my experience of trading and speculation has been the opposite. very little profit (or zero or negative profit) in return for an extraordinary amount of effort and expertise. see Acura/Honda NSX trading.
it's not complicated. suppose Bob wants to buy an Acura NSX and Kazuo wants to sell a Honda NSX. enter trader Joe. he knows Bob, and he knows Kazuo, and he knows that the Honda NSX was also marketed as the Acura NSX. trader Joe can buy the car from Kazuo, obtain an export license, arrange for shipping and tax duties, and sell the car to Bob for a profit. that is called trading.
you're thinking of "speculation." one could argue that the market needs speculators to take the risks that hedgers want to reduce. speculators might also find interesting information and improve the efficiency of market prices. traders intermediate between speculators and hedgers.
> send one or two people into the boonies ... there was the small (vanishngly small?) possibility of a good payout
This was called "wild catting." It gave people an excuse to carry TNT dynamite into the boonies and detonate explosives for fun (like fireworks for grown ups).
Oh wow, I read this story as evidence that neural nets are not the future back when I was an undergrad studying machine learning. Maybe I should have followed my instincts back then because even then neural nets seemed intuitively very interesting even if the statistics and math professors hated them because they weren't derived from any first principals.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Lying to the court is a routine part of litigation, and there is no penalty or sanction for it - especially not against the lawyers themselves.
> Males have dominated all power structures in every society in the history of humankind
> Why are men doing this to themselves?
What you are doing here is using a tiny substrata of hyper-successful men (those who "dominated power structures" as you put it) and using that to represent the entire structure of Western society. There is nothing about that that is vaguely appropriate.
> For admission to Chief, a women’s leadership network, members pay up to $7,900. That gets them executive coaching, big-name speaker sessions, a Rolodex of female executives and, for an extra cost, access to five sleek clubhouses. Chief is essentially an “old boys’ club” — for the ladies. The venture capital-backed company has grown to over 20,000 members and over $1 billion in value since it started in 2019.
So ... can we have the "old boys' clubs" back now, for the other half of the species? Somehow I don't think so.
That is a LOT of words dedicated to something that the author thinks is "ridiculous." People like this never pause to ask why they spend so much time thinking about things that they say are ridiculous fictions. I can say this because I used to be a radical materialist evangelist myself. Thankfully I grew out of that and settled into a comfortable agnosticism which I find much less exhausting.
TLDR: Lobbyists are going to use AI to ply their nefarious trade more effectively. In order to stop them, Congress needs to stop passing "monolithic, multi-thousand-page omnibus bills voted on under deadline" and instead a bill should focus on individual area and undergo through a debate and deliberation process, and we need more transparency over the activities of lobbyists. I can see how the AI part might happen, sadly the rest doesn't seem realistic at all.
They're being generous by saying it was merely a lack of competence. If they were in another mood, they could say that their aircraft was deliberately attacked in an act of war.
> Moody's was threatening to downgrade them, and they were forced to ac
Ah I was missing that part of the story. It turns out that SVB hired Goldman Sachs to advise them on this crazy plan and all to turn a 2 notch downgrade by Moody's into a 1 notch downgrade. Supposedly they were so rushed by Moody's that they couldn't even close the equity raise before announcing it (which is batshit crazy for a company with a public stock price to do while trying to avoid a credit downgrade). I'm not sure why SVB was surprised and caught off guard by Moody's - shouldn't they have been in communication with Moody's all along the way? Not sure what to think about Goldman's involvement, are they incompetent too?
But of all this just makes me agree even more with the employee quoted in the article. If you are facing these kinds of problems as a bank CEO, get on a plane to the Middle East and get a Sovereign Wealth Fund to close your funding gap, instead of publicly announcing that you'll raise equity just to satisfy a Moody's rating analyst. Because, as we now know, your stock will crater, your new equity investor will walk away, and your customers will start a run on your bank, and by Monday you will have lost your shirt.
Can anyone explain how this is even possible? It's 2025.