the defense is really trying the “SBF couldn’t have intentionally stolen the money because he didn’t spend it on a yacht or a lambo” strategy
just a $30M penthouse, private jets, a $16M house for his parents plus $10M in cash, chartered planes for their amazon packages… https://t.co/NA3DqkjWjn pic.twitter.com/zFbw7Zo1CJ
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 5, 2023
also some of the money DID go to a yacht! $2.5 million for former Alameda co-CEO Sam Trabucco’s boat, which btw is called “Soak My Deck” pic.twitter.com/jWdYgu2EOr
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 5, 2023
After reading her newsletter today, I subscribed to Molly White’s substack. (Even though I can’t keep up with reading all the subscriptions I already have… )
After recapping the testimony we’ve heard so far, I ask the question on everyone’s minds: will Sam Bankman-Fried testify?https://t.co/JDZt2NdIMP
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 6, 2023
According to Sam Bankman-Fried’s defense attorneys, he was just following the move fast and break things mantra that has led the technology industry for decades. “Sam and his colleagues were building the plane as they were flying it,” explained lead defense lawyer Mark Cohen. He was “a math nerd who didn’t drink or party”, Cohen went on, apparently hoping the jurors believe teetotalers to be inherently incapable of crime.
Sure, maybe Bankman-Fried hadn’t hired a Chief Risk Officer — a piece of information Cohen bafflingly decided to offer up himself — but hey, it was a new company! Well okay, maybe not that new (Alameda Research was five years old when the companies collapsed). Oh, and Caroline Ellison had refused to hedge trades over at Alameda Research, he said, previewing the argument that everything was her fault, not Bankman-Fried’s. “Sam didn’t steal from anyone,” said Cohen. “There was no theft.”
I’m not sure if “well, sure, they built their empire out of gasoline-drenched toothpicks and duct tape and then were shocked when $8 billion went up in flames, but he didn’t really mean to light fire to everyone’s money”, is a case-winning strategy to put in front of a jury, but hey, I’m not the superstar defense attorney here.
The government’s story goes a little differently. “All of it was built on lies,” declared Assistant U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn. FTX told customers their money was safe, even paying American celebrities to repeat the claim in multi-billion dollar television advertisements.
Instead, customer money went into one big piggybank, shared between FTX and all the other companies under his control, from which Bankman-Fried pulled fistfuls to spend on venture investments to political and charitable donations to sports sponsorship deals to luxury Bahamian real estate…
The big question on everyone’s mind is: will Bankman-Fried testify? I doubt his lawyers want him to, as he is both abrasive and evasive even on his best days. He likes to try to talk circles around interviewers — a tactic that may pay off with friendly tech journos or the crypto crowd, but is less likely to work for sworn testimony in front of an experienced cross-examiner.
Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, has shown nothing but conviction that he can talk his way out of this, if he just gets the chance. He spent weeks after the collapse talking to anyone who would listen, from journalists like Andrew Ross Sorkin to random people on Twitter like me [I13]. That’s been muted lately, but more likely due to the gag order [I35] and subsequent return to jail [I36] rather than any change of heart on his part. Meanwhile, the judge has told him that he has the right to testify, even if his lawyers don’t want him to. That temptation may ultimately prove too strong for Bankman-Fried.
“it’s not fraud if you pay it back” is innovative, i’ll give them that https://t.co/n7am5Uo8hH
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 6, 2023
Wang said that Alameda wrote loans in his name and then SBF told him to sign for the loans. Wang never saw the money — $200m-$300m total — and believes it was used for some of Alameda’s many investments.
— Jacob Silverman 🤌🪨 (@SilvermanJacob) October 5, 2023
Yedidia: I told Sam, I’m not going anywhere. Then I resigned.
AUSA: What changed?
Yedidia: I learned that Alameda had used customer deposits to pay its loans. It seemed like a flagrantly wrong thing.
