Harry Potter is not so clever, part 2. (Perhaps I should call this “advice for Harry,” to be less negative.)
“I accept your offer,” said Harry’s lips, without any hesitation, without any decision having been made; just as if the internal debate had been pretense and illusion, the true controller of the voice having been no part of it. “I should have the whole amount ready by the end of the month.” It would take his arbitrage trick, but certainly the Headmaster would let him do that instead of going into debt to Malfoy.
Lucius Malfoy stood motionless, frowning down at Harry. “Who is she to you, then? What is she to you, that you would pay so much to keep her from harm?”
“My friend,” the boy said quietly. “As is your son- I would have fought as hard and paid as much to keep him from Azkaban.”
“Save it,” Harry suggested.
“Let us all go home, indeed.” His blue eyes were locked on Harry, as hard as sapphires.
Harry looked further up.
“This is how far I go for my friends, Lord Malfoy. And now that Hermione is safe, I would like your permission to visit Draco. ”
Overall: what the heck is Harry’s model of Malfoy? Why has he not put any effort into developing it? Why, for the love of wisdom, scare him in public?
It may not be too late to turn him from an enemy to an ally, but Harry is making this too hard on himself. His flair for the dramatic is not helping things, either.
Harry may be an overachiever, but he’s still 11 - he’s allowed to be bad at manipulating people. He’s still at the “All I have to do is out-clever everyone and I can take over the world” stage. He has the tools to pull it off much of the time, but he still thinks of his opponents as pieces, not as players, which is a pretty serious hole in his worldview when it comes to things like manipulating Lucius Malfoy.
Oh, of course. He just reminds me a lot of the obnoxious little shit that I was at that age(albeit much more well-read, which is a feat), and has some of the same gaping flaws in his mental model of the world.
“I should have the whole amount ready by the end of the month.” It would take his arbitrage trick, but certainly the Headmaster would let him do that instead of going into debt to Malfoy.
Even if he does his arbitrage trick, what benefit would he get from telling it to Malfoy in advance. Why share unnecessary information with a potential adversary? Why risk additional penalties if something unexpected happens and the arbitrage takes five weeks instead of four?
The point there was to avoid the “I can’t let you do that, Harry” by making it obvious to Dumbledore (who knows Harry’s current wealth) that Harry has a trick up his sleeve. Mentioning the arbitrage trick in public would be a terrible decision, which is why Harry just thinks that.
I’m doubtful about the arbitrage trick to really work that smoothly—goblins will get suspicious quickly, and it’ll probably be seen as a threat to the Statute of Secrecy and would lead to legal troubles from the wizarding side. It would have to be done slowly and quietly to go on, not to be rushed in a few months.
Also problematic is that the Wizarding world undervalues Galleons and overvalues Sickles. If he can pay the debt in 1.7 million Sickles, then he’s fine- but if he has to pay them in Galleons, and he just modified the Galleon-Sickle exchange rate to 50-1, then he’s worse off. (He might have made enough from the arbitrage to pay back Malfoy, but maybe not.)
Worst comes to worst, he asks Dumbledore to cure some rich muggles with cancer who are willing to pay.
[edit]Remember, the trick only needs to work once. Take out 40k galleons, convert it to muggle gold (probably necessary, but maybe not), convert it to 50 times as much silver by weight, convert it to Sickles, and now he has (if they’re the same weight coins) 2M Sickles, minus conversion losses. Hand off 1.7M of them to Lucius (or get them changed at Gringotts), and the debt is cleared.
Now, Harry triples his money every time he does the trick- so he’ll probably want to try it several times before losing a lot of his principal. But that’s not a big issue.
Actually, there’s a fairly complicated question of why don’t we immediately go cure world hunger. I mean, the production and logistics aspects wouldn’t be very difficult compared to what today’s industry can output on an everyday basis. I guess that it’s 80% pure irrationality and only 20% politics.
