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Yes. Only people who are used to living in non-corrupt countries presume corruption is covert.

When the mission is to screw over the employees, we don't need people who will align with that. CEOs should be held responsible for the enemies they create within their organization. Treating people as necessary collateral damage is unacceptable.

You may demand that of yourself, but for others we must design around the fact that they are stupid. You do not have the power to change their stupidity, only your response to it.

Indeed. I'm not sure why you think that's responsive to my post. I'm mostly pointing out just how deeply stupid they are.

Though if you have a useful response besides "weather the storm while everyone else learns the hard way", I'm listening.


> some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.

Which country do you believe could possibly qualify for such an impossible task?


China's probably making the best argument for it now.

China's wot?

I don't personally like their government but at this point they certainly have the appearance of long term social and political stability. More than most western countries for the time being.

> they certainly have the appearance of long term social and political stability

You could've said that exact same thing about the US just 10 years ago when Obama was president.


The only real difference between Obama's foreign adventures in Libya and Trump's in Iran was that Obama lied to the security council to get their approval first.

Trump isnt all that different in character to previous administrations he just takes bigger risks and doesnt bother with the mask.


The person I was replying to was talking about China's own long-term social and political stability, not their foreign policy. If you're suggesting that Obama's boondoggle in Libya was the catalyst that led to Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 and Trump's first presidency, that's intriguing speculation. But I don't think his foreign policy is relevant to the overall topic since it was largely milquetoast for the American public at the time, and certainly didn't cause any immediate domestic instability like we're seeing with Trump.

China has a host of factors that make their current system very fragile. I doubt they make it five more years before turbulence hits.

I've been hearing that since the 1990's when it first started to become apparent that their economy was on track to overtake the rest of the world within a few decades.

It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?


They'll likely skate over the current turbulence that's already hitting many non-China countries.

China has been preparing for a global energy crisis for years. It is paying off now

  As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/20/china-oil-rese...

Been hearing that said repeatedly since 1989.

I've never once heard it from somebody who correctly anticipated China's rise though. The imminent collapse story just quietly changes every 5 years or so.

If the US has an imperial rival one thing you can almost guarantee is that the predictions of economic collapse will be as frequent as they are absurdly overblown and as always, This Time It's Different.


Look, if Gordon Chang and Peter Zeihan continue to predict China will fall for long enough, someday they'll be right. Maybe. Probably.

I'd be interested to read about that if you have any particular pointers to resources to share.

That's true, but the one child policy has backed them into a corner.

A society that is unwilling to replace itself will inevitably decline.


The policy in place for 36 years, that ended 11 years ago had pros and cons, but it hasn't backed them into a corner of inevitable decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy


> the one child policy has backed them into a corner

A policy that ended a decade ago, and was only ever marginally successful (even at the height of the restrictions their birth rate was nearer 1.4 than 1.0)


The one child policy was only for cities anyway. Agricultural areas were permitted, even encouraged, to have more children. There were other exceptions, like twins (obviously), if the first baby was disabled, etc. Later on, couples were allowed two children if both parents came from single-child families.

Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to invading Taiwan.

A dramatic end to his reign doesn't have to imply social or political instability (though it certainly could).

Would the us currently defend Taiwan? I think they might get the chance to just take it, especially if we get another president like Trump in 28.

No idea, honestly. But if I lived in Taiwan I would be shitting bricks.

Taiwan's biggest problem is that the average age is currently ~45 and in 15 years it will be ~55. It's going to be hard to keep the economy going once half the country's retired.

Yes obviously. We would erase President Xi and his family as well. What are they going to do, cross the Pacific? Our total willingness to do is unconditional.

If Japan became involved would the US then become embroiled?

> Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to

That’s a pretty big aside.


Not sure why you replied over here, but yeah, it sure is. Just trying to be clear about separating the moral judgement from the prediction.

Nesting.

One or more of the Nordics.

At first I took the comment about transferring nukes as a bit of a joke, but you make a fair point. Let Iceland have em!

Greenland can make a competing bid on the basis of a pressing need.

That's one that I didn't have on my bingo card for 2026 but it is funny to contemplate.

So, Sweden.

They're also starting to talk about a joint nuclear program.

As they should be

Who are you to quote laws to those carrying swords?


The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

- Terry Pratchett


Don't know why this is getting downvoted, it's well known that DOGE had goons to forcibly remove people that stood in their way.


> Don't know why this is getting downvoted

Paul Graham and Garry Tan were both big cheerleaders of DOGE, so, keep that in mind.

A shocking number of the biggest stories about DOGE over the past year were flagged here, probably including the stories about goons physically removing people.

Posts questioning this suppression/censorship were flagged.

Some people like to argue that since any story about Musk becomes toxic - for some reason - it 'makes sense' to flag every story about anything to with him. You know, like Israel, or US torture, or Assange, or Snowden, or Epstein, etc.

For we are but naive children here in the tech industry, and must have a safe space to discuss PCB specs and the meaning of 42 without too much 'current affairs', lest the site 'lose its focus'.

It's not like almost the entire top of the industry is neck-deep in collaboration with all this or anything, right?

