dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
Does that number include unrealized gains? Crypto exchanges also provide broker-style services, unlike traditional exchanges. Bitcoin grew from $4,800 in 2020 to $69,000 each by 2021. Lots of cryptocurrencies grew on that scale. The brokerage parts of FTX were almost certainly exposed to this upside.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.
You're assuming there was a bank account called CLIENT FUNDS and another account called EXCHANGE FUNDS and they decided to raid the CLIENT FUNDS one to make bets.
What if there was actually just a gigantic intermingled account and the separation between client funds and exchange funds were records in an accounting system that, when they snapped it to reality, they realized the funds they had left were smaller than what they were liable for in client redemptions?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
Damning with faint praise. They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose. They won a stupid prize from a stupid game.
This is the part that's sympathetic pitiful to me. Starting a business and failing at it badly enough that you lose customer money is just sad.
It's stupid, but not criminal. Unless you think criminally stupid is a thing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
I hate to be dumping on EA like this and I've always thought the quokka meme was unkind and annoying, but it really does come down to 'everyone trusted Sam' and they did that because they were all EA and so of course they were all pure, high-minded individuals in this to do good for the world, right? Sam is one of us so we don't need red tape and regulations, his word is good enough, and he knows about iterated prisoner's dilemma, so he's gonna do right by us all:
This but I'll raise you. Even if the reputation was well deserved and SBF didn't have a malicious bone in his body, it's still a bad idea to trust any one person so much. It wasn't just the EA community. VCs and other investors trusted him too. Nobody demanded a board seat? Nobody wanted independently audited financial statements? Everyone was smitten.
This is bad. Even if you're a genius and even if you're a saint, you cannot be perfect all of the time. You can still make catastrophic mistakes. Being challenged, having a process where you need to justify your request, out loud, to another human, is healthy. At the very least it's a sanity check.
Any company that scales past a certain size quickly learns that one person shouldn't have the admin password for every single system in the company -- even if they're qualified to do all of the things. Part of the reason is security, but it's also because by being the admin it's possible there's nothing in place to ever force them to go through the gatekeepers that the company has stood up for good reasons. They might not even know there are gatekeepers now!
Absolute trust is bad. I expect if Elon ever flames out spectacularly for technological reasons it'll be over something similar.
I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.
I think it's hard for people, including technologists who haven't worked as quants, to appreciate the level of technology risk that's present in quant trading. In most of tech your biggest risk is having all of your data destroyed, and you can address that with well worn improvements in backups. You also risk being hacked but those breaches tend to be embarrassing rather than company ending. Even Sony, which was pwned as hard as you could possibly be pwned, ultimately recovered. But an additional risk in quant trading is accidentally and irrecoverably giving all of your assets away in a few seconds.
Even companies that are following all of the rules and have the right number of members of the professional management class in their ranks can destroy themselves in a matter of minutes. Knight Capital Group destroyed itself in 30 minutes by (with some creative license) failing to follow heroic practices around retiring old flags in protobufs.
Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.
When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.
When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds. If those assets are suddenly marked down 90% you look like a fraud and you're in deep shit.
That's the nature of the business and he knew the risks. But probably in hindsight I'm sure he wishes he had been even more careful.
This isn't to say that I believe he definitely didn't commit fraud. Rather this is me saying that as someone who has pushed code that I thought accidentally gave away $10 million of my employer's money (the gigantic exhale of relief came when we learned I failed to scale by 1000x in the reporting and not the ordering), I am defaulting to blaming it on stupidity before malice.
Note the "Vox interview" was published by Kelsey Piper, who is another figure in the EA community. It's possible he thought he was confiding in a friend, whereas she thought the public's right to know what he said was more important than his friendship.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent.
While we're confessing to pro-forma parental activities... my kid's difficult-to-get-into, otherwise lovely preschool had a parents workshop over the weekend recently about talking to your kids about racism. I felt obligated to go so that they wouldn't think I was some kind of person who merely believes in color blindness. I made sure to bring up a traumatic bigotry-related thing from my childhood that had to do with honor violence, with a vow to not let my kid grow up in a world like that. I even almost shed a tear.
