Judge sends Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over witness tampering | Hacker News Reader

Judge sends Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over witness tampering

cnbc.com

597 pointscoloneltcb607 comments

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

"What is clear -- regardless of whether the defendant was the first source for stories regarding Ellison -- is that the defendant, rather than deny his guilt as he correctly now says it is his right to do, shared materials with the press obviously designed to intimidate, harass, and embarrass someone he knows is slated to testify against him, and to provoke an emotional response in potential jurors and color a potential jurors view of that witness."

"In support of its argument, the defense purports to attach an expert affidavit . . . discussing the constitutional considerations implicated by detaining Mr. Bankman-Fried on the current record. (Dkt. 185 at 2). The so-called expert affidavit is, in substance, an amicus brief filed without a request for leave to do so, written by a professor who is affiliated with the law firm representing the defendants father in connection with the Governments investigation."

That's Larry Tribe, once considered an authority on First Amendment issues.

"For example, in an attempt to cast the defendants conduct as protected expression rather than an effort to subvert the integrity of the judicial process, the declarant writes: Mr. Bankman-Fried has a constitutional right -- when sought out by reporters for his perspective on stories they are writing -- to avoid projecting a false image of someone who is media-shy or, worse, someone whose consciousness of guilt makes him shun the media rather than being forthcoming. (Dkt. 185-1 at 8)"

SBF as "media shy". Indeed.

Can I ask how you come across these links to such original court document material? I am always wanting to find the source of news reporting of such things, but reporters seemingly can never just quote the original document that contains so much more information than their interpreted regurgitation of it. It's like they don't want us to read the authoritative original.

Agree. If interested in source material used by journalists, perhaps check out this experiment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36823736

(Idea was what if one starts with the source material, then reads the article.)

https://free.law <--- I have certainly seen worse legal websites than this one

"It's like they don't want us to read the authoritative original."

Job security.

> Job security

More like "tactic to reduce the chance of getting exposed for our dishonest spin."

I am a journalist and you both are utterly misinterpreting what journalists do and why, which is unsurprising considering you know NOTHING about the actual job of being a journalist.

The fact that you specifically want to access and read the original source — which, as you just demonstrated, is public and somewhat easy to get - is certainly commendable. Yet, the vast majority of people need the news, which is indeed a summarization of very complex documents.

Like in any other profession, journalists are better or worse at doing exactly that. You can question that this article does a good or bad job at it, but always assuming malfeasance is a dangerous populist view that doesn’t help anyone, it only reinforces your own flavor of high-level dunning-krueger effect.

The reason why a journalist can be bad at doing this summarization in pieces like this is because they are human. Objectivity in reporting has been always a tremendous misconception of pure-breed American journalism. Journalists have preferences, biases, networks and more, like everyone else. They are not judges, and don’t have the law to stand by, but rather an ethical unwritten (or written, in case of a large publication that employs them) code of conduct. Surprise: they often disregard it.

That said, the business of news is indeed a business (and that’s a major issue, in my opinion) with all that comes with it. Nonetheless, journalists are not “out to get you and manipulate your mind”. That is a dangerous interpretation by people who know nothing about journalism and feel reinforced by the musings of rich actually manipulative idiot savants like Elon Musk.

I think a much more parsimonious explanation is that news websites make money from their audience. It doesn't help to send your audience to other sources - you'll lose money.

Your explanation doesn't really make a lot of sense. If some people just need things summarized for them by a journalist - those people could read the article. People who want to read the source themselves could follow the link. Linking to original sources from an article neatly solves the problems for both types of audience.

Of course, it brings back the problem I mentioned first - that linking to original sources would be sending some portion of your audience and paycheck away.

I also think your explanation would be likelier to ring true if your colleagues weren't tirelessly running down the reputation of your profession. My personal experience reading the news is not at all that journalists are usually trying to fairly or accurately summarize information - very much the contrary.

I suspect the comment was trying to say that journalism is opinions about facts. And the facts are less important than the opinions. And this is fine.

Good journalism is traditionally about holding power to account. Not seeing so much of that at the moment, except out in the mostly-unread fringes.

As for SBF - someone else was downvoted for suggesting this is really about the parents.

In my uninformed opinion, from the outside this looks like it may well about a very wealthy very narcissistic family which has persuaded itself it's above the law.

SBF appears to have absolutely no concept of moral behaviour or legal consequences - remarkable in itself. But there are wider questions about how his parents may have contributed to his beliefs and actions.

However this plays out legally, there's going to be a lot of interest in the psychology.

I unfortunately have to agree with your last paragraph. Plenty of my colleagues are absolutely doing an abysmal job, and many others follow a deeply self-righteous agenda. They are the vocal minority, and not the majority, and that’s really hard to bring across. My original annoyance with the tone of the comments I replied to is the deeply populistic undertone and the idea that a giant MainStreamMedia connection is trying to influence minds and steer public discourse. Could be that’s it also a personal trigger. I am NOT happy with where the journalistic profession is at right now, but I also don’t think we should just throw away the baby with the bathwater.

When it comes to sources, I believe it’s just an editorial choice by the publishing companies that’s more of a custom coming from the days of paper journalism than anything else. Journalists on average have absolutely no control over the links they can put in a piece. So the issue was just addresses to the wrong people. The reason why that is, is that the OP clearly doesn’t know much of how the journalistic profession works from the inside as it is today. That was my claim. I am sick and tired of people that express their “here’s how you should do journalism” as if they had any idea how a newsroom actually works. They do not know the profession, they do not understand the complexities behind the publication of an article, and yet they feel that based on that “frontend” they should express their unifying theory of journalism.

Yes, providing sources should be part of the standard plain and simple. The complaints r 100% valid. Ifs the year 2023 and why can't we just have the source? It's not the readers'fault that they want them

> I think a much more parsimonious explanation is that news websites make money from their audience. It doesn't help to send your audience to other sources - you'll lose money.

This cannot be the explanation, because journalists working for publicly funded organizations that don't get their money from eyeballs on ads suck at linking to their sources too. It's not a regrettable consequence of news industry business models, it's a culture problem in journalism.

That jab is at editors, not journalists. Journalists (as individuals) can make mistakes, but if you see three or four different papers or media channels propagating the same type of "news", you can bet the error is intentional.

Moving the goalposts isn't going to make things any better. Maybe just apologize?

What goalposts? Have you seen the media treatment given to SBF? Saying "News channels are more interested in shaping public opinion than objective reporting and transparency about their sources" shouldn't even be a controversial statement.

The main issue I have woth journalism in the digital, and social media age, is the sometimes utter misrepresentation of primary source material. One recent example was the article about UPS driver salaries, which based the headline on the UPS CEOs statememts. The reasons why stuff like this comes of as manipulative or agenda-pushing is:

- it ignores that the salary agreememt was signed by UPS as well, hence it was acceptable from a business point of view

- people tend to only read the headlines, and this headline created the impression of over paid UPS drivers and played of peoples jealousy

- the journalist did not reference the publicly available salary agreement, nor did the salary maths themselve or compare the results to industry salaries

Throw in that journalists simply cannot have the necessary domain knowledge to properly understand all the subjects they cover, the pressure to generate content, clicks and hence revenue, well, that means publishing content, and headlines, that have the potential to generate outrage / engagement is a very common thing. And that is, at the very least, borderline manipulative, even without any biases or agendas said newspapers or journalists have to begin with.

And that is even ignoring all the outright lying journalists (there were two prominent examples in Germany recently, one made up whole stories and interviews while the other pretended to be jewish to write a jewish opinion collumn). Or the pitfall of constantly two-siding issues. Or the fact that lying with numbers is just extremely easy. Or the clearly manipulative approach of publications like the the New York Post, The Sun or Bild.

