BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
16hr ago
· Edited 14hr ago
Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems
One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.
The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.
Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.
This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.
This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.
Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.
The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.
The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.
Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.
Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.
On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.
Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.
Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.
I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).
As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
20d ago
Pointwise vs Uniform "badness"
Note: This post assumes the axiom that some people are better than others, and that we can to some degree of accuracy say whether someone is a net contributor to the world or not.
Often when it is pointed out that people who are in group X are a net negative to society (e.g. low paid cleaners who consume a lot more in benefits and general wear and tear on public goods like roads than they put in) others are quick to point out that actually these people are the lifeblood of the country and if they suddenly disappeared the country would collapse within a week (e.g. truck drivers refuse to work, thereby causing collapse as food doesn't get to where it needs to be etc.). This is then followed by the conclusion that therefore these people are not bad for society but rather good for it, and so we shouldn't complain about them at all.
I am completely convinced that they are correct that the country would indeed collapse in short order if truck drivers went on strike, cleaners stopped working etc. However this fact is a statement about the group as a whole, instead of individual members of it. For example: If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners", even though the "factory owners" need the group "workers". In this case it is not the individuals who are indispensable to society, but rather the group as a whole, and the example above shows, it's possible for the group to be a net positive while every single individual in it is a net negative.
Of course not all groups of people are like this. The group of people who are criminals is a net negative to society full stop (restrict criminals to those who commit non-state sanctioned violence+thieves if your worried about how exactly criminal is defined). The individual members of this group are a net negative to society and the whole group is a net negative too. This is probably why "criminals bad" is a much less controversial statement compared to "street cleaners bad" even though someone who earns enough to be a net contributor plus does some light burglary on the side is probably much less of a drain on public welfare.
To be clear here: the people who are members of a net positive category but themselves are net negative are still those who society would be better off without on the margins. And since all economic decisions are made on the margin it is perfectly valid to say that ceteris paribus the world as a whole would be better off without them in expectation.
I think it makes sense to distinguish these two types of a group being bad for society. Firstly we have pointwise badness as an individual which we define as a person who is on their own a net negative to society ceteris paribus holding everything else the same (i.e. we remove them and just them from society and ask if the result if better or worse in expectation). From this we can define pointwise badness for groups where a group is given this label if most of its members are pointwise bad as individuals (note: here we depart from the mathematical definition, every group has it's saints, I'm sure there are some net positive criminals so we don't require every single member of the group to be a net negative).
As examples the group of Criminals are pointwise bad for society, equally street cleaners are pointwise bad for society because they are easily replaceable and consume more than they output.
Then you have uniform badness, which is when the group as a whole is a negative influence on the world and if we could somehow Thanos snap every single member of it away the rest of society would be better off. Criminals are uniformly bad for the world, while street cleaners, truck drivers and steel mill workers are not. Note that uniform badness sort of implies pointwise badness in the real world (not exactly: a group with 10 good people but 1 Literally Hitler is uniformly bad for the world, while it wouldn't be pointwise bad, the Literally Hitler is pointwise bad as an individual, but none of the others are) much more than pointwise badness implies uniform badness.
There are lots of pointwise bad groups but much much fewer uniformly bad groups. Generally when people are talking about how members of a group are bad, especially when they want something to be done they're talking about pointwise badness rather than uniform badness.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
20d ago
If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week.
If this happens we import new people over from the third world who're going to do this cheaper and won't stop working because they know what is good for them and know the meaning of being thankful. Trade doesn't just apply to goods, it also applies to humans. Your statement is no different from saying water should be the most valuable thing in the world because without it we die in 3 days. I'm going to make a top level on this soon where I delve deeper.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
Oh I absolutely agree people like Kendi are a net negative. I was meaning UMC to refer to roughly people in the top 4-5% of the income distribution. Yeah I agree I was basically using UMC and PMC interchangeably here, should have been more precise. This group probably does include some unsavory characters like Kendi, especially those who can set themselves up a good grift to extract resources from their followers but I would say the lower classes who net consume government spending have an even higher proportion of unsavory characters relative to those who do productive work like making food or clothes.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered?
Just because the UMC class don't physically partake in creating food, clothes and shelter doesn't mean they aren't integral to it's production at the levels we have today. Norman Borlaug's invention of more hardy wheat strains etc. led to a massive increase in the capacity of the world to reliably feed itself, he has done far more for the world's net food production than any random two bit farmer in a tractor (which I must add was envisaged, designed and continues to be iteratively improved on by UMC level engineers).
