The law creating Roth IRAs was intended for middle-class people, not billionaires. Likewise, the law allowing conversions from Traditional to Roth IRAs was intended for the middle-class. A billionaire taking advantage of the Roth conversion to amass a Roth IRA worth billions is not even remotely what the relevant laws were intended for; that it is legal is an oversight on the part of Congress, who did not realize what they were drafting when they wrote the law.
Moreover, it is not as if billionaires need to exploit the IRA rules like this. Typically billionaires will avoid taxes by borrowing against the value of their assets, then deducting the interest they pay on those loans from the income they use to pay the interest (done right, this results in no income taxes). That is an example of the law working as intended.
Using 80Mhz channels I found the default configuration never exceeded 200Mbit/s using iperf. For me "reasonable" is closer to 800Mbit/s, which is roughly the theoretical limit for 80Mhz with 2 spatial streams. I run my tests with my devices sitting 1 meter from the AP. This is on a hAP AC, and like I said, I get much better performance (close to the theoretical max) running OpenWRT on the same unit. I have had similar issues with the RB4011 and cAP AC, and in both the NYC area and suburban Virginia (so it is not just an issue of spectrum crowding in the city).
Mikrotik, but unfortunately getting reasonable throughput for wireless clients is a serious challenge (I always have better results with openwrt on the same hardware). Still, nice to have local control and not have to rely on some cloud service just to use the hardware I bought.
"The price" is just a convenient way to talk about the theoretical "value" of a company. Brokers use it to determine whether or not margin maintenance requires are being met, but in reality there is no single price at any given time. There are always two prices, the highest bid and the lowest ask, and those two prices are only meaningful for the size of the bid/ask in the order book.
How would an algorithm determine the price? The whole point of the equity markets is price discovery. The price should rise when people rush to buy, and it should fall when people rush to sell. In many cases that is the "right thing," in the sense that the rush to buy/sell is in response to a real change in a company's circumstances (e.g. an outstanding earnings report, a natural disaster that harms the business, etc.).
Limiting the execution of a large order would not stop insider trading, because you do not need to go to equity markets to buy/sell stock -- you can enter into a private agreement with someone to transfer shares in exchange for money. Limiting large order executions would also make index funds impossible -- index funds have to trade the stocks that make up the underlying index when customers buy or sell, and a large fund may have many individual customers buying or selling on any given day.
You cannot cite the average cost of a house while dismissing the idea of buying a house using a mortgage. Mortgages are a part of the housing market and are part of the reason prices are what they are. If there were no mortgages prices would be lower, and the market would be structured completely differently.
Not that they had any way of knowing what would happen. $20 could have been the peak for all anyone knew, and by the end of next week selling at $20 might look like a smart move.
The people with "diamond hands" are the ones who opened short positions when the stock was trading in the $300+ range. They are probably to busy looking up which sports cars to buy with all the money they made to bother looking at WSB right now.
As if "Wall St." is one giant conspiracy. What happened to criticizing "Wall St." for treating the economy like a casino and driving the stock market into a giant bubble? Where are all those complaints about how "Wall St." is recklessly risking our retirement accounts? The contradictory conspiracy theories are astonishing.
First of all, there is no such thing as a free market, certainly not in the capital markets. There are mountains of regulations covering stock, options, futures, and debt trades. Trading is routinely halted on various securities in extreme circumstances. Insider trading is restricted, and the restrictions become more significant for higher level management. Companies are required to report certain information to the public.
Markets exist to solve problems of valuation and capital allocation. Pump-and-dump schemes distort valuations in very extreme ways and work against the purpose of equity markets. That is a basic reason why they should be banned. Another reason is that scams introduce unnecessary risk to someone making an investment decision; ideally investors should only focus on risks related to a company's business, not the risk that the information they were given about that company is false. The extra risk will drive away investors and the result will be less capital available to otherwise promising ventures, which again works against the goals of capital markets.
It is not really possible to restructure markets in a way that would avoid pump-and-dump schemes, because the problem with a pump-and-dump scheme is not actually related to the rules governing the market. The problem is that the pump-and-dump scheme involves deliberately spreading false information; yet it is equally possible that investors hear true information and rush to buy, and the market should allow for that situation.
It is a near certainty that hedge funds fleeced retail investors who bought GME above $100/share. The real problem with WSB is not the people who post there, it is the large crowd of unsophisticated lurkers who overestimate their own knowledge and abilities. The media did not help by hyping this story and making it sound like "Wall St." was terrified by a mob of Redditors. Two hedge funds lost some money, but as many have pointed out, those funds will probably still turn a profit on the year. Meanwhile, a bunch of hedge funds, algos, and prop traders are raking in cash from the spike in volatility, and a bunch of HFTs took advantage of the spike in volume. I expect a small bump in sports car and yacht sales in the NYC region as a bunch of "Wall St. bros" spend the giant bonuses they are taking home from this whole episode.
