it's not complicated. suppose Bob wants to buy an Acura NSX and Kazuo wants to sell a Honda NSX. enter trader Joe. he knows Bob, and he knows Kazuo, and he knows that the Honda NSX was also marketed as the Acura NSX. trader Joe can buy the car from Kazuo, obtain an export license, arrange for shipping and tax duties, and sell the car to Bob for a profit. that is called trading.
you're thinking of "speculation." one could argue that the market needs speculators to take the risks that hedgers want to reduce. speculators might also find interesting information and improve the efficiency of market prices. traders intermediate between speculators and hedgers.
speculation and trading are practically the same to me, the end result is an unhealthy amount of money and immoral profit extraction from virtually doing nothing at all.
my experience of trading and speculation has been the opposite. very little profit (or zero or negative profit) in return for an extraordinary amount of effort and expertise. see Acura/Honda NSX trading.
> send one or two people into the boonies ... there was the small (vanishngly small?) possibility of a good payout
This was called "wild catting." It gave people an excuse to carry TNT dynamite into the boonies and detonate explosives for fun (like fireworks for grown ups).
Oh wow, I read this story as evidence that neural nets are not the future back when I was an undergrad studying machine learning. Maybe I should have followed my instincts back then because even then neural nets seemed intuitively very interesting even if the statistics and math professors hated them because they weren't derived from any first principals.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Lying to the court is a routine part of litigation, and there is no penalty or sanction for it - especially not against the lawyers themselves.
> I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Lying to the court is a routine part of litigation,
No, its not.
> and there is no penalty or sanction for it
Yes, there is.
> - especially not against the lawyers themselves.
There is a penalty especially against the lawyers. Heck, lawyers have been suspended from practice for lying to courts outside of their capacity as lawyers.
I don't agree that outright lying is tolerated, but one thing I was very disappointed to learn after independently learning about most of the informal logical fallacies is that lawyers do not avoid them. In fact, they use them to win cases.
This is tantamount to, but NOT equivalent to, "lying" in my book. Some of the most famous defenses in history, such as Cochran's "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH-VuP_5cA4 were fundamentally, fallacious appeals in nature.
Hugely disappointing to me. Would love for a lawyer to chime in on this.
If I could come up with any defense of this practice at all, I'd say that if you took my reasoning to its logical extreme, then the persuasive personality of an attorney themselves could be considered a fallacy, and that would be an unreasonable expectation to satisfy the elimination of. You could also argue that if 2 opposing lawyers are both permitted to make fallacious appeals that wouldn't be called out by judges or jury, then in theory they'd mostly cancel each other out. Maybe.
Can anyone explain how this is even possible? It's 2025.