AUSA: No further questions.— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) October 5, 2023
“In the summer of 2022, the leader of the team that raised concerns about Alameda’s special privileges was fired.”https://t.co/L5rgetZvb1 pic.twitter.com/BUIzCyLyvT
— Jacob Silverman 🤌🪨 (@SilvermanJacob) October 5, 2023
Also:
we shouldn’t lose sight, when getting judgy about all the influencers and biographers who tied their reputation to FTX, of the fact that the *best case scenario* for this thing was that it was an unregulated gambling platform where suckers money was exchanged for worthless tokens
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) October 4, 2023
the fact that the worthless tokens were themselves then stolen is a further layer which goes very much to the question of guilt, but every time I dunk on someone for not seeing FTX was bad, I worry that I’m implicitly legitimising the idea there could be a good crypto exchange
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) October 4, 2023
it can be a *legal* business, but tbh so is Bet24 and I’m pretty judgey of celebrities who endorse that
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) October 5, 2023
SBF was a fortuneteller pic.twitter.com/HXjpoibD8R
— Wendy O (@CryptoWendyO) October 4, 2023
cain
Why do these homes look so fucking ugly? Marble floors – just really cold. Ugh.
Alison Rose
If I had that kind of money, 90% of it would be spent on books, so…guess I would’ve gotten away with it!
Baud
@Alison Rose:
A book about
yachts!ETA: Houseboats!
Alison Rose
@Baud: But I hate boats!
trollhattan
Negative balance up to $65 BILLION?!? $65B would be #82 in the world GDP ranking, behind Costa Rica.
Frank Wilhoit
Molly is necessary; you would do better to drop fifteen other subscriptions to make room for her. If all of her present careers went back on her, she could pivot immediately to writing humor qua humor, she is that good. We hear the authentic notes of Thurber, Perelman, and her namesake E. B., in a style that is modern but not narrowly so. Simply some of the very best writing being done today.
H.E.Wolf
Sam Bankman-Fried is in his 30s. One of the benefits of white male privilege is for men who break the law to be portrayed as children… as the flip side is for non-white children to be portrayed as adults.
cain
@Baud:
@Alison Rose:
What about an illustrated book about birds?
Ken
@trollhattan: A lot of crypto, for values of “lot” approaching 100%, is persuading someone to buy one of your tokens for a dollar, then revealing that you have “minted” ten billion such tokens, therefore by geometric logic you are a multi-billionaire.
mrmoshpotato
Please let his parents be indicted too!
Also (too), no matter how much you order from Amazon… WTF?
Nukular Biskits
Philosophical question:
Does that kind of money corrupt people … or were they already corrupt to begin with?
Jess
I don’t even pretend to understand crypto (nor do I want to, TBH), but it starts to make a bit more sense when I mentally replace “tokens” with “tulip bulbs.” I don’t know if I will ever understand how people can acquire enough money to throw away on such schemes, and yet be stupid enough to do so. The world is a strange place.
Ivan X
Molly White is a treasure. Sometimes I wish that I was as smart, incisive, and witty as she is, but then I remind myself that she sets the bar impossibly high.
mrmoshpotato
@Nukular Biskits:
I think you’ll find the answer if you rephrase the question.
Did that kind of money make this all a scam, or was it a scam to begin with?
Another Scott
Good to see dsquareddigest cited here, he’s a smart cookie and is being recognized more and more.
(repost) – One minute MBA (from May 2004):
Lots of wisdom in that old blog post. A lot of it can be reduced to that last quoted bit.
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
A puzzle about SBF is why Michael Lewis, the famous author, somehow didn’t see the grift. A Slate article notes the puzzle but doesn’t solve it.
Due to the recent purchase of an iPhone, I got a three-month free trial subscription to Apple News. At $10/mo., it’s not ridiculously bad! It includes some magazines (Atlantic, Slate) that sometimes have articles worth reading. Some other magazines (Economist, Bloomberg) are ‘included’ but require subscriptions. Haven’t decided whether I’ll keep it.
