And I can sympathise with the pressures as well. It is stressful being under constant scrutiny. That is particularly true in my case because I choose to read my below-the-line comments. I am aware that most of the time these are helpful, add value, and are appreciated by others. That is why I try to provide the relatively secure space that this blog makes available, which in itself is unusual. I do that by quite deliberately getting rid of commentators who appear here quite regularly who are rude, offensive, or just have the apparent intent of wasting my time. In part, that is because I wish to create a place for others to comment, but it is also about surviving the process of blog publishing. Constant attacks do have an impact. Whoever first said that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me totally misunderstood reality. Words can hurt, and sometimes they do. I have developed a thick skin, but not impermeability.
So, apparently, are facts, knowledge and logic. That’s why they’re not allowed.
Zucman shows no understanding of the role of tax in the economy.
John Bates Clark Gold Medal winner there. Sure, I disagree with him too but at least I know why.
The last time he allowed one of my comments there he called me racist, stupid and uneducated. While that may be true, he doesn’t stick to own his own lofty standards. I’m guessing he doesn’t read the comments around here or he would’ve had a breakdown
“While that may be true…” Give that man a Bell’s.
He doesn’t realise that he’s the problem. If you are fixated on an outcome, either out of bloody mindedness or some personal advantage, you’re going to get pissy about people disagreeing. Like there is no point in me arguing with RMT members about why we should close down half the rail network. They don’t actually care about the most efficient transport system, they want rail jobs.
People who are honest debaters are like honest scientists. They want the disagreement. Because they might have missed something. A disagreement improves your thinking. Being told you’re wrong, and why, when you put your fingers in your ears and say “la la la” will get to you.
I sometimes wonder, too, how many commentators out there have to stick with their thing, even though they no longer believe it, just because they’ve got a market already. If Owen Jones wakes up tomorrow and realises that Mrs Thatch was right, that’s going to be a massive upheavel isn’t it?
People who are honest debaters are like honest scientists. They want the disagreement.
Exactly. This is also why those arguments and positions Humanities types regard as “settled” need constant re-examination. You need to know why they’re settled, because if you don’t you’re merely a bloviating ignoramus. You may also discover they’re falsely “settled”, because the settlement turned out to be in someone’s short-term advantage.
All the more reason why woke universities are fatuous.
There’s a huge difference between how Physics people publish and climate change scientists public. Physics people just dump everything. “Have at it”. Climate change scientists are like “the earth is warming, and no, you can’t see the temperature data, or the tweaks we made”.
The people who looked into the record temperature at RAF Conigsby had to do an FOI Request to get the data about temperatures and which aircraft were taking off when. The Met Office are entirely confident it’s all natural, even though it was a 0.6 degree spike within about 15 minutes that 3 Vulcans took off.
The problem is that I think all this stuff has about run out of road. I think we’ve maxed out on the airport/heat island/low quality weather station effects. If it shot up because of a footpath near the weather station, you can’t do more to push it up. If it shot up because a university that was surrounded by fields now has housing, you can’t really add a lot more housing. You can’t keep telling people that arctic ice will be gone or Kiribati will be sunk in 20 years, and not delivering on it.
The real answer to universities is to take away government funding. That’s where the trouble starts. People can go and study worthless crap in huge numbers without any cost. And universities paid by the state become instruments of the state, because the state funds the crap. You’re not going to be free market if the state is paying for lots of women to come and study psychology at £9K/year, which must be hugely profitable. You’re going to be “ra ra government is wonderful”. If you took funding away, you’d have fees, loans, scholarships. People would do valuable degrees and universities would be less biased towards the state.
