241–250 of 406 posts
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"rate of bitcoin purchases paid in dollars > rate of dollars purchased in bitcoin" Why don't these two numbers have to be equal?
“Rate” here meant the first derivative of the number of transactions. Not the “btc usd exchange rate” An equivalent way to say the same thing is: “number of bitcoins being purchased with USD per hour > number of USDs being purchased with bitcoin per hour”.
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I like the % of income idea.
What do you do with crimes committed by people who have little in earnings (students, unemployed, etc.) or folks who earn “$1” in income but obviously are otherwise wealthy?
Calculation is based in your total income (including capital income). Most rich people would be affected due to capital income.
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So fix the social safety net, too big to fail is not something we want to have, especially when it comes to actively harmful companies...
Jailing the people responsible seems like a way better option than putting potentially tens of thousands of people on welfare.
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> If a corporation is a legal person with inalienable rights (as the SCOTUS seems to have decided on) Please stop repeating this nonsense. Corporate Personhood is a legal idea, and does not mean a "corporation is a legal person". Without corporate personhood, you wouldn't be able to sue a company for wrongdoing if the guilty employee quit, or even enforce basic contracts. There are serious problems with corporations…
You can sue the government even though they aren't granted personhood.
I remember when this happened, I was running a hedge fund. Supposedly he was doing collars (split-strike conversions) to make this money, but it just seemed implausible to me at the time, since I traded options. I figured he just punted futures, nice and easy way to sorta hug the index (I hadn't seen his "returns"), maybe Martingale it and get lucky until you're not so lucky. But then it turned out he wasn't doing an…
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That's still not a Ponzi scheme unless you are also lying to investors by telling them that the returns are coming from some kind of business venture or something. Investors willingly speculating on commodities because they think they will rise isn't a Ponzi scheme.
The possible ponzi is people claiming Bitcoin will replace the existing financial system due to its intrinsic superior qualities and will go to $1 million and beyond. The HODLers don’t believe they are merely speculating. Of course that could be true, and people saying it may well believe it. Ponzi believed his international reply coupon scheme would actually pay out. So to some extent it will only be proveable in hi…
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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.
Other countries have $10k speeding tickets for the rich who ignore traffic rules. It’s not such a fantasy, it’s a real world way to reduce emissions and automobile deaths.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
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Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…
>Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine" is much better. Well, they sort of do that in Russia. So the CEO/founder of almost any sketchy company is a homeless person that signed the paperwork in exchange for some free vodka. Didn't particularly solve the problem. Corporate fines just need to be sufficient to make such "business" u…
This seems untenable because large businesses will then be forced to break individual business units into separate corporations to manage risk. At first glance this might seem fine, but you'd basically be creating huge drag on the economy bc large businesses benefit from economies of scale.
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Financial criminals and murderers are not comparable. Prison is like a death sentence to a rich person.
True, they aren't, but we're not talking about the class of crime. We're talking about a particular kind of incentive model.
Financial crimes are usually slow-burning and almost never crimes of passion.
Prison doesn't stop murderers, but that has no bearing on whether it stops Madoffs.
Here'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.