Printable View
Of course, I believe it was Rousseau who said that these rights in form of the social contract do exist, but that society can never truly interpret it correctly. I believe that it is akin to discovering some theoretical construct to explain how something exists in the universe and governed by the laws of physics. Universal rights are likewise theoretical construct to explain how best for people to exist together and governed by the laws of society.Quote:
Originally Posted by KSpin
Human constructs do exist under the form of actions. If you can act because you have something that is defined under "rights"; then they definitely exist, even in tangible form.Quote:
Originally Posted by KSpin
I'm not sure though, because if you example think that gravitation "doesn't exist" then you're right in saying that rights "don't exist".
Gravity is necessary for our view on the Universe, or even for physics. If it didn't exist, the Universe would quickly fly apart.Quote:
Originally Posted by FDG
I wouldn't say that 'Human rights' were in the same category.
Nietzsche? INTp? :? :? :? :? :?Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
(Notice there are five :?s, emphasizing the sheer :? I am presently experiencing.)
Argh, I don't understand why you people don't get the thing. You seem to treat rights as something that is imposed upon by authority. It is not like this. We accept a social contract with every transaction with other human beings. Let us suppose that everybody were to accept killing: then the social contract would classify killing as a right, and conversely there would be no right to physical integrity - I hope that now it is clearer?Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Eehe, rights aren't perceived. From the way I see it: if he is dishonest and others do not feel the need to punish him, they have given him the right to be dishonest.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Rights are not established by individuals, they are established in the mutuality of society. If someone perceives that they have the right to be dishonest in their transactions with other people, and other people do not, then being dishonest is not a part of the contract.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Great, Rawls... Although people who are born into society do not see an obligation to follow through on this invisible contract, and they willing separate themselves from the society, they will still be held accountable for breaks of peace by those who do.Quote:
Logos: there is no obvious veil of ignorance behind which we actually consent to any social contract. perceiving themselves as being thrown into society against their will at birth, some people see no obligation to follow through on their role in any contract society formulates. perhaps they hope that everyone else does, because social order among others does often promote positive externalities. but this would be more of a convenient occurrence to this person (to him or her, a convenient error on everyone else's part) than any contract, because from his or her POV no contract ever existed.
Of course not, in which case the goal is to shift or change the agreements held upon by society. That is part of the idea in representative government.Quote:
likewise it does not need the extermination of the human race or overthrow of the law to cease existing. some of these people may be sociopaths or some other extreme of being "free riders" (to borrow an economics term.) but not necessarily so, because they still might have compassion for others (albeit on their own rather than society's terms.) this could especially be relevant for a member of some group being oppressed (or otherwise shortchanged) by society as a whole.
Nietzsche is ENFj.Quote:
regarding gamma philosophers: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have been typed as INTp too.
Also consider his works in which he suggests within the opening chapters of Beyond Good & Evil that truth is relevant to whoever is holding the dominant position of power and thought (:Ti: and :Se:): the facts do not matter as much as the power politics of ideas.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Of course not, but not everything works as smoothly as we want them to be in real life. And that does not necessarily disprove a thing I said. Just because you are not caught does not mean that you are somehow not held accountable. The fact that you remain silent or hidden when you commit the crime is done out of a fear of being held accountable.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
True enough, I suppose, but people do not make mutual agreements with rocks and water. And while they see the universe as being sentient (i.e. God), God takes upon a noticeably human role. In other words, humans try and make agreements between other individuals. So while people may perceive the universe as being sentient and capable of contract making with singular individuals (a.l.a. them), that would fly in the face of human rationality. So you can go ahead and try and make a pact, agreement, or contract with the cosmos, but that does not mean that the rest of humanity will be as willing to acknowledge it the moment that it breeches the mutual contract upheld in the rest of the society.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Nietzsche in a sentence: the will to conquer our surroundings.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Beta in a sentence: the will to conquer our surroundings.
The Ubermensch concept is not very democratic by any means. They are an elite who are able by their own might conquer and subvert the world around them on their own whims. And Nietzsche was also the one who said that the only Christian was the one who died on the cross. To the best of my knowledge, Nietzsche considered Jesus one of history's few ubermensch.
I have the impression that most people does not understand the concept of the übermensch.
It is not a great man among men. It is something entirely different from men.
Nietzsche's ubermensch is quite human; an atypical human, but human nonetheless.Quote:
Originally Posted by mikemex
Nietzsche's übermensch is basically a man who only follows rules, morals and beliefs etc. that he has created himself built on totally nihilistic values, wich is the absence of them. And these new values that he creates are to be based on Will to Power. And he will keep continue to do this despite any adversity that he meets.
