth. It is obviously a very personal choice.
> if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child
Of course not. This wrong in two important ways. Midwives are medical professionals. They can administer medicine. Most notably they can administer Pitocin to stop hemorrhage after the placenta is delivered. This is the most common cause of maternal death during labor.
The other way this is wrong is it ignores the option of transferring to a hospital in an emergency. Midwives assess medical risk and can make the call to transfer. Delivering mothers who are overwhelmed can also make the call.
> And you actually pay for this?
The midwife model of care has many advantages over common OBGYN practices. As one example midwives are often delivering 2-3 babies a month instead of many every day. As another example the person delivering your baby is someone you have actually met before and have built a rapport with. Some hospitals try to make this happen with doctors but it is commonly not the case.
Overall the tradeoff is worth it to many people -- it's about 1% of births in the US.
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous (though not “unlimited”) limits designed to allow for bursts and spikes of usage.
Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.
We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
A dystopia is where people lie about free rice bowls to get people in the door but can't deliver. That's not nice things its taking advantage of a lie and blaming people who take up the offer.
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
In my experience the SaaS unlimited abusers often aren’t even trying to do capitalism things. They’re just abusing the systems for the thrill of it.
They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing useless things to store files on these services, like a competition. They’re bragging on HN about GitHub tools that force files into a non-file service and have rate limiters tuned to upload right at the server’s rate limit.
It’s not capitalism, it’s people thinking they’re winning points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a product on a small budget.
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
My favorite part about Ocaml is the type checker fwiw. Pretty much as soon as I appease it I'm guaranteed a 'working' program that usually does what I intended.
I suspect the root argument is really against the efficacy of markets and capitalism as a useful system for humanity, in which case I say that is a fair debate. The benefits are hardly obvious today.
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