Pity the poor traders: Even in these trying economic times, when markets careen from moment to moment, the men on the floor find themselves with little to do but watch DVDs and sexually harass unfortunate the unfortunate females who share their space. The culprit? Computer electronics, which have increased efficiency at the expense of actual human activity. (The number of traders on the ground at the NYSE has dropped 50% in the past five years.) It's gotten so bad that Hilliard Lyons trader Alan Valdes has gained ten pounds because, "I don't have to run around the floor anymore."

How bad is it?

As cameras and reporters from Fox Business News and CNBC canvass the gallery, traders openly engage in lengthy discussions over how the Rangers or the Yankees are doing. Some traders plug in headphones and watch YouTube clips online. Others browse goods on shopping Web site Amazon.com. Or they play computer solitaire.
Some prefer to sit in side rooms, reading the sports pages of the daily tabloids. A few page through thick novels or play crossword puzzles. Others nap slouched on benches in rooms adjacent to the trading floor.

Tragic, right? While some see a way out-using their downtime to secure degrees-others are abandoning the floor altogether, cutting out early to ferry their kids to the extra-curricular events which will hopefully get them into a good college where they can learn a valuable skill, like literary criticism or gender studies. Anything but business, really, because who wants to sit around watching Rambo all day with a bunch of other guys who are basically the financial version of Potemkin Villages, smiling-or, as the case may be, playing BrickBreaker-for the cameras as the visual embodiment of American capitalism?