561–570 of 1001 posts
To put this into its proper perspective, see table 7 here: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... In 2022, the average murderer in the Federal Southern District of New York (N = 58) was sentenced to a median of 231 months, which comes out to 19 years and change. No crime of any type had an mean or median sentence higher than 25 years; most were far less than half. So it should be really hard…
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…
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…
He's a 32 year old man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"AUSA Nicolas Roos: Samuel Bankman-Fried stole $8 billion dollars. It was theft, from customers spread all over the world. It was a loss that impacted people significantly and caused damage. I want to address a few of the new victim letters" "AUSA Roos: They lost their life savings. A man who lives in Portugal - the day before bankruptcy his daughter was born. He was marred by the ominous specter of financial instabi…
[flagged]
I call bullshit. Typical punitive justice reasoning. He might had done fraud, but it's hardly a risk that he "will be in a position to do something very bad in the future".
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cou…
He was a dumbass though. He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know...
I sincerely wish every centralized exchange had their own SBF to burn them down. The negative impact of "investors" has been terrible for crypto. They've turned what should have been a trustless medium into a caricature of traditional banking with all of its downsides and none of the benefits. Whats the point of computing all the hashes if you end up handing your coins to some guy who pinky promises to pay them back…
What I never see acknowledged (or believed) by more lenient people is the fact that adequate punishment (sometimes harsh is adequate) serves to send a message not only to other offenders, but maybe most importantly to non-offenders, that the justice system is worth something.
"Crime doesn't pay" is to me a greater message to people who are not willing to commit crimes in the first place.
The moral of the story is to always accept a plea deal if there is some chance of your being seen as guilty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cou…
Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much.
He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent".
One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy.
A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.