But surely the question is, why universities in the first place? An original reason for universities was that books were rare & expensive. So students went to the books rather than the books to the students. Hence the title “Reader in …” The printing press negated that excuse so the next one was universities provided a community of scholars who could share the experience of education & there would interaction between the students & the teaching staff. That argument collapsed with the arrival of this here Interweb. We manage to have dialogues & interaction despite being not only spread around the UK but around the world. Truth be known, probably the majority of interaction in universities is currently going on, on the Web, despite the participants being in adjoining rooms. So we’re left with sharing facilities like science labs other facilities where personal presence is essential. But why does that have to be concentrated in medieval cities in medieval buildings, mostly totally unsuitable? Best place for a physics lab would be on an industrial estate. Why the requirement that students of the STEM subjects require proximity to the Arts?
That’s the reason for my personal animosity to Oxford. I’d like the place utterly demolished & any graduates of Oxford banished from society. I’ll stop short of neck shooting because of the inevitable mess. Because the STEM side has cravenly acquiesced to the place being taken over by the lunatic members of the non-STEM side & allowed them a free ride on the university’s now largely erroneous reputational value. They didn’t have to do that. So far as I’m concerned they’re now tarred with e same brush. And this particularly applies to those graduates who were “up at Oxford” (what a particularly stupid term!) right back to the sixties. That’s when this shit started & could have been resisted.. Fuck tradition! Tradition is the enemy of knowledge. There should be no traditions in education.Knowledge is perpetual change
And to touch on the actual subject of Tim’s post, the university system gleefully validates cnuts like the Tri-Professor of Ely.
It gets ever clearer that you once had a bird you were keen on who was shagged by some Oxford undergrad with a TR3 (TR4 at a pinch) and a big cock 🙂
All my kids went to Oxford, the last graduating a year ago, and they’re very sound politically, as are a lot of their mates.
One of them would even do the actual neck shooting if you asked nicely.
Not that I think they should be allowed in polite society, of course.
And what contribution have these many offspring made to the reverse the situation? They protested vigorously about exclusion policies? Attended demonstrations in the same cause? Threw paint? Roughed up lefty fellow students? Held strikes? Of course they didn’t
And I suppose they’re now using their so called qualifications to gain advantage from those fooled by them.
Interested, your kids are the problem They’re not something to be proud of. They’re something to be ashamed of.
You are something to be ashamed of.
You know nothing about Interested’s kids except that they went to Oxford and you slag them off just for that reason. They are intelligent and they worked hard so the gained entrance without having a Socialist grande for a parent/grandparent.
FYI decent people do not rough up lefty students. I could have done but I was brought up to behave decently.
I don’t think we’re in much disagreement here. There’s the “in presence” courses that need people. But, if a university wants to teach history of art, and people want to do the classroom thing, and want to pay for it, fine. Jocasta’s daddy can pay.
I often refer to how everyone learned to be a photographer from Amateur Photographer magazine before university. Photography was a modern subject, came long after the printing press and so it got done that way and worked. You learned from it, you took photos, if you wanted someone to give you feedback you went to a camera club that cost a couple of quid a week. Or put on an exhibition. If people liked what you did at an exhibition, you’d get hired.
Then it became a degree subject. Complete and utter waste of money. And backwards. We’d created a modern subject, with modern technology for learning, and sent it back to the medieval times.
And yeah, if you go and do private training, it isn’t all sorts of things thrown together. You have companies that do trades, companies that do software, companies that do arts stuff. They’re generally quite canny at making use of cheap spaces. I’ve been to training courses in Bournemouth and Brighton in Winter. Hotels are giving away hotel and function rooms because no-one wants to be beside the seaside.
The problem when the state is involved is that institutions don’t get reformed that quickly. Look at how railways still have ticket office. Airlines and coach companies have been doing it direct for donkeys years now.
As our physics prof used to point out whenever we gave out about the art students. “An English prof needs a room with a desk”, he would then gesture at his large and well appointed lab, before adding “BA students pay the same fees as you. They are sponsoring you”
@WB, one of the ways I have Matured As An Engineer over the years is learning that I might not always be right. In my twenties, of course, I knew everything 🙂
People have trouble sometimes with me saying “we should do x”, then they argue that “no, y would be much better”, I stop and think and say “Yep, you’re right”.
Generally they launch into more reasons as to why their approach is better. And I have to interrupt and say “I’m sold, I see your point, can’t you take yes for an answer?”
