This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.
For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.
Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.
All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.
First Elon Musk dominated the news cycle 2-4 weeks ago with twitter, and now this guy, but Elon still heavily in the news. Just more evidence that billionaires (or ex-billionaires) run the show. Hardly anyone cares about Biden that much, who is like the incredible shrinking president. Oh, war still going on in Ukraine /Russia too, which also has become background noise.
Last week people were speculating that somehow SBF hacked his own exchange or was fleeing with money; I didn't believe any of it. If he wanted to drain funds from the exchange, he didn't need a malicious app update. He could have just made a transfer of $100 million or so quietly from a cold wallet to a wallet in which he controlled the keys, and then if the money is ever discovered missing, which given that FTX is privately owned would be almost impossible short of a federal investigation, he could just say he was hacked or lost it. Given how big FTX was, and still is, this would likely go unnoticed. He's still on twitter, giving interviews. This is not typical of felons running from the law.
I think this whole thing was just a big mistake of risk management on his part, and possible mishandling of customer funds and lying about the dollar backing of FTX deposits. He was screwed either way: had he been forthright about FTX's actual financial health, the ensuing panic would have made a bad situation way worse. Thus, there is an incentive to lie and hope that the market will recover, which in the case of Bitcoin it didn't. This makes him unethical and he may go to jail, but I don't think he profited from this personally.
I don’t buy it. He was already a multi-billionaire, what normal incentive did he have to risk it all on high leverage plays?
There’s something else going on here. Either behind-the-scenes polyamorous status-jockeying, or a calculated high-risk high-reward play for something BIG.
He was likely never a billionaire, or at least not for long. His wealth was based on hypothetical , private Alameda/FTX holdings, which were probably illusory long before the very public collapse. FTX/Alameda was probably running out of money long before last week.
I think this is the case, because I can never understand why anyone who gets that big and that rich doesn't immediately diversify a minimum of 25% of their holdings into other assets, such as blue chip shares, real estate, commodities, bonds etc to financially protect themselves in case of company collapse. This goes for companies like Tesla, but especially for companies like FTX operating in unstable high risk sectors.
People who make reasonable decisions like that never become temporary crypto-billionares in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link