Haunting. Probably why I'm terrified of weakness: the abuse of the 'lower' class is supported at a collective unconscious level. "At least it's not me..."
Funding science with taxes raised by income tax is socialist for me. Economic theory shows that income tax is the least distortionary kind of tax,
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
>relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss
On what basis are you making this claim? Since you are familiar with the term deadweight loss, you must be familiar with the economic theory associated with taxation, and therefore the standard claim that the least distortionary tax is income tax. Taxes other than income tax are usually justified in terms of negative externalities.
>we bullied them in school with no come back and they are crap a lobbying as a group so lets go to town on techies.
This motivation is not sufficiently acknowledged on HN. I think people are afraid to face up to this fact. A lot of what feminists say about rape culture is true, and similar observations apply to nerds. Our culture trivializes physical and sexual (wedgies) assault on nerds. It is only natural that this same culture put on a front of false outrage when some nerds earn a good living.
The main point of the article: that all stock prices are artificial, and so there is no such thing as market manipulation, is wrong.
Stock prices reflect the expected future dividends of a stock given current information. If a person intentionally gives wrong or misleading information to the public, and this results in shift in the stock price, then this could be market manipulation.
The author is correct in stating that it is hard to distinguish a person giving their honest opinion about a stock they own, and market manipulation. However, that doesn't mean that the concept of market manipulation is ill-defined.
I have a PhD in economics, and I was initially convinced by these arguments, but the are actually misleading.
If I have inside information, and there is a market with 1000 people, and I make $100 by doing insider trading, that money must come from the pockets of those 1000 people. This follows from the fact that the stock market is (for these purposes) a zero sum game.
The error in your argument is that (1) is false. You say "you just call your broker and ask to buy at the market price". But if every market participant was like that, then the order books wouldn't match and the market would break down. There must be some participants who are price elastic. And these are precisely the people whose decisions are effected on the margin, that is, the people who you cause to buy/sell when you engage in insider trading.
So when I buy shares with inside information (say I know the price will rise), I cause the price to rise by a tiny amount, and induce some people to sell who wouldn't have. Since these people wouldn't otherwise have sold, they lose money from my actions.
It is true that insider trading provides information to the market place, and so it is beneficial in that sense. However, it also creates asymmetric information and so harms liquidity. While there is always asymmetric information (I own stocks through my 401k, but I have no idea what MSFT should be worth), insider information is an especially extreme kind, and therefore especially harmful to liquidity.
What do you imagine this would have been? What would a "fair" reaction of the protestors have been?
The poster wasn't 'using' the protests, they were using a public park. It is hypocrisy of this movement to take over a public space and claim it for their own exclusive use, while not acknowledging that the fact that the police let them get away with this is a sign of their own privilege.
