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Its like being an rapist, a burglar. I'm waiting, sitting, sifting. First I just look. Praying for an opportunity, I look, pass over the newest posts, the freshest statements. The new ideas, the questions, the rants and the flames. There's angry people on the internet, people who are just positive that someone else is very, very wrong.

Me, I'm a step above that. I weigh opinions evenly, so long as they're written with near perfect grammar. I allow space for both sides of a debate, look for compromise, because this isn't trolling or ranting, this is the search for perfection.

So I wander, like a burglar, through each thread, casing the joint, discovering the ins and outs of their arguments, peeling meaning from their intent, and their intent from their words the way you'd peel clothes from a lover. I'm poised to strike, starving for it.

The hunger's real, the pressure for that discourse, discourse as treatment, as salvation, as competition. I'll lay down words, letter by letter, phrase by phrase, looking to tear right to the heart of things, to lay their secret meanings out to the crowd, to explain just what's been argued, and why they agreed. Where the bias is, that I see. Where the lies hide, the hypocrisy, the just understated rhythms of the words.

Because me, I'm a dive bomber, a hawk, a dragon, starving for that perfect statement, that bit of connection where I put the innards of what they've said, lain bare, right back on the table, and I tell them that they're wrong. They're wrong, and they couldn't even tell, because they're sitting in a universe of conformation bias and bile.

The hunger's there, the pressure's building. Someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet. I just haven't decided who, yet.

You deserve bad kids.

There's a gap in social security. A giant hole, which Gen X, and Gen Y, have grown up vaguely aware of. Children have learned in school that the money is running out. They're used to the idea that though they see social security deductions on their paychecks, they'll never actually see social security. They've come to terms, and accepted, because what else is there to do?

Well, we could be mad, and we still might be. We could be furious, ranting, screaming children. We could break things, we could riot. There's really no use in that, and we've been taught, well enough, to remain civil. Because our homes are nice. Unless they're not, in which case we politely decline to notice. Our families are of course intact. Unless they're not...

And beyond being well taught, well trained, well educated little drones, the number doesn't make sense. Its ridiculous. It makes me giggle.

What's the number?

$54,232,674,000,000 Fifty Four Trillion Dollars.
We owe that. Us. Americans. Right now. The nation will produce about 14 trillion worth of goods this year, but its ok. We're de-leveraging. Paying it off. The number's falling. That's really just the first of a series of punches, lined up for us by the jokes of our parents.

Here's another number:
$109,214,000,000,000 One Hundred Nine Trillion Dollars
A hundred million millions, and that is what social security cannot cover. Yet.

The joke, then, is the idea that social security will end. That the smaller generation of children will vote against their aging parents on social security reform. That we wont shoulder the three hundred fifty thousand per Millennial.

Waste

Some days, its streaming, steaming, storming from your fingertips, a sluice like rain rushing off the shingles, into gutters, down, onto streets, right off the curb, pattering, pattering, slamming down the trunklines, roaring as they meet, a thousand synapses fire and meaning pour down toward my fingers. My feet rap staccato, nervous twitches, but those aren't the words, not related.

Even my breath comes in broken gasps, heaving. and then, suddenly, its gone. Everything, wasted.

There's power in a blank page, a potential, much the same as a brick suspended. The second time, the third, that power is tinged with dissapointment, more and more.

Moral? Save often.

Calm

It certainly isn't the cacophony of panic, though it may be punctuated by such. Its the before, and often the after, because you're certainly panicking about something. And if you've become prone to such panics, it may well not be because you're facing it, the yelping, screaming mind and the feeling of death. You said you were going to, and that were enough, just an agoraphobic making the declaration that he'll walk outside today. Get his newspaper. All day, then, he has little flashes of the panic around his calm, punctuating and describing it in such a shape that it can be slotted into the word.

Its a calm of rushing feelings, of jitter, that lights upon valleys and spikes into the ether. It drives one to the hiding places, the comfort objects, closets, beds, teddy bears. Things get done late, or not at all, because the only time things are safe is while the blanket covers all parts of the body, bound in a cocoon where the air grows foul, where movement is strictly restricted. This is the calm before the storm, or better, the stillness at the apex of a jump, with the mind swung out over nothing, without foundation, but still for an instant yet, before it lets go. And out there, at the far end of the pendulum swing, the panic roils like an oil slick sea, builds inside. The comforts of closets and covers invite from the other side, if you simply hold on a minute more. You can leap, here, or swing back over, into the embrace of pretending it isn't there.

