dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
So you guys do know all these Palestinians will end up in Europe, right?
So, nation states that want the EU to disintegrate will eagerly try to pick them up and put them on boats and send them to Europe, eh?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
But there's a reason none of those western democracies are in Israel's place, that reason has a lot to do with Israel's actions as a nation, and those actions do change what is reasonable for them to do, and who we should side with.
I can appreciate that the US is not Israel, but why aren't the actions of the Palestinians in the territories also a factor? If they had followed Gandhi (as mentioned elsewhere) they would have probably been a lot more successful and not suffered so much. And the physical and cultural destruction we carried out on Japan in WW2 which was surely far more outrageous was apparently very productive.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
No, I meant if terrorists abroad are going to consider me, someone that was a teenager on 9/11, morally culpable for what the US government does and a valid target, that makes me much more war hawkish in general.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Perhaps this is obvious, but that view actually makes me much less sympathetic to any grievances someone may have against the US.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
The current border contention made it feel like an appropriate analogy.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
If there are backdoors in Apple and Android phones, wouldn't they be ordered by the government and not be shared outside of intelligence agencies?
NSO, OTOH, appears to have developed remote hacking tech and is selling it far and wide, by contrast.
I see NSO as more of a play so that police departments and other minor state security services can try to phone hack too.
This is all assuming NSO isn't a cute little Mossad front, of course.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Sorry, are you saying you set up iptables rules on your android phone to lock it down in case of malware/spyware/hacking?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
In general I’m no big believer in democracy. I think the solution, if the Israelis were to commit to the extreme casualties required, would be large scale indoctrination, a combination of extreme and Full Xinjiang (VoA propaganda edition).
I believe this would also be considered genocide.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
On the other hand, Native American peoples (including, say, Mexicans?) have an ancestral claim to North America that goes back many thousands of years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands while USians barely have any by contrast.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
I'm trying to imagine how we'd behave if every Mexican was actually really angry about white settlement of the Americas. Lets say hostilities between Mexicans and the rest of the US never subsided, and Texas and California were disputed states with constant violent flare-ups. Life in Texas and California dragged behind quality of life in the rest of the US and Mexicans living in those territories were pretty miserable and Mexican terrorism and US heavy-handed response was a fact of life.
Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough. To put the numbers in Israel proportions, this would be up to 160 million Mexicans in the global diaspora potentially settling the entire US.
Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of how Texas and California were litigated, I don't see the US capitulating to terms like that. If Mexicans were engaging in cross-border terrorism against civilian targets I can see the chances going from vanishingly improbable to fucking never.
This seems to be the position Israel is in.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Any objective look at numbers tells us the story that jews in Israel have been massively overrepresenting the threat they face compared to any other integration issue facing the west.
Hamas's pathetic kd ratio isn't for lack of trying though, whereas I don't believe the dominant position in Israel is to kill as many Palestinians as possible. If Hamas got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would absolutely use it on Israel. That's the threat model.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?
Is this whole line of moral questioning useful? I consider it a given that the civilness is based on security, safety, abundance, lawfulness, peace and so on. Teasing out religious and cultural differences is a little interesting, though I think misses the point. It's fairly universal that stripping away these civilization cornernstones make people more savage.
The more interesting question is, is it ever possible for a 21st century civilization to collide with a 14th century one and for the 14th century one to be warmly embraced and adapted? And I say 14th century because I consider the currently problematic Islamic cultures of the world to be basically the Spanish inquisition with the sign flipped from Christian to Islam.
For a more extreme example, my mind immediately goes to European settlers meeting the already-here indigenous peoples of America. Despite the billions of words written about how harmoniously they must have existed in connection with the Earth and one another, I'm sure they were probably even more insane to deal with than the currently situated Hamas.
(Of course the native Americans didn't have adversaries of the European settlers hooking them up with modern assault weapons)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
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.
Can you elaborate on this? I know a bunch of people who work in quant finance and while it seems completely socially useless it also seems perfectly legally legitimate
Every trader makes mistakes: around trading on what turned out to be material non-public information, or discussing business on non-recorded channels, or their company learns they've been failing to record chats (or emails) for months without noticing before, or due to a glitch they accidentally sold a ton of shit short they didn't have the right to short, etc.
All of these things are technically illegal but if you immediately reach out to the SEC (or whomever) and fess up they'll probably just slap you on the wrist. But it's completely at their discretion and they might bring serious charges. Or threaten licenses. Or jail. It very much depends on your relationship with the regulator. Woe is you if the SEC discovers these problems before you've noticed yourself and fessed up.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
In pretty much every jurisdiction in the world there are rules on what you need to do to drive a car for hire and Uber frequently did not require drivers to follow every jurisdiction's rules to start driving. These jurisdictions had the option to shut Uber down for this but they either couldn't get their shit together, they looked the other way, or they did and it became a constant political issue they had to balance against how mad local taxi companies were.
In my town Uber was warned to stop or comply, they ignored the warning, the town fined them, and then Uber disappeared from town. Then the town council got shit for it for years before they changed taxi laws. Uber did some form of this everywhere. As much as I appreciate Uber and love the future we live in, this is a blatantly criminally minded business plan!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Yeah, 10+ years of work and you still can't do anything useful with crypto. What were we all even doing.