I think addressing people's expression of skepticism of the average motives of journalists by simply making the unqualified claim that the people expressing skepticism "know nothing" made the opposite point than you intended.

This is an article posted to Hacker News where a defendant was incarcerated by a judge for media manipulation, and journalists who were involved made statements to the judge in support of the defendant. Since the defendant was incarcerated, that makes the journalists involved closer to malfeasant than not, but the entirety of your claim is that there is never malfeasance involved in journalism and the skepticism of the people you're reprimanding is simply "populism." Frankly, that comes off as a bit malfeasant, in the reflexively defensive sense.

Would you like to claim I "know nothing" about the profession of journalism as well? How would you know that I know nothing about the profession of journalism?

> I think addressing people's expression of skepticism of the average motives of journalists by simply making the unqualified claim that the people expressing skepticism "know nothing" made the opposite point than you intended.

I don't see that as the case at all.

> How would you know that I know nothing about the profession of journalism?

A person's words are excellent evidence of what they do and don't know.

You are probably correct that few journalists seek to mislead, but you skim over the real problem by saying it's "certainly commendable" to want to read primary sources...and then just drop the subject. Why is it so damn hard to read the publicly available source material behind an article, if it's so commendable to do so?

You argued for five paragraphs that it's not nefarious, but never gave your own answer; yes, some journalists are bad at summarising, but that doesn't tell us why none of them provide sources, or are expected to.

I'd guess the answer is some combination of deadlines and editors and market demand and it just not being critical to summarising the news, but it's a bit milquetoast to complain about other explanations without giving one yourself.

>Nonetheless, journalists are not “out to get you and manipulate your mind”.

...No stuff That's the Editor's job.

> you both are utterly misinterpreting what journalists do

yet, journalists almost never link their source material.

> * The reason why a journalist can be bad at doing this summarization in pieces like this is because they are human.*

The source is most likely to be digitized and in front of you. How on earth does one manage to not link it, yet has the time to write multiple paragraphs based on it?

Lots of provocative blather that ignores something obvious - you can write your distilled opinion and add a source.

For someone who, by reflection of your argument, knows so much about journalism, it is laughable that citing sources is somehow not a core tenet of your work.

>>*vast majority of people need the news, which is indeed a summarization of very complex documents.*

THe problem is that the summations are typically done with the journalists assuming that people are far dumber than they actually are - and thus, youre not summarizing "complex issues in a meaningfully understandable way" as much as creating a watered down, lacking of key details, click-bait form of communicating the topic at hand, and insidiously NOT doing journalism - as you fail to ask actual critical hard questions, and NEVER hold any person in authority accountable for their lies, or worse promises to do something they fail to do.

You're a plastic facade of journalism for the majority of topics - and youre beholden to billionaire media bosses, such as murdoch and big corporate interests (when NEWS is "brought to you by pfizer" (CNN) you're instantly untrustable...

Then, there are crazy examples of how you all just simply read a fn script "its extremely dangerous for our democracy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78w

Yeah - I dont trust a single word from MSM

Unfortunately, the HN crowd has an incredibly naive view of what journalism is. I think it's mainly a product of ignorance, typically conflating op-eds with the journalism, and false-equivalencies that lump the Washington Post into the same bucket as Fox News, and People's Daily.

I'm always surprised the degree to which this kind of anti-journalism rhetoric ignores the role of journalism holding powerful governments and corporations accountable.

Whatever good journalists do in holding governments and corporations accountable does not absolve them of their responsibility to link to their sources.

> Yet, the vast majority of people need the news

Yet, this is not an "either/or" situation. You can generalize and cite a source. However, for some reason you choose to ignore this simple fact. Instead, you're essentially saying "kids these days don't understand what journalism is; summarizing sells, but we do it poorly because we're human, so get over it". Absolutely useless.

Actually, people here on hn can summarize better 4 times out of 5, and that's the reason I've mostly stopped following links and read comments instead - there are too many lies in journalism, even if unintentional (and I believe it mostly isn’t).

Chat gpt please write a news article based upon this record. We actually created incentives to hide information..

>and to provoke an emotional response in potential jurors and color a potential jurors view of that witness

So just like every mass media and social media influencer would do about the same defendant?

Or do those follow the "innocent until proven guilty"?

So amusing watching Trump supporters desperately try to rationalize and excuse criminal behavior and witness tampering.

I've been watching with curiosity to see if Donald goes over the line there and ends up with similar issues to Sam.

Sorry, do I know you? Did I mention Trump in the discussion? Can you be any more rude?

The point here is that the part of appearing in the media to "provoke an emotional response" they accuse SBF of, is part and parcel with what the media do already to in any major case, and what the defending AND the prosecuting teams do in the "court of public opinion". Regardless of Trump or whoever you might have in mind, which the world doesn't resolve around.

>...once considered...

What happened to make people reconsider that notion?

I'm fascinated by how so many comments here seem to assume that Bankman-Fried is playing some long strategy, when the simplest answer is that he's mentally ill and can't stop himself from engaging in compulsive behaviors, even when he's been appraised of the consequences, repeatedly.

Elon Musk vibes. For example when he was shilling dogecoin, or bragging about not caring at all about the $420 SEC settlement. It's oddly fun to watch such exceptional narcissists, both when they rise and when they fall. They're so invested in their image.

Elon has been important in at least 3 major companies that have real products that are delivering real value today.

I can't speak to his mental health, but SBF is simply not comparable.

I've loathed Elon since the Thai cave fiasco but I think this is entirely fair.

It was a judgement of personality traits/disorder. Not of commerical success.

SBF, Musk or Trump behave like privileged children that believe rules/law do not apply to them. They want everyone to know and admire them for their awesomeness, in fact it's their awesomeness that buys them an infinite number of get-out-of-jail cards.

Yes, Musk is the most useful out of all of them, by a mile. Still, the personality type/disorder is the same.

Important in being a source of money. The rest? Not so much.

Being a source of money alone was not enough to establish a successful private space launch company. There were plenty with even more money available and even actual institutional support that never got anywhere.

One of the three he certainly wasn't important as a source of money (X/PayPal), as that is where he got the seed money for the other ventures you are diminishing his involvement in.

For Tesla he was an original source of money but has also been the CEO since 2008 (the same year they began production of the original roadster). So all the things people know Tesla for today (and have made it a hugely valuable company) happened under his direct leadership as CEO.

For SpaceX the idea that he is just a source of money is clearly ludicrous, given that it is entirely his brainchild. Since founding the company, he has done an excellent job of hiring all the right people that have made the company what it is today, and is clearly leading the vision and focus of the company.

Elon has also engaged in crypto market manipulation by shilling and dumping DOGE regularly. They're absolutely comparable.

DOGE is a joke and anyone who thinks that it's a serious investment deserves to lose money. It's an idiot tax.

Ponzi schemes are a joke, too. Obviously they're not going to scale -- but people running them are often caught and sent to prison.

I find it baffling that you're defending his antisocial and exploitative behavior.

The creator of DOGE straight up told everyone that he created it as a joke. Ponzi schemes, on the other hand, are marketed as legitimate investments.

What the creator of DOGE said is completely irrelevant to this discussion. If you think there's nothing morally wrong about abusing your position to swindle your fans in technically-legal ways, then any further discussion is pointless.

For what it's worth, I have the same level of disdain towards all celebrities/public figures who abuse their power in this way. It's alarmingly common these days.

> so many comments here seem to assume that Bankman-Fried is playing some long strategy

People like to feel that they're in on a conspiracy. I think because it means they're smarter then the others who "can't understand it". Its especially prevalent in technology-enthusiast circles, internet-culture, etc.

