2rafa
10hr ago
It depends what you consider a slap on the wrist but unless the prosecution has built a terrible case SBF is going away for 8+ years at the extreme leniency end of the spectrum. He won’t get Ulbricht tier (because he’ll likely be less obstinate at the end, and it wasn’t the drug + hitmen hiring combo) or Madoff tier (because he was ripping off VCs, pension plans and tech schmucks rather than very well-connected elderly ladies in Palm Beach), maybe there will be some leniency due to his age, but it could easily be 15 years or more if he’s unlucky.
2rafa
10hr ago
There are surely crypto (interpersonal) betting sites, but again you’d need someone to manage escrow and judge the winner, at least.
2rafa
11hr ago
I agree that it was toxic, but they didn’t really have a choice. Metals is a very small world and if he’d been called and the banks had to try to seize $10bn in Chinese assets (majority located in mainland China and Indonesia via networks of holding companies) they knew they’d be completely screwed. The Bloomberg article said the bankers knew everyone was losing their job and never working in the business again if they fucked it up. As it is there are likely obscure provisions in some ancient administrative bylaw of the LME that mean they can win the lawsuits against the angry traders, but we’ll see. I don’t envy them, but quants also need to know when they’re playing in markets that are a lot less fair than their historical favorites.
SBF had a weird double-or-nothing gambling philosophy vaguely informed by EA stuff, sure. The weird thing seems to be that he didn't think there would be another severe crypto crash when it had happened like 5 times before in the last 10 years before FTX collapsed.
Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court. This is even worse in the crypto era, as the position taken by the SEC and friends is shameful, giving very little guidance on new forms of financial technology and telling firms years later by indictment that they were frowning on their behavior all this time.
As @Gillitrut suggests, the SEC (and US taxation regime under the IRS too, if you're talking about personal risk) is essentially the epitome of anarcho-tyranny in the modern age. It has unlimited global jurisdiction to ruin your life; anyone with any money or indeed any business can be fucked for something; the only "defense" is that you (a) help them enough to get other people (or in some other way) so that they let you off, (b) that they show mercy for some other reason (like political connections) or (c) that you have something that makes them look bad. I don't know that all quants operate in this area, the issue for them is that as the LME situation last year showed (where quants made hundreds of millions in losses after the LME reversed $7bn in trades to prevent the whole sector from imploding because pursuing the Chinese metals guy for his assets in China would have been legally impossible; JS etc are now suing), they're not the biggest fish and regulators and exchanges have very little sympathy for them.
Billionaires don't really have a lot of power in the West, or at least most of them don't. If you make it to billionaire status in any way that isn't the most boring, legitimate tech business where your sole pre-IPO investors are legitimate domestic VCs, diligently file everything, pay everything, and operate exclusively domestically in a way that satisfies everyone (and even then...), you can get got for something. The only reason Elon Musk is fine is because the government relies on him for the Ukraine War and for NASA, which means he has leverage. But that leverage isn't because he's 'rich', it's because he controls technology that the state has deemed useful.
2rafa
19hr ago
From Newsom’s perspective he doesn’t want to pick winners in the 2024 race, and Butler definitely isn’t going to win.
And his presidential bid, like any ‘moderate’ or business democrat’s, will rely on winning the heavily black southern primaries, where most black voters are black women. This prevents any issues on that front.
2rafa
1d ago
Stacey Abrams, probably. There are a few no-name state level candidates. A not-white but also not-black woman is possible (but less likely).
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, it'll be the same ticket next year unless something crazy happens. Harris will run in 2028 and lose in the primaries, possibly to Newsom or someone else. Then she'll enjoy a lucrative retirement on the speaking circuit.
2rafa
1d ago
Two white guys is very unlikely on the ticket, especially if one's replacing a black woman. Newsom's own advisors would tell him not to take that offer, especially because a 'moderate' business dem (which he is) has to win the black vote in the southern primaries, and the black vote is substantially black women in particular.
2rafa
1d ago
Newsom would be a fool to attach himself to the sinking ship of a 2028 Kamala Dem nominee bid. He'll do better in the primaries than she will.
2rafa
1d ago
Length is a requirement, not the requirement. A good top-level post has both volume AND is interesting, I'm unsure why that's so strange.
2rafa
2d ago
The thing that some users don’t understand is that the objective is neither to present the most banal, concise factual statements (these can be found everywhere) nor is it to “write” (or otherwise produce) paragraphs of needlessly flowery drivel. It’s to write in an interesting and entertaining way, like Scott, and to do so in a way that makes people want to read whatever else one has written.
This kind of trolling is embarrassing because you don’t seem to understand this. It’s not just about writing long posts, it’s about writing long posts that people want to read. Failing at the latter is as bad as failing at the former.
France is the most elitist meritocratic credentialist society in Europe though, and has been since the Napoleonic era. If you go to the right Grande Ecole, you’re set for life, otherwise you’re a pleb unless you’re either well-connected or very lucky.
In Britain, you can be poor and go to Oxbridge and still do poorly in life because you aren’t of the right class, make poor decisions or picked the wrong course. In Germany, you’re born into the bourgeois class, make it in via some pushy parenting and a few lucky programs (and, of course, the Gymnasium), or stay beyond it, no matter what you do. Perhaps those are worse, but they are different.
