the seasonal gradient is a temporal imprint of the geographic temperature gradient [via jet stream two-dimensionality] ; both index the climate change derivative : in three days we’ve experienced this continent & century
god is real
my presidential campaign slogan in 2024 is “Cosplay 1824”
4 359 916Ā Northeast
0Ā 859 305Ā Midwest
4 419 232Ā South
0 000 000Ā West
As much as 70% of price moves in commodity markets are generated by trading programs reacting to one another,
a) Is there a principled distinction between human cognitive algorithms reacting to one another and ātrading programsā (designed by humans, often based on abstractions of human tradersā behavior) doing so?
b) If my 30 seconds of Google-ing donāt deceive me, this is a pretty misleading summary of the underlying study. The articleās phrasing made me think that it was basing this claim on some kind of data about who was trading with whom, but I donāt think that actually exists. Sure enough, some (smart) Swiss people just took high-frequency price data and fit it to āthe Hawkes self-excited conditional Poisson modelā and then used that to estimate that 60-70% of commodity price changes are āendogenous.ā This doesnāt actually have anything to do with āprogramsā as such. The āmovesā could be endogenous even before electronic trading existed. Just look at what Washington Irving said about John Law!
b) Yea wow that’s bunk. The roughest way I could extract a meaningful component for algorithms and/or HFT from something as sketchy as “endogenous” moves—which they explicitly suggest, fuck the WSJ, include “Behavioral mechanisms and herding,” “Hedging strategies,” etc.—would be subtracting the earliest percentage from today’s; thus algorithmic price moves max out around [*skimming*, *skimming*, *skimming*] 30%. I’m not savvy enough in market activity or history to say, but it’s hard for me to imagine there was less herding (i.e. ‘bubblous endogeneity’) (and thus an even lower figure for algorithmic responsibility) in 1998… All in all a far less alarming result—not that we should necessarily, especially in an ideal universe, be alarmed by a fully automated exchange, because,
a) Nah, and this sort-of gets to a comment I left out to collect more notes: (in a world where prices are primarily determined by machines) capitalism, or at least the capitalist, is fucking moot. Traders ought to be jamming this software with their sabots. (Maybe you have front-line experience of such resentment?)Ā ‘Free enterprise’, ‘neoliberalism’, whatever you want to call the existing distributed world government approaches the wildest fantasy from the overlapping peaks of SF and socialism—the executive as a black box. It’s not ‘central planning’, exactly, but it’s exactly what central planning should look like given the extreme diversity and range of factors involved, plus what we now know about how probability works, and what we’ve always known about the stickiness of corrupt bureaucrats (liboors notwithstanding). The joke, of course, is that skynet’s being run precisely to enrich the wastoid functionaries it ought to eliminate, but that’s okay because„ if your office pays income taxes it’s not a bureaucracy, it’s a ‘team’?
In reality, anyway, I think there are unprincipled reasons to distinguish, with some concern, between metaphorical cognitive and literal coded algorithms. As always writing in flagrant ignorance of the specifics, let’s imagine two hypothetical, stereotyped responses to today’sĀ TimesĀ input:
[The high plains revert to their discovered form, the Great American Desert.]
A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.
At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge ā in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.
Sorghum, or milo, gets by on a third less water, Kansas State University researchers say ā and it, too, is in demand by biofuel makers. As Kansasā wells peter out, more farmers are switching to growing milo on dry land or with a comparative sprinkle of irrigation water.
But as long as there is enough water, most farmers will favor corn. āThe issue that often drives this is economics,ā said David W. Hyndman, who heads Michigan State Universityās geological sciences department. āAnd as long as youāve got corn thatās $7, then a lot of choices get made on that.ā
Human sez, ‘Holy crap we’re already tapping out a nonrenewable resource that only becomes more necessary as the planet heats up: short everything west of the Missouri River.’
Algorithm sez—well prolly algorithm likewise just sells everything on declining profits, but for the sake of philosophy and/or scaremongering let’s pretend the quants have been outdoing each other lately. So hypertrophied algorithm sez, ‘Profits down, crop diversification up, commodity input [water] efficiency up: sell now, go long in futures market.’ Stirred by an interesting play, the nest of algorithms awakes, and bam—Midwestern agribusiness crashes hard now only to crash harder later. Fuzzily in short, what sometimes positively distinguishes human from computed algorithms is precisely what negatively distinguishes them the rest: the tendency to skim to the forest over the trees.
In any case, what I really wish—now that I have the free time at work to readĀ threeĀ newspapers, jesus help me—would be that the rise of the machines meant instead of tossing out standard rationales like
Traders, analysts and economists cite the resurgence of the U.S. dollar, growing global energy demand and a steady flow of investment dollars into markets designed to trade and hedge price risks between producers and users of oil [for the high price of crude].
guys just threw up their hands like, ‘Whatever dude, we don’t get the Powerpoint on algorithm schematics until June.’
(Source: childress)
As much as 70% of price moves in commodity markets are generated by trading programs reacting to one another,
the tallest building in new york will be a luxury condominiumĀ
[video]
death to the cryogenic corpse america
an SNES game calledĀ Escape the Floodplain
after you cross the Hudson (biking) night falls and it’s just press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ press A-B press A-BĀ listening to radio reports of carnage until sunrise
no saves
if you win the console flash burns-in a stained-glass image of the main character eating bugs under a rotten apple tree
sending nudes to the moon
You can send radio waves to the moon and bounce them across the world for free
this is also the purpose of HAARP, across the world and deep under the sea
death to america
console froze at the part where seidel takes a vow of silence
the island purchased by organized violence against entropy
Sioux City, Iowa had their first-ever snowfall on record in the month of May on May 1 (1.4”), but hit an astonishing 106Ā° yesterday. Not only was this their hottest temperature ever measured in the month of May, but only two June days in recorded history have been hotter (June, 10, 1933: 107Ā° and June 21, 1988: 108Ā°.) On May 12th they registered 29Ā°, and thus had a 77Ā° rise over 56 hoursĀ (from 6 a.m. May 12 to 1:30 p.m May 14.)
»Ā Sitting in his Ford pickup next to Section 35, he unfolded a sheet of white paper that tracked the decline of his grandfather’s well: from 1600 gallons a minute in 1964, to 1200 in 1975, to 750 in 1976. When the well slumped to 500 gallons in 1991, the Yosts capped it and drilled another nearby. Its output sank, too, from 1352 gallons to 300 today. This year, Mr. Yost spent more than $15000 to drill four more test wells in Section 35. The best of them produced 195 gallons a minute—a warning, he said,
is no longer earth but this against all future centuries
anarchism without purpose / fascism without method / ~ [mesovorticism ~] / fascism with method / anarchism with purpose
Computational Biology Division
Oils Division, Hair
Oils Division, Skin
Cybersecurity Division
Heavy Weaponry Division
Posture DivisionThatās all I can think of for the next functioning government so itās probably all we need
Academy of Prophecy (Classified)
Academy of Prophecy (Unclassified)
Bureau of Allowable Facial Expressions
Mass Hysteria Registry
Biosphere 3 [submarine]
Call Out Queen