... Anyway, if people here don't know much about DOGE, the massive flagging that's gone on here is probably a big factor as to why.


“Shocking number” being “pretty much all of them” to the point I discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/active which shows topics where discussions are happening even if they’re flagged.

That’s the only way I browse HN now because this place is clearly brigaded to bury certain topics.


I wrote an extension that lets me tag users, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite, and it's interesting seeing the intellectual dishonesty from certain actors, yet because they produce "valuable" discussion the moderators take no action.


Interesting! I bet I'd recognize some of those names.

And I also would bet that saying them 'out loud' here would result in a ban for 'harassment'.


Yeah, I only use active and new; for the same reason.

Idk if there's anything anyone here can do about it. There's zero transparency, or less; so most people don't even know there's a problem.


I watched this happen and I'm still pretty mad about it. It was so clearly an important tech topic of discussion and it was just buried.


The rich have known they're in a class war since at least Occupy Wall Street.


Yeah, you can't rely on HN to get important information. It will be flagged to death. There could be a holocaust going on and it'd get flagged for being "controversial".


Usually the opposition party, once it gains power.


Sadly, the Sicilians and Marians definitely did not regain power after Pompey said that to them. They did get purged though.


In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging. People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not. The assumption is that simply by being close to a source of information, you are compromised. The same restrictions should apply to those close to government. By being family, he is compromised by default.


Wrong. People who work in finance (I spent years there) are allowed to trade stocks their company is trading. There is a process to get approval. The equities division at an IB might be trading every single name in the S&P500. If you sit in the investment banking division and that division isn't doing anything related to a name, you are likely to get approval.

In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.


Oh - so the kid went out and he got permission to do this?

Where is that? Who approved his request?


> In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.

That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.


Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.


I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.


> If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict

This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.

I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.

As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.

Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.


You are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.

Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.

There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.


> Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration.

Uh, essentially betting against a policy your former head put in place isn't a typical thing?

You would absolutely steer clear of this. There's plenty of other things they could be doing, no?

Just to make the point. This is such a typical thing investment banks do, that (especially) they are the ones doing it and nobody else?


It's an investment bank. They have a million things going on, sometimes counter to each other.


Almost all companies issuing stock to employees also ban them and their family members and fellow house residents from trading in the same stock to avoid insider style improprieties and the SEC has frequently prosecuted such cases. Wild that congress and WH staff have zero such restrictions even in 2026!


Nope, wrong. Most companies have black out dates around earnings releases. Otherwise, good to go.

(and/or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).


> In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging.

It was damaging.

In 2015.

And then for a bit between 2021 and 2024.

Now it's not again.

You have to enforce these sorts of gentlemen's agreements. Just saying "it's damaging" isn't enough to actually make it damaging.


>People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not

But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.


I'm curious just how wrong they're going to be about the ages of people who work from home or use a mobile device at work.


What kind of founding ethos doesn't allow tracking internal latency? Is their founding ethos "Never Admit Responsibility?"; "Never Leave A Paper Trail?"

This company's official ethical foundation is "Don't Get Caught."


From the wiki about IEX: "It was founded in 2012 in order to mitigate the effects of high-frequency trading." I can see how they don't want to track internal latency as part of that, or at least not share those numbers with outsiders. That just encourages high frequency traders again.


One would hope for a more technical solution to HFT than willful ignorance lol. For example, they could batch up orders every second and randomize them.


I worked in HFT. (Though am now completely out of fintech and have no skin in the game). "Flash Boys" traditional HFT is dead already, the trade collapsed in 2016-2018 when both larger institutions got less dumb with order execution, and also several HFTs "switched sides" and basically offered "non-dumb order execution" as a service to any institutions who were unable to play the speed game themselves. Look at how Virtu's revenue changed from mostly trading to mostly order execution services over that time period.

Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.

If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.

Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.


This is what should happen, because what the game actually being played is to profit off those who cannot react fast enough to news event, rather than profit off those who mispriced their order.

Or leave things in place, but put a 1 minute transaction freeze during binary events, and fill the order book during that time with no regard for when an order was placed, just random allocation of order fills coming out of the 1 minute pause.

These funds would lose their shit if they had to go back to knowledge being the only edge rather than speed and knowledge.


This isn't a good approach because it assumes there are no market makers on trading venues, and that they (as well as exchanges) do not compete for order flow. Also, maybe you haven't noticed, but stocks are often frozen during news announcements by regulatory request, so such pauses are already in place and are designed to maintain market integrity, not disrupt it with arbitrary fills.


The founder Brad Katsuyama talks about his background and motivation for starting the company here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hoqFpDjVs

It might add a bit of color to this conversation.


The availability of exclusive content should not be the point over which streaming services compete. The same content should be available on all streaming services, and they should compete on the quality of their delivery and discoverability technology.

Content producers must not be vertically integrated with content distributors.


You might not be surprised, but you should still be shocked. Being struck by a heavy weight will shock you even if you expected it. We are allowed to be shocked by things that we abhor even when we understand their causes and probability distribution. Not being shocked suggests you no longer despise it.


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