Endless validation on the internet reinforces this. If you want to believe the Earth is a simulation you can go find a forum or podcast exactly to that effect. Heck YouTube will put a chain of videos at the top of your recommendations.

> People like to feel that they're in on a conspiracy.

People like to feel that people always make the best informed decisions and so there's always "more to it". That's especially so for established professionals or "successful" people.

The idea is if so and so is successful they must be doing things right - at every step.

"because it means they're smarter than the others"

That may be part of the reason for conspiracy theories, but I think there's more to it. A lot of people take comfort in the idea that there is some grand order to the world (regardless of it being good or evil). It can be hard to accept the alternative - that the real world is chaotic and that no one is actually in control.

There's also the fact that history, politics, business, etc. is full of actual conspiracies, just not of the "lizzards and aliens" kind, but of the people acting covertly, intimidating, bribing, working together, etc. to further their private interests kind...

Sometimes it's not even particularly covert just hard to see the big picture as the events unfold.

https://wwnorton.com/books/Invisible-Hands/

Like the conspiracies Trump's going down for!

This is your second off-topic comment to me, that focuses on Trump, in this thread.

I take it you have taken to some kind of crusade in the comment section, because I wrote something in some other thread and post, potentially months or weeks ago, in support of Trump? God forbid anybody ever does that. Then they are bad people, with bad ideas, and the good people must go from thread to thread to tell them so.

Not that it would be diffucult to just answer: "More like the wining and dining with business owners and oligarchs from several countries, to use your father's influence, with his full support and abuse of his position, to get bribes and do them favors, and then using the same power to thwart the story in the mainstream media for years". Seems like the world is more complex than bad guy vs good guy, "my side, right or wrong", but who cares when there's partisan fun to be had...

The most popular conspiracy theory is The Rich People Rule The World Conspiracy Theory. No amount of debunking seems to move the needle. People think a wealthy elite control everything and that all or most human problems can be solved by taking money away from them.

Yeah, I can't understand how people can think that those in power and riches have power and riches!

>No amount of debunking seems to move the needle.

Because it is hard to debunk something that is objectively true and backed up by thousands of years of history.

People who have a lot of money or some other influence do actually have more control. Doesn't imply they always put it to good use...

Alain Juillet, former head of the French CIA (DGSE) recently claimed in a youtube interview that "if you do not know what is happening in the African freemason circles, you can't understand the current geopolitics of Africa". He was the head of several lodges/masonic confederations.

https://www.jeuneafrique.com/137763/politique/franc-ma-onner...

> discusses the power play between American and French controlled lodges in Ivory Coast.

https://www.jeuneafrique.com/141986/politique/franc-ma-onner...

> In the neighboring countries of Mali and Guinea, the same expansion phenomenon is observed. Amadou Toumani Touré, overthrown on March 21st, and Alpha Condé oversee the destinies of the Grand Lodge of Mali and that of Guinea, respectively. As for Blaise Compaoré, he was - until he gave way to Djibrill Bassolé, his head of diplomacy - grand master of the Grand Lodge of Burkina, which counts among its ranks numerous ministers, diplomats, and businessmen, notably a part of the management of the national chamber of commerce. Further south, Beninese Thomas Boni Yayi, a known evangelist, has always denied his affiliation to Freemasonry but maintains close relations in the field. Togolese Faure Gnassingbé keeps people guessing, causing some of his brothers to smile: "This young president quickly understood the means to control his elite," they note.

And some people take comfort in the notion that there are no conspiracies and everything is as it seems on the surface.

> Endless validation on the internet reinforces this

Yet they have been wrong time and time again.

First he was never going to face any consequences because something something connected. Then there were never going to be charges. Then he was never going to see the inside of a jail. etc etc etc

Even more delusional than those that cant see they dont have any clue - are the ones who claim "they only pressed charges because "WE" forced them into it by shining a light on the conspiracy"

Sounds like a perfect candidate to run a large, unregulated financial institution. /s

The government has said it is going to show he was conducting a "political influence campaign" using customer deposits and using "political straw donations" as part of a money laundering scheme.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

If SBF was incapable of orchestrating such a campaign himself, perhaps his parents were assisting him.

> when the simplest answer is that he's mentally ill and can't stop himself from engaging in compulsive behaviors

This is the new favorite reason to let people off the hook. Classifying themselves as ill to distance their own behavior. "It was Jekyll not Hyde".

Where did anyone say he (or anyone else) should not be held responsible for his unlawful conduct?

Even in the so-vanishingly-rare-it-almost-doesn’t-exist-outside-fiction case of someone being found not legally culpable for a crime by reason of insanity, that almost always comes with things like compelled inpatient mental health treatment instead.

The Dan White “Twinkie Defense” was so astounding because for once something like that worked. (One guess as to why it happened to work for him, but here’s a hint: Cops celebrated when the verdict was announced.)

Elizabeth Holmes is playing this very strategy https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/09/elizab...

Which mental illness are you speculating that he has? I listened to and read a lot of his words in the months leading up to the FTX collapse and he came across as sharp as a tack and not unstable.

I think people are conflating diseases of the mind (mental illness) with being mentally unhealthy (toxic, impulsive, egotistical, narcissistic,...)

An unhealthy mind can be trained to be healthy. Like going to the gym.

Mental illness is chronic and medical and requires medical intervention.

Neither absolve the person of responsibility except in very narrow cases (imho) where a medical issue has impaired cognition in such a way the person committing the crime saw the actions in such a radically opposite way to how society (composed of people with varying mental health) sees those actions.

Both mental illness and being mentally unhealthy require compassion. Let's face it, anyone whose pursuit of wealth at all costs has this outcome is unlikely to be very happy or feel very good much of the time.

It isn't healthy behaviour

> the simplest answer is that he's mentally ill

Or he's just a crook and trying desperately to avoid consequences of his illegal actions.

He can be both, it's not an either or.

Calling him mentally ill without any professional diagnoses minimizes his culpability and criminality.

As long as we’re throwing out random theories, I submit he is just a cocksure asshole who still thinks he’ll get away with his scam based on who mommy, daddy, and their friends are. Pardon the language, but I think it is the most apt.

This sounds plausible. He probably haven't suffered any serious consequences of his actions ever before, and his bail agreement, which is pretty mild, only reinforced him in the illusion that this is nothing, it'll all be ok, consequences happen to other people.

Another victim of affluenza it seems.

I remember watching a body language analysis video of some of his interviews early on. Your assessment seems spot on. He’s a failure of parenting.

He can be both. An entitled schmuck who's not entirely there.

I learned "cocksure" thanks to that comment.

Also I think it runs deeper than his parents. Wasn't it the top contributor to the democrat party during last election ?

Mental illness or conspiracy theories also dilute his actions: he's either not guilty by insanity, or extremely intelligent by manipulation. We don't need to make any excuses for him: he's just an asshole sharing someone else's most intimate information.

Does he have to be mentally ill? He's stupid, that's it

It’s even simpler, he’s addicted to stimulants. Watch the final act of Scarface or Goodfellas for context.

> when the simplest answer is that he's mentally ill

I'm sure his lawyers would love to claim otherwise, but affluenza isn't a real medical condition. The simplest answer is that he's lived his life believing that he can do anything he wants. These "consequences" people talk about are for poor people, not people like him. His behavior makes perfect sense with that in mind.

My baseless theory is that he hasn't realized his minders have cut the cord. This stuff happens from time to time. Someone who is propped up and aided by a government agent begins to feel like they are an insider. When they screw up, their agent goes to bat for them. But if they screw up and are no longer needed, the agent acts like they've never met.

At least that's how it works in all the $7.99 paperback thrillers!

I think he's the Human form of a Ferengi.

