Based on the wikipedia article it looks like Jacob Schiff funded the Russian Revolution because he was Jewish, and disliked the anti-Semitism of the Tzarist regime. As the article discusses, he funded the Japanese side in the Russo-Japanese war for the same reason.
Given this I don't think it makes sense to say that the Russian Revolution was funded by "Wall St." but rather that it was supported by a wealthy Jewish American who opposed the Tzarist regime.
The entire Schiff connection is bogus, and you'll see that the sites that talk about him tend to be one click away from outright anti-semitic conspiracy pages.
The topic of American capitalists running huge factories in the USSR in the 20's is absolutely fascinating, and I'm glad you linked to it here. But it is entirely separate from what the parent comment is trying to say.
With respect to financing the Bolsheviks, I don't dispute that Americans did it. My issue is with the insinuation that Wall Street Jews were the puppetmasters, which is where this stuff leads.
Nobody did more to help the Bolshevik cause than Germany, by allowing Lenin to cross their territory in a sealed train during a world war. The rest was luck, ruthlessness, and quickly broken promises.
I don't see what it is in my comment that you disagree with.
I was only pointing out that Schiff funded the Bolsheviks because of his political views that were related to bring an American Jew. And there seems to be plenty of evidence in the Wikipedia article for that asking.
I never made the claim that Schiff was particularly important. Can you point to something specifically in my post that if incorrect?
wait so why did you reply to my comment instead of just to the original comment? Is there something wrong with me addressing inaccuracies in the portrayal of Schiff's role, even if I don't address the aspects that interest you?
As Jennings Wise (a legitimate historian from the '30s, his Wilson biography is quite good) said: "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."
The Germans were not exactly in a position to promote the Bolshevik cause in 1919 (eg, at the proposed Prinkipo conference). Or in point 6 of the Fourteen Points.
The top thread above is giving the Soviet (and American) party-line interpretation of the American "anti-Bolshevik" intervention in the Russian Civil War. Actually if you read enough primary docs (for instance, the memoir of Graves, who commanded the Siberian force) it quickly becomes clear that the actual goal of the policy was to sandbag the Whites (and, in Siberia, also the Japanese). The American forces involved are all full of bureaucratic duplicity and all swear up, down, left and sideways that they're enemies of godless Bolshevism. And some of them actually are.
"this stuff leads" -- sure. And reading the NYT leads to Castro-worship, "hands up, don't shoot," Haven Monahan, and other fake news of a sinister persuasion. If you let it.
Wise's Wilson book is quite good. It was written in 1937. The only people who care about it today are anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. So what? Who cares? They will all die, and the book will still be there. It's a book.
The problem with the comparison is that the left also has blood on its hands. The self righteous zealotry of the progressive movement is as comparable to China's cultural revolution, as Trump's populist appeal to Whites is to fascism. That is, there are real parallels and real concerns on both sides. We can't just act like the only danger comes from the political right.
It's hilarious that the one thing that is consistently down voted on hn is economic orthodoxy.
This is absolutely no different to the anti vaccination movement.
People are simply too lazy and arrogant to listen to what the economics profession has to say, and ignore that fact that the methods, organization and incentives of the economics profession are identical to the rest of academicia.
Which side of economics, the "freshwater" or "saltwater" side? There isn't the kind of consensus in economics that there is in, say, climate change. And economics is much more susceptible to funding-based distortion.
Both freshwater and saltwater would agree with the comment I replied to. freshwater and saltwater econ differ in their approach to macro models. Both sides broadly agree on general equilibrium theory as kind of first order approximation, and the post was a summary of general equilibrium theory.
Which side do you think would disagree or are you just trying to bluff me out with technical terms you don't fully understand?
As to funding, can you point to major sources of funding for academic econ research that would introduce bias?
This is an interesting question, but don't forget to also ask "how much would they make if they weren't working for Uber?"
Same goes for Walmart. If you've been to Walmart and Starbucks it's pretty clear that most Walmart workers would never be able to get a job at Starbucks.
You are interpreting "all lives matter" to mean this.
It could also mean that black people are not especially target by the police and that outrage at law enforcement is misplaced. For example we know that the rates of police violence against black people vs white people roughly mirrors arrest and conviction rates.
Now you might consider this incorrect, but I think it's a debate that has to be had in the open and not shut down by calling people racist.
Yes there is. The actual tweet, verbatim was "will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting atrandom white people or no...[two eyes emoji]". Scroll down in the thread to see it.
This is exactly the kind of misinformation bubble that people are talking about. Kevin Allred is clearly misrepresenting his original tweet.
I agree misinformation/misrepresentation is a problem. Do you think this misinformation bubble is happening more on one side or the other, or is more evenly split?
I think the left tends to deal in half truths or highly questionable interpretations of facts passed off as facts, while the right deals more in outright lies.