Hildebrand
Is it bad that I’m really not interested in following the trial? I mean, honestly, I just want to flip to the last page of the book and know that he will be spending a very long time in jail.
Splitting Image
@Nukular Biskits:
In the case of crypto, I think that the corrupting influence is the fact that people are basically handing their money over and saying “please steal this from me”. You also find this in evangelical churches.
John Oliver once did a show about megachurches where he learned that there are basically no rules whatsoever about what churches are allowed to do with their adherents’ money, so if you want a private jet, all you have to do is register as a church and start soliciting money to buy one. It’s like The Producers only without the need to put on a flop in order to pocket the money.
The systems seem to be actually designed to attract corrupt people and reward them with so much money that their corruption becomes more and more obvious to everybody not in the cult.
Villago Delenda Est
I’ve heard enough. Time to airdrop him on to an ice floe in the Arctic.
trollhattan
@MattF:
Good question. While I haven’t read any Lewis stuff specific to crypto, I consider “Flash Boys” required reading for learning how legal financial grift happens, and how we are never allowed to partake of the legal grift, ourselves.
Alison Rose
Unrelated to literally anything, but I just saw a YT comment that said “I’ve always loved how much Neil Gaiman feels like a Neil Gaiman character” and I think that’s the truest statement I’ve read in a long time.
MattF
@Another Scott: Agree that Dan Davies is a very smart guy and is worth reading. The only issue is that he writes so clearly that he can fool you into thinking you understand what he’s saying when you really don’t.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken: Next up: the explanation for the missing strawberries.
Another Scott
@Splitting Image: Yup. Look at that guy in Texas, what’s his name, … [eta] Joel Osteen.
Just don’t be an idiot and try to use your “church” to steal from Uncle Sam: (from September 1)
Jesus wants me! you! to be rich!!1
[eta:] Sigh – I keep forgetting that editing removes the fancy-text markup. That “me!” is supposed to be strike-through-ed.
Grr…,
Scott.
scav
So here they’re arguing that the lenders got some money back, so no harm no foul. Rather like the Defendant in Chief is arguing that so long as his lenders made some money, his outright delusional paperwork is totally legit. Likewise, the DiC’s claim that his perfect paragraph means all lies in his financials means no legal recourse is possible, Muskrat is claiming his deathtraps disclaimer means all his hype and advertising about self-driving cars is clearly legally gun-proof BS. Hive mind of about two neurons. Santos did one-up his dear leader a bit by inflating the values of something he didn’t have at all.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Does Houdini count as a grifter? Yesterday, a guy came to my building to give a presentation about Houdini. It was more interesting than I expected. He said Houdini wasn’t a great magician, but he was an amazing escape artist. At the end, he showed us how Houdini used to get out of straight jackets, just in case we ever need to know, I guess.
MattF
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In fact, Houdini was very much a major debunker of his era.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MattF: About spiritualism. Yeah. The presenter said Houdini made that a third of his show for the last part of his career. He used to send people ahead of him into towns and had them attend seances. Then he’d debunk what went on at those seances during his show
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Doesn’t the straightjacket trick involve dislocating your shoulder? Having seen (and heard) that happen to someone once, I think I’d just try to relax in that nice comfy straightjacket.
jonas
I think there was a thread here a few months back about these faith-based healthcare “cost-sharing networks” that are basically massive fraud operations that take people’s money and then leave them high and dry when they need medical care. Meanwhile, the people who run them are partying it up on some private island. Can’t touch ’em, regulation-wise, though. They’re “faith-based!”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ken: He did it right in front of us with no dislocated shoulder. He had an audience member (someone I know) do up the buckles, so they were ok.
Nukular Biskits
@jonas:
Being “faith-based” and having “sincerely-held religious convictions” is the card being frequently played by Christianists (note that I did not say “Christians”) in this country.