To put it shortly übermensch only obeys one rule, that is to have more power, and that so that nothing else will have power over him.
And that isn't power over others. But power to do what he wills to do.
Similar to Crowley's: "Do what thou Will, shall be the whole of the Law."
By "normal" standards übermensch doesn't even have to be "succesful".
My understanding of the ubermensch is practically synonymous with Warlord's and I definitely still see Nietzsche as Beta. All the functions which Nietzsche clearly values exist in Beta.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Not necessarily, but I think that hierarchy is much more visible, real, and measurable for the individual.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Yeah, Crowley's True Will is different from Nietzsche's Will. Although Crowley was hedonist, the concept of True Will isn't. Actually it's similar to Zen, but then again not exactly the same. Crowley usually in his writings tries to mystify things, rather than explain them. I think it's just to cover up that his thoughts have nothing ingenious about them.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
I don't think that Se deals strictly with hierrchy, more with authority. While these two often go together, often there is authority without hierarchy and hierarchy without authority. So Ghandi had authority but no hierarchy, while the UN has hieararchy but no authority.Quote:
Originally Posted by Logos
I like the way the topic has pretty much been derailed, and I have no idea what's going on. How great.
ifmd95, are you a philosophy major? I must admit that I am enjoying this whole deal quite a bit.
Perhaps Nietzsche would probably best be left in a thread of his own now, but we do agree that Nietzsche valued :Ni: and :Se:. Anyway, the rest of your argument I can agree with quite well, especially the economics of rewards versus the risks. Economic reductionism is pure beauty in how it views the world.Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
hey im majoring in the same shit (shit meant positively). Do you advise me to change?Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
Yes that's what I've always wanted to do. No networking and stuff it's not big on my list. I already understand that getting into that would mean having to transform my whole life into workQuote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
yeah I understand, here in italy the situation is better actually since I know what with a 3.8 gpa i can enter an masters in finance which is (said to be) the n.1 here in italy for just 1000 $Quote:
strong grades and program are a must for either of these. also strong interviews. ibanks especially have insane interviews. if you don't make the cut there's commercial banking where you'll really be pushing papers. and you'll be going into there with fewer paperpuhsing skills than the business school guys. lower salary than the first two options and career advancement is also less certain. (you could always go to law school too in this last case. economics is an good major for that. but in my case the tuition for law school, like grad school, is not yet in the cards.)
so that last prospect is kind of scary. and doing actual research without a graduate degree is very unlikely in any case (the main reason i was complaining earlier.) with just your undergrad you are sort of stuck being not quantitative enough for "real" economics yet and not qualitative enough for stuff like the think tanks or journalism.
i didn't think though that it wasn't qualitative enough for journalism. I honestly belive that if you have the quant you're forced to have the qual, but not vice versa
honestly i've always been torn between three paths: sports, grad school, or brokerage/trade desk. I don't think I'll have the patience for grad school though, mostly due to the poverty in which i'll have to live through itQuote:
i am in the USA BTW so things may differ across the pond. i also came up through high school into college expecting to do graduate school and research. if you're more adjusted to corporate life already i actually think economics and math can be a solid choice.
Getting an advanced degree is a must. A quantitative degree from a good school (or a highly quantitative degree with top grades from a medium school) should open the doors to inv. banking areas like trading, structuring, risk management, quant analystics etc. The large houses pay huge amounts for such people as the prducts they trade are becoming more and more complex.
Trading is fun and my guess is that there are specific types of people who engage in it, and they will either love it or hate it. If you feel so-so about it or dislike aspcts of it, you won;t be there for long.
The trading desk of an IB is an intense environment.
I used to work at an IB, not as a trader, though I have been trading forex for 2 1/2 yrs on my own account, and I personally find it fascinating. These organisations are so big that there are many options and routes to take.
By advanced what do you mean? A PhD? My plan is a masters degree in economics and mathematics and a master in finance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grek0
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifmd95
By "Investment Banking" now two things are meant:
In the narrow sense , the so-called "pure" investment banking, means Mergers & Acquisitions and Corporate Finance work, which , when in junior positions, means doing valuations and powerpoint pitchbook work, and in senior positions (SVP and Managing Director level) means doing origination work. Origination is basically all about marketing, relatioships and wine & dining. In my view, you have to be a marketer/seller/relationship manager at heart to do this. By the way, it's pretty much th same thing in senior management consulting roles. Senior consultants are basically marketers, not problem-solvers.