2rafa
3d ago
The impression that people who spend a lot of time in dissident right circles (ie our corner of twitter), regardless of their own politics, have of Africa is indeed an unsalvageable shithole, The Camp of Saints, 7.5 tfr Nigeriens trapped between the desertification of the Sahara and ISIS, millions in desperate Libyan camps trying to make it to Europe with the belief they’ll be soccer stars, millions more in the Congo being raped and butchered by gangs fighting over diamond and rare earth metals mines, an orgy of violence and - even in comparatively peaceful parts of Africa - miserable, grinding, absolute poverty. Africa, Addio in other words.
And it is true, of course, that all those things exist to some extent in Africa. But it is also true that they provide, at best, an extremely incomplete picture. Since 2016 I’ve travelled regularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, everywhere from Nigeria to Namibia, from Sierra Leone to South Africa, from Zimbabwe to the DRC to Ethiopia. And the world I see, as someone in finance, is obviously as skewed as the world a UN volunteer in a refugee camp sees.
But I have to say, the progress in the last ten years alone has been incredible. Often it’s obscured on statistics because of the collapse of EM currencies since 2014 (and more generally since 2010), and because population growth, which is slowing down, has been so high. Sometimes the stats do show this, as in e.g. Rwanda. Kinshasa is a completely different city to the one it was a decade ago. So is Addis, which has hugely developed and is now often (airport aside) quite pleasant, with a neat monorail that’s mostly clean, some good public spaces, despite the fact that they’ve been fighting a civil for for a few years now. Both cities, by the way, are cleaner than Mumbai. The growth of the middle class in many of the places I work has been extraordinary, entire suburbs with air conditioned malls and movie theaters emerging wholesale from the earth, even in countries not blessed or cursed with great natural resources. Government is (slowly) getting more competent, things are moving beyond paper into digital, where they’re more easily tracked and the petty corruption that cripples all developing countries is slightly more easily detected. The living condition of the great majority of Africans, who do not live in war zones or even in grinding poverty (perhaps a third do, which obviously isn’t great, but it isn’t the majority), is improving.
Things are being built, sometimes to great (although underreported) success, some of which I have helped to fund. New hotels and restaurants and luxury apartment buildings line the main streets of nearly every major sub-Saharan capital, along with new parks and gardens, the emergence (at last) of actual public services, including street cleaners and so on. And there is, a few countries (like South Africa) excepted, an air of infectious, absolute optimism. Last time I was in Kinshasa our clients took us out to try interesting Chinese-African fusion food, we went to a warehouse gallery that could have been in LA, we even walked around which I’d never have done 5 years ago. Small things, of course, and limited to the country’s top 5% at most (and in any case, some will say, evidence of the American monoculture spreading far and wide), but still progress in some sense. Many Africans live lives that are now comparable to the ‘global middle’, including in large parts of Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East and so on.
Even if one accepts the DR position on various evopsych concepts, it is a fallacy to suggest this means there is some “maximum level of development” to which a people or nation can aspire. Does that mean charity is warranted? I wouldn’t say so, but then I think charity is never warranted beyond one’s immediate community, where judgment about impacts is easiest. But Africa is far from a lost cause, and I’m very optimistic about its future (although, of course, I have every incentive to be).
2rafa
3d ago
The sooner the public accepts that the future of the West’s leadership is a combination of Brahmins and PoC women who have nerdy white husbands, the more comfortable we will all be.
2rafa
4d ago
The goals of AA aren’t really to close the achievement gap, they’re to create a small class of black elites who went to Harvard/Yale/Stanford and work in elite occupations in the private and public sector, as a kind of integration with (formerly) white society. The idea is that in the long term this creates a more racially harmonious society because it isn’t ‘just’ whites (and Asians) on top. I’m not defending or condemning this, just saying that this (ie a form of benevolent racial spoils system) is the implicit object of affirmative action.
2rafa
5d ago
Most people aren’t smart enough to consistently get away with criminal behavior. This includes very smart people. In addition, the psychological burden of looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life for all the enemies you’ve made, and for the law, can be taxing.
As for non-illegal unethical behavior, the lines are more blurred, but you’ll still make a lot of enemies. And all it takes is for one of them to snap, and it’s (as we’ve discussed here before, I think) very easy for a committed, vindictive person to ruin your life, provided they don’t care much about their own.
2rafa
5d ago
I don’t know anything about commercial real estate, but weren’t people below saying that declared valuations in an SFC statement aren’t really relevant to these decisions?
2rafa
5d ago
It’s almost all the same guy. He really needs to be banned although I assume they keep creating alt accounts.
2rafa
5d ago
He was never particularly involved in the Chicago political machine by local standards, mainly the (very marginally) less corrupt state government.
I agree that if the inflated valuations weren’t used to obtain any financial benefits (eg. borrow money or attract investors) then it’s not a serious issue. Still, the flipside then is ‘why lie lol?’.
But in a wider sense it mirrors most of Trump’s legal issues, ie. stuff that he really didn’t have to do and which didn’t benefit him in any way, but which he did for ego-related reasons that now allow political opponents to easily go after him.
2rafa
5d ago
This seems more egregious, though:
In 2010, Cushman & Wakefield appraised the Trump Organization's interest in 40 Wall Street at $200 million. Cushman & Wakefield appraised again in 2011 and 2012, reaching valuations of between $200 and $220 million.
Despite these appraisals, the 2011 and 2012 SFCs valued the Trump Organization's interest in the property at $524.7 million and $527.2 million, respectively, an overvaluation of more than $300 million each year.
“Hi guys! Remaking the group with this new chat because unfortunately we’ve heard something that made us take this decision for community safety + trust reasons. Next month’s meet up is __. Before reaching out to invite someone not in this chat, please let me know so I can make sure everyone’s comfortable.”
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