As to the scam aspect, I give it a 50/50 chance that someone saw an opportunity to pump-and-dump some symbols with very high short interest. I doubt it was a hedge fund, it was probably an individual, probably someone living outside the reach of US law enforcement. The alternative is that a bunch of idiots actually came up with the idea that they could take on "Wall St." and managed to trigger a short squeeze, many of whom have yet to realize that the party's over.
You are right that with OS X you have no particular say over the features. On the other hand, you do not have to deal with poorly supported hardware, and if something goes wrong there are people whose job is to help you. Most users find those things to be advantages, but many will choose open source software because of the various other freedoms they can get. There are also people who choose open source software because they have unusual requirements that proprietary systems either cannot meet or are too difficult/expensive/onerous to deal with.
Losing users is always a bad thing for the open source ecosystem. Lost users means fewer bug reports, fewer patches, fewer donations, and less support from paid developers working for various corporations (easy to forget but there are people whose job is to maintain open source projects like the Linux kernel). Fewer users means less incentive for hardware companies to provide any support, even just minimal technical documentation, needed for open source developers to write drivers (let alone contribute to that).
Forks require a significant commitment of time and effort, and really should be considered a last resort. The time commitment is much greater for prominent projects that receive a lot of activity like Gnome or Linux. Most users, even those with the necessary technical skills, do not have enough spare time to maintain a fork when things break.
Your dismissive attitude is fine for a obscure hobbyist project with a dozen users. It makes no sense for desktop Linux distros that now have many millions of users.
Nothing wrong with that attitude if you don't mind large numbers of users, many of whom are very technically competent and able to make meaningful contributions, giving up on the open source ecosystem. Most users do not have time to figure out how to stop using systemd when that is what their distro uses, let alone how to do so while staying on top of updates for whatever they are using instead. Most users who stop using systemd are going to switch to OS X or Windows, and they will contribute less, maybe not at all, to open source projects. The result will be an open source ecosystem that is less able to keep pace with proprietary software and has an even harder time staying relevant.
What is a "power user?" Sounds like the same nonsense we hear from proprietary software vendors all the time, "That feature is for enterprise users."
Gnome more or less optimizes for minimal configurability, the theory being that most users want the UI to be as clean as possible. They do not particularly care if someone would like to be able to change some annoying behavior, because they thought that behavior made sense and they feel the cost of adding a button to disable it, or even burying a configuration bit in gconf, is far too high. Of course, they do not have the resources needed to run actual user studies the way Apple, Google, and Microsoft do, so their idea of what users want is mostly based on their own ideas about what users want (since they usually dismiss feature requests from their actual users, because those are "power users").
"I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions?"
How many people asked for their distro to switch to Wayland?
You seem to think that these critical packages that millions of people depend on can be treated like hobbyist projects. Yes, when your project is a hobby, you can tell people that their complaints are not your problem and that they should just fork the code if they need something different. However, distros should not make hobbyist projects core components that users are unable to avoid, nor should anyone push their hobbyist project as a replacement for a core component.
The fact is that the Wayland developers set out to replace X11. In what world are they not opening themselves to criticism from people whose use-case was supported by Xorg but not supported by Wayland? By now a decision made by the Wayland maintainers will affect the vast majority of desktop Linux users; why should they be immune from complaints? When people depend on your software you have to deal with their complaints, that is just a fact.
The funny thing is that a lot of users switch to open source software because the proprietary software they had been paying for was not supporting their obscure use case. You know, it is not something worth the investment because only a handful of users care or it works against the interests of some business partner or whatever.
"Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project"
Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.
What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above?
Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do the Gnome developers not benefit from that?
We cannot all be contributors to every package we use, but we are all part of an ecosystem and we all have the right to ask for changes by others in that ecosystem. You call it whining, but you know what? When developers break use cases, users have the right to complain about it. If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.
"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it."
If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else.
Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude.
As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.
Actually I have found a use for VXLAN in my home network, when I was trying to set up a mesh and was finding that 802.11s support was poor and that WDS was creating annoying switching loops despite STP. So I just set up wireless links between routers, use OSPF to determine routes, set appropriate weights to prefer the 5ghz band (which periodically goes down because of DFS but otherwise gives higher throughput), and use VXLAN to create the logical network I want. It has worked extremely well for several months now and my wife is happy to not have cables going all over our house. There are probably "better" ways to do this but honestly, it works, it is flexible, and it is straightforward to extend to more routers if needed.
The law creating Roth IRAs was intended for middle-class people, not billionaires. Likewise, the law allowing conversions from Traditional to Roth IRAs was intended for the middle-class. A billionaire taking advantage of the Roth conversion to amass a Roth IRA worth billions is not even remotely what the relevant laws were intended for; that it is legal is an oversight on the part of Congress, who did not realize what they were drafting when they wrote the law.
Moreover, it is not as if billionaires need to exploit the IRA rules like this. Typically billionaires will avoid taxes by borrowing against the value of their assets, then deducting the interest they pay on those loans from the income they use to pay the interest (done right, this results in no income taxes). That is an example of the law working as intended.