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Comment by thefourthchime | Hacker News Reader

High speed trading. You can send a packet faster from London to nyc via a LEO network than an underwater fiber.

Why are there people investing so much money on these things, filling up the space, just for some stupid trading. Why is humanity doing this ??

$$$

"just for some stupid trading" is one of the underlying forces beneath the success of all modern economies. Without it almost everything you buy would be more expensive.

They referred to HFT only - how does it contribute to "success" of modern economies?

It just sucks out value due to stock market implementation.

That argument can apply to any improvement in efficiency of a process.

Admittedly any contribution of HFT to economic success (other than that of the traders themselves, of course) is probably fairly marginal, but more efficient markets are probably a good thing.

Are you considering “having cheaper stuff” actually progress in terms of humanity ?

Yes, when everything becomes cheaper we can pursue greater technology. Having a 5GHz computer would have been impossible some decades ago; now they can be used for scientific research by anyone who has $500.

Ultimately price is just a measurement of how many resources it takes to make something, with the currency added in as the medium of exchange. A product being cheap means it is now easy for us to make; the previous price of the now-cheap product will be taken up by a better product.

Yes, the march of human progress can be measured in the decrease in prices of all of the things we produce.

Sure, why not? Cheaper stuff, from another angle, means you can work fewer hours to achieve the same lifestyle. And that's pretty good!

But you don't. None of us do. At some point theory has to run into a reality check.

You can if you're a contractor or running your own business.

But it would definitely be nice for businesses in general and employment law to stop being obsessed with 40 hours as a magical number. Working 4 8-hour days, or 5 6-hour days, or 4 6-hour days should be just be an option by default.

(And wages have to stop stagnating relative to prices so that the premise of "cheaper stuff" actually happens in the first place.)

you've grown so accustomed to modern conveniences that you don't realize that you're kept alive by things that not even a king could've afforded 100 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/the-a...

Being able to trade milliseconds faster is about as pure zero-sum as you can get. The comparison isn't versus having no stock markets at all.

Dude, we blasted from New York to the San Francisco to enable high frequency trading.

If we had a way to remove all oxygen from earth, require people to wear astronaut suits, in order to reduce 10ms off the speed for HFT, you'd have companies start sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.

Would you pick up a $20 bill on the ground?

I think we all know the answer to that question, and if you know the answer to that question, you know the answer to your question:

To make fucking money (of course).

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