I mostly agree with you. Though, I contend during the peak of cryptomania, banking these bluffs as assets sounded "reasonable". Unless you mean something by bluffs that I'm not understanding. Bitcoin grew from $11,000 to $67,000 in a couple of months, there were 10000% APY DeFi yield farming plays, and SBF was on a podcast with Matt Levine describing innovative new ponzi schemes magic box technology and instead of derailing the train it blew people's minds even harder.
The party is now well over, everyone is hungover and people are regretting their life choices.
SBF was obviously high on his supply. Or he's an extremely manipulative criminal mastermind. But this seems more easily explained by untethered (ha!) speculative mania to me?
I would bet you a fairly large amount of money SBF will get at least ten years in prison but we're anon, unfortunately. We'll have to settle for fake internet points (which, in the spirit of FTX, I will add to my personal balance sheet as a $10,000 asset).
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Well, it's fraud if you do that on purpose. It's a mistake if you have an accounting accident. And, as per Matt Levine, I agree your accounting accident is not sympathetic if you were also spending lavishly on yourselves. Where did FTX fall here? I'm slightly inclined to believe in the accounting accident story, but only because I've made multi-million dollar accounting mistakes before, which we thankfully discovered immediately. More than once. And I wasn't in a "move fast and break things" grow to the moon kind of place that FTX was.
I realize SBF arguing "accounting accident!" doesn't sit well with people amongst all of his other horrendous behavior. Poor slob.
The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried begins tomorrow.
As a person that has worked in crypto quant trading[1], I have the tiniest slice of sympathy for him. He still seems like an unsympathetic freak overall, and has done some stuff that seems pretty unethical, and some of his actions are definitely criminal. He has given EA a bad name as well.
There are certainly a lot of process crimes he's guilty of. The fact that the US has pulled his international operations into US jurisdiction means he's in for a universe of pain and if they can't fight that he's going to jail for infinity years. I consider this legal theory a bit dubious but the US has taken the position that it can prosecute crimes that happen in the rest of the world if they even marginally involve US citizens[2]. Is everyone in the world really supposed to follow US laws? That strikes me as a bad precedent; on the other hand, I also do appreciate it sometimes that the US is an international law enforcer of last resort.
That's not really where my sympathy lies though. He knows he was playing a dangerous game. 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.
Many tradfi firms prostrate themselves before the SEC in the hopes of maintaining a good relationship. Even still, reputable firms who were attempting to operate outside of US jurisdiction have been caught with their pants down in the crypto era e.g. Trading Firm A, B and C in the recent Binance indictment: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-27/the-cftc-comes-for-binance (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/aMi5Q )
It's still not clear to me that SBF and FTX spent user funds as a matter of course, or if it effectively became spending user funds because so much of their other assets imploded. Though, again, that's not necessarily a crime if you operate outside of US jurisdiction, which is what their international arm believed it was doing. But, that's also sort of secondary.
The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".
FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.
One thing that's common to these frauds is that people always seem to have a moment of reckoning where they know they're fucked and they can either pack up and go home and face the consequences, or they double down and hope it'll all work out. Indeed, there are some legendary stories from doubling down: FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.
Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business. Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned. And in this case the burning is fantastic public spectacle.
- To be clear I think crypto is not that world changing and its only redeeming quality for the foreseeable future is of the flavor "casinos are fun to build and play in".
- Arthur Hayes of Bitmex was busted for something similar, though he was "wink wink" keeping US citizens off of his exchange whereas FTX International was pretty serious https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1323316/download
EDIT: Matt Levine's newsletter today is about SBF's trial, which hit my inbox right after I submitted this comment. Amazing, as usual. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-02/sbf-s-defense-will-be-tough
EDIT2: As replies have pointed out, I am probably technically wrong for calling what Uber did fraud. Sorry to distract. I should've made my case that Uber was more like a plan to openly disregard and defy taxi regulations across many jurisdictions with the excuse that this isn't a taxi it's a "carpooling app" tee hee. I think this is an insane business plan and it depended on them delivering an amazingly useful app. And if they hadn't succeeded (by delivering an amazingly useful app) they would've all been busted for something rising to the level of organized crime.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Ah. Well. That's rough. I got nothing. I'm sure a committee will think really really hard and figure this out.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Why isn't the solution to this to say "women and women identifying attendees only" and trust that 99% of cis men / man identifying would be too embarrassed to pretend to be trans to crash the party?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
NFTs were supposed to have a mechanism where you could verify ownership, track transfers, and maybe even compensate the original producer every time a work changed hands. Lots of drawing board schemes appeared on how you could pivot this platform into a fair system for paying creatives, and creatives would produce like never before, in some kind of decentralized way through common consensus.
Everyone got so excited about it that they took a leap of faith on the NFT part and... kinda forgot to actually build the rest of that stuff? The default way to even trade these things ended up being a central exchange (Opensea). Pretty far from the ideal.
Tulipmania ensued and then a crash happened.
What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
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