Rules are decided by each state on its own. You can blame the constitution for deferring election procedures to each state.
In PA, for example, the legislature (which is GOP I might add) forbid counting mail-in ballots until election day. That basically guarantees delays.
Have you been around for Gore vs Bush? I'm not sure why you're claiming this is one of the worst elections. Most close elections aren't called on election day. Almost every state continues counting past election day. It's just you're only hearing about the ones that are close.
Each state's legislature decides that, so naturally states will differ on deadlines for when mail can arrive. Also, the count dragging on is because counting hasn't finished on the sheer quantity of mail-in ballots received before election day, not after (which are insignificant in number).
Because while matter cannot move faster than the speed of light the universe itself is allowed to expand faster than the speed of light. Think of the spacetime fabric stretching so fast light cannot cover the increased distance. The universe is essentially creating more distance between objects.
Another way to think of it is velocity of an object is derivative of position in space over time. If space itself is moving your position relative to it isn't changing.
I still can't intuitively understand this. If two objects ar stationary relative to each other, the expansion implies that at some point, the distance between those two objects will increase (without either of those objects having moved).
So space is being somehow created?! What if i have a large object, will the length of that object increase? Or will it break up?
The object is bound together by electromagnetic forces, and the local group is bound together by gravity. These forces are much stronger than the expansion of the universe (cosmological constant), but the expansion of the universe manifests as a tiny tiny outward pressure term (too small for us to detect). It makes every atom/orbit a little bigger by changing the equilibrium point, but they don't to grow in size because the force isn't increasing.
If the cosmological constant were much larger than it is, atoms would have never formed at all.
I think you are using a concept of space-time that is quite limited. You are at most using concepts from Einstein's Special Relativity. Everything changed with General Relativity.
Space is not "created", space-time is warped. Gravity is the deformation of space-time by mass/energy. The distance from point A to point B is measured by the time it takes for a light ray to get from A to B using the shortest path. But if you move objects with mass (or with energy) near A and B, the shortest path will change. Also, it's easy to measure distance in seconds when you know the speed of light.
If I understand this correctly, you're talking about something similar to Star Trek's Warp Drive (or the Alcubierre drive, for something less fictional). Instead of stars and galaxies moving at the speed of light, the space around them expands and the expansion accelerates at a rate that will eventually make the speed of expansion larger than the speed of light. Or in other words, stars and galaxies will continue to move at their sub-luminar speed, but the space in which they exist will expand so fast that the expansion will cause the distance between them to increase at such a rate that light will not be able to keep up.
[Edit: and, er, all that has something to do with dark energy?]
OK, but in that case, and if we still exist as a technological civilisation at that time (very doubtful) we might be able to use the effect for our own benefit. By building warp drives and er, not-quite-travelling faster than light, by expanding space around a ship, etc.
So if I invest in Facebook now, I'm helping them by making it easier for them to raise money several years ago? In some kind of weird acausal way, because people then anticipated my actions now?
> In some kind of weird acausal way, because people then anticipated my actions now?
They didn't anticipate _your individual_ actions, but it's highly likely that the persons that bought into Facebook's IPO did expect that they would be able to sell the stock to _someone_ at a later date.
So, yes, people anticipated your actions now (if you look at _your_ actions as the general actions of the crowd, instead of your individual actions)
If you invest in a stock with the intention of selling it later, rather than holding it forever to earn the dividends, your decision was motivated by the expectation that there will be a market for it in the future.
By buying Facebook stock now, you're fulfilling that expectation of earlier investors, which motivated them to provide Facebook's initial funds.
I haven't read the documentation, but I can respond to your questions given what you quoted.
1) It seems that way. Presumably, they will require affiliates to follow stricter rules. Even so, you would expect that these affiliates would try their hardest to take advantage of their speed advantage.
2) Pegged orders are essentially orders that the exchange manages for you. For example, if you peg an order at the inside bid, your order will follow the market as it moves around. Essentially, these orders will react with close to zero latency since the exchange itself is modifying them. It's unclear how these orders will be used to game the market, since their logic is so simple and predefined by the exchange.
