MetaAnomie

I got to go to the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the first time today. It was pretty interesting to see, but to be honest, it wasn’t as exciting as I imagined. It has pretty much all been computerized since 2000 so there is no trading floor, and no big crowds of people screaming at each other — just the market center where the exchange administrators monitor trade traffic, or from what it looked like, just sit around chatting and drinking coffee.

Or maybe vodka, who knows.

Funny side note: you usually always see the market center from a high angle on television (with the quotes rotating around the glass cylinder surrounding it) and I always imagined it to be filled with all sorts of crazy servers and equipment. I was a bit disappointed to see it was just printers and cardboard boxes for the most part. Makes sense when you think about it though — there is no way in hell they would have their data center on-site in this day and age.

The media center was kind of interesting though. It looked like a bunch of storage containers on one of the adjacent walls with pull down steel doors and everything, about 3-4 layers of them if I remember correctly.

And um, that’s about it really.

Oh, and I finally finished reading “The Wealth of Nations,” and have moved on to the second book in the Twilight series (”New Moon”). Great contrast eh? I have to admit that it does feel nice to fly through 20-25 pages in the time it took me to get through one of the before mentioned book, but at the same, I find myself having a hard time deciding which one is more painful to read.