But the left has the ability to get you fired if you question their assertions too much. So their falsehoods are actually more effective
It'd be interesting to dig in and see what the distribution of methods is. There should be enough out there on line now, if someone wanted to take it on.
Then again, who'd believe the results? :) Who fact checks the fact checkers?
"But the left has the ability to get you fired if you question their assertions too much."
Sure, I will give an example. Most people on the left believe that black Americans commit more crime per capita then whites, and that this is due to various sociostructural phenomena. However another common viewpoint is that the gap in conviction rates is actually due to a biased justice system and blacks do not actually commit more crime.
The latter view is rarely argued in academic circles so I've never seen it rigorously defended. But it is passed off as fact to the general public.
Now I am not able to correct this later group because if I do so, not only will they attack me as racist, but the former group will not defend me. In fact the former group will say "the only reason you would present this fact in isolation is because you want to imply black people are genetically inclined to crime". This would most likely result in disciplinary action in my workplace.
Thanks for the response. What I was hoping to see was some support based on some broad, non-anecdotal, cross-domain research that showed that the left (by some definition) exerts statistically more power in actually firing people for ideological reasons. Please don't take that as a criticism. I'm not looking to score points. I suspect this kind of research is hard to do in a convincing manner.
What would be cool is using the windscreen for an AR display, with glasses for both head tracking and for stereoscopic display.
I guess it would be expensive, probably too expensive for Uber drivers. Maybe it could still be used in luxury vehicles while full autonomous operation is in the works.
While not AR, Mazda is moving in that direction with their HUD. They display speed, directions from the NAV and speed limit from sign recognition. All on the screen in the CX-9 (or is it 7?) and a little popup display in the 6.
After playing Holopoint for 30 minutes, I felt a sense of elation and heightened perception. I felt like I could type faster, and my reaction times were faster. It reminded me of Lawnmower Man.
I didn't get this effect with less intense games like Space Pirate Trainer.
>If you want to make something cool, don’t give it to geeks first.
Does anyone else get really tired of stuff like this? Why is it that every possible difference is celebrated except within liberal circles, with the exception that nerds are considered objectively bad. In fact the article comes across as body shaming.
I think you are confusing "liberal" and "mass consumer marketing"; in the latter, which is the issue here, focusing appeal on the interest of any isolated niche that isn't representative of the actual target market (nerds certainly qualify, but aren't the only niche with this problem) is objectively bad, in that it is manifestly harmful to the concrete objective.
"othering" of nerds isn't restricted to liberals but it is especially hypocritical when they do it. Also liberals are predisposed to "other" nerds because they have chosen nerds to be the symbol of unaware privilege and crude libertarianism so in their thinking nerds deserve no sympathy.
I am somewhat amused by this because I've been a liberal and nerd my whole life, participated extensively in liberal activist circles, and never once encountered this among liberals (the closest to this I've seen would be some segments of the community's reaction to perceived ivory tower intellectuals that are distant from pragmatics, but even that isn't so much an othering as a sometimes white-hot debate about priorities and tactics within the movement.)
Even as a liberal I think there's actually something to this idea. You can see it with things like the financial transaction tax proposals that are clearly meant to hurt nerdy HFTs rather than affect banks. I think part of it is that nerdy HFTs aren't eloquent enough to explain what they're doing and how it benefits the world.
So first, why it's important for me that we're able to trade continuously. Suppose I'm an HFT who trades the S&P 500 ETF. I put out a buy order at 217.75 and a sell order at 217.76.
If a trader comes in an buys the ETF from me at 217.76 then I need to be able to hedge immediately in other products. Without continuous trading I would need to quote wider.
Second, HFTs make less money per dollar traded than the people who used to do this. In a sense, HFTs "won" because they were willing to do this cheaper than anyone else.
This is different from investment banking, where it's my impression that they get paid these huge fees because CEOs hire their friends and pay them with shareholders' money.
Probably keep in mind that the nominal value of the stocks changing hands on a given day is hundreds of billions of dollars and that an actively trading counterparty is facilitating the movement of that money. What's fair compensation for that?
How did markets function prior to HFT? They're only facilitating exchange between other algorithms, right? And in that case how is it helpful to the market?
Note I'm actually asking these questions - not just being rhetorical. The whole concept of it seems plainly ridiculous to me but I don't know much about this area.
You had 10 very tall loud guys in brightly colored jackets yelling at each other in a pit. Mentally they were running the same algorithms as HFTs, just slower.
Later on you had some fast fingered guys watching charts and mentally running the same algorithms as guys in the pit, just a bit faster.
Except the people were exploiting inefficiencies in markets (and still do today). HFT algorithms exploit inefficiencies in servers, ISPs, fiber optic cable, a competing algorithm's implementation, etc.
