Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#461

Post by gizajob » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #447

layer8 wrote: post #317

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

I think there's a good chance his tendencies to arrogance and mendacity will get him killed in prison.

Maybe not killed but pummelled on the regular. He might be cut out for crypto fraud but he’s definitely not going to be cut out for such a long stretch in a “survival of the fittest” environment. Any skills he has are worse than useless inside.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#462

Post by foreverobama » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

setgree wrote: post #176

An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover. I think that's true for Sam. I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit; I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done. As Rick Heicklen writes, "We are not ever going to be Sam. But we could be Caroline…

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#463

Post by KingLancelot » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#464

Post by doctorpangloss » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

mrbonner wrote: post #400

I really don't understand the severity of criminal justice system punishment. SBF got sentenced to 25 years for a white collar financial crime while a guy in my hometown hit and killed 2 people, while DUI and ran over 100mph on a local street with 35mph limit got 26 months sentence forb2 vehicular homicide.

This was intriguing to me, so I want to share how I did some light investigation of the question.

https://chat.openai.com/share/2dc83d60-d14b-4438-8226-ac59de...

I don't know if it can summarize books correctly always, it almost always does; and I also don't know if there's just a bias in publishing about race relations because that sells.

But it seems right to me that the most orthodox opinion is that racial bias, drug policy and socioeconomic status are the biggest factors in the severity of sentencing in general.

So you are referencing two acutely exceptional cases - a white collar crime by a rich person that only somewhat interacts with drug abuse of Aderrall that is acutely severely punished, and a drug-related crime that is acutely poorly punished.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#465

Post by sgt » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

loeg wrote: post #265

JKCalhoun wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, 27.5 would be right down the middle. As others have suggested, likely he won't even serve the 25 though.

> As others have suggested, likely he won't even serve the 25 though. Because instead he'll serve 21.25?

Maybe serve 15 then the rest with a foot tracker thingie at home?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#466

Post by nradov » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

hodgesrm wrote: post #354

layer8 wrote: post #317

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

Or he could end up like Michael Milken, who went to jail for securities fraud but became known as a philanthropist. As Gandalf once said to Frodo, Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7374580…

Michael Milken got a raw deal. His actual criminal offenses only resulted in $318K of damages and were largely related to facilitating tax fraud by others. He was a piker compared to SBF. The judge in Milken's case gave him an unusually harsh sentence explicitly as a deterrent to others; I suspect it would have actually been lower under current federal sentencing guidelines.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/highly-c...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#467

Post by chanamasala » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

publius_0xf3 wrote: post #449

It's funny. I lost tens of thousands of dollars thanks to this individual, yet his sentence brings me no joy or arouses any emotion at all. I'm utterly indifferent to his fate for some reason and I don't know why. Yet if he had been a mugger who stole a much smaller amount of money from me on the street, I think I would've been far more vengeful. Should I feel vindictive? Or is it healthy to forget about it and move…

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#468

Post by MichaelRo » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

25 years seems excessive. Funk, for murder they get 10 years in Sweden. Yes, fraud is bad but he didn't kill nobody. I think 5 years would have had been enough.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#469

Post by caturopath » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

jimmydddd wrote: post #460

FabHK wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I didn't find Lewis's book as bad (or amoral) as it's often made out to be. Yes, he didn't put his judgement in every paragraph, but his description of SBF was: a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) he knew best and should basically ignore the advice of everyone else (particularly his elders), his naive utilitarianism without any deontological/virtue…

I think I read that Lewis was almost finished with the book, which was about to come out, and which was highly pro-SBF, when the FTX scandal Broke? So he then had to quickly revise and "save" the book by changing the tone in view of the FTX scandal? If so, it's probably an unusual book in view of the last hour rewrites.

That doesn't seem to be the case at all. A lot of the sympathetic content occurs _after_ the scandal and arrest, and Lewis has continued to take the same tone in interviews. Further, an inordinate amount of time is dedicated earlier in the book to a problem at Alameda that Lewis draws parallels to the scandal that took him down, clearly working toward his thesis. Lewis is one of the most-read living authors: they could have gotten a crack team of editors to help him revise the book in no time if he wanted to. It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. It's not even an implausible view.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#470

Post by gls2ro » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

lb4r wrote: post #278

melenaboija wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the goal of the punishment? If it is to harm him and make the rest of the world satisfied with it 25 years behind bars seems enough to me, I don’t care if it is 25, 35 or 155. In five years I will have forgotten about this. If it is stopping others, same thing, I don’t think that if someone is determined to do something similar would care about 25 or more years.

I think of it like this: Many people would "happily" spend 5 years in prison for a more than probable chance to get filthy rich. That's a superset with, I imagine, significantly greater cardinality than the set of those willing to spend 25. Obviously there is a sweet spot. For example, if you're okay with 60 years, than you're probably okay with 80. I'd imagine 20, give or take 5 years or so, is near that sweet spot,…

I think many people _say_ they will happily spend 5 years in prison but that is different than actually being faced with the actual possibility.