A long short month
September 30, 2017
September flew by. Somehow I did not post a single article, or photo in the whole month. I got a lot of things done, but it still feels like it was an intellectually unproductive period.
On to the next one. More...
Links - September 29th, 2017
September has been a long month. Moving apartments is both mentally, and physically taxing, and the process is extremely time consuming. These have been sitting idle in the draft box way too long, so here goes:
Flash Boys, a short review
August 30, 2017
If you’ve ever taken an economics class, you probably know about arbitrage: exploiting the price differences of an asset on different markets by buying low, selling high, and pocketing the difference. I recently finished reading Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys, a book that sheds light on the many faces of arbitrage in the 21st century. Flash Boys is a story about the extent to which Wall Street banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions apply high frequency trading (HFT) techniques to gain an edge over other players in the most competitive financial markets. Continue reading...
Fascism is bad
August 27, 2017
Not sure how we got to a point where the title of this post is not taken as a fact.
Over the last few weeks there was a lot of talk about neo-nazi and fascist sympathizers coming to San Francisco to stage a big rally. Knowing that the Bay Area is very left leaning, it is very likely that the goal of the event was to incite the locals, and to get some favorable sound bites on how there is “violence on both sides,” and such. The original protest was meant to be at Crissy Field and after getting some pressure it was demoted to a news conference in Alamo Square Park. The SFPD shut it down, closing the park and putting a big fence around it, so the Patriot Prayer people ended up doing their talk in Pacifica - a small town south of San Francisco.
At the same time, several counter-protests started around the city, and when I heard there was one coming down Mission Street, I knew I had to go photograph it.
One thing that stuck out to me about this protest was that it was really a ton of small protests all joined together: anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-gentrification, anti-Islamophobia, and more. More...