Which is of course why we have these discussions in the first place. There are plenty of times when I have to say we can’t do that for whatever reason, but a good idea is a good idea, and I’m not too proud to acknowledge it just because it wasn’t mine.
I get the feeling that Spud has never learned this lesson.
Oh, totally not worth the fight. The thing is, most people you work for don’t care. They gave you the task and it was done well. Even if you say “it was Ltw that cracked it”, well, you listened to Ltw.
Yes. My job description is unofficially “gets shit done”. And I’m pretty good at being the translation layer between on site people and desk engineers. Which involves understanding both sides.
Nobody wastes more of his time than he does.
“ I have developed a thick skin..”
Just skin?
The dura mater is a kind of skin innit?
I hope he doesn’t have a stroke, or some other kind of painful and debilitating seizure.
I’m currently worried about the poor kidney stone he apparently has. What has that kidney stone ever done to anyone?
What’s actually entertaining about the post is its about Gary Stevenson and his apparent ‘retirement’ from Youtube in the wake of the calamitous Channel 4 documentary.
My one observation, based on the great Bongo’s revelations about the shindig in Cambridge is that any documentary involving Murphy would be a greater disaster than the Titanic. He has no empathy, a truly horrible personality and can start an argument in a phone booth. His contentions are manifestly absurd to the point he has had to block around 25,000 people on Twitter alongside more than that on his blog. He wouldn’t stand up to 30 seconds of real questioning (Witness his appearances on Talk TV or on the radio for the ‘neoliberal’ BBC as examples) His attempt to present himself as some latter day Socrates is as absurd as is is an example of his total overestimation of his own capabilities.
My one observation is that based on the great Bongo’s revelations about the shindig in Cambridge
I must have missed this? Sounds amusing. Any more info VP?
This was his big ticket event at some hotel in Cambridge – it revealed that his effective pay rate post leaving academia (Actually being kicked out for being too left wing – which short of being actually Kim Jong un I cannot imagine anyone suffering that fate!) was £2 to £3 per hour. He also refused to provide biscuits for his audience on the grounds it was too complicated. I’ll see if I can dig up the post for you and put it on here with the usual Asteriskes!!
Lord Spud to provide the Dogmatix.
Oh, did someone actually go, and report back? I must have missed that.
I’m imagining people leaving because Sue Cook wasn’t coming.
The lack of biscuits is in my top 5 potato highlights – a man who thinks he can control the economy of the whole world, and knows the needs of billions of people and how to satisfy them, can’t organise a few packs of ginger nuts and some digestives
He’s organising another one in Ely apparently.
With or without biscuits?
“What’s actually entertaining about the post is its about Gary Stevenson…”
None of Spud’s posts are ever about anyone else other than Spud. The mention of anyone else is merely the lead in to allow him to talk about himself.
To be fair,. there’s also a fairly large cast of imaginary characters.,
I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of his commentators are invented, including some of the abusive ones.
Wrong medal; Murphy criticising people for being rude & offensive online deserves the Dame Emma Thompson medal for Hypocrisy.
Y’all hurt muh feelings.
At the same time I sympathize sincerely. I stopped going to the ASI blog because of the plentiful column-inches granted without moderation to the resident troll, TDA. It’s Murphy’s blog. He has a spine. He makes the rules.
Ditto re the ASI blog. Comments section ruined by a tireless wanker who either doesn’t understand anything or deliberately misunderstands everything.
It’s the price for free speech and the intellectual benefits of debate.
Same as Guido, Marius, but I go along for the comments and snippets of information that crop up.
As for Trolls, I look upon them in the same way as did those Victorians who would spend Sunday afternoons paying to look at the lunatics in Bedlam.
I take the ASI blog RSI feed in Feedly and rarely go there or if I do I ignore the comments.
‘Constant attacks do have an impact.’
“Never let your enemy know that he is hurting you.” – Sun Sue
Step it up, boys!
