Were the cameras off, like in Epstein's jail strangulation?
Bernie Madoff has died
151–160 of 406 posts
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is this obsession with jailing people? Prison is pretty inhumane, especially in the context of a limited lifespan. Even if we're immortal, it's still inhumane. Moreover, how does making people go to prison fixes anything? It's just a way to assign punishment and blame people.
My prediction: Start giving perpetrators of financial crimes real prison time and you'll see major prison reform within a few years.
You think white collar criminals go to bad prisons?
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#153Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.
And if you do end up stealing, make sure to steal from the less-off. Afaik nobody has yet gone to prison for liquidating an employees' pension fund, for example.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the US most commonly jail's people for (drug offenses) is barbaric. That said, the reason for jail is to not only rehabilitate but also to deter. The problem we have is that white collar crimes almost never result in jail time for the rich. The financial deterrent is just ineffective at stopping bad behavior. They can run the risk/rewards calculations and often come up with the conclusion that "we'll make more m…
I actually feel like Disney would be willing to pay people to spend 2 days in jail in order to keep their fireworks show. You’ve just moved the cost from a fine to a salary.
You just have to go up the management chain until you find the person that will stop the practice.
I doubt if it ended up with the CEO and going to jail that they'd keep it up.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is this obsession with jailing people? Prison is pretty inhumane, especially in the context of a limited lifespan. Even if we're immortal, it's still inhumane. Moreover, how does making people go to prison fixes anything? It's just a way to assign punishment and blame people.
What the US most commonly jail's people for (drug offenses) is barbaric. That said, the reason for jail is to not only rehabilitate but also to deter. The problem we have is that white collar crimes almost never result in jail time for the rich. The financial deterrent is just ineffective at stopping bad behavior. They can run the risk/rewards calculations and often come up with the conclusion that "we'll make more m…
>> What the US most commonly jail's people for (drug offenses) is barbaric.
If you're talking about prisons, nearly 4 times as many people are in prison for violent crimes (robbery, assault, rape, murder...) than drug charges.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you just redefined a the name „Ponzi” to mean something else than the commonly accepted definition.
Here, let me google that for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=ponzi+scheme+definition Pon·zi scheme /ˈpänzē ˌskēm/ noun a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
Well you used to be able to buy drugs and child porn with it so it's not a nonexistent enterprise. /s
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how the stock market works as well.
There is certainly zero-sum speculation within the stock market, dwarfing that in Bitcoin, sure, but the S&P 500 also pays out half a trillion dollars in dividends a year, and buys back a similar amount of stock from the profits of the actual businesses being invested in through the stock market. A trillion dollars a year funneling from business profits to investors is the difference between the S&P 500 and Bitcoin.
Gold might be a better example then.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the % of income idea.
I like it simply because screwing the rich and middle as hard as the poors on trivial issues is gonna make it real clear real quick how excessive penalties for common civil offenses are and pretty soon thereafter the laws will change. HN has this fantasy of $10k speeding tickets. In reality it's gonna look like 100mph speed limits, $100 fines for you and $10 fines for your nanny.
This is true of much of the justice system. Penalties aren't meant to curb certain specific behaviors, they're meant to be used as general control mechanisms for people who can't wiggle out of punshiment by one means or another. I think the advance of physical and digital surveillance is eventually going to force a reevaluation of what behavior we criminalize, because either otherwise-upstanding people start to get caught in the web (see: piracy for personal use in the 00s), or we see an increasing number of highly public instances of clearly malicious or neglectful actors sliding (which we're arguably already seeing wrt police brutality cases).
We're inadvertently about to make the dystunction of our legal system everyone's problem, which is when you'll see change.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#159I learned a few years ago that I actually worked closely with one of the two programmers who worked with Madoff and was part of the "Madoff Five" the year before he started with Madoff. I feel the judge went too easy on the programmers involved as there is no way they did not understand what they were helping to orchestrate. I also worked closely with another programmer a couple of years later who wound up being a dr…
What were they coding? Sounded to me like nothing at all was going on inside.
Re: Bernie Madoff has died
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin may or may not intentionally be a Ponzi scheme. But that doesn't matter, because functionally, there is no difference between an intentional Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin. Bitcoin trading is a negative-sum game. All winning that anyone gets comes out of the pockets of newer investors. There is no net inflow of value or money that could cover the gains people make trading, other than the money being put in by other…
Bitcoin is as much or as little a ponzi scheme as things like the US dollar.
Bitcoin is in some ways preferable, since you’re not subjected to violence if you choose not to participate in it.