I have a question about Robert Mercer.

[Eyeball_Kid]

How could he have become a billionaire without being a globalist? And what kinds of excuses does Steve Bannon use to take Mercer's money?

Whoever wants to persue these questions and present them as op research can take the ideas and go with it.

[lapfog_1]

1. Hedge funds... developed the concepts around "technical evaluation of the markets"

[ck4829]

2. Hey now, you're not supposed to actually THINK about what "globalist" means. Just hate it.

If they were truly anti-"globalist" in the globalization sense, they wouldn't be going after CNN, they would be attacking, I don't know, K Line or Maersk. They're the companies that are moving products and goods all around the world.

"Globalism" is just their word for the shadowy conspiracy that changes from era to era... Secret communists, the gay agenda, secret Muslims, deep state, etc. The name changes but many of the characteristics of what it's supposedly about remain the same; opposed to them for some nefarious reason, deviance, they on the right possess "secret knowledge" and everyone else is a dupe, ultra-wide conspiracy that has operatives everywhere, Jews can sometimes be thrown into the mix, giving aid and comfort to those uppity minorities, etc.

[Cary]

3. Read Joshua Green's book.

The Devil's Bargain.

[Lucky Luciano]

4. He was a middle class computer scientist at IBM until 1993.

Then Jim Simons (Mercer's boss) invited Mercer to Renaissance Technologies - one of the first quant hedge funds. Mercer led a group at ibm that pretty much invented speech recognition and also natural language processing that could help translate documents into different languages. The techniques were highly computational and statistically based. Simons' brilliant insight was that he could use a guy like Mercer to build statistical models for systematic trading.

Mercer initially ignored the letter Simons wrote him, but then responded to a second letter when he realized putting his three daughters through college was costing him a fortune. I knew Jenji and Bekah as we went to high school together. Imagine my surprise when I figured out Robert Mercer was their father and that they are now billionaires. Mercer spent four years building his models for Simons before trading - very patient. Most hedge funds do not have that kind of patience for such scientific discipline because they need to make money right FUCKING NOW. It worked. Mercer and his team built the most amazing automated trading system in the history of the world.

They are the original data scientists. First class data analysts, machine learning, and artificial intelligence geniuses. People should not have taken Cambridge Analytica lightly...

[triron]

5. He was an extemely bright math/physics student I remember (at UNM)

Took advanced calculus in his freshman year; also know he took thermodynamics and some advanced mathematics class at the same time (exactly same meeting times) in his sophomore year.

[Cicada]

6. He harvests trivial brief tiny stock price fluctuations

Stock trades generate tiny deviations form perfectly rational valuations. When you cross the street you don't go in a perfectly straight line. You are a little to the left in one step, a little to the right on another. His computers detect the tiny errors and trade to scoop them up. He gets a penny from one trade, a penny from another. But his computers make billions of such trades. He gets the billions of pennies and millions of other traders lose a penny here, a penny there. His work produces zero economic value, it produces zero additional valuable products for consumers. He is just a leech.

[Lucky Luciano]

7. He is not doing anything useful now, but he has received a lifetime

...achievement award for his work in computational linguistics from his time at IBM. Speech recognition technology and Google translate technology is based heavily on his work.

He still a major asshole though.

[Cicada]

8. That makes him even more dispicable

He has ability to make the world better but instead uses his exceptional skill solely to transfer money from others to himself while doing nothing of value to anyone else. My cat is more valuable than he is because my cat gives me pleasure. He delivers absolutely nothing of value to anyone but himself. He thinks that those who earn money must produce value but that is obviously false. A thief does not produce value even tho he earns money. And his super complicated stock trades similarly do not produce any value even tho he earns billions from them.