I was wondering why SBF was not immediately jailed when he was caught communicating with ex-FTX employees with Signal earlier this year.

Also the news reported he was installing VPNs so that he could 'watch football online' or something about as stupid.

One word: money. If you have enough of it, the rules can be bent, or broken altogether.

It's more about inefficiencies in the judicial system, every infraction is a new crime that has to be researched and evidenced and ruled upon which provides avenue for delaying actions by lawyers.

The justice system is designed to defend the innocent, not to aggressively pursue and harass the guilty.

SBF's is living on borrowed time as the cases make it through the legal process.

does he currently have "enough money"?

His family and he is extremely well connected, I'm sure they can scrape together some money for lawyers

He was likely funneling billions(?) to Alameda girl, who apparently absconded with a bunch... and to his parents, who are already wealthy law professors at stanford, and he gave hundreds of millions to political bribes.

While I agree that there is an excess of evidence available to jail SBF with ease - and he should be jailed without question - I am bit unsure about your VPN comment.

Specifically, if Sam uses a VPN after having communication restrictions put in place around what he can say, is that inherently suspicious to a court? I would have assumed it is insufficient on its own but could be presented as the means for breaking court order if shown with other supporting evidence.

I'm not a lawyer mind you, so this is just me trying to understand it for myself.

The hardest part for him is going to be the dopamine withdrawals. He's supposed to be in a drug treatment program but with his behavior during house arrest, who knows if his parents have any disciplinary skills to make sure he was clean before his bail was revoked.

Not trying to lend to your theory, but I found a interesting document:

https://www.bop.gov/resources/pdfs/detoxification.pdf

> Inmates with a dependency on cocaine or other stimulants generally do not require treatment in an inpatient setting. The cessation of this substance does not always cause specific withdrawal symptoms. However, symptoms may be severe enough to require clinical intervention. For most inmates who use cocaine or other stimulants, medications are not ordinarily indicated as an initial treatment for withdrawal or dependence, as none have shown efficacy. Inmates are treated symptomatically.

> SAMHSA recommends that patients withdrawing from stimulants should be monitored closely for depression/suicidality, as well as prolonged QTc intervals and seizures, which may be additional complications of stimulant withdrawal. An EKG is recommended during cocaine withdrawal to monitor for cardiac complications.

He wasn't just on amphetamines, he was also on MAOIs which are stronger stuff

Characterizing MAOIs as "stronger stuff" than amphetamines is just nonsense and I don't see how the context here would make it either meaningful or relevant.

Using selegiline as a stimulant has a lot more risks (some irreversible!) and side effects than just using an amphetamine or methylphenidate like anyone else seeking the same effect would.

It certainly explains the tremors you saw him have in interviews - you need a lot of abuse with amphetamines to get to that level of side effect.

In general it speaks to a level of personal recklessness you don't even see in the typical cocaine guzzling white collar criminal.

Source? Spent about 15 minutes looking into it and I can't find anything other than the general "these people did amphetamines!" stuff from December 2022

You mean, like, SBF's own tweets? https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1173351344159117312

That's not how medically-prescribed stimulant works.

That's not how court-ordered in-patient drug treatment works

"Substance use treatment" was one of the initial reasons his bail was not opposed by AUSA

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/22/sam-bankman...

https://cryptoslate.com/sbf-granted-250m-bail-released-to-pa...

Welp https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1691154628694646784

He is an adult. His parents shouldn’t have to tell him this.

do the people who put up his bail money lose it due to him violating the terms of the bail and having it be revoked? or do they get it back now as its not needed anymore?

My understanding is that generally you don't lose the bail money unless the person ultimately doesn't show up in court. There are exceptions and the judge has some discretion.

I wonder if the credible threat of losing, say, $250 million might encourage people to ensure the defendant doesn’t engage in witness tampering!

I suppose if he showed up for jail, then the assets weren’t seized.

No, he didn't skip trial.

My understanding is that the default federal rule is that you forfeit for any violation, but that the judge has discretion to decide otherwise.

I doubt you'll see movement on, for example, the parents' house, but I could imagine the monetary portion being forfeited.

(Edit: and I've read since posting that there will be no forfeiture here)

It’s not like he actually ran away. This seems sort of reasonable.

I bet all the money will be returned. The people who pitched in to the bail fund are well connected and this trial isn’t meant to harm them (from the judges point of view).

But the fact that he’s in custody and isn’t on the run, means there’s more risk politically to forfeit the money than to give it back.

Not if he's compliant with the revocation. The idea behind bail is ultimately it's the amount that needs to make you show up for trial. Either it's an amount that you or whoever post it won't be willing to lose or it's the amount that someone can get for bringing you in. If you skip trial your bail becomes the bounty payable to whoever brings you in.

It is actually very rare for a judge to forfeit the bail money when a defendant violates the terms of his bond.

Source: 10 years in criminal court

Funnily enough, I had my bail revoked last year because I retweeted a posting from the county public defender's office about the serious flaws with house arrest monitoring.

So, when your bail was revoked, I assume you got your bail back, right?

Yes, I did get to "keep" my bail money, but the judge knew I'd already assigned it to my lawyer to pay his fees, so he was very unlikely to forfeit it.

Is there any public information about your case?

I must not understand how bail works in federal court.

SBF's bail was 250 million dollars. out here in the my world, you have to find a bail bondsman, who commits to covering the entire bail amount, makes sure you have enough assets to cover the entire bail amount, charges you ten percent of the bail amount. You don't get the 10 percent back.

Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford's law school, pledged to cover 500,000 of it. Andreas Paepcke, a Stanford computer scientist, pledged to cover 200,000 of it.

SBF's parents have a house under a weird agreement where sale of the house is strictly controlled by Stanford University.

SBF's parents pledged to cover the rest of it (I think?)

There is no way SBF's parents are worth 25 million dollars. Or 249 million dollars. Unless SBF parked millions of dollars of FTX profits with them. which just opens more questions.

SBF "gifted" his parents millions of dollars in assets.

They're going to study SBF in law school some day. In the same way a computer science professor would emphasize automated testing to catch edge cases, a legal professor will emphasize that no matter how intelligent and well-connected your client seems, they may still be suffering from "edge case" delusional behavior that destroys their case.

This is the same guy who dialed into tech conferences and made provably false statements after the public collapse of FTX and after his parents (both law professors) had retained counsel. And yet, nobody thought to explain to him how easily he might get caught up on witness tampering and obstruction of justice charges if he continued making public statements.

Someone may have explained to him that this was witness tampering, but as my mother likes to say “went into one ear came out the other” for SBF. He’s rarely faced consequences for his actions until now.

Yeah. On his PR tour he repeatedly made public statements that will negatively impact his defense; there's no way his council didn't try to shut that down. SBF isn't listening to his lawyers.

Much like anybody who tries to 'explain things' to the cops he thought he could talk his way out of it, or into a better position.

There are plenty of better examples. Sam is essentially just a common crook. He put his hand in his own companies cookie jar. This idea that he's going to "be studied" just plays into his own paid for media created mythos.

This is the same guy who tried to make "effective altruism" part of his image. That was a pretty strong signal that the outcome we all witnessed was highly likely.

I don’t think the intriguing part of SBF is the crime he committed, which is a pretty common one. For me, it is how he, after getting caught, hurts his own case being proactive in doing and saying stuff publicly.

The common type of white collar criminal remains in silence and follow orientations from their very well paid lawyers. And it is a pretty proven strategy that leads to minimal or no relevant punishment. If SBF was a common criminal in this sense, he possibly could leave all of this judged not guilty by the justice.

He reminds me of a few people Ive known who have a kind of "it'll all work out in the end" syndrome.

