Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to Keir Leslie,
why an oil company employee betting on petrol price movements is doing anything unethical - except in terms of possibly misusing their employer’s confidential information
Misusing confidential information is one problem. Having a conflict of interest such that the employee can change a price to make money for themselves (as opposed to setting an optimal price for their employer to make money) is another. In the case of interest rates, there's the possibility of abuse of public office.
Would Vic Uni regard it as ethical to operate a market for stolen goods, just as an academic exercise to find out what prices they sell for?
In pretty much all real futures markets, insider trading is illegal for the above reasons.
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to BenWilson,
Well plugged in politically, anyway. I don't know if anyone else has ever tried something like this, but it strikes me that the FMA wouldn't have been as helpful to a random bunch of kids with a startup or an overseas betting operation like IG Index.
There are a whole bunch of lines of research that would deliver interesting results but aren't legal/ethical. I'm actually surprised that the universities ethics committee approved iPredict, given the scope for insider trading (such as an oil company employee making a few bucks by predicting petrol prices). And they've had seven years to gather data.
Maybe the way out of this would be to lobby to amend the gambling laws.
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What they were doing was running a small stakes online casino. Personally, I have no problem with that, but Parliament did some years ago, and they gave TAB and the National Lottery a monopoly of such things.
To get round this, they got the FMA to license them as a futures market. Which worked fine, except that such markets fall roundly inside money-laundering law. The law doesn’t really allow for small-stakes futures markets, because they don’t really exist, except as a way to get around gambling laws.
There's a reasonable argument for allowing small-stakes online gambling, (especially as there isn't any way to stop NZers using offshore sites) but not on a basis that one company gets an end-run round the law by being a university / mates with the National Party.
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the North Sea with it’s unending gentle drizzle on shallow and sheltered coastal waters
I just saw this, and it reminded me of the time I was out there on a 50,000t ship in 80knot winds, with waves breaking on the bridge.
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So Bridges doesn't like Farrar and is taking his toy away?
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Sounds like Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings has a rival.
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Traditionally, uniformed servicepeople are subject to military discipline – they’ve signed up for their term of service and don’t have the right of other employees to tell their boss to stuff it and walk out the door. (Although I think most NZ troops can give notice nowadays?)
Police (and firemen, security guards and spies) are not subject to these strictures – they can leave at any time and the worst that can happen to them for disobeying orders is the sack. That makes them civilians.
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The irish Examiner? That's an eejits paper. Stick to Waterford Whispers.
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Speaker: The beginning of the end of the…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
The "Meth House Cleaning Industry" reminds me of Breaking Bad's Vamonos Pest, where they use a house fumigation company as cover for their meth lab. Taking this one stage further, a miscreant could use a meth lab cleanup firm as cover to run their own meth lab for a few days before they finish their "cleanup".
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Surely the Pope should be concentrating on the sainthood paperwork for Jonah Lomu and Richie McCaw?