In terms of time frame, it's just the evolution of technology. For example, processors are clocked in nanoseconds. When your limiting reagent is how quickly you can update based on changes in the world, you need lower latencies. That's one of the aspects of the system that IEX tries to solve, by adding a giant delay to everyone's orders, so that the jitter swallows any small advantage.
One of the concerns of changing the rules, however, is that once smart people start using the system, they will eventually find some new way to game it, landing us not far from where we started.
You're overestimating the effectiveness of computers in taking in data and finding patterns. If you throw data naively at an algorithm, you'll get garbage. It's especially difficult to make sense out of trading data because of the sheer size and percentage of noise.
For any given trading strategy, a ton of thought, testing, and domain knowledge goes into creating the algorithm. It is not a black box that writes itself.
That said, computers are far more effective at certain tasks, especially latency sensitive simple calculations, just as calculators are far better at doing arithmetic.
Because whether the spin is up or down when you observe it is completely random. Both observers at either end would believe they looked at it first without any other information, and the stream of bits would be completely random AND 100% correlated with other.
Ok, so you will always have perfect correlation and since you spun the polarizer after the photons started moving that implies spooky action at a distance.
One aspect of inflation is that it is a tax on people who choose to hoard their money. Because inflation naturally makes every dollar worth less and less over time, you are forced to either spend it now or invest it somewhere that grows with inflation. As a result, money is actually utilized instead of sitting in a bank account.
Thus, I think the idea that a dollar saved today can buy roughly the same amount of stuff in a decade is actually bad, because in a world where that's likely, that dollar was probably sitting useless in someone's purse for a decade.
Inflation, in my opinion, actually does the opposite of what you suggest -- because it encourages lending and investing in order to beat inflation, money is actually put to use for longer term projects such as infrastructure that can last years and years.
As a result, money is actually utilized instead of sitting in a bank account.
Because we all know banks put all the currency they receive in huge vaults filled with paper $100 bills, instead of, oh, lending it out (several times over one way or another).
Unless you're converting it all to gold, or stuffing it under a mattress, your savings are in institutions like banks which are not a sink where the velocity of your money goes to zero, outside of economic messes where they aren't willing to lend, or people are afraid to borrow. And your being encouraged to spend your money doesn't seem to help those situations.
A piggy bank would have been a better example. Anyway, it's not an argument against inflation: the reason putting your money in a bank account is a good idea today is (among other things) because they do invest it to stave off inflation. So inflation doesn't preclude saving (as in savings accounts), it just makes sure you save in better ways, like storing it in a bank that does lending.
If you are earning less than a percent, you are probably paying for liquidity.
Inflation is currently bouncing between around 1.6% and 2% (but mostly towards the 1.6%). A 3 year CD at a decent bank is currently paying around 1.6%; a 5 year CD is paying around 2%. So if you're willing to commit to a 5 year deposit, you will probably beat inflation and realize a small, real return. Even an interesting-bearing checking account (with a sufficient balance...) pays close to 1.6%.
Granted, it's not the glorious 5%+ returns of yesteryear, but then, we're in a savings glut.
> Granted, it's not the glorious 5%+ returns of yesteryear, but then, we're in a savings glut.
That's a nonsensical statement when the central bank is fully in control of the money supply, and thus, the interest rate.
That's like saying "well my computer has a billion copies of funny cat gifs on it, so there's a funny cat gif glut". It doesn't make any sense. You control how many copies of funny cat gifs are on your computer. If there are too many, it's because you made too many copies. If there are two few, it's because you made too few. Pretending that market action had anything to do with something that you are ultimately in control of makes zero sense.
The interest rate is low (or zero) because the central bank decided it should be, not because all the people in the world collectively don't have any real preference for a dollar today versus a dollar tomorrow.
I don't see how you can just assert that they're similar but not the same, without any supporting argument, and expect me to accept it.
The interest rate is supposed to be the price of money. There's going to be a bid/ask spread on that because of the cost of accepting money and bundling it together, along with the cost of keeping up with the book-keeping and various other things that are costs for loans. So the rate you get paid in interest should always be less than the rate that you pay in interest. This I understand.