You mean IRL? It mostly boils down to “we’ve tried giving hungry people food, it doesn’t work, and that’s pretty much all the ideas we’ve got”. It’s a much messier problem than it seems at first glance, and it isn’t all politics or insanity. To pick the most obvious, when you dump planes full of grain on the tarmac in Zimbabwe, what did you just do the finances of the local farmers who now need to compete with free? And what does that do to next year’s crop?
I might agree with such a reversal, provided that you agree with the well-known maxim that “The personal is political”* and make one more step towards embracing our insidious corruption :)
(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don’t various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)
(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don’t various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)
The linked article does point out the difficulties of raising overall quality of life and human development. Is that what you’re saying is harder to do than just throwing money at the problem? If so, I agree completely (and join the anti-PC crowd in suggesting that the very best of currently conceivable general solutions for Africa is reinstating colonialism).
However, I was talking specifically about satisfying the most elementary physical needs of individual destitute Africans (sustenance, health, peace), not grand questions of policy or structural change. Why I took such a narrow view is because I feel that pushing the self-sufficiency, ground-up angle when talking about ways to fix the whole mess is quite limited and even hypocritical; maybe sharing a little of our wealth to guarantee those needs for everyone (and enforcing birth control, and dealing with a whole separate can of worms, but that’s a problem with every approach) could indeed ameliorate the ongoing nightmare while our social engineering looks for a way to kickstart the aforementioned self-sufficiency.
Yes, increasing dependency and taking away responsibility is a clear instrumental evil, and according to many just evil, period. But if we could first stop people from 1) being born into suffering to do little but increase that very suffering and 2) dying quickly and miserably, maybe that’s worth the tradeoff.
maybe sharing a little of our wealth to guarantee those needs for everyone . . . could indeed ameliorate the ongoing nightmare
When there is hunger, there is power in controlling the distribution of food. When people have power from something, they do not simply allow outsiders to come in and take it away without a fight. You can ship all the food you like for free to African ports; the people of the country itself will still go hungry, because the people with guns will control the distribution to maximize their power.
If a man is intentionally starving and beating his children, you can’t solve their hunger and bruises by giving him material goods. You need to remove his power over the kids and put the kids in care of someone who won’t abuse them. If you want to grant the “the most elementary physical needs of individual destitute Africans (sustenance, health, peace)”, what you will have to do is overthrow their governments and install colonial governors.
There currently seem to be few volunteers for the job.
Yes, this problem is quite obvious, and yes, I’m in favor of full-scale colonialism, but couldn’t a heavier presence by UN/coalition-of-the-willing peacekeepers, with powers to override local authorities when it’s needed to prevent open violence and abuse, also keep the scum that floats to the top there in check? What’s the tactical record for peacekeeping operations that had a reasonably broad mandate for use of force? (Hmm, here’s one account. My cached thought that a “firm hand” brought decent results in Somalia appears to be confirmed.)
...Of course I realize how unlikely any international body would be to approve such powers against the protests of an “independent” local regime (Somalia being an unusual case in that regard), so such policing of aid-receiving countries would have to be carried out unilaterally and without foreign oversight by whatever nation could be willing to implement it. Which creates a power dynamic that’s basically colonialism. Which, again, would IMO be quite OK with purely selfish intentions and better yet with benevolent ones, but should be done openly anyway for clear generic reasons.
It’s an interest-free loan. Unless the “certain rights” Lucius has over HJPEV until graduation are troublesome, it is in probably HJPEV’s best interest to delay paying the loan back as long as possible.
Or unless, I suppose, he expects significant deflation before graduation. I don’t think any of the HJPEV’s plans that we know of are likely to result in deflation, quite the opposite in fact.
It’s an interest-free loan. Unless the “certain rights” Lucius has over HJPEV until graduation are troublesome, it is in probably HJPEV’s best interest to delay paying the loan back as long as possible.
Dumbledore was willing to send Hermione to Azkaban to prevent Lucius from getting those rights (well, and the money). It seems likely to me that they’re troublesome.
True as such. But storywise it would seem weird to leave this hanging. That’s one reason why I’m already irrationally overinvested, I notice, in my theory that it’ll get taken care of pretty much on the side by finding out the true culprit and thus cancelling the debt through the Wizengamot or, failing that, possibly through Draco.
