How fondly I remember these types of discussions at the HFT company I worked for. "We're not doing anything illegal.", they'd say. "The law allows for this."

How fondly I remember these types of discussions at the HFT company I worked for. "We're not doing anything illegal.", they'd say. "The law allows for this." I've learned that as soon as a company says something like that, they're doing something ethically shady. Like applying for government funding when replacing whole datacenters full of slow, old, energy-slurping HP servers. How old? 6 months old. "But these new machines are much more eco-friendly than the ones we're currently running. So we're entitled to government funding for replacing all those bad bad units with more eco-friendly units!" After replacing those machines with more energy-efficient (and faster!) machines, we'd make more money in a day than most of us will make in a lifetime. The 6 month old machines got scrap-heaped. With money that the Government was supposed to have spend on ecologically sound business cases. We weren't doing anything illegal. But it sure felt like it.