Basically, it’s their trump card (pun intended) to ignore any law/regulation they don’t like.
Ivan X
This recap of the trial by Tiffany Fong and Carly Reilly as they sit outside the courtroom vaping and dropping f-bombs is both informative and hilarious.
Villago Delenda Est
@jonas: The solution: tax the living poo out of churches. Mosques and Synagogues don’t seem to be into this scam.
H.E.Wolf
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It’s an odd spelling, because it’s archaic: straitjacket, from the old word “strait”, meaning “narrow or confining”. As in: narrow is the path and strait is the gate (paraphrasing some Bible verse or other).
/word nerd :)
scav
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Things get a little muddier I think in entertainment. Certainly don’t expect the busker on the street to be the world’s best musician but hey, he’s not bad at that particular lick. There’s somehow a difference from the shell game when part of a magician’s show and when run in a CTA car.
Roger Moore
@Nukular Biskits:
I think it’s a bit from column A and a bit from column B. It’s very hard to get stupid rich money without it affecting you; even people who win large sums in the lottery are changed by it. At the same time, I think you have to be pretty corrupt already to pursue that kind of money with the kind of single-minded dedication needed to get it.
Steeplejack
@Nukular Biskits:
Let’s ask Sam’s mother—after all, she’s an ethics professor!
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: I’ve had my issues with him–the main one is that one of his recurring themes in the 2000s was that Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style” was a bad essay, that the liberal aversion to conspiracy theory is misguided and should be abandoned. I don’t think that’s aged well at all.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@H.E.Wolf: I actually hesitated over the spelling, but was too lazy to look it up. Thanks!
@scav: Houdini was a showman, for sure.
Paul in KY
@cain: I stayed at a condo once that had those and on the recap they wanted me to leave, I said ‘The floors are as cold as a tomb’.
Steeplejack
Straitjacket!
ETA:
@H.E.Wolf: Thank you!
Paul in KY
@Nukular Biskits: In his case, I believe he was corrupt to begin with.
Paul in KY
@Splitting Image: L Ron Hubbard latched on to this many years ago…
Aimee Semple McPherson before him…And so on & so on.
Paul in KY
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Harry Houdini was a singular artist that we have not seen again since he died.
PJ
@Paul in KY: I would be a little concerned if we did see him after he died. Maybe there was something to that spiritualism stuff after all.
MattF
@Steeplejack: This is a genuinely funny aspect of the SBF tale. I suppose there’s no reason why an ethics professor should be ethical.
Roger Moore
@Jess:
I think you understand it perfectly well. The technical details of how it works are mostly misdirection. That’s not to say the technical stuff is complete BS- the math and everything checks out- but it’s completely secondary from the standpoint of someone thinking about putting their money into it. They want you to get wrapped up in the technical side so you don’t notice the financial side is a fairly standard Ponzi scheme or a pump-and-dump scam.
scav
For Straits / Straights wrestling, think also of
a) Geographic Straits (Juan de Fuca! Gibralter! Hormuz!) skinny little water things.
b) Straight but not narrow.
For that matter, combining all the above physically and with wrestling could lead to some very interesting and memorable vacations. The joys of definition.
Old School
@PJ:
This Halloween will be the year!
montanareddog
@Nukular Biskits:
I think that is the wrong frame to use for analysis because corruption is an act, not a personality trait, which is why we punish criminals for their acts, not their character flaws. And why the likelihood of the punishment is the best deterrent.
As we all know, the relatively low risk of punishment for “white collar” theft is the primary reason that so much of it takes place. You could argue that SBF was just stupid; he should have started a regular business and systematically underpaid the legal minimum to his workers – unpaid overtime, fees for training and uniforms etc. You know the drill. That is the biggest crime in the US and it never gets punished.
MattF
@Roger Moore: I’ve read Zeke Faux’s ‘Number Go Up’— it delivers a pretty accurate picture of the pre-collapse crypto world.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@H.E.Wolf: Like the Strait of Gibraltar or the Straits of Hormuz.
