Please be assured that this thread is as academically serious as all of my posts. And that no attachment will offend any elementary school child who might wander here already familar with Viagra, Cialis, homosexuality, birth control and the meaning of the word fellatio (thanks to news about a former President). My thesis is simple. The increase in the rapidity, viciousness and stress in trading over the last century has significantly contributed to the the need for and the rise in the availability and raunchiness of pornography. As someone posted here last week: "Porn is what multiple monitors are for!" But in yesteryear, there was no porn, only smut. The pace of trading was so leisurely that they did not need dirty magazines or films. When the ticker tape slowed down, great grand dad would pull out the bottom desk drawer, reach under that innocuous looking pile of paperwork, and fondly but surreptitiously gaze at a well-fingered postcard like the attachment. This is the sort of porn that was available in Jack's day (in fact, that may BE Jack). Certainly it was the kind of sweet smut that was the first exposure of young men of his time to sex. What do we have today? Day trading, derivatives, one-second charting, index futures, news flashes, ridiculous volatility. And the nasty, nasty stuff we all love so much and cannot get through the trading day without! If there is enough interest, I will discreetly chronicle how over the last century the complexity and pace of trading fostered the rise in the intensity and variety of porn. Drawing from my vast representative collection (for academic research purposes, of course) of ten decades of smut. If the thread survives.
1) Is that a picture of a man and a woman or two lesbians? 2) Your "thesis" is backwards. The rise in the distribution of porn preceded the rise in rapidity of trading. Porn website owners have been using the most cutting-edge technology because they were immediately profitable on the web and could afford and understand the value in having the best technology at their disposable. Improvements in the ability to distribute porn were then applicable to trading-related applications. 3) What does that mean? Maybe people should be thanking Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy for trading progress instead of Trading Technologies.
You got it in one, Nazzdack! I started to say what I think, but deception is so much more fun! Indeed pornography has supported the rise of every new technology medium: chipped stone, hewn rock, sculpted clay, painted board, canvas, photography, celluloid film, magnetic tape, internet, CDs, DVDs...Hope I live long enough to experience direct brain stimulation. As to the sexual orientation of those in the photo, don't ask, don't tell! Ah, the 20's were a time! Wish I had been alive then!
Now that we all understand, thanks to the Nazzdack, that smut leads trading, let us consider the next advancement in smut and how it influenced trading. Most of us are familiar with the life of legendary trader Jesse Livermore through the fictionalized account of his life as Larry Livingston. Livermore married a showgirl, so presumably he had some appreciation for the erotic art of the time. My belief is that the photo I initially posted is representative of the genteel smut leisurely traders of Livermore's time might have enjoyed (although why I have no clue, as I am so jaded that it does nothing for me but remind me of the first time I saw my grandmother naked). Now consider the attachment, which no school child who has ever watched the flashed flesh on the daytime TV soaps would be even remotely shocked at. Here we see an insidious development in smut: the fascination of women fondling machines (somewhere I am sure there is a photo of a 20's babe ecstatically straddling a vibrating ticker tape machine, but I have yet to find it). In such smut we can see the beginnings of the causes of the Great Crash and subsequent depression in the perversion of traders. It is a cautionary tale for our own times.
When the Bush stimulus checks went out, online subscriptions of porn went up. Perhaps the liquidity of money causes an upswing in porn.
I did my part. I hope you did , too. At any one time, I typically have two subscriptions running. Solely for academic research, of course!
1. Frustration must be relieved. 2. Who pays for porn? No wonder the economy is in such a mess (for most).
With my last post of 20's light smut, I made the point that traders of the time came to associate sex with technology (recall the young lady caressing the vacuum cleaner lovingly, a tool in the service of mankind which miraculously both sucks and blows). Smutographers of the time, being infinitely finely tuned to the tastes and needs of society's uberclass (traders), escalated the game with smutto like this attachment (again, if there is a child of the 21st century who will be excited by this, I want to sell him my entire vintage "art" collection). This is the first recorded association of sex and communication. The trader of the time no doubt fantasized that the nubile young lady was transmitting an order to his broker. Need I extend this association to the present time? Do today's traders not insist on their DSL, their cable, their broadband wireless, their fiber optics? And for what? To get multiple porno video downloads running simultaneously on multiple screens, all the while avoiding competition with the trading data stream!
please send a dollar to the Red Cross after you click on the jpeg that way you can claim you do something meaningful today.
Nkhoi, you know I am going somewhere profound with this. Kindly willingly suspend disbelief, and you will be rewarded. If you didn't like my posts, you all could long since have ganged up on me and tossed me out. Fortunately for me, Jack is somewhere ahead of me on the list of obnoxiousness.