I have worked on equities platforms in the US and Europe. I consider both arguments given early in the piece to be convincing defences of insider trading bans.
1. "insider trading argue [..] violates the principle of equal opportunity because actors are trading on information available only to them". This is true - it does undermine the principle of equal opportunity. The argument the author makes later about hedge funds is not relevant to this, because they are building their conclusions from a foundation of public information.
2. "[insider trading] creates inefficiencies by discouraging investment". It does. The equities market only exists because of the combination of the heavy regulation that creates it, and the public that chooses to invest in it. The equities market will only retain public confidence while people have high confidence in the utility value of the system. This is an ongoing project, akin to regularly painting a house to protect the walls. Allowing insider trading would undermine that project, because it would rightfully strengthen the perception that there was one standard for insiders and another for outsiders.
I will present two further arguments.
3. Work related to employment should focus on service to the company. If people are trading on the back of information they access through employment, that creates mixed incentives.
4. Laws around equities trading are structured to service the principle of do-the-right-thing. This includes bans on front-running, rules about not loading up the book to communicate false interest. The ban on insider trading fits naturally into the ethos of the larger set of rules. It would be weird to create an exception for that alone.
The post does give an interesting picture of a world without insider trading.
a. More efficient price-discovery. This is true.
b. Non-government mechanisms where firms prevent insider trading. A firm could build a reputation for being good at this, and distinguish themselves against the market.
The second point is true, but it creates a more complicated market structure, because pricing of equities would need to consider how individual companies enforce the behaviour of their staff. Perhaps this would evolve into an industry standard akin to SOC 2 Type 2. Yuck! It is simpler and more efficient to have the regulator outlaw insider trading.
Most markets emerge organically. Food stalls, shoe shops, commodities, foreign exchange. But this is not true of the equities market.
The equities market as we currently think of it is a product of heavy government regulation, and would not exist without it. There is no such thing as a big equities market without heavy regulation. If you tried to build such a thing, that thing would not win public confidence. If they changed an existing system, liquidity would flow away to other jurisdictions. The importance of public confidence motivated Hong Kong and France [1] to create insider trading bans. The dynamics of insider trading and public confidence are a reason to be dubious about the prospects of some proposals for blockchain-based securities.
Be is much more like NT than OS/2 or classic Mac OS. Like NT: kernel written in C, portable, emphasis on multi-threading, robust against subsystem failures, shipped with a TCP/IP stack in the base OS. Be booted straight into the desktop but you could download software to give it a logon screen like NT4 and different users - the structures were already in place.
The current crop of operating systems may themselves be a temporary niche. The design of NT and unix are awash with single-host assumptions yet most use-cases are now networked. Consider the way that linux filesystem handles are specific to the host they are running on, rather than the grid of computers they run in. Yet we run word-processors in browsers, ssh to other host to dispatch jobs.
There is a gap for a system which has an API that feels like an operating system API, but which sits on top of a grid of computers, rather than a single host. The kernel/keeper acts as a resource-manager for CPUs and memory in the grid. Such systems exist in sophisticated companies but not in the mainstream. Apache Yarn is an example of a system headed in that direction.
Once such a system becomes mainstream, you don't need the kind of complex operating systems we have now. A viable OS would do far less - coordinate drivers, scheduler, TCP/IP stack.
Yeah, we cannot see very far into the future and betting that system software will remain stagnate is not a good bet. If that means wholesale replacement, few of us will understand it at first. Otherwise retrofits will remain the norm for example one old idea that seems to be on the up and up is hardware-enforced capability systems and those working on them have found plausible ways to retain most of the existing C ABI world. Whether it always remains a good idea to continue propping up the past is one of the hardest questions and ultimately will be more of an economic one.
There are obsolete systems that meet your criteria, Plan 9 and Apollo Domain/OS had plausible early answers for networked computing that haven't been adequately explored.
For your last point, I would say scheduling, security, namespacing are the core features and everything else can be layered (perhaps interchangeably) on top. As a practical example, even in monolithic FreeBSD it supports fully runtime swappable TCP/IP stacks and out of tree network stacks.. the core illusion for that system is retaining the same Socket interface for userspace. Presumably if you get the namespacing thing right the entire system and network of things would look a lot more like deliberately interchangeable parts.
Had not heard of Apollo, an interesting read. I am building a 9P library at the moment towards some projects in this spirit.
You make a good case for base features in your last paragraph. I think monolith drivers as well. Raw speed seems to be important for survival in computing platforms. I am far from a domain expert but as far as I know, monolith drivers have efficiency/speed advantages over microkernel.
If you are looking for an audience for your platform, you may want to connect to that community via their Discord. They have some experienced network stack developers.
I found the part about clay cisterns fascinating (6:40). Does anyone know the trade-offs about lining the outside of cellar walls with a thick layer of clay. Would it be effective to pour a slab foundation onto a thick layer of clay? Or, to have a thick layer of clay, and then a few feet of gravel, and to pour a slab onto that?