And perhaps you won't panic, anymore, once you're well away from the stew.
And perhaps you should just have eaten the stew, and been done with it.

Panic

You gasp, you struggle, but its like the air is too thin. The room's only dimly lit, and everyone's either too loud or too quiet to quite understand. They're agitated, or ignorant, and either way, you're afraid.

Its the feeling of the insane, curled like a fetus, greasy strips of hair hanging down your shoulders, that everything is sliding sixty degrees to the south, the air, light, and clarity have slid down the slope and into some dark hole.

Holes open up around you, your vision narrows, and all along, there's an ill rock in the pit of your stomach, forcing your last meal to press hard against the sides, to bubble and froth like ice cubes dropped in a half filled glass.

Butterflies, they call it, until you've half your mind on not throwing up all over yourself, half your mind holding on for dear life, wishing it had a joint or an inhaler or enough tranquilizer to down an elephant, trying to shut up the other half, which is screaming, over and over, that the walls are closing in, there's no way out, and it'd be better off dead.

You're breathing hard, gasping through your nose, and even though the lights are out, and there must be a million megawatt spotlight shining directly on your back, you're certainly sweating like the room's become a sauna, sweating in all the regular places: your feet, your face, your palms, your belly. Even though the lights are out, and you've driven so far to the flight side of things that you could dig yourself out of a concrete cell, even though you can't eve see anything but the rims of your glasses, anymore, the conversation continues around you, banal and dry and utterly unaware.

The world just teetered on the brink, stepped off the edge and swung out into oblivion, and everyone around you continues like the foundation's still sound, so you reply to a question, first lamely, and then with more zest, struggling to force the froth back down. You'll later lie, and say you're fine, because how do you articulate that there's nothing beneath you but a yawning abyss, and your brain's been cut out to make space for a pack of yelping pups during the thunderstorm?

On stocks, and HFT

Since the recent market explosion, a topic well discussed in financial circles has busted into the attention of the popular blogs: The High Frequency Traders. These are people, backed by massive banks of computers..or, rather, computers backed by quants backed by investors with piles of more than at least a hundred million dollars, running trades on tiny changes in the prices of stocks: They notice stocks in a market on the rise, which is to say, a rise in demand for the stocks, at which point they swoop in, buy massive quantities of these stocks, and resell to the slower buyers.

• As an aside, its interesting to note that here is one of the only places where technology is creating middlemen, rather than cutting them out, as, generally, technology and the internet work together to form new markets, places like ebay, amazon, zappos, and innumerable other online trading places which have jumped in between wholesalers and retailers, and by claiming the profits of both groups, while passing savings on to the consumer, captured great shares of the markets.
  

What HFT claim is their redeeming value, is that they add liquidity to the market, which is to say, make it easy for a buyer to buy stocks. They do. If the market were composed only of buy and hold longterm traders* then days, weeks, even months could pass between lodging an order and finding someone willing to sell their shares of the stock. So, conceptually, traders have a place in the market, as in any market, if only to create the fluidity and the jobs.

Where to draw the line? On the moving frontier of our technical capability. Computers, in the grand scheme, are not so expensive as to be prohibitive to the smart trader, nor is the programming excessively difficult to attain. In fact, a large gripe is that the HFT have been seeking the edges of markets: selling at higher and higher prices until buyer's orders dry up, and then dropping down below the edge of what people are willing to pay. People feel cheated, for when they plug in a stop order for CheeseCo at $23.40, and CheeseCo is selling at $23.10, they expect to pay somewhere between, as CheeseCo prices rise...and they often find themselves paying $23.40, or $23.38. Backtrack for a moment. Someone's decided that they're not willing to pay more than $23.40, entered that into a computer, and left it to buy their stocks (or, really, for this to make any sense, a great deal of people have done so) Another computer has discovered the movement to buy CheeseCo, bought a great deal of it, and is now selling small portions of it at rising prices...seeking the highest point where people are willing to buy. Haggling, in other words.

"I'll give it one you for $23.29"
"Deal"
"And I'll give it one you for $23.30"
"Deal"
"And I'll give it one you for $23.33"
"Deal"
"And I'll give one to you for $23.41"
"Screw that"
"Ok, I'll give one to you for $23.39"
"Deal"

People have decided they're not going to pay more than $23.40, and their machines refuse to do so. Other machines find what they are willing to pay, and charge that...and people turn around and feel cheated. Cheated because the price rose, when there was a mass movement to buy Cheeseco. Cheated because they bought at the price, or just under the price, they said they'd buy at, rather than lower.