Roger Moore
@scav:
Watch out, though, if their music is amplified. Apparently there are a lot of “buskers” who are just pretending to play along to recorded music.
Ken
There have been a couple of cases where the math, as presented in the prospectus, was wrong. Didn’t stop the company, though, since as you point out the math is just there to distract the marks.
However, it’s likely they don’t even need to distract them. The crypto scams are pulling people in with promises of “zero-risk investment with 15% return each month”. That is an actual quote from one prospectus — they are promising something that is impossible by every principle of finance. Yet they still find suckers.
Sure Lurkalot
@montanareddog:
A thousand thank yous for pointing out the magnitude of wage theft. Funny how there are few news articles about it but lots of headlines on store closings (supposedly) due to shoplifting. Even there, a fair percentage of retailers’ shrinkage is being ripped off by their own employees.
scav
@Roger Moore: Air guitar’s gone semi-pro? Decades past Milli Vanilli. Ah well.
jonas
I think I read somewhere that Houdini had a deal with his wife or other associates that if he were to die, and spiritualism were true, they should try to contact him beyond the grave and he would give them a secret sign that only they knew about, or something. Anyway, still no sign of good ol’ Harry yet.
And speaking of his death — what a terrible accident. Some guy apparently sucker punched him in the gut, thinking he was performing a stunt, and he ended up rupturing his intestine and dying of peritonitis.
citizen dave
My favorite thing about FTX will always be the Larry David commercial–long version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH5-SR–Jt0
I think it was a Super Bowl ad, right? I remember thinking at the time that Larry was punking them and would have the last laugh–while taking their money.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
When I was talking about the math, I was thinking about how block chains work. They are actually a reasonably clever way of doing things, just not the things they’re being asked to do in cryptocurrency.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore:
Yes. I think most people who say things like “I’m too dumb to understand crypto” are actually correctly seeing that there’s no reason to regard any of this as valuable, but assume there must be something there because the techbros are so fascinated by the technical flash and say technical things they don’t understand.
All those complicated mechanics are devoted to making a decentralized record that you “own” some abstraction (and, in some cases, in ensuring that those abstractions remain relatively scarce). But why? What’s the point in owning that abstraction? There is no inherent point.
Crypto bros originally argued that this was no more arbitrary an abstraction than money (they’re right, it isn’t), and that, in fact, it would replace money (they’re wrong, it won’t). The advantage was that it was not dependent on a government and was (originally) not regulated by a government, but this mostly turned out to make it useful as a medium of exchange for people seeking to commit crimes.
For everyone else, it just turned into an extremely volatile commodity for trading that had zero intrinsic value. The only reason to buy it aside from criminal stuff would be the Greater Fool theory–pure speculation on the fluctuations in value.
MattF
@Ken: Also, crypto involves software. Lots of software. Databases, immense pointless calculations, encryption, trust— all surrounded by attackers eager to draw off a million or two that might, just accidentally, be left on the table. Or maybe not so accidentally.
montanareddog
@Roger Moore:
Serious question: given the well-known energy consumption issues of the crypto-mining farms, are there positive uses of block chain technology that don’t consume obscene amounts of electricity? Or is it just mathematically-clever but environmentally dangerous?
Frankensteinbeck
“I didn’t lie, I just built a shitty risky business” sounds to this non-lawyer like a plausible legal strategy. If only he hadn’t also lied, and handled his money in various illegal ways.
@Ken:
If you are sufficiently double jointed, taking your shoulder out of the joint is not a big deal. It’s the same as bending my fingers back to touch my hand. If you’re hyper mobile the joints don’t lock, so they go out and in with much less damage.
It has some weird side effects. You rely on locking knee joints to stand. The legs get strained quickly if they don’t lock.
