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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

"inhabitants of the Western world need to realize that the tallest structures they can see in the landscape are the face of what may be a new kind of God: finance."

Oh come on, so much drama for a slick lean tower in sparsely populated land, barely visible to anyone but local fishermen.

Compare it to, say, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar

This is a very prominent military installation that spoiled shortwave communications for years, and nobody dared to say a word against it.

If the choice is between Ares and Hermes, I am choosing Hermes.

(Disclaimer: I am a trading software engineer).

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The Problem is that some of these people live there becausw they like the view of the nature. Uninterupted by some modern skyscrapers. I prefer to live in a more rural area. I accept wind turbines, because they are a nesessery if you don't won't depend on coal and nuclear energy. Now these people get some building that doesn't benefit them and isn't strictly nesessery. With the Duga Radar you could argue it's some country defenses mechanisms, which the microwave link clearly isn't.

You could also argue that losing out economically has significant impact on a nation and its people. While national financial institutions are rethinking the focus on finance as a focus of the economy, it's not by happenstance London, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, HK, etc. pursued being financial hubs.

They were keystones in their respective economies and thus just as integral to national physical defense.

well this is a private company, no? Not really of much impact to a whole nation

Nation is the sum of private individuals and companies.

I totally agree. I like guyed towers. They are quite invisible. I just wanted to end with the new eyes of God (dishes)

Most of the world's trading is now going through three physical unremarkable buildings: Equinix datacenters NY4, LD4 and TY3 in NYC, London and Tokyo respectively.

Inside, there is a mess of server racks installed by major banks and financial companies and everybody else (it's not that expensive, by corporate standards, to rent a rack place there), all interconnected by a web of optical fiber. Chaos reigns.

These are the places where billions per second change hands.

I know. I visited the Basildon NYSE facility. That said, it's half empty (I mean, the colocation halls are half empty).

>If the choice is between Ares and Hermes, I am choosing Hermes.

Ares and Plutus, surely.

FWIW, if you have to look to the Soviets to find favorable counterexamples, that's not a good sign, is it?

Sorry, I am Russian, this was the first thing that crossed my mind.

American, UK and Australian analogues are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar

> If the choice is between Ares and Hermes, I am choosing Hermes.

Well put.

Hermes outspends everyone else on war and invades countries on false pretenses, murdering millions of people in the process. There is no dichotomy here.

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