Similar story for me. Elevation, your post is a form of marketing and you need to give people a way they can contact you. For a start, email address in your profile.
This is a beat-up. The US has a lease on the territory, and it is their prerogative to control access. The British would not have let Chinese lawmakers into Kowloon during the lease. The US would not let Cuban lawmakers into Guantánamo Bay, also leased.
How can anyone think that Hong Kong new territories and Guantanamo, which were areas essentially taken by force and then had a dubious leasing agreement painted over them, is the same situation as an agreement between two formal allies?
Between 1968 and 1973, the Chagossian (Îlois) inhabitants were forcibly expelled from Diego Garcia by the UK Government so that a joint US/UK military base could be established on the island.
Many were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles, following which the United States built the large Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, which has been in continuous operation since then.
In 2019, this action and continued British administration of the archipelago were deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a ruling the United Nations General Assembly supported.
In 2023, Human Rights Watch condemned the action as a crime against humanity.
An important detail to add to that, to ensure a complete picture is created of the situation, is that originally the atol was uninhabited. The French created a colony there of 60 or so people and slaves.
Umm, "people and slaves"? Do you really consider slaves to not be people?
Also, originally Iceland was uninhabited. The Norse created a colony there of - as you put it - "people and slaves". That equivalent history surely does not affect the legal status of the descendants of those people now living in Iceland. Why should it affect the people now living in the BIOT?
A major difference is the clearing model. The asset classes you mention generally have a clearing house behind them. This is designed to protect the system against counterparty risk. If one party goes under, it has limited contagion, even to the people who were (in practical terms) on the other side of the trades.
This layer of protection allows better specialisation. In crypto, you need to trade on your own balance sheet. In centrally cleared markets, it is routine for trading firms to lease balance sheet from banks, who have lots of capital and good risk management at scale, but who are typically less effective at trading specific markets competitively. This leads to more liquidity being available and more competitive markets.
Banks aren’t trading because post-2008 regulations made it nearly impossible. They have plenty of money to hire top trading talent and did so for a long time.
It is not a clean example of NIH. Got stores its data on disk in the git format.
That aside, NIH is only foolish when the talent falls short of the ambitions. When the talent is up to the challenge, and when there are resources available, there should be no shame in it.
There is a different folly, but we don't yet have a pithy name for it. That is where people are so fearful of being criticised for reinventing the wheel that they twist technology to satisfy requirements it is badly matched to.
The Windows alt+tab behaviour up to Windows 7 was reliable/predictable with two caveats,
1. Things that minimised to the notification area would not go to the back of the stack when you minimised them.
2. Microsoft Excel misbehaved - something to do with each workbook having its own window entry in the group, but also the application having this entry.
At some point since Windows 7 I played with it and found it to be no longer consistent. I could somewhat correct for this by using alt+esc to move a window to the back of the stack and then reverse to it with ctrl+shift+tab.
1. "insider trading argue [..] violates the principle of equal opportunity because actors are trading on information available only to them". This is true - it does undermine the principle of equal opportunity. The argument the author makes later about hedge funds is not relevant to this, because they are building their conclusions from a foundation of public information.
2. "[insider trading] creates inefficiencies by discouraging investment". It does. The equities market only exists because of the combination of the heavy regulation that creates it, and the public that chooses to invest in it. The equities market will only retain public confidence while people have high confidence in the utility value of the system. This is an ongoing project, akin to regularly painting a house to protect the walls. Allowing insider trading would undermine that project, because it would rightfully strengthen the perception that there was one standard for insiders and another for outsiders.
I will present two further arguments.
3. Work related to employment should focus on service to the company. If people are trading on the back of information they access through employment, that creates mixed incentives.
4. Laws around equities trading are structured to service the principle of do-the-right-thing. This includes bans on front-running, rules about not loading up the book to communicate false interest. The ban on insider trading fits naturally into the ethos of the larger set of rules. It would be weird to create an exception for that alone.
The post does give an interesting picture of a world without insider trading.
a. More efficient price-discovery. This is true.
b. Non-government mechanisms where firms prevent insider trading. A firm could build a reputation for being good at this, and distinguish themselves against the market.
The second point is true, but it creates a more complicated market structure, because pricing of equities would need to consider how individual companies enforce the behaviour of their staff. Perhaps this would evolve into an industry standard akin to SOC 2 Type 2. Yuck! It is simpler and more efficient to have the regulator outlaw insider trading.
Most markets emerge organically. Food stalls, shoe shops, commodities, foreign exchange. But this is not true of the equities market.
The equities market as we currently think of it is a product of heavy government regulation, and would not exist without it. There is no such thing as a big equities market without heavy regulation. If you tried to build such a thing, that thing would not win public confidence. If they changed an existing system, liquidity would flow away to other jurisdictions. The importance of public confidence motivated Hong Kong and France [1] to create insider trading bans. The dynamics of insider trading and public confidence are a reason to be dubious about the prospects of some proposals for blockchain-based securities.
:1 see p46/47 https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...