Timill
@scav:
Well, usually…
Roger Moore
@montanareddog:
Wage theft is about marginal advantages. The scope of your wage theft is always going to be smaller than, usually substantially smaller than, the size of your business. It can make the difference between going bankrupt and staying in business or between being modestly profitable and very profitable, but it can’t build a business out of nothing in a hurry. If you want to be a multi-billionaire by the time you’re in your early 30s, as SBF supposedly was, you have to go for the big score.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Nukular Biskits:
Depends on when and how they acquired it imo
Matt McIrvin
Fundamentally, I think it all rested on the libertarian/goldbug fallacy: that everything is better if there isn’t a government involved. But governments regulating things is actually a feature when it comes to finance, not a bug–unless you’re a criminal. Most people want the government regulating their large financial transactions. Or they should.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
Wait, he said what!? Oh I have to know why he thinks it’s misguided
montanareddog
@Roger Moore:
That’s true but it is not really my point: it is a relentless, and never punished, crime against against the working poor. And the aggregate amounts are huge.
This vile goon is only getting his comeuppance because he went for the big score and fucked up; and because he fucked up under a Democratic AG; and he fucked while having an already high media profile. He is just another example of the quick and easy story with which media inundates us
ETA: Because of his high media profile, the media never stop talking about his trial; apart from the likes of, say, Mother Jones, the media never talk about wage theft, probably because most of these joints are practicing it themselves, certainly with all the unpaid interns who work in them.
cain
Famous Bear Dick Butkus has passed away at 80. That guy seemed to be always be around especially on ESPN.
scav
@Matt McIrvin: Everything but big government enforcing copyright, patents and the ilk. That they’re generally ok with.
Paul in KY
@PJ: Ha! I did edit it to add the ‘again’ :-)
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): If I recall correctly, he argued that big conspiracies are in fact central to the real workings of the world. A lot of them being things we might not identify as conspiracy-theory-type conspiracies, like so many of the world’s movers and shakers being in loathsome old-boy networking clubs like Bohemian Grove. He thought that aversion to the Paranoid Style meant that we downplayed the importance of such things.
But I recall him also getting kind of huffy when people dissed JFK assassination conspiracists, and occasionally having kind words about some of the ones bordering on UFOlogy (secret military aircraft with tech not following the publicly acknowledged laws of physics, etc.)
But I think that in the age of Trump it’s hard to ignore how damaging a conspiracy-centric worldview can get.
Ken
@MattF: Oh yes. Molly White’s “Web 3 is Going Just Great” blog has plenty of examples of attackers (some of them insiders) stealing funds from crypto companies. Their security often doesn’t reach that of a college sophomore’s class project to build a web server, much less what traditional financial services require
I suppose this is in part because they are, as several have said, “speed-running the history of finance”. The banks have had hundreds of years of experience with theft, and seventy years of seeing how it can be done with computers, and have been hardening procedures and programs that whole time. You can’t really expect someone who threw together a web service in a few months to match that.
C Stars
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@Nukular Biskits:
After reading the article about his parents, I think they were already a little corrupt in the effete way that some successful intellectuals are–believing mightily in their own genius (and, of course, their son’s genius) and thinking of themselves as therefore untouchable. “We’re wealthy and acclaimed liberal Stanford professors, how could we do anything wrong?” They genuinely don’t think the law (or ethical considerations) should apply to their son because they still see him as some kind of baby savant who didn’t understand what he was getting into but had great intentions the whole time. At heart, I think they are awful people who are hoping very much to pin all this on their son’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison. Ellison is herself a terrible piece of work, ethically and, well, humanly, speaking, but she at least had the good sense to plead guilty.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF:
Ahh yes, the immense pointless calculations.
No one has ever been able to explain their usefulness. I mean, the calculations going on for medical research actually have a point to them.
But using massive amounts of electricity to calculate numbers for the hell of it essentially? 🖕
C Stars
This part is just straight up bullshit. They bragged online about taking drugs. SBF apparently was prescribed Adderall for ADHD, but others in their circle regularly talked online about using stimulants off label as part of their work habits.