With the growth of derivatives etc, most of the money that the IBs make no longer comes from M&A work, but from trading:
Fixed Income: i.e. corporate and government bonds, Equities ('stocks' in the US), Currencies and Commodities and their respective derivative instruments: swaps, options, exotics & hybrids, futures etc.
Even "white shoe" IBs like Goldman, make the bulk of their money for this type of invstment banking activity now, not from M&A. It's not that M&A has not grown, it has, but those other areas have grown even faster.
These derivatives instruments are becoming more and more complex, which is why those banks that wanna stay ahead of the game need to hire entire hordes of super-geeks for their Quant divisions and then their trading and structuring desks. A not too senior Quant specialising in very complex derivatives will alway have a PhD in subjects like Astrophysics, Quantum Mechanics etc. Masters in Finance are nowhere near quantitative and advanced enough for the type of work these guys need to do. They of course get paid well, top banks like Lehman may pay $300k/year base and more for these people.
Those who trade these instruments do not need to have PhDs, but they still need to be highly quant and definitely have programming skills like you said - at least VBA. Usually masters in fin. mathematics, or engineering degrees are good. Masters in 'softer' stuff like "economics" or "business administration" are likely to be treated less favourably. Again, the type of school you come from makes a higuge difference, at least in London. A BA from Cambridge or Oxford in a soft subject, even stuff like anthropology, opens more doors than a degree in Financial Management from a Uni much lower in the rankings. So my advice would be that unless you come from a top-notch Uni, make sure u do an advanced degree with a strong punch, and preferably a more clearly quantitative one: Masters in Fin. Maths, Quantitative Finance, Financial Engineering, Financial Risk Management, Financial Statistics etc. You will probably touch on Stochastic (i.e. probabilistic processes and their related mathematics) while doing this, which are essential when dealing with Risk
Trading careers pay very well in large IBs. And the more complex the instruments you trade, the more the money. Eg. trading vanilla options will make less money than if you work on various exotic and hybrid options. This is because the more simple [roducts tend to become commoditised and thus less intellectual capital is needed to deal in them. Whereas newer, complex products require intellectual skills and this gets paid better. If you don't want to be a trader , you can become a sales or marketing person for these products - after all, they need to be sold to the clients of the IBs. You will tend to specialise on specific types of clients: i.e. you may cover banks, central banks, corporates, Hedge Funds, Insurance companies, asset managers, private banks etc. You will still need to be quite quantitative, especially if you are a marketer/structurer -= you try to understand the client's needs and you put together a tailored "solution" for them using derivatives etc = big money for you and the trader who wil work on this with you.
In those jobs, the base salary is a small fraction of what you actually get paid. A trader typically gets a bonus equal to 10% of what he makes for the desk. So his base salary might be $300k, but if he makes $8m for his bank trading spot forex, for example (typical for a large bank), he takes home another $800k at least. Senior deriv. traders and marketers make a lot more than that. As an extreme example, there is a guy at Deutsche who typicaly makes $150million/year for the bank trading oil& gas.
And then of course if you're realy good, you get to quit, create your own hedge fund and make billions ;-)
That's why doing an advanced degree is the only way to realy get that specialty in your profile. Mechanical engineering and engineering graduates in general are also highly regarded by inv. banks,because they tend to be quantitative and technical but also have that problem-solving, pragmatic angle, as opposed to a physics grad who maybe be dealing with purely theoretical stuff.
In my opinion, maths , statistics and quant. finance/financial engineering grads will have no prob getting such jobs in banks
Studies with in an edge in Economics and Econometrics are more likely to open the door to jobs like so called macro research in an IB's research department: looking at the longer trends, trying to predict their impact on the movements of the bond, equities, forex/commodities markets, the movement of interest rates etc.
It is not impossible to move internally from research to ttrading though, especially if you start generating research that is "actionable" for the trading desk, i.e. you apply methods that can help the traders take positions in the markets and make money
Like in all businesses, where there is risk, there is reward, and the more the risk, the higher the rewards you are aiming at.
Alot of these"bad boys" are actuall doing good in the markets in that they are there to provide liquidity. When everybody else want to sell and send the prices tumbling, "contrarian" traders come in and provide much needed liquidity to those panicked sellers, by buying from them. They do the opposite when irrational buying exhuberance sends prices up in unsustainable parabolic rallies.