Shurely Sun Tzu? -Ed. (Unless you mean Sunbonnet Sue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCk1zRYgLBI.)
Gamecock didn’t feel like looking up Sun Tzu quotes, to see if he actually said it. So he attributed it to Sun Sue. She is a modern who says things that sound like something Sun Tzu would have said.
No doubt that works on your home planet.
Aaaahh… You mean Lu-Tze… Always beware the Sweeper……
I thought you meant Sun (a boy named) Sue.
I studied law because I thought I’d get to meet a girl named Sue.
All of that including proving him wrong, with …solid arguments… even!! Sometimes they even dare to use facts at him!!
getting rid of commentators who appear here quite regularly
He’s incompetent at getting rid of them.
He is too hard on himself. He is entirely impermeable to reason.
Anyone who claims they have a thick skin – doesn’t.
As the saying goes, anything that precedes the word “but” – doesn’t actually apply.
Gary Stevenson tho, I wouldn’t buy untaxed fags off this guy. He looks like the kind of junkie who tries to sell you cold meats and coffee in a pub. He’s like if Jeremy and Super Hans from Peep Show got into the teleporter from The Fly
Haha.
I’m remembering something my father said when Charlotte Church appeared on TV singing Ave Maria and everyone was like “oh wow”. He said “everyone loves a novelty”. It wasn’t that she was a great singer, it was that a child could sing that so well. That was the gimmick
Gary’s a novelty act. The working class boy who became top trader (later disputed by one of his colleagues). And people get bored with novelty acts. He’s gone the way of Joe Dolce and the hula hoop world record holder.
Wasn’t most of it just good luck and survivorship bias?
He was gambling with the bank’s money, so you may as well take a punt on something. If it comes off, you get a huge bonus. If it doesn’t, I don’t think he’d been in the job long enough to mind losing it.
Gary’s a novelty act. The working class boy who became top trader
As ever, the people the lanyards love to lionise as working class ‘heroes’ (the grifting mongoloid Jack Monroe is another) demonstrate the lanyards’ absolute contempt for the working classes.
Working class people are neither stupid or inarticulate, but Gary (a 40 year old man who dresses like a homeless 20 year old, despite claiming to be rich) is an obvious dunce who had rings run around him by every single person he interviewed on his own documentary.
I know plenty of working class boys who did well for themselves, and any one of them would’ve demonstrated more nous, more wit, and more humour if you shoved them in front of a camera. But of course, they’re all Reform (or Restore) supporters now.
Smoke some fags and play some pool. Pretend you never went to school. But still you’ll never get it right.
Out of interest, what’s the metric now for “top trader”? It used to be copious & accurate memory, the ability to do arithmetic very fast & reliably in your head & pattern recognition on the fly. But those talents are now largely automated. From what I’ve seen it seems to be appalling dress sense & the ability to speak fluent Estuarine.
Very much the same tools as being able to play poker really well.
Gazza was not, really, a trader. To use the old words, he was a jobber. He made a market (in, I think, 2 year interest rate futures or something) but he was, as with a jobber, making a two way market. As such he had a vast order flow which made his position a decent profit whoever – well, nearly – was doing it. A good “trader” in this sense is someone who reliably makes an extra pip off this flow.
I went for one of these jobs in the mid-80s. Not wholly seriously, but. First question. “So, how good are you at poker?” “I don’t”. “So, not the job for you”.
The idea that a jobber could be an East End lad with some numeracy and card playing skills was really not unknown in the Old City now, was it?
Scalping order flow is just fine by HFT algos these days AFAIK. Gary is full of it re bring a ‘top trader’.
Tim. I’m probably one few people here who understands what a jobber is.If a jobber runs a tight book he should make a profit. The opposition needs to buy or sell. You shouldn’t have the need factor.
I find the poker reference interesting. I would enjoy playing poker. I don’t in the way that I avoid any form of competitive activity. Right down to “friendly” games of pool or even board & computer games. Competition brings out the very worst in people. They always take winning & losing far too seriously. Even if it’s completely trivial. I wouldn’t even play myself. Now, is that because I understand the meta-rules of the game?
