I really doubt that, trade capital and relationships are what define those houses, not their tech stack. Some of them are already pretty advanced from an in-house development perspective and could compete with the best of commercial-ready in the market trading platforms and data sources.
Yup, I should have worded that a bit more carefully. It would appear to me that they could be rebuilt, but still need the key ingredients of a trading house.
Most exchanges are public companies and they do much more than provide a simple marketplace for investors. Exchanges used to be owned by their customers but many of them “de-mutualized” years ago.
LSEG, ICE, NASDAQ also have major data and software businesses that generate significant revenues.
People can have a variety of different comfort levels with different kinds of risk. You’re suggesting that someone should consider a slightly lower salary + future possible earnings on options as equivalent to slightly lower salary + future possible earning on options - risk of loss on early exercise. Some people work for startups, some are angel investors, there is some overlap but it’s not 1:1 and it’s because those are different types of risk.
It is not the same as sapphire reserve and before times. Even the churning subreddit kind of died not long after. The Amex ones are rewards points, and you have to play a lot of games to get the value. Used to be really simple to get large basically cash or cash equivalent rewards.
> It is not the same as sapphire reserve and before times.
If I'm not wrong, cashing out Chase Ultimate Rewards points wasn't that lucrative until recently, when they introduced Pay Yourself Back — it was 1 cent per point before, and is much higher now for certain categories (groceries, restaurants) with Pay Yourself Back.
> The Amex ones are rewards points, and you have to play a lot of games to get the value.
For US residents, cashing out at 1.1 cents per point would be opening a Charles Schwab brokerage account and the linked Amex Platinum card, then "investing" the points. That doesn't sound too complicated.
(Speaking as a non-US resident playing the game myself: I do have extreme difficulty trying to get good cash value for my points, since Schwab refuses to open a brokerage account for me.)
Chase Ultimate Rewards got heavily nerfed since the Sapphire Reserve release. For the first couple years, you could get 1.5 cents per point for any travel (flight, car rental, hotel), and the price on the chase ultimate reward portal was the same you got via the actual airline or car rental or hotel website (i.e. the cheapest price.)
Then they made it so you had to use ultimate rewards via Expedia, and they bumped up all the prices, so effectively your UR points lost a ton of value. Searching the same flight on Expedia UR website was more expensive that directly going to the airline.
Then I stopped following because I had already canceled all my UR cards, but I assume they downgraded it even further because I heard they raised fees and substituted some benefits with door dash or lyft credits or something.
> For US residents, cashing out at 1.1 cents per point would be opening a Charles Schwab brokerage account and the linked Amex Platinum card, then "investing" the points. That doesn't sound too complicated.
I did not know this, but that seems okay. However, I have experience with AmEx being strict on people who constantly open cards for sign up bonuses.
Have you read up about the world of commodity trading at all? I imagine you’d be interested in the book The World for Sale if you haven’t already read it. Interesting combination of market structure, fraud and geopolitics.
I partially disagree. Assuming you are majoring in something that has some positive ROI and do enough to actually graduate, which isn’t hard at most colleges, the party experience can be very supportive of most people’s future careers.
The social skills, networks, and alumni connections you build at college are a large fraction of the benefit that college gives the average person to further their career.
Otherwise, I agree. College is a great time to take advantage of the time you have to change your network, generate new ideas and take risks. And I also agree that most there can be benefit (though highly unlikely) for some people to not attend college or to drop out.
I find it really funny how we talking about socialization like it's just for really young kids when we all have experience dealing with adults that never learned the skills.
College is expensive socialization to be sure, so make sure to go for other reasons as well -- but if you aren't going to parties, making friends, and doing stupid shit then you're missing out on part of the real tangible value provided by colleges which is community. (And to be clear this is something totally separate from professional networking.)
I have been in IT for 25 years. If the gang at work was going to a bar after work, I would go - just to enjoy myself, giving no thought to it furthering my career and so forth.
Despite going for purely to enjoy myself and giving no thought to work or my career, I would say an hour I've spent in a bar with my co-workers almost always does more for my career than spending twenty hours over a weekend getting some pull request finished so my product manager can check it off their list. I've found out information about my workplace that I really needed to know. Once it probably saved me from getting axed during a layoff once since I didn't interact much with outside the bar with the manager who put in a good word for me when they were cutting people.
Not it wouldn't, much as engineers might think it so. Sales is not purely technical, it is an emotional process. If the seller can convince the buyer to buy, they generate a lot more income than having people go through sticker shock. One of the first things they teach you in sales is to focus on the benefits of how the product will make the user's life better, and use that to anchor the price.
Also, the "contact us" pricing pages are not for regular people, they are for VPs or executives to go through. That it filters out regular people is a feature, not a bug.
It's human nature to make emotional decisions, not necessarily logical ones. I'm not sure how one would rethink the system rather than using it to our advantage.
Robert Bork had already been Nixon's acting-Attorney General at that point. He became acting AG when AG Elliot Richardson refused Nixon's order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and instead resigned. Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus also then refused to fire Cox and resigned. Bork then became acting AG but he did not refuse to fire Cox.
Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.
Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.
Well there was the whole Blockbuster rental history thing during his confirmation but that’s more like fun/interesting pub-trivia than anything necessarily “brilliant”.
It's quite silly and not the greatest look for the country. I mean, to some people it is the greatest look -- the DEI story and the heroic "brilliant youth" narrative.
But appointing someone so inexperienced to such a high office is not something you do you if you are serious about governing.
Since when are 32-year-olds "so inexperienced"? Maybe she's got different experience from prior appointees but 10+ years of high quality experience is IMO, more than enough. Most people are at the top of their game at that age.