They do not not cause these extremes. Human fear and greed do. They are simply there to profit from it. They do take large risks while doing it. Buying when everybody else is selling might end up being like trying to catch a falling knife. But there you are , a buyer when so many sellers get desperate in searching for one. Why shouldn't you get rewarded for the risk?
You can claim that they are not worth these reward because they don't provide any real service to society. Look around you. How many peoples' jobs actually represent a real service to society? The UK's public sector is infested with ludicrously high-paid "consultants" who strut around selling commonalities while re-organising (read: destroying) the public health, education and other systems, letting patients die in surgery rooms, people with no insurance cover, students who graduate knowing how to read and write and count, but not think for themselves (ready for the transition from school to corporate slave).
Trading is fascinating, and there are so many ways you can do it and make money. You can create black boxes, you can judge the long term macroeconomic fundamentals right and make the right bets on them, you can trade by looking at chart/price patterns other technicals (my way) and many others. The markets are there anyway. They have always been. And they will always offer opportunities for those who can snatch them.
You are right I misunderstood your post. I didn't realise you were referring to the trading platforms themselves and their operators. This is actually an issue that has come to light relatively recently. I don't know about the US case, but in Europe the stock exchanges had been operating under a form of a cooperative: they were owned by the same firms that traded on them , using both their own money and their clients' money (since their clients asked them to act as brokers}. So the exchanges were not so much "for profit" organisations. They were set up by those who were in the industry, as a common platform upon which to trade, so that the whole thing could become more standardised and also less dependant on the capital strength of each individual broker. But in 2000-2001, the London, Paris, Frankfurt exchanges were de-mutualised. They themselves became publicly listed companies, in which anyone could become a shareholder. And as these companies see their share price move everyday, they are driven to maximise profit and the price of the share: so they started raising the fees they charged to their members, and basically trying to make money whichever way they could. This has angered the inv. banks who say "hey, with the technology you have, your fees are not justified. You artificially maintain them high which means we the intermediaries are also unable to lower the costs for our clients" (say you and me who might wanna buy shares in companies}.
There is a lot of debate on whether exchanges becoming demutualised was the right thing to do or not. But it is happening. In any case, however, you do need some kind of platform on which the best available price will be quoted. You need a market where buyers and sellers can "meet".
IFMD95: to respond to your questions - the question "how do i become a trader for a company" is frequently posed by the new joiners in online trading forums like those at forexfactory or Oanda. There are many routes into the industry. Yes, a maths degree would help, being able to demonstrate an actual interest in this would also help, especially if you are able to prove some positive results (even if u traded on a demo account with fake money - brokers like Oanda allow the creation of such accounts). Having done advanced degrees would definitely open doors. Another thing the banks look for , when they judge grad applications and CVs for trading positions, is a risk-taking tendency. So in the "interests & hobbies" section they wanna see stuff like bunjee jumping, extreme sports etc. Sounds funny at first, but these things do matter for juniors, cause if you think about it, other than your grades and your claimed interest in trading, they have no proof that you have the risk-taking appetite often needed in those jobs.
There are also firms that work on a proprietary trading model: basically they are brokers who say "are you young (usually 18-23s} and wanna trade? Come join us, you won't get paid but we'll train you and allow you to trade 100k of our money. X% of what u make is yours, and after 6 months if successful, we offer you a proper contract and some serious money to trade for us."
Things are not so easy as they might seem..and I must say that trading can be a tough, painful and very direct way to self-discovery and the goal of "knowing thyself". I can think of very few other activities that can pitch you against your "other" self, the irrational one, ruled by deep-seated emotions and desires, and that can batter your ego and self-esteem with such regularity and intensity. I wouldn't believe this myself, if I hadn;t gone through it. I think it applies more to people trading their own money though, rather than people like bank traders who deal with other people's money.
Thanks sweeties, you've made clear that I truly have to try and multiply my efforts towards the sports branch of my possible careers. :lol:
Well, you will reap a psychological consequence.. evilness does have a way of defeating itselfQuote:
Originally Posted by KSpin
well, i use phrases like in general often.. but usually its followed by an inparticular. Its a way of opening up the elaboration of an in particular. In generals, followed by no in particular, are the enemy. The in general sounds like a cop-out for actually understanding why and when, specificly. I run into the problem especially with psychology professors, feeling types.. INFJs especially, but feeling types trying to apply thinking to their feelings, their mental structures end up full of in generals.