All very privileged and sheltered.

Even in jail, he'll be 'a rich guy in jail', able to buy all the favours and protection that can be bought in such a place.

I probably won't attract many friends by separately pointing out that "it'll all work out in the end" was also the primary investment strategy of virtually every crypto "investor" who lost money, but that's another matter...

IANAL but it seems all this stupidity may cost him what really matters: he may lose any chance of minimum security prison. That’s the real prize if prison time is all but guaranteed.

He could still get a decade in ClubFed with work release which… while obviously not great, is a hell of a lot better than living under guard in a low or medium security prison.

> Even in jail, he'll be 'a rich guy in jail'

Doesn't that require him to still have money?

It requires his friends, family and other connections to have money. Which for people like him seems to be basically a given.

I think it's a case of "I'm smarter than everybody else so I can talk my way out of these charges"

Like Hans Reiser trying to beat the murder charges, representing himself in court.

This is a trap very smart successful people fall into. They think they can figure out anything better than somebody who spent years learning the trade and acquiring the experience, just because they are so smart. Sometimes it's true, but often it's an illusion which can have life changing and sometimes deadly consequences.

I think this underestimated the abilities of the “common white collar criminal” — there are lots of chat logs of SBF and his coconspirators saying essentially “we’re doing fraud.”

Common white collar criminals say “let’s take this offline” in their chat transcripts.

Well there’s another high-profile case in the works where there are lots of transcripts of the coconspirators saying (occasionally explicitly), “we’re doing fraud.”

It's probably only appealing to the tech set because he came from a upper middle family with law professor parents and fooled some silicon valley money... So basically he existed in the social circle of the academics and Palo alto tech elite.

It's a status thing as much as the crime. Who he had access to and what knowledge everyone involved could have had to detect it earlier. If that is real idk but that's the pitch

Crypto is a bit unique though. Not many markets would have tolerated this behaviour.

No, a common crook shuts his mouth and says “talk to my lawyer.” This is a guy with a God complex

> No, a common crook shuts his mouth and says “talk to my lawyer. ”

... and then the lawyer wakes up and has to deal with his real client, who has done no such thing.

> This idea that he's going to "be studied" just plays into his own paid for media created mythos.

It’s not as if people are saying he’s going to be studied because he’s fascinating. I don’t think he ever tried to cultivate the image that he’s idiotic bordering on the pathological, because that discrepancy seems to be study-worth.

It’s like on one side, there are Musk actions, some call them insane and idiotic, but they can be explained away, theoretically, and then there’s SBF where even the most adamant supporter would just stand there, open-mouthed.

The only reason some people struggle to understand the behavior of Musk, SBF, Trump, and others is because of an assumption that a certain level of wealth or power implies some level of rational behavior.

That assumption is often, but not always correct.

We aren't astonished or confused when a broke high school dropout maxes out their credit card on Candy Crush in-app purchases and drives drunk and crashes into a tree. Some people are stupid and stupid people are going to make stupid, thoughtless decisions.

People are more surprised when the rich and powerful do dumb shit like this because of a presumption that they must have been consistently able to not do dumb shit in order to acquire their stature.

But that assumption is very often wrong. Trump had his father slowly plow $700m of his wealth into his son in order to burnish his own image. Musk inherited wealth. SBF came from prestige and then lucked into a historical moment where fake Internet money could temporarily be exchanged for real money.

These people are just fucking morons with limited ability to delay their gratification or think through the consequences of their actions who happened to win the lottery. Most of the time, it's because they lived an entire childhood where they never needed to learn to think about the consequences of their actions because they were completely insulated from them.

Musk did not “inherit wealth”, and I need a source on Trump getting $700m

Musk absolutely inherited his wealth. His parents benefited directly from apartheid.

Unless you have a primary source, no he didn’t.

Great job making an impossible standard, by demanding a primary source rather than a secondary one.

https://i.imgur.com/qOluudx.mp4

I despise Elon Musk but I’m not going to stoop to making things up just because I don’t like him. It’s called integrity. There are plenty of verifiable things to not like him for.

Take your juvenile behavior back to Reddit.

His anti-apartheid politician parent?

> I need a source on Trump getting $700m

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...

> This is the same guy who tried to make "effective altruism" part of his image. That was a pretty strong signal that the outcome we all witnessed was highly likely.

Why do you think that was such a strong signal?

My 2 cents is that it's because anyone who tries to convince you that themselves getting rich can somehow save the world is already deep into narcissistic sociopath territory.

> Judge Kaplan: This defendant tries to go right up to the line - his use of the VPN to watch a football game over an account he wasn't authorized, there it is..

> Judge Kaplan: He subscribed from the Bahamas and used a VPN as if he were in the Bahamas when he was in Palo Alto and could have watched it on public TV. It shows the mindset. All things considered I am going to revoke bail.

Dialing into tech conferences and lying his ass off wasn't necessary the wrong strategy. SBF's goal at the time wasn't "avoid jail;" it was "bail out company and course correct." He wanted to acquire a lot of large investors to save his company, and a lie-filled PR campaign was probably the best bet he had to do it. The estimated value of (tiny chance) * (stay a billionaire) versus the estimated value of (smallish chance) * (avoid prison) might have looked like a pretty good call to him.

Or, more likely, his life as he knew it was under threat and he was panicking by following the same script that always worked for him before. But it wasn't NECESSARILY the wrong call.

He was lying his ass off on conference calls while playing RPG games.

I see your point, but would more categorize his actions as a "messiah complex" belief in his own invincibility, reinforced by years of experience running the FTX charade. I doubt he was ever rationally examining the odds of pulling it off.

no matter how ... well-connected your client seems

Is SBF connected at all anymore? At this point, everyone knows he's a fraud (at least in the court of public opinion). There's no money to be gained by helping him; associations to him are toxic; favors are unlikely to ever be repaid. He may have used some of the money he scammed for donations to curry favor, but that only works up until the scam falls apart. What sort of connections are you thinking of?

The "old money" entrenched nepotism that typically outlasts the short attention span of the people watching the circus

SBF is literally the opposite of old money

Hes referring to the Old Money connections that SBF bribed with hundreds of millions to finance their political grift... er I mean "donations"

"Everyone" is still buying crypto.

One way or another the NYT was still willing to print a story about the leaked writings for him. It's been well-known that he has connections there.

I was referring to the general notion of someone who can satisfy exorbitant bail requirements and has two law professors for parents - legal counsel in such a case may mistakenly assume that their client is sophisticated enough to avoid obvious mistakes.

well-connected your client seem

When you have 100bn you are well connected. When you had 100bn but now have nothing, you are not well connected. Even people you have litterally given 100mil to wont take your phone calls.

He is certainly well connected, but what evidence do we have that he’s intelligent?

MIT grad that worked at Jane Street and made a Billion dollar “tech” company are things a lot of people would use as evidence of being intelligent.

Building a company based on fraud is potentially more of a marker of ruthlessness over intelligence, but certainly we don't know with certainty, and it is likely a combination of the two.

I would agree. He was definitely connected, and definitely smart. Anyone would drive in such a position could make a successful company. But he was ruthless and also has no moral compass, so he became a crypto fraudster.

passed quant interview at jane street.

Intelligence is unrelated to integrity, at least by common wisdom.

A common Warren Buffet quote passed around : "We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb"

Sam and Liz (Yay rebranding!) are both good at one thing: Playing the part people want to see played and telling people what they want to hear.

In other words: It's not their delusion at all.

You shouldn't expect them to be good at anything else. They aren't good at anything else.

There are some criminals that are genuinely delusional and think they are right and just need to explain more - could some element of that be present here. I know I've seen good examples of that kind of behavior, where people behave ridiculously because they're blinded by thinking they're kn the right, but I'm struggling a bit to come up with one. Skilling maybe?