Why is it that haggling at the grocer is acceptable, but haggling in the market is not? Because its too fast for people? People planned it beforehand, decided on a price, and were not persuaded or manipulated out of it. If I paid more than I wanted to at the market, my mother would encourage me to not make the deal. I'd encourage anyone else to set their stop orders at what they wanted to pay, and be glad that the HFT machines aren't nearly as persuasive, don't even try to be persuasive, as street vendors.

*note that I do not say investors, a title which should be reserved for persons who fund companies: that is to say, the initial buyer of a stock, as any subsequent trade of a stock does not affect the company. If I buy a google stock on the market, I'm betting on google, but not helping google. If I, instead, buy shares from google, I'm investing.

what goes on when I'm not home

When I left the room, years ago, there were wooden-bone dinosaurs, three of them. There were tiny cities, of lego and k-nex, there were bears, in plenty, a snuffeluffagus, and a musical wind up sheep. When I left the room, years ago, these toys had six hours to effect a hasty civilization, organize a dance, bombard the opposing village (lego and k-nex are not compatible). They rarely made it to the upper reaches of the closet, where board game armies and venture capital investors waited, stacked away in boxes. Things were different, back when the longest chance they had for freedom was an eighteen hour sleep over.

Bears would work in pairs, hurling throw pillows twice their size over the edge of the loft, until a sizeable landing pad had been created. Then, with a running leap, they'd hurl their fuzzy selves over the edge, to collide with big, meaty slaps against the floor, the bed, the chairs, the radiator.
Picking themselves up, bears across the room surveyed the damage: a few bruises, quite a lot of mussed fur. The landing pad had survived quite intact, of course. Next time, they'd stick the landing, they'd promise one another. They'd shake their heads, growl, wipe the fur out of their eyes (and back into their eyes), and survey their domain. They were the natural lords of the territory, watching tiny structures emerge from the lego pile, or great skeletal piles from the k-nex, nothing they couldn't rush upon in a moment of frustration, tear down, and demand tribute from, and so they sat on great pillows, ate great meals of dustmites, captured from under the bed at great expense.

Later, newer, trickier things entered the room. When the bears catapulted down, they were met by yards of fishing line, hooked and weighted by the lego swarms. The k-nex wrapped their structures in tight clothing skins, and defended against onslaught behind their walls, beneath the desk, consulted intrawebs and wrapped themselves in how-to knowledge and built catapults, scorpions, trebuche. Dwarven cities arose, networked to other civilizations across the globe, while the legos waged brutal war against the ferocious bears.

While the K-nex were well defended behind their massive walls, the lego built fortresses of their own, simple block cubes atop piles of books, or hanging from webs of floss stretched between bunks. Their commanders wore massive mustaches, and screamed obscenities while wielding spears or swords. They catapaulted men across the field, armed with tidbits and string, to force the bears back down, barbarians still.

Times changed, and the K-nex found themselves in possession of new and stronger processors, better strategical simulations, more t-shirts strewn across the floor. They maintained their dominance, and their isolation, while the lego discovered the ruins of their first mainframe.
They found it in bits, pieces. An alien technology, but strangely similar to what they knew. There were slots for things, and when things fit, they often worked. So they hung new wires in their webs, a motherboard, a floppy drive, an hdd, the guts stretched out along their cords. The first one hadn't worked, but with the second wireless antennae, they found themselves the net.

Still, I came home, either thumping up the stairs, which gave everything but the bears (who'd taken to hiding under the bed anyway) ample time to escape, or, more worrisome, clambering in through the window, off the porch. They'd have to build small, things they could tear down at a moment's notice, little networks that could be reduced to piles from the cry of a spotter...and then I left.

Now the K-nex hive towers above the desk, anchoring its center of gravity against both the ceiling and the floor, the corner and the fan, an entire nation secreted behind towels, blankets, shirts and sheets. The legos, though, have spread out, developed. Their suspended platform villages have become towers, their generals: explorers. They've plumbed the heights of the closet, where once they'd only encountered the depths. Top-hats, steamships, and thimbles have added venture capital to their economy, and they've hired cannons and cavalry from other camps, mercenary armies from across the globe. They've built a steel plane, and folded many sheets of paper, refashioned their hooks into harpoons, cutting edges, and make ready. Their target? Not the bears of old, who tyrannized barbaric tribes, but the insect aliens across the room, the hive with the stronger net connection, the hardware of the future.