I get where you're coming from, "so inexperienced" is probably overstating it. But she's been out of law school for four years, and I feel like saying most folks are at their best then discounts all the experience and learning that come from working another 30 years in the field (for, say, a 62-year old).
4 years out of law school is what I was referencing.
I stand by my phrasing. She had (presuming usual timelines) 3 years of work between undergrad and law school. She went from law school student to law school associate professor (on the strength of her viral rewview article).
She has 0 non-academic work experience and will now be regulating entire industries.
Most people are at the top of their game at 31? Uh, no. No. Maybe in startup lala land, but in this kind of role, 31 is "learning the ropes" territory.
What? The whole point of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" is that we should abandon the "consumer welfare" standard. Meaning that we should gut Amazon even though it provides enormous benefits to consumers in the form of low prices. Lina Khan may represent the interests of Amazon's competitors, but she certainly doesn't represent the interests of consumers.
The problem with the "consumer welfare" standard is that it traditionally only considers a single variable: Cost. But consumer welfare can and should extend beyond that. But if you try to get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks. Google abuses people's privacy, eliminates competitors, kills off services people rely on, provides literally no customer service... but because their core services are "free", the consumer welfare standard is often considered inadequate to deal with an absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company.
And what's really crazy is: Competition tends to force companies to compete on treating consumers well. Protecting competing businesses protects consumer welfare pretty darn well, and it provides room for innovation which stagnates when a single company dominates a field.
> get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks
That's true of many non-monopolies too. And Amazon is widely known to have pretty good service. Conversely, no cellular company has ever had a monopoly in the US but a number of them are famed for poor customer service.
I can call Verizon or Comcast right now and get someone on the line in minutes. Usually they can solve my problem too. Get Google on the phone though. (Amazon actually does deserve credit here, their customer service isn't the worst, by any means. But they have a litany of other issues, like a work environment where people have to pee in bottles to make quotas...)
I'm not sure there are any companies where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support. Do you happen to know of an example? I never had any trouble getting support from Google when I was a Fi customer. On the other hand, I'll bet I couldn't get support for web search over the phone for love nor money. Similarly, I doubt I can call up Facebook or Twitter's customer support lines, although perhaps I am wrong.
> where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support
They're still getting paid for your services. If my ad attention is equal to dollars, why don't I also get customer service for it?
I'd argue the idea that you shouldn't pay for services, and that you shouldn't expect to get customer support, are both examples of failures of the current antitrust regime.
Phone support is, unfortunately, a hard to find commodity anywhere in tech these days. Generally I have only selected web hosts and domain registrars that have 24/7, US-based customer service. I used to have a few options, now there's very few. :/ You're lucky if they have a ticket system they respond to in less than a day.
Even Metro has quick 24/7 phone support. Which, given the sad state of their online self-service options, has been the only thing that's kept me with them as long as I have.
To add onto that, if we manufactured more here, it might raise the price of goods, but if those goods are of higher quality and they last longer it might be better for the consumer in the long run. You might even extend this to looking at the environmental wins of having better wuality products that stay out of the landfill.
Absolutely agreed. Additionally, the more we manufacture here, the more competitive with overseas we eventually become. We'll never reach price equality, because we have labor standards, but we can get closer than people imagine today.
Indeed. In my ideal world, the United States would set expectations on labor and environment that a foreign company needs to meet for their products to be imported to the United States.
We can't tell other countries how to operate, but we can set a bar for who we do business with, and we have the market power to encourage foreign entities to meet those standards.
Amnesty International disagrees. (I think it would be off-topic here to give a lengthy account of Google's human rights abuses, the way they harm women and minorities, and the money they invest in politicians which are also very detrimental to society, with sources, but suffice to say, my description of them is, at least, a defensible position.)
My read is that people are seeking a means to an end. Means: whatever she’s writing. End: reducing Amazon’s scope of business.
If you’re being intellectually honest, the source of low prices is Chinese outsourced labor, not monopolies. Amazon could vanish tomorrow, and shit will still be cheap.
Amazon has many retail competitors. Maybe they have pricing power in AWS, but otherwise, I do not see evidence of them having control of the retail goods market.
Even for AWS, they have Microsoft and Google as competitors and a few other companies too.
Amazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.
And those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website?
We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart.
The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help.
The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.
They can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.
And how is that comparable with an appointment to the number one top position in the authority over thousands of regulations governing thousands of companies etc.
Also I think i's safe to assume you don't just "get appointed" to the lead team in SpaceX you need to actually "show" that you have what it takes.
I'm not saying she won't be good, I'm just asking how can we trust?
Yes, she wrote a virally-popular law school review article in 2017. It aligned with a ton of political interests, which no doubt helped buoy it as high as went.
She then got invited to do some fellowships, advisory roles, etc... while stepping from law student to associate law school prof. None of that exposes you to the inner workings of industry.
Surely, she's a very smart and capable person. But there's a lot you don't learn in academic settings.
Regulating trillions of dollars worth of industry with only a theoretical understanding of the market, acquired only from a regulatory perspective, does not inspire confidence.
At least she's not on the backend of her mental stamina. +1 for being hungry. Unlike congress, who today ignored the homeless ( or pick your) crises to make Juneteenth an official holiday. I'd like to see a lot of under 40 year olds governing if that is the result of "experience".
This already happens in some places. For example, in Houston, HOAs and other neighborhood management districts will contract with Constables to have a dedicated deputy in their neighborhood with a separate contact number. Others will contract with armed private security to patrol their neighborhoods as well.
Also, this is how people use the police already. They call them when they are annoyed with their neighbors, the infamous woman in Central Park that was covered heavily in the news this year comes to mind.
Imagine thieves calling different private forces to confront "fake" security guards. Like that guy who asked construction workers from craiglist to meet with him next to the bank, but now with guns involved.