No way.

Playing by the book it's an easy, open and shut case that he loses very badly badly. No other conceivable outcome that way.

His only option is to throw the book out and create as much chaos as possible so prosecutors are faced with the unusual and novel and make mistakes his team can capitalise on.

It's a long shot, sure. He's got nothing else. This lunacy is all 100% rational behaviour on his part.

Maybe, but the most probable event here is a kid with too much money and fame

Disagree. Amoral trader, who always acted like an amoral trader, continues to act like an amoral trader. He's always been calculating and clever.

You did see this, right?

https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/senate_ftx

Washington corruption is rampant and at an all time peak, both R&D, to be sure but he's got to give them some kind of smoke screen by making a really simple thing like his being a thief "complicated." The guy knows where the bodies are, he has some leverage. Probably not nearly enough but we'll see.

...or he ends up with a bunch of fresh new charges in addition to all the existing ones, some being of the very exciting felony class.

I don't see how that's very rational at all.

He's going to jail for many years, this is really unlikely to increase that duration to parole or change the facility to supermax but is a long shot, hail mary at reducing things or even getting off. Why not?

Classic asymmetric payoff. Any trader will see that. (Maybe my analysis is wrong and it /can/ make things meaningfully worse but if not, it's extremely rational).

You're correct that it can't make things meaningfully worse. Even if he got the maximum charge for obstruction of justice (5 years), it would be an insignificant risk for someone facing 120-150 years.

I don't see how chaos leading to bail being revoked is an awesome strategy. Where exactly is the win?

May not be a win, I sure hope there isn't one. There should not be one.

I just don't see him as meaningfully worse off. The muddier, smokier, more controversial and strange make it at least /possible/ there can be some lawyers "Aktuhally..." and he comes out somehow ahead. If not, nothing lost, he's unlikely to go to jail for longer or a worse one. It's a hail mary to be sure but it's a free throw of the dice.

Do you think this list of, um, "politicians" wants to give all the stolen money back that he donated? They sure have an interest in how this plays out, huh?

https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/senate_ftx

Just because someone act like a total idiot doesn't mean that they aren't.

Nobody is giving back anything of course, but that's all in the past - that money is gone and no more us coming, so nobody is going to stick with him for that. His parents and their friends - maybe.

He's going to jail for witness tampering.

If he successfully tampers with the witness, enough to sow reasonable doubt and lead to his acquittal at trial, then it's worth it. That's why it's a crime - because there is a potential payoff to it. If actually tampering with the witness never worked, there would be no need to criminalize it.

Getting charged with tampering is much, much easier than successfully tamper. If he wanted to scare Elison publishing some dirt or sending texts is not going to do it - feds have much better ways to scare people into cooperation. And his very expensive lawyers told him as much, I am sure, because every lawyer would. But he probably decided he knows better.

But the payoffs are very much asymmetric. Getting convicted of tampering adds a few extra years to his sentence which will probably be more than his life anyway. Successfully tampering with the witness may avoid the conviction in the first place.

Except there's no chance of successful tampering the way he did it. Never was. Publishing dirt on one of his co-conspirators is not going yo negate his conviction.

I could actually see this being a viable strategy - create enough evidence and research burden for the prosecution so as to maximize the debate around admissibility of evidence and opportunities for limiting the trial's scope.

Yup and when I wrote that I was only thinking of the asymmetric payoff and had forgotten how much stolen money he donated to the powerful who don't want to give it back. Now that /should/ be totally irrelevant but will it be? Will they all stay 100% completely away from it even in secret? The level of corruption that are normal right now are unprecedented IMO. I'd like to be wrong about it but I'd like it if it were reformed a lot more.

It seems to be working well enough for a certain other high-profile defendant at the moment.

I think he was warned about the consequences of making public statements. I think he thought he knew more than anyone else. I am guessing that he will have an extremely hard adjustment to prison. But who knows? He could end up being the shot caller.

Perhaps he goes on to start the world's first decentralized cigarette currency? :)

> But who knows?

people with law degrees do

This is a win-win for everyone since it will also let SBF start serving his sentence early.

If he considered starting serving time early a win for himself then he could've chosen not to be bailed. Therefore I don't see how you can call it a win for him if it's not what he wants.

He’ll be grateful to have some credit for time served once he’s sentenced.

Six weeks won't do much against 100 years.

Do people really get life sentences for crimes that don’t involve causing death or physical harm to others?

Madoff did, but I only know that because it was remarkable enough to be big news.

Three-strikes lifers exist, yes -- a system where your most recent crime is punished as an extension of a previous crime, even if the time was served.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rummel_v._Estelle

Scamming and embarrassing the American Elite seems to be pretty serious crimes over there...

Federal sentencing guidelines take into account many things. You get (bad) points (called levels) for how many people you harmed, dollar value of the harm, whether or not you used "sophisticated" means, etc, etc. These points are then converted to a sentence length according to this[1] chart. The main contributor in a case like this is going to be the dollar amount of the fraud (which is huge), as those points stack up quickly, capping out at 30 levels for a fraud of over $550M. So if as assume he gets the highest level, that's 30 levels on its own, which if you read the guideline chart linked means a recommended sentence of 8 years for a first time offender just from those levels alone. Add all the other levels in and you can get to 43 (life imprisonment for first time offenders) pretty quickly.

[1] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu...

The possible Sam Bankman-Fried who thinks this is a win-win is not the one in our universe. [0]

Our universe's Sam Bankman-Fried has been caught witness-tampering, which you only do if you think you are going to get away with it.

Being caught witness-tampering is going to lead to an early start to his jail time, yes. But you understand that it's going to lead to additional jail time, right? It's a crime and a really serious one. It will be seen as aggravating behaviour, so extra time, perhaps extra charges, not a head-start.

Edit to add: it's entirely possible in a legal sense for the primary charges against him to collapse entirely and for him to still see extra time, not just time served, for witness tampering. Because witness tampering is a crime even if what the witnesses saw turns out to be something the state declines to prosecute.

[0] unless he is both sorely misinformed and poorly advised

Good thing Trump's openly tampering with witnesses, because if there's any justice it'll land him in jail sooner and keep him there as long as necessary for him to never be free again.

Trivia: the judge in the SBF case is the judge who heard E. Jean Carroll’s civil case against Trump, where Trump made things worse for himself by continuing to defame Carroll after he was found liable.

Anyone who didn’t see from a mile away that this guy is trash was intentionally closing their eyes. Pretty cringey how much press he got.

> see from a mile away that this guy is trash

Actually possible, given the billboards lol

Is his brain fully formed? Does he have functioning critical thinking skills? Is he just that dumb? Surely his counsel and others are advising him to shut his damn mouth …

He's on crazy stimulants.

Here's the resulting New York Times article from the Google docs that SBF shared.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37095093

Good. At this point SBF has become an amazing caricature of himself.

I'm a very cynical old git, but even I have been amazed by the limited bounds of my imagination which is forever defeated by this story.

Saying that, I do get the feeling he is now being scapegoated quite hard, and that probably serves to motivate his latest stupidities, but FTX required collective and not only individual madness. That must not get lost in all this.

> FTX required collective and not only individual madness.

I think this either conflates crypto with FTX, or alternatively, SBF being on trial with being scapegoated.

The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness

Why stop at execs?

Nope, they were all crazy. Look at the things Ellison was writing and saying back then. And the money she was losing while claiming to be a savant.

Look at the programmer who put in the code that was something like TRADE_IS_ALLOWED = HAS_POSITIVE_BALANCE || TRADER_IS_ALMEDA.