There are other options, of course. There have been good points about Dumbledore now having an interest to Make Money Fast for Harry, and about possible other people who might be willing to bankroll a business venture for the newly brightened legend. And, again storywise, I can see handling the “leave it hanging” option in a decent manner as well, if there’s some closure about the relations of houses Potter and Malfoy (presumably with Lucius dead or imprisoned and stripped of his status).
Either I misunderstand you or you have it exactly wrong.
If HJPEV pays back the no-interest loan early, he has less money to spend in the meantime.
If HJPEV pays back the no-interest loan at the latest possible time, he has plenty of money he can use to make more money, and to spend, in the meantime.
The way I imagine it working is that any money Harry might acquire is automatically spent on paying off his debt, but he doesn’t get into trouble if this doesn’t pay the debt until he turns 18. I don’t think the situation where he makes plenty of money and does not pay off the loan will be allowed. So either Harry can not worry about the debt and pay it off eventually at the cost of not having any money til then, or pay it off sooner and then have free use of money.
I don’t think we need to rely so much on your imagination.
“I think there’s about forty thousand in my Gringotts vault,” Harry said. It was strange how that was still causing more internal pain than the thought of taking an over-fifty-percent risk to his life to destroy Azkaban. “As for the other sixty thousand—what are the rules, exactly?”
“It comes due when you graduate Hogwarts,” the old wizard said from high above. “But Lord Malfoy has certain rights over you before then, I fear.”
If a debt isn’t due, it need not be paid on. There’s nothing here that says he’s required to pay anything else before he graduates.
In fact, it’s possible that the author meant us to understand that HJPEV didn’t have to pay anything right now and that the whole hundred grand isn’t due until graduation. But that would mean the author had been a bit sloppier than I’m fairly confident he is.
Lucius was still wearing the cold smile. “One hundred thousand Galleons. If you have not that much in your vault, I suppose I must accept a promissory note for the remainder.”
[...]
“I think there’s about forty thousand in my Gringotts vault,” Harry said. [...] “As for the other sixty thousand—what are the rules, exactly?”
“It comes due when you graduate Hogwarts,” the old wizard said from high above. “But Lord Malfoy has certain rights over you before then, I fear.”
Emphasis mine. I think (most of) whatever he has must be payed immediately, and the “due” part is only for the rest.
Better than scaring him in a dark alley. At least he’ll have time to think through his reaction.
Far more important than not scaring Malfoy in public is not insulting him in public. Public scaring isn’t too much of an issue unless the nature of the scare is also insulting.
Better than scaring him in a dark alley. At least he’ll have time to think through his reaction.
Also, he scared pretty much the entire Wizengamot (plus a Dementor!), not just Lucius. “I scared him, and people know why” is different than “I scared him, and people know it”. [ETA:] It’s no loss of face to be scared by someone who more or less scared everyone else.
I read that at first as “if anybody tweets him about it” and spent some moments pondering the possibility of a magical Twitter (functioning by owl post, of course).
I would be surprised if this did not quickly lead to the revocation of his time turner, but presuming he asks McGonagall and it’s deemed responsible that is also an option.
The foreign exchange(i.e., currency) market is both very liquid and very volatile. With advance knowledge of major changes from a Time Turner, it’s easy to make very fast exponential growth of your seed money—even a 1% change per day, in any direction, multiplies your money by a factor of 12 every year(or x3 million before he graduates Hogwarts). Of course, anyone with that sort of record would get investigated hard and fast, but a more cautious approach can still result in absurd growth.
And there is leverage, so you can invest 100 $, but get profits or loses like you invested 10000 $. So if theres 100x leverage, and 1% profit to make on currencies each day, you can double your money every day.
So to turn 100 galeons to 100000 galeons Harry would need 10 transactions with 1% profit each.
True, but there’s no way an 11 year old would have access to 100:1 leverage, even with derivatives. LTCM wasn’t much higher than 100:1, and they’re just about the all-time kings of leverage. There’s things like regulatory limits and credit checks to contend with here.
