Thief?
He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.
He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.
Almost the majority of Wall Street refused the bailout money. Paulson almost force them. The bailout money eventually made a profit ($15B). One could argue that the return rate was low (0.6% annualized), but still, this is far different from what most people have believed till this day: i.e., US gov just gave taxpayer's money away to the banks to cover their ass.
Paulson also almost managed to save Lehman Brothers until British Gov said no to Barclay's role in the plan. (Wall Street banks would acquire LB's "good assets" while Barclay would buy their toxic ones as its gateway to become a more influential player in US market.). But even Lehman didn't reach out to Pualson to get itself saved. It's the other way around: Paulson was trying many ways to save Lehman because he knew when Lehman went down, market would panic and then even those banks in good shape would be affected.
http://www.reuters.com/article/barclays-lehman-idUSLDE62B258...
You can't trust anything in Too Big To Fail, unfortunately. Shame, it reads really well.
It depends on how you calculate it but, actual costs where over 50 billion net loss. But, it was really important for politicians to point to it as a 'success' so there is more than a little creative accounting going on.
Every official source that explains the 2008 crisis is full of lies. The big banks all engaged in massive fraud and the bailout was the cover up.
Same idea with the guys getting rich of off of patents in the pharma industry (e.g. EpiPen). Nothing these forms are doing is technically illegal.
But the reason some of these guys are gonna be crucified is the arrogance and lack of public contrition. They really need to take a page from the banking execs of 2008 who cried no-fault all the way to the bank.
> The California electric grid operator built a set of rules for generating, distributing and paying for electricity. Those rules were dumb and bad. If you read them carefully and greedily, you could get paid silly amounts of money for generating electricity, not because the electricity was worth that much but because you found a way to exploit the rules. JPMorgan read the rules carefully and greedily, and exploited the rules. It did this openly and honestly, in ways that were ridiculous but explicitly allowed by the rules. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fined it $410 million for doing this, and JPMorgan meekly paid up. What JPMorgan did was explicitly allowed by the rules, but that doesn't mean that it was allowed. Just because rules are dumb and you are smart, that doesn't always mean that you get to take advantage of them...
> The U.S. legal system has built up a pleasantly redundant system of safeguards so that investors usually get more or less what they expect. If you invest in a U.S. public company, you are in a sense signing up for a certificate of incorporation and bylaws, which are written in lawyerly language. But you also get a prospectus that explains the terms of your investment in relatively (relatively!) plain English. Also the terms of that investment -- how you vote, what duties the company owes you, what rights you have, etc. -- tend to be constrained by federal securities law, state law, stock exchange listing requirements, underwriter due diligence, public policy, custom and tradition. Even if you invest in a company whose bylaws say that the board of directors can sacrifice you to a demon on the first full moon of a leap year, it's unlikely that that term would be enforced. There is only so much leeway to depart from the standard terms.
> If you invest your Ether in a smart contract, you'd better be sure that the contract says (and does) what you think it says (and does). The contract is the thing itself, and the only thing that counts; explanations and expectations might be helpful but carry no weight. It is a world of bright lines and sharp edges; you can see why it would appeal to libertarians and techno-utopians, but it might be a bit unforgiving for a wider range of investors.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...
Code is law. The community decided/realized the "law" as written wasn't the one they wanted, so they created a fork that captured both the letter and spirit of the "law" rather than the letter of some other one they didn't want.
I don't get the holy wars over this, other than the fact that some people are obviously very motivated to pump their empty shell coin in the hopes that it beats the leading ETH one. "Code is law" and "laws are imposed upon humans against their collective will" lead to two very different things.
- Women are underrepresented — in STEM fields at large and in the cryptocurrency space in particular — relative to a fairer world with less sexism, outmoded notions of gender roles, etc.
- This underrepresentation self-perpetuates partly because well-meaning men in these fields don't realize it's happening: it always feels better to believe a happier story about the world being more fair, and such men have less data about what keeps women out than they would have in a fairer world where women were more present to tell their stories.
- Erring on the side of feminine or gender-neutral pronouns — against this backdrop of under-representation — is a lightweight way to signal basic awareness of these issues and avoid the appearance of reinforcing them or believing they should be reinforced. As such, it informs my general model about the writer's thoughtfulness/sensitivity, which has some bearing on how compelling I find their argument to be.
It also bears noting that while I can mostly shrug and move on if a writer is implying apathy (or worse) about this issue, it is a more acute and even threatening signal for some women whose careers/lives have been damaged by these playing fields' having never been level, and it is morally fraught to participate in and benefit from discussions/community/resources that are effectively/unfairly off-limits to under-represented groups.
tl;dr:
- default-masculine-pronouns are not neutral,
- we've all been tacitly made to think that they are,
- some work to counter that makes sense, and
- it's good to push conversations/awareness about them because the default perpetuates them.
Avoiding Sexism in Legal Writing—The Pronoun Problem
https://lawyerist.com/49433/avoiding-sexism-in-legal-writing...
It has some solid advice, but it also notes that the use of "he" in sex-indeterminate situations was codified by Ann Fisher, "an 18th-Century schoolteacher and the first woman to write an English grammar book." Now, every time I see "he," I think of her.