Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

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> Lets take a yellow cab driver in Manhattan not wanting to pick up a black passenger.

A good example for folks on news.yc, instead, would be to look at hiring in tech: In particular gate-keeping by screening in only the traditionally White/Asian universities: https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 Such institutionalised behaviour has ripple effects of all kinds including people from under-represented backgrounds finding it increasingly difficult to make it in tech.

In India, similar situation plays out with hiring and fund raising: https://twitter.com/arnav_kumar/status/1354780261158801409

Coming back to Robinhood, it isn't far-fetched to really view their decision, subsequent lying, and the follow-up CMA stories to be construed as "don't care about the little guy as much as the big guys" behaviour.

Robinhoods actions were all about saving themselves, and the little guys, ie their customers.

Had nothing to do with benefiting anyone else, because it didn’t benefit anyone else.

That's the very problem, in this case, it _did_ benefit the institution -- the hedge funds. By restricting buys, retail was unable to drive the demand and put shorts into margin calls (we discuss the ethics of this until the cows come home). In this very case, an unknowable amount of money should have been transferred from hedge funds to retail investors but didn't because buyers were unable to buy.

Robinhood is just one part of stock retail demand, and overall a tiny one. And institutional demand is huge, I guarantee you there were Hedge funds buying GME hoping to provoke margin calls for the shorts too.

There is no monolithic blocks here. The conspiracy crap is doo doo.

yeah, in the US it is ironic as the intelligence and defense agencies and contractors do recruit software engineers from other universities, including universities made that were originally made for minorities, most of which are closer to the capitol. this results in encryption standards proliferation and exploits and much more, which shows competence.

"big tech" keeps saying "pipeline problem" while not even touching the universe of possibilities.

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