Edit: Silly me, I should actually have read your link. I’m used to limits on equity leverage, apparently forex works damn near an order of magnitude higher. Disregard the above.
I was in an equity mindset, where the rules are much tighter, because the underlying assets are so much more volatile. Doing that sort of leverage there would require you to post some pretty hefty collateral(likely beyond the means of Prof. Verres) and be in a low-regulation jurisdiction for it to even be legal(which the UK is not).
Harry Potter is not so clever, part 2. (Perhaps I should call this “advice for Harry,” to be less negative.)
Overall: what the heck is Harry’s model of Malfoy? Why has he not put any effort into developing it? Why, for the love of wisdom, scare him in public?
It may not be too late to turn him from an enemy to an ally, but Harry is making this too hard on himself. His flair for the dramatic is not helping things, either.
Harry may be an overachiever, but he’s still 11 - he’s allowed to be bad at manipulating people. He’s still at the “All I have to do is out-clever everyone and I can take over the world” stage. He has the tools to pull it off much of the time, but he still thinks of his opponents as pieces, not as players, which is a pretty serious hole in his worldview when it comes to things like manipulating Lucius Malfoy.
“I’m a young boy,” Harry said, “and I judge myself.”
Hence why I have been titling this “not so clever.”
Oh, of course. He just reminds me a lot of the obnoxious little shit that I was at that age(albeit much more well-read, which is a feat), and has some of the same gaping flaws in his mental model of the world.
Even if he does his arbitrage trick, what benefit would he get from telling it to Malfoy in advance. Why share unnecessary information with a potential adversary? Why risk additional penalties if something unexpected happens and the arbitrage takes five weeks instead of four?
The point there was to avoid the “I can’t let you do that, Harry” by making it obvious to Dumbledore (who knows Harry’s current wealth) that Harry has a trick up his sleeve. Mentioning the arbitrage trick in public would be a terrible decision, which is why Harry just thinks that.
I’m doubtful about the arbitrage trick to really work that smoothly—goblins will get suspicious quickly, and it’ll probably be seen as a threat to the Statute of Secrecy and would lead to legal troubles from the wizarding side. It would have to be done slowly and quietly to go on, not to be rushed in a few months.
Also problematic is that the Wizarding world undervalues Galleons and overvalues Sickles. If he can pay the debt in 1.7 million Sickles, then he’s fine- but if he has to pay them in Galleons, and he just modified the Galleon-Sickle exchange rate to 50-1, then he’s worse off. (He might have made enough from the arbitrage to pay back Malfoy, but maybe not.)
Worst comes to worst, he asks Dumbledore to cure some rich muggles with cancer who are willing to pay.
[edit]Remember, the trick only needs to work once. Take out 40k galleons, convert it to muggle gold (probably necessary, but maybe not), convert it to 50 times as much silver by weight, convert it to Sickles, and now he has (if they’re the same weight coins) 2M Sickles, minus conversion losses. Hand off 1.7M of them to Lucius (or get them changed at Gringotts), and the debt is cleared.
Now, Harry triples his money every time he does the trick- so he’ll probably want to try it several times before losing a lot of his principal. But that’s not a big issue.
I think that the can of worms of why wizards don’t immediately go cure world hunger etc. is best left to be opened near the end of the fic, if at all.
Actually, there’s a fairly complicated question of why don’t we immediately go cure world hunger. I mean, the production and logistics aspects wouldn’t be very difficult compared to what today’s industry can output on an everyday basis. I guess that it’s 80% pure irrationality and only 20% politics.
You mean IRL? It mostly boils down to “we’ve tried giving hungry people food, it doesn’t work, and that’s pretty much all the ideas we’ve got”. It’s a much messier problem than it seems at first glance, and it isn’t all politics or insanity. To pick the most obvious, when you dump planes full of grain on the tarmac in Zimbabwe, what did you just do the finances of the local farmers who now need to compete with free? And what does that do to next year’s crop?
I’d reverse those. (Although one could be considered a subset of the other.)
I might agree with such a reversal, provided that you agree with the well-known maxim that “The personal is political”* and make one more step towards embracing our insidious corruption :)
(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don’t various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)
This is much harder to do then you seem to think.