Brachiator
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Interesting distinction, but I think that still counts as magic or the art of illusion. Did he talk about how Houdini loved to expose spiritualists and others who claimed that magical powers were real?
This sounds like fun. Unless you have to intentionally dislocate your arm or something in order to make an escape move.
I always admired Houdini. His movie biography, starring Tony Curtis, is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.
Matt McIrvin
@mrmoshpotato: The technical issues aside, what goldbug-adjacent people believe is that gold is a good medium of exchange because it takes large and increasing amounts of work to get it–the theory is that this is a natural brake on inflation, which they mortally fear above all things.
So from their perspective, the real point of the massive useless calculations is that that’s the “proof of work” that makes crypto increasingly scarce like gold, and prevents it from being inflationary.
Now, I understand that the calculations are also involved in maintaining the distributed ownership database itself. But this is how they can sell the costliness of “mining” as a feature, not a bug.
mrmoshpotato
@cain: And the Bears actually won last night! 🤯
montanareddog
@mrmoshpotato:
That makes me nervous; we all know what happened the year the Cubs won. I think I need to buy gold.
raven
@montanareddog:
We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation
with your T-formation.
Brachiator
@montanareddog:
Also, the rewards of various forms of white collar theft are extremely high.
Also, I find it amazing that criminals, high and low, sometimes don’t seem to mind the punishment. The buzz they get from crime seems intoxicating.
jonas
@cain: I was actually watching the Bears/Commanders game last night when they announced that he had passed. Da Bearrssss!, who hadn’t won a game all season, did ol’ Dick proud and beat Washington 40-20
ETA sorry — must have been writing this just as mrmoshpotato posted!
Sure Lurkalot
The fact that wealth and wealthy people are idolized contributes to the getting away with a lot of it. Funny how there’s moral hazard galore in forgiving college debt but little in giving huge tax breaks to billionaires who are no different than any other fucking hoarder. Until we tax the ungodly accumulation of wealth and prosecute the corruption that accompanies it, we will have story after story of these immoral reprobates.
Brachiator
@scav:
There are techno libertarians who hate copyright and patents.
They believe in open source and the right to repurpose and reproduce everything connected to the arts, software and technology.
No problem with software piracy, movie piracy, song piracy.
It’s all stuff and should all be free.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
I am deeply suspicious that a lot of the reported thefts are inside jobs. Some of them are probably the company trying to hide malfeasance by claiming money was stolen, and others are the owners just running off with their customers’ money. There are probably some cases of outside thieves making off with the money, but insiders have way more knowledge and opportunity.
mrmoshpotato
@montanareddog: A fascist shitstain was elected to the highest office in the land by the undemocratic Electoral College because of a combination of racism, misogyny, and Russki disinformation?
ETA – oh, and let’s not forget the decades-long Rethuglican war against the Clintons.
montanareddog
@mrmoshpotato:
And because the Cubs won. Everything went wrong at once
ETA: to be clear, I don’t blame the Cubs. But it was clearly a bad omen, like Harold Godwinson’s comet.
Brachiator
@Sure Lurkalot:
I tend to agree with the idea of forgiving student debt, and favor free college in return for a term of public service. However, I always find it odd that there are people who believe that debt obligations that they freely enter into should magically be forgiven if it becomes burdensome.
And this is true throughout history in the West and at many income levels. Kings and Aristocrats used to run up debts with merchants and bankers and then use their titles to evade responsibility.
I’ve had many conversations with CPAs who had clients with cancelled debt related to credit cards and repossessed cars lie about insolvency because they felt entitled to get loans even if they ran into hard times.
At what level does wealth become “ungodly?” I remember the old days when the idea was that the rich should pay their fair share.
In my youth I had friends who were real communists who believed that all wealth belonged to the state, and that people’s councils should provide homes and monthly stipends to everyone. Anything you earned over this would belong to the state.