When I have played poker, I find the actual dealt cards almost irrelevant. I’m playing the people not the pack. Back in the old physical market I operated in, that would be a factor. One kept one’s supplementary eyes on the other traders. But the modern market isn’t a physical market. There’s little really to watch.
The market does two things. The technical part calculates price against things like P/E, yield, redemption yield, whatever.. And then there’s the emotional side which is supply/demand. I say emotional because supply/demand isn’t always logical So the trader tried to calculate the technical side faster & more accurately than the market was doing it whilst having a feel for the emotional side.
I’ve quite enjoyed spread betting on the currency markets because unless there’s something actually happening in world (in which case I stay away) it’s pretty pure. I watch price movements in fine grain & am aware that behind every movement is the result of individual’s decisions that are trying to achieve something. So you get prices that people will buy at & prices that other people will sell at. So I’m trying to anticipate what they will do before they do. Seems to work. So far I’m well ahead of the game.
A good “trader” in this sense is someone who reliably makes an extra pip off this flow.
I’m not sure about that. In any market there has to be a gap between the highest bid & the lowest offer. (Or there would be a transaction) And that is the space the jobber’s playing in. If I take the meaning of an extra pip as being outside that space, then he’s taken a view on the underlying security. A jobber should never do that. Running a tight book means never being exposed.You’re only making your money on the turn.
Not a pip on a trade. A pip on the flow. The reason there’s a human in there is that a good – good – reader of the flow will make a little more total turn on the book than without such a good reader. Means going off being wholly balanced for a few minutes at a time given anticipation of future flow etc but that’s the job. Market’s 31 33 – say, just example – but you’ll offer 32 32 because you think there’s a big sale coming in and the markets going to move to 29 31. So, you clear your book of any holding and don’t take on more. A jobber might well do that if they think it’s going to happen this side of lunch. This is one of the things that folk don’t grasp about Gazza’s claims to be running a very profitable book. Well, yes, he was. But that book was wildly profitable with or without Gazza. Which is why the internal measurement of good trader or bad is what is the added value by the trader to the amount the flow will produce anyway?
“I find the poker reference interesting. I would enjoy playing poker.”
I recently said, in something for publication later “Poker is not a card game. The cards are something to do while you manipulate the other players”.
You have it exactly!
Gamecock is not a poker player.
Gamecock is a bridge player. And that’s where the skill is: getting your opponents to do what you want them to. It is behavior science.
If you are Declarer than you know which cards your opponents hold but not necessarily which one holds each; if you are defender you have to guess who holds which card, based on the bidding and plays to previous tricks. It is not *just* behavioural science. Yes, you can often improve your chances of success by playing mind games but selecting the right contract is usually more important.It’s approaching sixty years since I gave up playing but unless the rules have changed the facts cannot have done so.
Oh come on John, I’ve never played bridge in my life but I know exactly what Gamecock means. Given bridge players of equal technical abilities, an understanding of behaviour is going to provide an edge. And behaviour will provide information on the technical skills of other players. As Tim regularly says “Everything happens at the margins.”
Yes, I said that playing mind games can help – BUT it is far from being a majority, let alone the whole, of what matters at bridge. When I was playing bridge at school or college I didn’t use or need mind games to win (and I did win most of the time). Analysis was important.
Let’s play for money.
Of course I bloody know what a jobber does – so does *everyone* who has worked with quoted investments.
Isn’t more like “what a jobber did”? They’ve not been used since everything went electronic 40 years ago?
We don’t use the name any more but the function still exists. Market makers. Like what Gazza was doing.
If if everyone who had worked with quoted investments understood what a jobber did, they wouldn’t have asked such damn fool questions.
You wish!
Sometimes people ask damn-fool questions because they misheard, sometimes because they’re covering up that they don’t know what to say next.