The linked article does point out the difficulties of raising overall quality of life and human development. Is that what you’re saying is harder to do than just throwing money at the problem? If so, I agree completely (and join the anti-PC crowd in suggesting that the very best of currently conceivable general solutions for Africa is reinstating colonialism).
However, I was talking specifically about satisfying the most elementary physical needs of individual destitute Africans (sustenance, health, peace), not grand questions of policy or structural change. Why I took such a narrow view is because I feel that pushing the self-sufficiency, ground-up angle when talking about ways to fix the whole mess is quite limited and even hypocritical; maybe sharing a little of our wealth to guarantee those needs for everyone (and enforcing birth control, and dealing with a whole separate can of worms, but that’s a problem with every approach) could indeed ameliorate the ongoing nightmare while our social engineering looks for a way to kickstart the aforementioned self-sufficiency.
Yes, increasing dependency and taking away responsibility is a clear instrumental evil, and according to many just evil, period. But if we could first stop people from 1) being born into suffering to do little but increase that very suffering and 2) dying quickly and miserably, maybe that’s worth the tradeoff.
Yes, I’m exploring a view I know to be naive.
When there is hunger, there is power in controlling the distribution of food. When people have power from something, they do not simply allow outsiders to come in and take it away without a fight. You can ship all the food you like for free to African ports; the people of the country itself will still go hungry, because the people with guns will control the distribution to maximize their power.
If a man is intentionally starving and beating his children, you can’t solve their hunger and bruises by giving him material goods. You need to remove his power over the kids and put the kids in care of someone who won’t abuse them. If you want to grant the “the most elementary physical needs of individual destitute Africans (sustenance, health, peace)”, what you will have to do is overthrow their governments and install colonial governors.
There currently seem to be few volunteers for the job.
Yes, this problem is quite obvious, and yes, I’m in favor of full-scale colonialism, but couldn’t a heavier presence by UN/coalition-of-the-willing peacekeepers, with powers to override local authorities when it’s needed to prevent open violence and abuse, also keep the scum that floats to the top there in check? What’s the tactical record for peacekeeping operations that had a reasonably broad mandate for use of force? (Hmm, here’s one account. My cached thought that a “firm hand” brought decent results in Somalia appears to be confirmed.)
...Of course I realize how unlikely any international body would be to approve such powers against the protests of an “independent” local regime (Somalia being an unusual case in that regard), so such policing of aid-receiving countries would have to be carried out unilaterally and without foreign oversight by whatever nation could be willing to implement it. Which creates a power dynamic that’s basically colonialism. Which, again, would IMO be quite OK with purely selfish intentions and better yet with benevolent ones, but should be done openly anyway for clear generic reasons.
It’s an interest-free loan. Unless the “certain rights” Lucius has over HJPEV until graduation are troublesome, it is in probably HJPEV’s best interest to delay paying the loan back as long as possible.
Or unless, I suppose, he expects significant deflation before graduation. I don’t think any of the HJPEV’s plans that we know of are likely to result in deflation, quite the opposite in fact.
Dumbledore was willing to send Hermione to Azkaban to prevent Lucius from getting those rights (well, and the money). It seems likely to me that they’re troublesome.
Or that it doesn’t fit Dumbledore’s narrative.
True as such. But storywise it would seem weird to leave this hanging. That’s one reason why I’m already irrationally overinvested, I notice, in my theory that it’ll get taken care of pretty much on the side by finding out the true culprit and thus cancelling the debt through the Wizengamot or, failing that, possibly through Draco.
There are other options, of course. There have been good points about Dumbledore now having an interest to Make Money Fast for Harry, and about possible other people who might be willing to bankroll a business venture for the newly brightened legend. And, again storywise, I can see handling the “leave it hanging” option in a decent manner as well, if there’s some closure about the relations of houses Potter and Malfoy (presumably with Lucius dead or imprisoned and stripped of his status).
This is only true if you assume harry won’t have any other use for money for that whole time, which seems unlikely to me.