JaneE
Those “special business relationships” can hide a host of crappy or shady business dealings. I worked for a company whose majority owner insisted on special business relationships between our company and other companies he owned outright or was a major partner in. Those got more and more special until the other partners raised the money to buy him out. Our profits rose substantially as soon as the special terms orders worked their way out of the system. Of course that took almost a year, because the terms were really special.
mrmoshpotato
@montanareddog:
You a Cleveland fan? 😁
Brachiator
@Splitting Image:
I generally refused to do accounting work for churches and non-profit organizations, but would see that some churches had boards which supposedly would audit finances and determine salary and benefits that would be provided to ministers.
But I once watched a bit of a minister’s TV broadcast. He actually said stuff like “you can’t expect me to live in a small house. I deserve a big house and a private jet. And you need to give it to me if you care about me.”
A friend used to write software to be used by churches. I would tease her and call her work godware.
jonas
That’s generally considered best practice and I’m sure there are churches and religious organizations that do take their fiduciary responsibility seriously. The problem with the megachurches is that the pastor has become a huge celebrity and fundraising juggernaut, and is then able to either cow the board into granting him any perk he wants, or hand-picks lackeys he knows won’t ask any questions about his spending habits. In other words, corrupt AF.
montanareddog
@mrmoshpotato:
My iconoclastic side would love to bring the jackal wrath down upon me by saying I’m a Yankees fan but, in reality, I have no allegiance to any baseball team, or even interest in the game.
Now if you want me to pontificate on football (the real football, you know where the the ball is a ball not an egg and the players use their feet not their hands), I can bore you for hours.
LiminalOwl
I shared the Molly White article with someone who replied with this: Was Sam Bankman-Fried’s beanbag chair a lie too?
(And I just tried, and failed, to find an online version of this story that I could link to. A bit of a stretch on this topic, but a favorite since adolescence: Mack Reynolds, “Compounded Interest.”)
Subsole
@cain: I…had to reread that sentence a couple times before I figured out on which words the stresses were supposed to fall.
Hob
@Matt McIrvin: If I recall correctly, he argued that big conspiracies are in fact central to the real workings of the world. A lot of them being things we might not identify as conspiracy-theory-type conspiracies, like so many of the world’s movers and shakers being in loathsome old-boy networking clubs like Bohemian Grove
Sigh. I haven’t read his piece but if that was really the gist of his argument, what a non-point that is. I mean… granted that those things are real things, if they are in fact not what people talk about when people criticize conspiracy theories, and people on the left are clearly still capable of seeing old-boy favoritism as a problem, then why should he be annoyed that people are criticizing conspiracy theories? Is it that he literally thinks the word “conspiracy” can never have different connotations and relevance in different contexts? That’d be like saying “I think people shouldn’t call BTS a ‘boy band’, because that’ll make everyone think all bands whose members are boys play the same kind of music.” Like seriously there is no genuine confusion about this.
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that nearly all computation ever done by or on behalf of humans is of SHA256 checksums – computation of 256 bit cryptographic one-way checksums – for bitcoin purposes.
Mostly by rooms full of high speed specialized hardware running on cheap (often subsidized)( electricity. Ridiculously faster than GPUs, which are orders of magnitude faster than CPUs.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: @Hob:
I like D^2, but don’t read him regularly and missed the “conspiracy theory” stuff.
Made me look…
(Context here is Epstein’s “suicide” in jail.)
As far as it goes, I agree with what he said there. But if he was elsewhere trying to redefine a loaded term like, well, he’s asking for trouble.
And that’s before all the scientists appear and note that “theory” doesn’t mean what the politicians and popular press think it means. (A theory isn’t a hunch, or even an informed hunch. A theory is an explanation that fits with known evidence, makes predictions, and is testable to know if it’s wrong or not.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruviana
@MattF: I’m reading it now. It’s great!