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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

(tangent) Ok this confuses me:

> (in December, their $1.8 million Palo Alto home was used to secure a $250 million bail package after Bankman-Fried was released on a personal recognizance bond.

Their Palo Alto home is worth only $1.8M? Do they live in a 1BR/0.5BA shed?

edit: Apparently the assessed value (for property taxes) is $1.8M. But realtor sites estimate it at $3.1M, and it was apparently renting for $12,000/month back in 2013. Still cheaper than I thought for a 4-br home on Stanford's Dish

https://sfstandard.com/business/inside-sam-bankman-frieds-pa...

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The house is on the Stanford campus, and is under Stanford’s control. It can only be sold to Stanford employees, so it limits the value.

I think you make a great point and I agree, but to play devils advocate for a second...

Do we think Stanford is lacking in people willing to live there? I bet it may even increase the chance (so long as the HOA is not all that bad!)

You're right, the thing limiting the value is not demand - there are more than enough faculty and high-level staff that want to live there.

The thing limiting the value is the other restrictions that Stanford imposes on these houses - namely they essentially control the price the houses sell for because they all have to be financed through a Stanford-controlled lending program.

It seems weird that they could us a property constrained like that to secure a bail.

Why not? Many houses can be constrained by a HOA, state law etc. It‘s value and market value can presumably still be determined, so I would assume it can be used.

I suppose Stanford could buy it back for the agreed to price thus providing them cash. Seems they don't need it however.

$250 million bail secured by a $1.8 million house and that's the weird part?

There’s actually nothing at all weird about that.

Only because federal courts are consistently weird about it! :-p

From an objective, outside perspective, it's definitely weird to say, "Put up $X to assure us you'll actually appear for trial. Oh, you're putting up .01X? Okay, we're cool."

Like, even accepting the validity/logic of the cash bail system, they should just be honest and call it .01X bail. The full X is never actually used for anything beyond "look at us, we're a serious court, taking this flight risk seriously".

(To pre-empt a thoroughly well-tread response from the previous threads: Yes, I know, in SBF's case, the parents are on the hook for the rest of the X, so X is, in a sense, "used". But their net worth is nowhere near X -- more like .04X -- so that just pushes the farce ratio down to .96X, which, while better than .99X, is still pretty darn close to X.)

My earlier comments about this absurdity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810830

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599868

It’s a silly game they play, but the fact that it’s common means there’s nothing weird about it happening here.

That's exactly the distinction I was making in the first two paragraphs, about "weird" relative to existing practice vs "weird" relative to the outside world's standards for reasonable behavior.

> From an objective, outside perspective, it's definitely weird to say, "Put up $X to assure us you'll actually appear for trial. Oh, you're putting up .01X? Okay, we're cool."

What is historically weird in the history of money-involved bail is the practice of having a penalty plus either full-value security or arms-length employment of a government-licensed agent as surety with a government-set fee schedule; penalty, surety, and security are three separate levers to acheive compliance.

What’s weird from a system outside of money bail world is...money bail.

The federal system of the courts having freedom to adjust the compliance levers independently to acheive what they feel is necessary sufficiently acheive compliance is weird only from the perspective of the system that has evolved away from that in state practice (and the even more divergent image of that state practice that has been advanced by popular media portrayals and misunderstandings.)

> Like, even accepting the validity/logic of the cash bail system, they should just be honest and call it .01X bail

Would you view a $100,000 non-dischargeable, non-expiring debt to the federal government when you have $100,000 in current assets as equivalent to $10 million non-dischargeable, non-expiring debt to the federal government when you have $100,000 in current assets?

I wasn't criticizing additional means to achieve compliance -- I don't know what you think you were addressing there.

>Would you view a $100,000 non-dischargeable, non-expiring debt to the federal government when you have $100,000 in current assets as equivalent to $10 million non-dischargeable, non-expiring debt to the federal government when you have $100,000 in current assets?

Would you view the $10 million as anything other than a number that attempts to sound big but will not have any meaningful impact?

I can see $100k vs $200k as being a meaningful distinction, but not $100k vs $10 million (re-read the farce-ratio part).

>What’s weird from a system outside of money bail world is...money bail.

Did you miss this part?

>>Like, even accepting the validity/logic of the cash bail system,

> Did you miss this part?

Well, I addressed:

(1) What was weird within the history of money-involved bail, and

(2) What was weird outside that context, and

(3) Why the federal system was not #1, and

(4) What context the federal system was weird in.

So…no?

Did you miss…my entire post?

I missed what it was responding to beyond “look I can show off my knowledge and my proud opposition to cash bail”.

If you want to dispute the “not weird” label, you should reply to the person originally making it. As it stands, you’re responding to something I didn’t say while implying you’re correcting something about it and getting in your virtuous anti-cash bail jabs (to say nothing of the word salad in your paragraphs 1 and 4 — try quotes or something to make it easier to parse).

The house is on Stanford land and so does can only be sold to Stanford faculty or staff. In fact, it's technically not even owned, it is leased from the university.

This changes the pool of potential buyers, and therefore the market is quite different than the normal Palo Alto market.

They live in housing that can only be purchased by Stanford professors.

Talk about being sheltered.

It's a big club but you ain't in it.

Looking right now at listings in Palo Alto, the few things in that range ($1.5M-$2M) are 2-3 bedroom, 1-3 bath, 1,200-1,900 sq. ft.

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