Either I misunderstand you or you have it exactly wrong.
If HJPEV pays back the no-interest loan early, he has less money to spend in the meantime.
If HJPEV pays back the no-interest loan at the latest possible time, he has plenty of money he can use to make more money, and to spend, in the meantime.
The way I imagine it working is that any money Harry might acquire is automatically spent on paying off his debt, but he doesn’t get into trouble if this doesn’t pay the debt until he turns 18. I don’t think the situation where he makes plenty of money and does not pay off the loan will be allowed. So either Harry can not worry about the debt and pay it off eventually at the cost of not having any money til then, or pay it off sooner and then have free use of money.
I don’t think we need to rely so much on your imagination.
If a debt isn’t due, it need not be paid on. There’s nothing here that says he’s required to pay anything else before he graduates.
In fact, it’s possible that the author meant us to understand that HJPEV didn’t have to pay anything right now and that the whole hundred grand isn’t due until graduation. But that would mean the author had been a bit sloppier than I’m fairly confident he is.
Emphasis mine. I think (most of) whatever he has must be payed immediately, and the “due” part is only for the rest.
Wasn’t it noted that Lucius would have some extra powers over Harry while he holds the debt?
No, not “extra powers.” Only, “certain rights,” which I mentioned in my post.
Weird—I didn’t see that the first time.
Out of curiosity, is there a relevant distinction between “extra powers” and “certain rights” as used here?
Only that one is what Dumbledore said and I quoted, and the other is what you thought I’d left out.
Better than scaring him in a dark alley. At least he’ll have time to think through his reaction.
Far more important than not scaring Malfoy in public is not insulting him in public. Public scaring isn’t too much of an issue unless the nature of the scare is also insulting.
Also, he scared pretty much the entire Wizengamot (plus a Dementor!), not just Lucius. “I scared him, and people know why” is different than “I scared him, and people know it”. [ETA:] It’s no loss of face to be scared by someone who more or less scared everyone else.
I think that being pushed into showing fear is something like an insult, especially if anyone twits him about it.
I read that at first as “if anybody tweets him about it” and spent some moments pondering the possibility of a magical Twitter (functioning by owl post, of course).
So, Hooter?
Arbitrage trick is overengineering. Just trade on forex and use time turner to go back and choose the deal.
With 40 000 galleons even going back a few minutes could suffice.
I’m loving the idea that time travel is being proposed here as the simpler, less over-engineered solution to making a bunch of money.
I would be surprised if this did not quickly lead to the revocation of his time turner, but presuming he asks McGonagall and it’s deemed responsible that is also an option.
You sir, are a genius.
Didn’t get. Could you explain?
The foreign exchange(i.e., currency) market is both very liquid and very volatile. With advance knowledge of major changes from a Time Turner, it’s easy to make very fast exponential growth of your seed money—even a 1% change per day, in any direction, multiplies your money by a factor of 12 every year(or x3 million before he graduates Hogwarts). Of course, anyone with that sort of record would get investigated hard and fast, but a more cautious approach can still result in absurd growth.
And there is leverage, so you can invest 100 $, but get profits or loses like you invested 10000 $. So if theres 100x leverage, and 1% profit to make on currencies each day, you can double your money every day.
So to turn 100 galeons to 100000 galeons Harry would need 10 transactions with 1% profit each.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/forexleverage.asp#axzz1qS7tVBFp
True, but there’s no way an 11 year old would have access to 100:1 leverage, even with derivatives. LTCM wasn’t much higher than 100:1, and they’re just about the all-time kings of leverage. There’s things like regulatory limits and credit checks to contend with here.
Edit: Silly me, I should actually have read your link. I’m used to limits on equity leverage, apparently forex works damn near an order of magnitude higher. Disregard the above.
Harry has a father who is quite respectable. He could act through his father.
I was in an equity mindset, where the rules are much tighter, because the underlying assets are so much more volatile. Doing that sort of leverage there would require you to post some pretty hefty collateral(likely beyond the means of Prof. Verres) and be in a low-regulation jurisdiction for it to even be legal(which the UK is not).