Just because they're pleading out doesn't mean they are/weren't crazy.

Not to be all woke, but "crazy" and "madness" probably aren't the right words for what happened here.

Diabolic has religious connotations, but just the right religious connotations.

Depends on if you consider "crazy" to include rampant narcissism fueled by the usual ridiculous elitism and we're-smart-so-everything-will-work failure mode of "rationalist" culture.

They could also just be, you know, selfish assholes.

If a flat broke person living on the street, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by their circumstance, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality, it isn't controversial to say that person is 'crazy' or mentally ill. People might nitpick the terminology you use to describe that person or criticize you for needlessly drawing attention to it, but nobody goes to bat for the sanity of a homeless person saying crazy shit about themselves.

But if a very rich person living in mansion, doing lots of drugs, mentally stressed by the enormity of their crimes, starts making wild self-aggrandizing claims completely divorced from reality are they crazy? Suddenly people have an interest in defending their mental sanity. Why? Because rich people are entitled to more respect than the homeless by virtue of their wealth, and therefore we shouldn't put common labels like crazy on them? Or maybe it's because a rich luxurious lifestyle makes people immune to the onset of insanity? Were Caligula and Nero not crazy then? On the contrary, I think being very wealthy puts you at greater risk for becoming crazy; the more elite somebody is the more divorced from the typical human experience they become. Power and wealth corrupts their minds, inflating their egos to such an extent they lose track of reality. These people were all crazy. Maybe they weren't "mentally ill" in any biological sense, but they were crazy.

When you have a billion dollars to your name, you no longer get to play the victim card. ANY problem you have is tractable. You could have an entire team of the ten best psychologists in the country surrounding you at all times and keeping you grounded in reality and ethics and humility.

At the point you are a CEO, being "crazy" is a choice. More than that, mental illness is almost never an excuse for bad behavior.

You don't need to have empathy for the billionaire who has spent their entire life grifting and surrounding themselves with cheerleaders to feed their ego. Ego isn't a mental illness, every living human faces their ego, but most aren't allowed to feed it because they have to interact with a cruel reality. Nobody put a gun to Elon's head and forced him to make as much money as possible through lies and grift.

“Reason is the slave of the passions” as philosopher David Hume said. Amazing how many rationalists completely overlook this easy to remember maxim.

That's part of it, and it's certainly why so many of them have persistent chips on their shoulder about shit that happened in middle school (looking at you, Scott Aaronson).

The other part is that trying to construct all truth from first principles is a hopeless endeavor for a single person or even a group of people. The rejection of institutional expertise - and the collective knowledge of failure modes that is embedded deep within institutions - leads to a lot of predictable failures.

Not be all unpolitical, but maybe people use "woke" to mean "people who turn me into a snowflake"

I'm not sure what's crazy, insane, or demonstrates madness with that, that's good ol' fashioned criming. Re: the readings I was assigned, her Tumblr is standard fare for the age and intellectual mileu, nothing crazy.

They were on a lot of drugs. Drugs make you say and do shut that in retrospect looks crazy. But sounded like a good idea at the time.

>The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness

They plead guilty because they were granted deals that involve testifying against SBF, and sang like canaries.

But the feds have every intention of nailing Sam as hard as possible. There will be no plea bargaining for him. So it's either fight it in court, or take the max sentence. What we're seeing here are the last acts of a desperate man who knows he's screwed either way.

I feel like they shouldn't have been let off so easy. They are equally responsible. Making this all like some sort of Dr. Evil SBF scheme is silly. They were a gang, working together on the fraud. The case against SBF couldn't be hard to prove, why do you need to plea bargain the other execs and get them to testify?

Disagree - there are multiple VC claiming multi-month due diligence before piling money into FTX. That premise and this multi billion exchange running the entire business on emojis and quick books cannot exist in the same reality.

Does anyone know where Sam Trabucco is or what happened to him? Leave as Co-CEO a few months before a total fraud collapse and everything is fine? There is 0% chance this was only happening after he left.

Good question.

Sam Trabucco might end up as the equivalent of Lou Pai from the Enron scandal. Left just in time before the whole thing came crashing down and escapes all criminal charges.

To be fair, he could have realised all the blather was lie after lie, talked to a lawyer, and was counciled gtfo.

Sometimes you get pulled in, little by little, then you wake up and realise what sort of situation you're in.

And if he was legitimately thinking "wait, this is wrong"...

> "wait, this is wrong"

More like, "wait, this is getting too risky from a personal legal/criminal standpoint". If he knew something was off and he cared about someone other than himself, he should have become a whistleblower.

I’m wondering if he did and if he is going to be the prosecution star witness walking down the aisle the first day of the trial. It’s too weird that there is no mention I can find anywhere of a warrant for his arrest etc. They’ve gone after everyone else like Gary Wang and Nishad Singh and of course Caroline.

It is surely entirely possible to get stuck in the no-man's land where you know something is seriously wrong but you cannot prove it to the level of qualifying for the kind of whistleblower protections you need to survive the process.

In this situation, blowing the whistle and failing to be heard is one outcome. Blowing the whistle and having the consensus in a light-touch regulatory system be that you're doing so without cause or worse maliciously is another.

Blowing the whistle, being unable to prove it and being sued into oblivion is yet another. If you are sued into oblivion by a crook, you tend not to get your money back when they are finally caught.

My own feeling is that in such a situation I would walk away, refuse to give interviews, pointedly not take a job for a while, talk to a lawyer in a way that is recorded, and likely brief an appropriate journalist off the record.

Time will tell if he did.

While I personally don’t think—now—that SBF in retrospect likely posed this kind of risk, the scale of the grift is the kind of thing where someone pulling it off is quite likely to have motive and means to cause quite heinous outcomes to perceived threats.

A quiet but apparently amicable distancing may be the most someone feels safe doing.

> Ellison’s testimony claims that the fraud between FTX and Alameda took place as early as 2019 and Trabucco joined Alameda the same year. In crypto circles, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate is suspected of being aware of financial misconduct if he was the co-CEO for that long and if Ellison’s story is accurate.

... then he paid himself a ten million dollar bonus using customer funds and bought a yacht. haha.

>unpopular opinion ;;

SBF's parents deeply need investigation here - they are both law proffs at stanford.

THere is not a chance they dont have dirty fingers in his dealings - where are their political donations from the money SBF/Alameda.

I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts.

@lotsofpulp (I love pulp BTW, grew up with huge orange trees)

The "we" is not just some no-face prosecutor, its everyone - but "proof" that they arent looking into it is, have you ever seen a Pelosi, Biden, Kushner child with massive grift based on their familial insider trading knowledge that was exposed.

Take Kushner as the primary example. So, we know that he received billions (not just from Qatar), we know that his family has a history of real-estate fraud, and everyone just ignores all of this.

This isnt a political comment : its a comment against the financial frauds that are so massive throughout and we do 'surface-level' looking into it.

I cant believe I have to outline this for some....

Don't worry; it's documented that money stolen from FTX went to the parents. It's grinding slowly.

> I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts.

Who is “we”? If you mean prosecutor, do you have a source that they fail to look at the networks of those they are prosecuting?

You shouldn't be downvoted.

I don't know if it's willful ignorance or what, but most people can't grok the fact that children do not develop in a vacuum. They are in most cases a reflection of their parents' traits and values. Worse for SBF, it is entirely plausible that they had a direct hand in enabling his fraudulent behavior. They were politically-connected Stanford lawyers. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of them opening doors and providing cover for their son.

Perhaps an extreme comparison, but I feel the same exact way about adolescent school shooters. We are so quick to absolve and sanctify the parents as if their child's violent tendencies emerged suddenly and spontaneously.

