He's gotta be eyeing that Elizabeth Holmes sentence nervously
Nha, he spent a good couple of billions on buying favor of politicians. He’ll end up with a slap on the wrist and a “boys will be boys” sentence compared to Holmes.
FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
211–217 of 217 posts
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simpler? A premise of EA is that people can make choices that maximize the good in the long run. Events like this should make us doubt that premise. The proponents of EA can't do it. Who can? I would say: no one, and serious moral philosophies should take that into account.
1. I don't think it's a premise of EA that you can predict outcomes 100% of the time. Thus the fact that SBF failed to predict something isn't some sort of fatal blow you think it is 2. Even if we accept your conclusion, what does that mean in practice? Wikipedia describes effective altruism as: >a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much…
I think reason and empiricism are useful tools. But so are intuition, deontological ethics (thou shalt/thou shalt not), and adherence to tradition. I don't think we can do without any of these things and EA seriously overrates reason and empiricism.
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is at peak MAUs and according to previous financial statements should be cash flow positive after personnel changes. Seems like they invested in a business which was almost immediately switched into a profitable enterprise on an upward trajectory. What am I missing? Or are you making a prediction that is the opposite of available evidence?
> What am I missing? The fact that a massive number of high-profile advertisers have announced they've stopped buying ads? > > Audi of America, United Airlines, General Mills, General Motors, Volkswagen, Modelez International (which makes popular products like Oreos), and Omnicon (which manages advertising for brands like McDonalds and Apple) So two of the world's largest automakers, the world's richest computer comp…
>That it's not "personnel changes" but thousands of their best employees leaving?
If you pick a random 50% of people from ANY company, only 10-20% of that group are actually high performers. As Musk pointed out, there were several developers laid off who wrote zero lines of code in three months. Sorry, but that's unacceptable and is not indicative of high performance.
Top performers may write 1,000 lines of quality code per quarter, but it's never zero. If you're writing docs all day, you're useless.
Also consider the leaked Project Veritas videos of a Twitter senior engineer admitting he worked only 4 hours a week.
The "top performers" laid off you defend literally work less than 1 day a week.
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertisers the "may" be losing? They're canceling their spending in droves if you google the subject...
Really? https://twitter.com/eglyman/status/1590385689895784448
“$10B in anonymized, aggregated business transaction volume each year by Ramp customers”
1. That’s basically nothing compared to the big names. 2. This tweet is intentionally using _rates_ but I don’t see absolute values. If I spend $2 vs $1, I’ve doubled my spending, but I also haven’t really spent anything. Last week my coffee spend was about 700% higher than usual! Because I bought a single coffee from a coffee shop instead of making it at home. 3. This sample seems to be just of a very small number of small companies (which are this tryramp’s customers). Again, this is pretty useless on its own. Especially when we have statements that large companies are pausing spending. 4. If big names are pulling out, the ad space may be cheaper (due to less demand) at which point they are giving more to Twitter but Twitter is still taking in less.
We don’t know either way, but that tweet gives no real information on its own.
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that was the whole point: unregulated (or at least extremely minimally regulated, preferably in a jurisdiction that has a looooong history of looking the other way and in a perfect world with no extradition treaties), decentralized, anonymous financial systems. It doesn't surprise me in the least that these clowns were running across the high wire without a net using other peoples money. The fascinating par…
There's a weird split in the space in that regard. There's a lot of right-libertarian-esque "no gods or kings, only man" ethos in the cryptocurrency space but there's also been a lot of work trying to build the guard rails that are common to society into the systems. People like to joke that cryptocurrency is just right-libertarians speedrunning financial legislation history but the reality is more that a lot of the…
I didn't say this was a right-libertarian thing, so I don't want anyone to think that was my bias here. I think it's clear that there are hucksters of all stripes jumping on this bandwagon.
That said, I think this is as insightful a summation of the situation I see in crypto as I've read recently.
It's a race against a regulatory clock and when it strikes midnight...
I may steal this gem. :-)
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of. Sam was not doing what EAism says you should do. But he was embedded in the EA movement, close to many of its other members, and abetted by people like Will. So if you look at EA descriptively, Sam was very much doing EA. He was lying about his business. But he wasn't lying about giving the money away. That was very real, and a big part of what "doing effective altruism" is. Sam/Caroline were also doing cryp…
> But both those movements were happy to work with them when they appeared to be successful, non-fraudulent billionaires. Are you claiming failure to do "due diligence" ? Because otherwise, that seems fairly normal.
I am claiming two things:
1) EA as a movement and as a principle has been at best equivocal on whether or not it's OK to deliberately harm a few people in order to benefit many people. There's a very strong argument that SBF was pursuing utilitarian goals as espoused by EA. Riches amplify our flaws. He committed EA on a grand scale, and it turns out that SBF's version of take-no-prisoners utilitarianism is a) illegal, b) harmful to millions of people, and b.1) that includes his own movement.
2) SBF and Caroline did crypto. They didn't do crypto and secretly scam people and therefore they are not really doing crypto. Scamming is at the heart of crypto. If you want scamming not to be at the heart of crypto, then accept that you will need a centralized authority with a mandate for violence to impose rules of behavior, much as we have with the rest of finance.
Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree
#217The amounts of money we’re talking about here are sort of staggering. I know they did a pretty good job of not keeping any records of depositors, but do we have any sense of depositor demographics, total number of depositors, or average account size? Any KYC at all? Like did retail “investors” really pump close to $16B into this? Could the scam here be crypto whales used this as an off ramp to turn their crypto into…
Clients had to log into FTX to witness their account balances and history, so it is impossible that the data was never captured or available.
How can i log in to see my history