The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.
I work in finance (though not in IB) I assure you your food in the shop where you buy it from would be 20+% more expensive if investment bankers who broker deals in the background didn't exist, as well as your life being generally shittier, no different to it being shittier if you had to live with the computing power we had in the 1990s, which is yet another thing the PMC provides (technological progress).
But all this is moot, I was talking about their net tax contributions that end up getting spent by the lower classes. It doesn't matter one whit whether the UMC produces a single grain of wheat, a single strand of silk or a single beam of lumber if they can trade their money (which they by and large got because someone was willing to give it to them for something in exchange) for it. On a countrywide level that's no different to producing the item indigenously, the end result in both cases is you got yourself some grain, cloth or shelter that wasn't present before in your borders, and they can do this trade easily with a farmer in Ukraine or a grower in China. The terminal problem is not with the worldwide lower classes who by and large know their place, it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world whose only crime is being born somewhere without a sizable highly earning UMC they can extort money from.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
This video just made me go "Ew".
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
If the plebes want noblesse oblige they better start showing some obeiscence. The UMC class is already funding your continued existence, start showing some gratitude instead of "Eat the rich" (sidenote: it's much more efficient to eat the poor instead, but that's a digestion digression for a different day) and then we can talk.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
Sure, and there are millions of people with rich parents, but only one Bill Gates. Even if he is not a 1 in a billion level human (I don't even think he would claim this), he is most definitely a 1 in a million level human, since there are millions of people born in similar situations to Gates.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
assabiyah
God it's been so long I had to look up the definition of that word again. How time flies...
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
I can't speak for others, but I downvoted that comment (and yours) not just because I disagree, but first of all because I thought it would be funny. Sue me!:D
This is the best reason for issuing downvotes. I just did the same!
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Yeah, this here too. I personally consider myself to have an IQ close to 140 and that's around what I scored when you convert my SAT results, my GRE results and the proctored IQ test I sat once many moons ago, which probably means my true IQ is somewhere close to 135 (I made sure I was prepared and ready to go for all those tests, and we all tell ourselves some comfortable lies), and I certainly think I'm smarter than the average bear who frequents these parts. I'd be very surprised if the average here was actually 135.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
26d ago
Probably, but I'm not the all, and I don't care about the sums of all. I'm one person, and I care about myself.
I assume you don't like anti-monopoly laws either. That or you're a massive hypocrite, which is fine, but then you can't complain either about Affirmative Action and other policies designed to disadvantage those like you (apologies for assuming you're a standard white person with nothing exceptional going for you) over people with the right skin colour/beliefs.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
26d ago
Without a large chunk of them,.not without all of them. Just like cancer, the optimal amount of low end citizens is non-zero.
Fair enough that my language in the post above was needlessly extreme.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
26d ago
I'm not convinced that people like L are a harm on the country in any way shape or form, at least any more than comparable citizens. I can accept that the country is better off without L, but then I equally want acceptance that the country is better off without all its low end citizens (I am not asking for the citizens to be removed, I just want there to be a societal consensus that the low end citizens are a drain on society, who only get what they have by grace of their superiors), and we all know that's never happening.
The next best alternative to this is to flood the country with people like L. That way the wilfully blind societal consensus gets what it deserves by being run over.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
27d ago
Reading this I wish L the best of luck in making a successful life in the USA. Economic migrants (of all stripes) are one of the few groups for whom their version of the American Dream is still a possibility.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
27d ago
If you do not trust these free masons,
Side note: Freemasons are some of the most trustworthy people I have ever met, on average they stick to a stricter moral code than your average man on the street. If I had to choose between trusting a freemason I knew nothing about or John Doe, I would trust the freemason without hesitation.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
This is so idiotic I don't even know where to start. I genuinely wouldn't be against seeing this dude get shot on live television pour discourager les autres.
