The idea that there can be good and bad ways of spending your time is a separate question from whether other people are telling you what they are, or whether you are deciding for yourself.
Title: Should high-frequency trading be banned?
OP: How about a tax on capital gains that is inversely proportional to the time the financial instrument is held? The biggest cost HFT imposes on the world is the brain drain.
This thread isn't about discussing the best use of talent, it's about whether talent should be forced to not do certain things, and your post reads naturally in that context.
You: Would you call it sinister for example to criticize someone for spending their time murdering people at random?
I read this as an equivocation, as though misuse of talent falls into the same category as murdering people.
I used murder as an instance of misuse of talent. It is an extreme case, obviously, but if you want to prove the existence of something (in this case the possibility of wasting one's talents), the fastest way to do it is to use an extreme example, since for existence proofs any example will do.
Normally it's fruitless to argue about these sorts of things, but I kind of want to see if anyone disagrees with my 'heuristic of conversational originalism'. I'm pretty fond of it myself; it's been very helpful for me.
It's a threaded comment system, rather than a flat comment system. To me this implies that the search for context should begin with the most tightly bound scope. By default I assume a comment is a direct reply to its parent, as the writer of the comment made a deliberate choice to place it there.
While the larger context informs the tone and examples which will be used, it's the background scenery, not the subject.
> In a sustained conversation it's unreasonable to expect readers to perform a context-shift every time someone says something
Maybe I'm reading this too strongly, but how else can you have a conversation? Every statement is, most immediately, in the context of the directly preceding statement, that's what a dialog is.
> especially when the in-context reading (particularly the murder comment) is more natural than the out-of-context reading.
Again, maybe I'm completely misreading you here. But what exactly do you mean by the 'in-context' reading in this case? The subject as I read it was: "Humans will always be underemployed from some perspective ("Oh but she could be doing X"). Penalizing them for not operating in a way that is consistent with your (or anyone's) world view is far more sinister."
With a larger context of the validity of 'wasting time' as a criticism, the implication that what constitutes a waste of time is purely subjective, and the background example given being HFT vs. Ad revenue. (The choice of HFT as an example being the result of the overall context of the article)
As requested, that's what this hacker thinks.