I think I'm safe, for a little while.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
There has never been a safer human being than a Western person currently alive.
Agreed, to be clear, I'm not discounting the Pinker Better Angels / Enlightenment Now dialog about this being the safest time to be alive in history. Indeed, we should be happy about the progress! At the same time, that doesn't mean you can just pretend crime doesn't exist. The fact that crime is lower since the 1990s doesn't mean it's orders of magnitude lower. You probably need to be just as vigilant as your parents were.
Guns
This election we saw measure 114 in Oregon, which would require permitting for guns, which includes receiving consent from the local police department and mandatory firearms training. The measure passed by about 9000 votes.
I find this pretty outrageous; there has been both an uptick in crime in Oregon and also a reduction in police morale so there's this perfect storm of random deranged break-ins and confrontations and police who take 20+ minutes to respond.
I know movie plot threats / just so stories aren't a good way to do law, but I'm immediately reminded of this story: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022-06-29/eugene-woman-attacked-with-acid-for-third-time-since-march
She appears to be a non-white woman going to university here in Oregon that is being targeted with some kind of honor violence (acid attacks seem honor violencey), though she doesn't know the perpetrator, she just describes him as white. The first two attacks were reported to the police who (my reading between the lines), did not take her seriously. She came to Reddit to ask for advice; by the time she was attacked the third time the intruder tried to set her on fire in her home. She had a gun by this point, and went for it, and the intruder fled before she could fire at him.
I'm trying to imagine in an alternate timeline telling her, after her second attack, that no she can't have a gun yet. She needs to be a good girl and ask the police (the same police who thought she was making this story up, mind you!) for permission to have a gun, and then go through firearms training. Then she can have one. Hopefully the psychopath who is targeting you doesn't murder you in the meantime! It's for safety!
I don't own a gun myself and I don't fetishize them, but I do think they're an important tool for protecting yourself in a dangerous society and my heart breaks that we would be so condescending to tell decent people, who are in the midst of personal security crises like this, that they're not trusted enough to get the tools they need to defend themselves immediately.
Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them. It's even more tempting to believe this because nowadays worrying about crime is racist coded. I don't blame people for believing it. Yet finally, something happens that shatters the illusion: you're the victim of violence or are being credibly threatened and ... in this worst moment we add insult to injury and infantilize the victims further.
Trump repeatedly telegraphed that he would not accept the election outcome if he lost. There was a distinct sense that we'd all become very familiar with the post-election process because there's no way he'd ever concede.
I mostly considered him too incompetent/lazy to stage a proper coup, not that he would be against one on principled grounds of respect for democracy or whatever.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
Musk tried to back out, allegedly because of new information about bots. Of course, his own financial valuation and/or mental state may have changed, too. This was very upsetting to anyone who lost money when his public statements pushed the price around. It was also offensive to the state of Delaware, which let Twitter take Musk to court.
He was going to pay for Twitter by selling/borrowing against Tesla stock. After he made the offer there was a market downturn. Both Twitter and Tesla stock were trading lower, however, the price he would pay for Twitter was locked in beforehand at a higher price. So, to complete the deal, he would both have to overpay for Twitter and sell a greater share of his Tesla stake to complete the deal: a double whammy to his personal balance sheet.
At the minimum he alleged the bs about bots and go to court to try to renegotiate the deal, but the judge seemed pretty unsympathetic so he decided to skip the risks of being deposed and ruled against and closed after all.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
IMO it's hasn't yet risen above "placebo effect".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_mononucleotide
Note how few human studies there are compared to the claims.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
If it were possible to create a completely new, convincing, and cohesive identity by way of adding it to cart and clicking checkout for a very affordable price, I imagine this would delete 95% of the controversy around transgenderism.
People don't care that the woman in front of them used to be a man so much as care that the man in front of them who has squeezed into a dress and is wearing a wig demands to be treated as a woman. Asking people to deny what they sense is the outrage. Asking us socialize the cost of $100k in surgery so an old man can look like an old man with scars in a dress is the outrage.
I'm not saying any of this is good necessarily just that I don't expect miracles on this kind of trans acceptance front. Indeed, the best thing for trans acceptance would be orders of magnitude improvement in body/behavior modification treatments.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
He correctly figured if he did it at the start of his term, people would be focused on other concerns come the 2024 campaign, if not midterms.