Something that regularly happened. Usually several times a day. Some days I’d have a dozen on the spike. Questions from the “back room boyz” investments analysts, both in-house & those of clients. What is the “market opinion of ….? Why this price movement. How would I know? Not from from other brokers’ dealers. Conversations with other brokers’ dealers were about cricket in summer, football in winter & the size of the tits of the girl on Page 3, perennially. They didn’t open their books to each other. The partners back in the office would’ve severely disapproved. The only person a dealer discussed securities with was a jobber. And jobbers, like us, were uninterested in the underlying qualities of the securities they were trading in. That was your job, when you could be bothered to do it, not ours. Go look at the share price. We weren’t interested because it wasn’t important to us. What we were interested in was your opinions as expressed in the dealing orders we were being given. Because that’s what trading is..
You had my sympathy …
I never asked about “market opinion” which was some sort of average of what other people thought. I had my own views of relative values (relative to cash, gilt-edged and other stocks in the same sector and bought, sold, held or avoided accordingly (although taking tax into account often meant that we didn’t sell because the tax would have wiped out the expected profit).
Ditto Andrea Bocelli , who, if he wasn’t blind, would never have graduated beyond a church choir
What happened to the bloke that played Super Hans? I always thought he’d make a great Doctor Who. He has that oddness that you also get from actors like Peter Greene and William Fichtner that works great for both comedy and for sinister acting.
Flounced off Twitter and went to BlueSky in protest at Musk, came crawling back obvs, spends a lot of time slagging off Trump and The daily mail.
Demanded footballers give a week’s salary to the ‘heroes grafting on the frontline of the current Covid crisis’, then had a stroke which left him paralysed.
Can now walk and tweet again.
I know exactly what you mean by that, Steve. Shoplifted gear still cold from the cold cabinet. Been there & told them to fuck off.
Egg shelly I worked with his doppelgänger who was/is a helluva nice guy.
Can I bum a fag off you mate?
“It is stressful being under constant scrutiny. Therefore I delete the comments of anyone that disagrees with anything I write”.
Didn’t C.S.Lewis write a book with an antihero named Konstandt Screwtinny? I wouldn’t want to be under him either. The genital cuff, you know.
Haha. Badum. Tish. 🙂
Off topic but this is tickling me no end:
Looks increasingly like the DNC was and to an extent remains a vast criminal enterprise based on US AID, the Act Blue scam, getting weighed in by Somalis running fake ‘Daycare Learning centres’, and book advances etc, and propped up by thousands of illegal votes.
Harris must have some shit they’re worried about for them to have paid $7.5 million for a list of cretins’ names.
Maybe they’re worried that she’ll run again in 2028 and cost them another $ billion plus change? Personally, I’d love them to run her again and finish the job that the Clinton Crime Family started.
In the mailing list game they’re called nixies.
Very much OT but it thought worth noting
Our good friend Guido has listed the names of the “bag carriers”, PPS’s appointed since the Burnham reshuffle.
https://order-order.com/page/2/
There are 61 in all. Curiously only 7 (if you don’t count names originating in that island to west) are obviously of the highly valued effnik enrichment. And two of those are doubtful. Contrast this with any list of appointees or employees by the public sector. So who are these people? Could it be the Labour establishment looking after its offspring, other family members, their friends … Surely not! It’s just such a unexpected anomaly What’s wrong with Darkies all of a sudden?
Burnham wants “a diverse and talented group of PPSs, bringing together a broad range of experience, expertise and perspectives”
I hope someone goes through the list to see just how broad a range of experience there actually is. How many will have worked in business? How many run a business? How many even have been doctors or teachers or in the Forces?
What’s the betting 90% of this “diverse” group have social science degrees and haven’t had any significant jobs outside politics (lobby groups, thinktanks, unions, charity policy, etc.)?
There’s about 60 of them; hopefully someone (one of Guido’s minions, perhaps?) will go through and do the analysis.
ISTR someone asking, and answering, your questions…
How many worked in a business? – I think it was 4.
How many run a business? -Zero.
Social science degrees etc. etc..? – The other 56..!