And the tall loud guys exploited inefficiencies in trading pits and human perception. Ask yourself why I explicitly described them as "tall loud guys in brightly colored jackets"? Those are not irrelevant details.
HFTs do the exact same thing that pit traders did. They just do it faster and cheaper.
And if you really think they don't provide a useful service, you can very easily NOT buy their services - just change one flag in FIX. The question to ask yourself is why everyone chooses to trade with them.
Those things can't be meaningfully separated from the market.
Exploiting inefficiencies in a competing algorithm is the same type of thing as exploiting inefficiencies in the mental model of the guy standing next to you. Taking advantage of better market proximity is the same type of thing as drinking less than the other guys in the pit.
If you presuppose that the purpose of trading is to make money in and of itself then sure. Of course the real (original?) purpose is more tightly coupled to reality and to real goods exchanging hands. There seems to be a fundamental difference between profiting from the exchange and profiting from the mechanism of exchange.
I'm not asking for how we ended up here. I get that faster = better and 1ms faster is still 1ms better. What I'm asking is what value it brings to the world — specifically the world outside of, historically, the pit, and today, outside of the computers executing trades.
Are goods more accurately priced? Is there more liquidity in the market? Is the market more stable? Is the market more efficient, or is it only the technical implementation of the market that's made more efficient by these? Do these benefits, if they're present, outweigh the cost of things like flash crashes caused by algorithms? If flash crashes hurt all of us, then shouldn't we all be benefited by the algorithms when they're doing well? Do we benefit and by how much?
This is why people want "nerdy HFTs" to be taxed in a special way. Maybe it's because they can't articulate the value or maybe it's because there is no value. I can't see the difference and I can't get anything other than evasive comparisons when I ask what the difference is.
Borrowing a point from tptacek, Vanguard has come out and said that they have lower costs due to HFT. Their customers save money over the previous providers of liquidity.
Awesome, I appreciate the link. It's still not totally clear to me how/why this helps Vanguard, or whether the pros outweigh the cons for the market as a whole, but this is in fact the type of evidence that I've been asking for. Thank you for sharing!
It helps Vanguard because they don't make money through active trading: they are literally the vanguard of the movement, now practically accepted as orthodoxy, that funds should be passive and diversified across the whole market.
If you buy and hold, HFT helps you, by reducing the cost of execution --- both by reducing the spread, which is a tax you pay any time you place a market order, and by literally reducing trading fees. In fact, even if you're an active trader, HFT usually helps you: the only people truly harmed by HFT are the ones who tried to make a living selling liquidity before, who are now being outcompeted.
I think viewing the HFT tax propoals as being motivated by anti-nerd rather than a out accumulation of wealth that is perceived to be at the expense of people like the tax supporter where the tax supporter fails to see the social utility of the function producing the accumulation of wealth is, well, a significant case of seeing what you want to see rather than what is actually there.
Go read Flash Boys. It's almost literally "Revenge of the Jocks". You have a jock (Katsuyama) who is naively bro-ing down and schmoozing clients while selling button pushing services to them.
Suddenly some evil nerds come along and use computers to "pick him off"! ("Pick off" is a wonderful phrase Michael Lewis uses but never defines, but it somehow involves computers doing evil things.)
Finally, at the end, Katsuyama builds a new exchange with no nerds allowed.
I was planning on reading Flash Boys at some point but if this is your overall description of the book my enthusiasm has been tempered.
Have you read, and if so, would you recommend I read Flash Boys: Not So Fast by Peter Kovac for a more balanced/informed perspective on the subject? Should I read both? Keep in mind my knowledge of HFT is extremely limited.
I have not read "Flash Boys: Not So Fast", so I can't comment on it. I do however recommend completely skipping Flash Boys - it provides almost no new information and a lot of FUD.
If you want an introduction to HFT, I'll shamelessly plug my blog posts which describe the basic mechanics of it:
I appreciate your response. I'm familiar with your blog but I haven't set a time aside to review your posts on HFT. I will certainly do so now. Thanks for linking me the relevant posts.
I was thinking more of outside support for the proposal. Pretty obviously, the inside-the-industry support is just supporting burdens imposed selectively on competing business models, which is common independent of nerd/jock associations.
It's almost enough to make you question whether "acceptance" as politic was actually about acceptance, or using the language of something agreeable to push a slightly different goal.
I say "almost" glibly, a refusal to see the machinery at work is how political movements lie to themselves.
Observe that those who say they want "acceptance", when they get it, complain about being "erased" or their thing "selling out". That has been a common refrain since at least the 60s... and it is even more common today.
Given this I don't think it makes sense to say that the Russian Revolution was funded by "Wall St." but rather that it was supported by a wealthy Jewish American who opposed the Tzarist regime.