Just like how there is an upper limit to how much solar energy we can generate in a day on earth (surface area of planet *maximum amount of energy falling on each unit area per hour*24 hrs), there is an upper limit to how much tidal energy we can generate because we don't have any way to make the tides stronger (and thus pull energy from the earth's rotation into the movement of seawater). This upper limit doesn't give a shit about us needing to grow energy consumption at 2% per year. It is a physical fact, nothing to do with humanity or its needs. When we reach this limit we're straight up not going to be able to generate more energy via tidal methods and will have to switch to something else. What will it be? I don't know but so far humanity has a very good track record in finding alternatives when they become necessary. And this upper limit is so low that it will be many millions of years before there is even a slight impact on the length of a sidereal day.
As a result of this limit we can spend eons harvesting tidal energy and it won't make any significant difference to the earth's rotation. In fact, it's going to slow the earth's rotation just as much as if we harvested literally 0 tidal energy. This is because the earth loses rotational energy when it gets converted into the movement of water (as the tide goes up, water needs to move to that area), not when we harnass that water movement to create electricity. At the moment all this energy is being converted into heat and sound as the water of the tide comes in and rubs against the land/the aligned directional movement of the water molecules gets replaced with random movement though entropy, thereby increasing water temperature. Diverting a portion (any portion, up to 100%) of this energy into electricity is going to do literally nothing to how much the tides are slowing down the earth.
Tides are already slowing down the earth's rotation, harvesting tidal energy won't speed up or slow down this rate at all.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
29d ago
Just started on Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami. It's a surprisingly easy read and fun to get through as well.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
30d ago
Review was not written by me, I just think it offers a fascinating insight into a culture that was stable long term (the Zhou dynasty - pronounced like Joe - lasted 800 years, which is twice as long as we've had modern democracy for) but very very different from the way we live these days in the thought processes of the people.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
1mo ago
Yeah. I feel like what we now call the homeless should be split up into two groups: "those down on their luck" and vagrants. People in the first group need help and helping them is the economically (forget morally) right thing to do. With some money these people will get back on their feet and continue contributing to society. I'd wager they make up 80%+ of the current homeless, but they're not very visible. Group 2 is the vagrants, no amount of money etc. will help them and they are the group that make the lives of ordinary citizens worse on a day to day basis. we should be a lot more strict and come down on their ass like a ton of bricks the moment they start doing stuff that makes society worse off.
Conflating the two groups helps nobody except these vagrants and those who want to virtue signal about how good they are to these vagrants.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
1mo ago
Sure, I see nothing wrong with picking up your daughters to go home after school.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Amongst the old guard westerners nothing much improves. I expect the market for women to go bust a fair bit with the advent of hyperrealistic porn coupled with AI that allows you to create your own waifu who has the full spectrum of beliefs of your average human being and is just as intelligent (I already prefer talking to GPT4 over some IQ 100 normies I have the misfortune of having to regularly interact with in life, I genuine prefer talking to the IQ 80-90 people over the IQ 100 ones, at least those people know they are stupid and defer to you easily). But none of the underlying issues get fixed.
More and more demographic replacement from the third world, which will cause them to have their own population issues too, but in the West they'll always be able to get immigrants at a steady rate, countries not named the United States of America might have to scrape the bottom barrel for immigrants who are willing to move, but they will be able to get them.
These people will bring their own culture with them. Some of it and some of these people will dissolve in the alkahest of modernity and adopt the ways of the westerners, the rest of them will keep their own ways, and eventually hopefully we can get a second stable life pathway that is able to stand up against the constant chips and attacks of the western mindset, a sort of duopoly of cultures with healthier gender relations, which over the generations slowly gains converts from the children of those who were failed by the western way of life and converted to this one as a way to save their children from the Western Cultural Monster.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
1mo ago
Indeed, The guardian just published an article on this in the last hour: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai
Literal empirical confirmation we get newsworthy stuff before the big sites.
BurdensomeCountTheWhite
He fell; and was returned to life 20 days later to be clothed in a new garb, his task not yet done.
1mo ago
I like this, and it gets at what has bothered me about how some of my fellow board members have responded to this problem lady.
Vestigial Christianity fucks stuff up again. If modern society wants to reject Christianity it has to reject it fully, not just reject small parts of it like belief in God etc. That gets you to where we are now in the world. To quote the great Chesterton:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
That was the biggest BS ever. Trading strategies very rarely just buy and hold, they hedge their exposures. If your trades get cancelled you suddenly have exposure that you didn't account for, and it's likely going to be quite toxic too if everyone else has been handed exposure in the same direction and they all try to get rid of it at the same time.
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