His polling after that took a huge hit and never recovered. It shattered the feeling that he was competent. In hindsight he would've been better kicking it down the road to December 2022.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
It still boggles my mind that you can find YouTube videos on how to rice out your vim editor's status line that have 30,000 views.
The internet is so big that your weirdest subculture will still have hundreds of thousands of people who are into it who can find each other.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
We should live in a world where blue-checks who claim Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15 and killed three black people
Bad, but not the same thing?
Wasn't this Rittenhouse claim debatable enough that it had to be factually settled in a court, though? The state prosecutor argued exactly the same thing as the blue checks.
OTOH, as far as I'm aware, the claims Jones made were clearly batshit crazy and would be thrown out instantly by a judge if he ever tried to introduce them in court.
But it only has higher risks because hot culture war listeners are excitable and the insane drivel he was spewing caused them to hurt people. That doesn't strike me as kangaroo court BS, but rather rule of law trying to enforce a modicum of reasonable behavior. Stated differently, if you want to try to wield that kind of power you need to be more responsible.
He was slandering these completely innocent private citizens at a minimum.
What's on the other side of this argument? We should live in a world where people can blast completely wrong and malicious information about you on a top 50 podcast and the law is powerless to stop them? You don't think that the punishment for that sort of behavior should be "example making"?
With apologies for sounding like a sneering monocle guy: my self-improvement/growth mindset is also a form of pleasure seeking. I consider mine more enlightened (mature), I suppose. Sophisticated pleasure-seeking, rather than base.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
I'm generally astonished when I hang out with people who don't appear to be trying to improve themselves. Not continuously learning, not growing, not getting fit, not working on solving these big gigantic problems grinding away at their lives.
How do these people get up in the morning? I feel like a basic transition from childhood to adulthood is learning that base pleasure seeking is a fleeting distraction at best and that the purpose of life is to grow in as many dimensions as possible. Is this considered some kind of elite worldview. Maybe it is, but what do others replace it with? How do they wake up in the morning? Are they... happy? Are you one of the "they" I'm talking about? How do you see the world?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
Russia's behavior was norm violating and did result in some sanctions (causing Russia to retaliate in various ways, including US election interference) but my read is that Crimea was mostly not in favor of the Ukrainian revolution. It's one thing to annex a place that hates you and is keeping you by force. Another entirely if the people welcome you.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
My hair was thinning badly in my 20s so I just started shaving bald. Otherwise I lift and run and follow a diet and select form fitting clothes.
Not that worried about not having hair. A lot of Hollywood actors pull it off just fine.
I do feel that most of the men I know personally have let themselves go, though. Not sure what to make of that. I wouldn't say I'm doing the bare minimum but I do find the general succumbing to decrepitude and laziness mildly alarming.
Would a different defendant have been treated differently? It's true if he was the host of Planet Money and he had an otherwise normal podcast but once in awhile he shared a deranged conspiracy theory about parents of victims of kids who died in school shootings, the damages might be lessened. But probably only because because people who show up for light hearted economics chat aren't hankering to fight a culture war and act on the defamatory information.
Running a hot culture war podcast has higher risks.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2yr ago
Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them.
I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?
Still very broad, but I assume excludes crystal therapy even if there was evidence of its efficacy.
Well, suppose we were talking about Pfizer instead of FTX.
Do you doubt that the CEO of Pfizer has said this aloud (and worse) about the FDA in closed door meetings with a handful of trusted people and definitely not in writing? Pfizer absolutely depends on being in the FDA's good graces to survive and they almost assuredly suck them off all day long and will never say a bad word about them in public.
Is this evidence of malfeasance from Pfizer? Or are they just playing this game and they and everyone know it's bullshit?
Or do you mean that as an EA courting nerd savant he's supposed to be above all of that and the fact that he sank to at least the level of normal CEO (in this limited regard) shatters the image and makes him somehow worse?
At least according to his public statements he does not deny that he's not completely responsible for it. The question, IMO, is whether or not failing spectacularly at business is a crime you go to jail for.
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