FJim

Force quotes to be in sixteenths, the way they used to be and HFT disappears.

What does that even mean?

According to the one other source I found, it wasn't the video which led to the charges.

He recorded a subsequent phone call with the police department without notifying them that the call was being recorded. According to Wikipedia, regarding the recording of telephone conversations, New Hampshire is an 'all parties consent' state, and seemingly by his own admission he broke this law. Thus the calls for jury nullification, to ignore a law which they find unjust.

Certain rights can be signed away. A right that cannot be given up, even willingly, is called an 'inalienable' right.

Thus in most of the world today, you cannot willingly sell yourself into slavery.

While I agree with your larger point, that retribution (and worse) is not justice, I wouldn't put too much weight on the study you mention.

It's extraordinarily difficult to 'give details' in a completely neutral frame. Without knowing the details of the study, its hard to say more. It seems likely to me that they probably found what they were looking for.

Originators lend the money and sell the loan. It is agreed that the originate to sell model has perverse incentives. However, the point is that home borrowers are not the victims of this fraud. The people who bought securities backed by these loans are the victim of the fraud.

The homeowners got the money, the investors lost the money because the homeowners can't pay it back. The originators and the securitizers (Citi) facilitated the fraud, because they got their cut as the money passed through the pipeline.

Absolute twaddle. This is not science -- this is the science industry.

This work is so subjective on so many levels as to be worse than worthless -- rather than increasing humanities knowledge by even a modicum, this 'research' positively reduces human knowledge by simply adding noise. It's a shame that PhD's can't just lecture and are forced to do research. This is the crap we end up with.

The first sentence is not an argument nor is it true. The next sentence follows it up with a non sequitur hypothetical.

Let's say his aging mother died and he continued to cash her Social Security checks for a year, to continue to pursue his dream, would you consider it unethical? The federal government certainly has the money, and he is tenaciously pursuing his dream.

Threatening to bankrupt someone with a nuisance lawsuit that has no merit is not looked favorably on by judges, and a lawyer who says as much risks sanctions from both a judge and the bar association.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

When you live in a city, most merchants deliver.

Intellectual property absolutely is rent-seeking. It brings the full weight of government to enforce an artificial monopoly, for the pragmatic end of encouraging the creation of works of art and technological advances.

The idea that one party can prevent another from exploiting a novel idea (which may have been arrived at independently) does not come out of ethics or natural law. It is a (seemingly) useful legal construct which seems to have served us as a society fairly well.

It is perfectly reasonable to challenge the idea, however, if it is no longer serving us. For instance, consider fashion and the law -- two creative industries which have no such protection and within which imitation is a measure of your success.

In fact 100 years ago it was quite the opposite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

Again I raise the possibility that laws were not broken. There may have been instances of fraud, but its more than likely that the mess was largely the result of of groupthink and really bad decisions made in good faith.

There is the possibility that despite the populist rancor, no actual laws were broken.

tb;dr

What's astounding is that anyone pays any attention to "Occupy Wall Street". It's a big circle jerk between some hippies in need of a bath and lefty-media types.

For the sake of argument lets say time spent on line = revenue. This picture shows us top line numbers. What about costs? I suspect that Google's cost for delivering content is markedly lower than Facebook's.