But if the interest rate is low, then the interest rate is low. The interest rate is determined by the aggregate supply and demand for money. If there is a lot of supply, relative to demand, then the interest rate is low. If there is a lot of demand relative to supply, then the rate is high. And given that people have a nearly infinite desire for money today versus in the future, the rate is really determined by the supply.
The Fed is in control of the supply by creating or destroying money as needed. That means that they fully and truly do set the rate, because they can do literally whatever is needed to move the needle.
The idea that everyone's individual actions to save is somehow what created the tremendous amount of expansion in the money supply (and thus the very low interest rate) is utter nonsense. The Fed created a lot of extra money which expanded the supply of loans, thus pushing down the rate.
Amplifying, the bank is also spending money to service your account. There's also the issue of how much your money is worth to the bank: demand deposits where it can all be withdrawn without notice are worth less than forms which lock it up for a while.
> Because we all know banks put all the currency they receive in huge vaults filled with paper $100 bills, instead of, oh, lending it out (several times over one way or another).
Right?! Every bank vault is just huge piles of gold bars and ornery old men counting and recounting the money, hoarding it up and never loaning it out.
So everyone should live paycheck to paycheck and thus keep money circulating in the economy more rather than "hoarded" in checking accounts to absorb shocks like big car repair bills and stuff like that?
I think the idea that a dollar today buys just as much in a decade IN NO WAY precludes people from investing their money to earn a return. It just eliminates the stupidity tax that some people pay for not understanding how things work.
In a non-inflationary environment nearly all people would still invest their money and put it to work. It's just that they wouldn't be taxed for not doing so.
Inflation doesn't encourage lending, it encourages borrowing. It's smart to pay back with dollars that are worth not as much as the dollars you borrow. Inflation actually discourages lending because you now have to find borrowers who can pay you back higher than the interest rate.
Of course, all this is predicated on a real market in interest rates which we don't have in the US because the Fed sets the rate through various means.
You don't need more than a year's buffer in a checking account, and target inflation is insignificant at the timescale of a year. It only discourages long-term uninvested money.
If a year's buffer is 20k (rent, utilities, car payments, insurance, etc can total $1500/mo pretty easily) then 2% inflation (and basically zero interest) means that this buffer costs me $400 a year, or over $30/mo. That's a non-trivial carrying cost, $30/mo can buy me substantial, actual real things.
I might not care too much if it was $0.50 or $1 per month. But quantitative differences eventually become qualitative ones, and at this point it's not just some tiny abstract amount of money, it's real consumption that a person has to forego every month (or day!) for the sake of not getting financially ruined the first time a big unexpected expense comes up.
Everything has a gravitational field, but gravity is extremely weak, so you never notice it.
Just imagine how a tiny fridge magnet can overcome the gravitational pull of the entire Earth. Scale down the Earth to the size of ordinary objects and you can get an idea of how weak gravity is.
Correct. A safe observer far from the black hole will observe a singularity at the event horizon, but that is a coordinate singularity, not a true one. There is singularity at the event horizon for a falling observer. A falling observer will pass through the event horizon and reach the center, which is a true singularity that physics currently cannot explain.
I think you mean there no singularity for a falling observer. Given that time slows down, it is not a certainty that you'll fall through the event horizon.
There are two viewpoints:
For an outside observer: the black hole will evaporate (over many billions of years) before you ever cross the event horizon.
For the falling observer: There shouldn't be an event horizon at all. That brings the question: what happens. Occam's razor would seem to indicate that most likely you'd just keep falling.
There are various "solutions" to this problem being worked out. One is that the surface of the event horizon is actually a universe all by itself, with 3d space you can live in. Over time that space would collapse into nothing, and that would happen quickly, but not instantaneously. This space is visible from the outside of the black hole, and you can interact with it but because time goes so much faster in this space any light escaping from it would appear extremely redshifted and weak.
In PA, for example, the legislature (which is GOP I might add) forbid counting mail-in ballots until election day. That basically guarantees delays.
Have you been around for Gore vs Bush? I'm not sure why you're claiming this is one of the worst elections. Most close elections aren't called on election day. Almost every state continues counting past election day. It's just you're only hearing about the ones that are close.