To be (sadly) honest this is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the comment at the top, but suspected it would have been buried for being so direct. It is gratifying to see some people here with guts to say what they think.

As a society we have now a possibly exaggerated tendency to ascribe any positive contributions by an individual to their environmental circumstances (this is definitely more true where I am in Canada, but it is becoming more true over time in the US), while we have a tendency to assume all the bad things can be blamed on a single leader to absolve everyone else of all responsibility for their supporting roles. A slight correction is in order imo.

His father having some level of involvement in FTX is indisputable, as he was a consultant to FTX. His mother's PAC also received a significant amount of funding from it, which certainly raises questions.

As far as nature vs nurture, consider this navel gazing 2013 essay by his mother ( https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam... ) essentially arguing that criminal culpability is impossible because free will doesn't exist.

>>*arguing that criminal culpability is impossible because free will doesn't exist.*

OK - WTF?

There is a lot of discussion about 'free will' - however, thats around predestination, blah blah -

But to state that '*criminality*' doesnt exist DUE to predetermination is psycho bot BS.

Some people more educated in philosophy or logic or whatever that I may be --- EXPLAIN THIS??

To paraphrase the old TV commercials.

"This is your mind on postmodern thinking. Any questions?"

Just like mate selection in peacocks created elaborate pointless plumage, competition among scholars in fields with inadequate connection to reality allow divergence off into absurd lines of thought which have their own elegant internal consistency but no external purpose. They could just be considered art or entertainment, except for the risk of causing grave harm when someone mistakenly uses them to justify policy without evaluating their consistency with reality or legible human values.

See also the recent HN thread on kritiks in high school debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920566

Interesting that the article misscharacterized Nozick as right wing, completely missing the history of rejection of libertarians by both right and left parties and the continued outreach by libertarians to both.

I don't know enough about this to even comment...

Is it of value for you to link to something important? Lacking information on this.

Thanks

A good place to start would be with this text on Rothbard’s leftism, which connects ideas you may already familiar regarding libertarianism with leftism: https://cdn.mises.org/19_1_2.pdf

However the roots go much deeper. Nozick himself was advancing the progressive tradition. One way to understand it is to start by considering how the state was the tool leftist had used through the 19th century to advance individual human rights. Once the state had become totalizing in the way all modern capitalist countries are today, the only way forward to advance human rights further must involve the dissolution of the state since oppression is no longer caused by traditional social mores but rather by the system that replaced those. That’s why you often see weird alliances between rightists and libertarians: the few remnants of reactionary resistance against the state allied with what is at core a radical progressive movement. Leftists are a more natural ally with libertarians but cannot support libertarians as leftist power flows from state authority.

There’s also a more specific history of libertarian plus leftist conference and other collaborations but I’m not knowledgeable on the details, merely that the info is there if you search for it.

While Nozick was not traditionally right-wing, he was arguing for a pretty minimal state that’s not compatible with left, liberal, progressive ideas.

Minimal state is absolutely compatible with leftist philosophy! Anarchism itself is a leftist movement. What’s incompatible isn’t ideology, its praxis. Mainstream leftist movements rely on state power to further their goals. That said there’s still a ton of great leftist movements today that attempt to sidestep statism.

We don't know how aware they were of they initial fraud - maybe not at all, maybe more than we've heard so far.

That said, we do know that he committed several additional offences, including the ones described in this article, while under house arrest at their residence. That alone should warrant further investigation and call their conduct into question, along with their standing in the legal community.

Didn't the parent put up a property for bail that they don't in fact own? As I recall, the home they put up for bail is owned by Stanford.

This feels like the approach organized crime takes where they go after everyone you know regardless of culpability. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be investigated if there is evidence pointing to the fact, but it’s very believable to me that they never questioned it.

SBF seems like the sort of person to flaunt their “success” to side skirt questions. For those around him, I think they believed it more than anyone, because the world was revering him an undisputed genius. His parents pride, and background, probably put blinders on any signals of nefarious activity. They were also watching billionaire investors dump money into FTX assuming they weren’t total fucking idiots… but they were.

Smart, wealthy people, are often children of luck more than ability and unable to discern between to two because their entire existence inextricably interweaves the two. Look no further than the demigod status American oligarchs have despite being examples of capitalisms inefficiencies (there’s no cream to skim in perfect capitalism which is the real source of their immense wealth).

It is not an unpopular and I am sure parents are under scrutiny as well if the law enforcement is doing its job at all.

If there is any hesitation in going after the parents of an accused individual, it is that.. they are parents. The sins of a child are not those of the parent and vice-versa, at least in my book. We have our own scorecards as it were.

But.. if there is proof of wrongdoing? No problem.

NOPE.

If you are in the middle of a scandal of any of these scales - EVERY SINGLE PERSON you've ever come in contact with should be under scrutiny.

And, as an example, when your father is in prison for financial and real-estate fraud, your father in law has decades of fraud cases against them, multiple impeachments, indictments, etc...

Caught on setting up back-channel comms

Accept $2 billion dollars from a foreign government, and basically walking through the USG as a ghost (as is hunter)... you need to be brought down.

Jared should be considered PRIME in such a case - such as Kushner is.

Edit:

I was not arguing against you.

EDIT

@A4ET8a8uTh0

No, I am saying that the defacto needs to be a scale of frauds that literally is public knowledge and everyone knows what the F it is.

So if you're a Holmes, or a SBF or even a QWEST (Recall them (that was tax fraud - not actual product fraud) Aside from the fact that they setup a national fiber infra along the tracks, and then had it basically siezed by cerberus, such as MAI-west and PAIX....

Uh, I would love yo talk to others who know much about internet cabling infra that was done through late 1980s and such before I forget it as I get too old.

Aside:

Look at the vids of the fires in Maui and you see some where they show pole-lines where there isa serious wave/flux in the lower cables (the ones with the round junction tubes -- and then the 4/6 wires at the top if the pole....

The ones that are super FN wobbly are FIBER (perhaps some coax, not sure on that) - but those splices are lower as no electricitry risk to work on them.

But they are heavier. So more pront to force wind to swathe them out.... thus coms are down.

We need all cell towers to have underground.

Anyway - this disaster has ressurrected a F ton of my former infra design exp....

Would love to discuss.

(And where did PAIX connect to back in the day?)

Do you see me arguing against charges where there is evidence something is up? No.

What I am saying is that any normal parent will protect their kids.

I've noticed the effect too. My friends and family are all just glad Epstein got what was coming to him - blissfully ignorant of the rest of the conspirators who didn't.

It probably shouldn't be surprising that the good old fall guy spectacle works though - Lee Harvey Oswald was a resounding success.

> That must not get lost in all this.

I fear it will. so long as we keep being all confused between individual things (actions of persons) and systemic truths (actions of institutions). e.g. "Putin be Bad"... uhm, he's just the face of a large government.... he does not exist in isolation.

Huh? Was Hitler just the face of a large government? Like Hitler, Putin is directing the large government *that he controls* to commit horrendous war crimes.

Putin has spent over two decades building "the vertical of power" - he's at the top, and all the power goes through him. So, yes, he's the face. He's also the unquestioned decisionmaker. He does not exist in isolation - there are people who carry out his decisions - but they're his decisions.

yea, you (both replies to my comment) reinforce my point hahahha.

you are of the stance "there's no collective madness, just evil rulers"... it's naive

It’s both. Collective madness supports the ruler while the ruler cultivated collective madness. You don’t even have to look into the extremes to see this- both democrats with Biden and republicans with Trump are seeing complete unreality, while both rulers have taken well documented evil actions (mass murder, human rights violations, etc). Rulers can be evil while their supporters are also evil and insane as well.

Because it was Putin as an individual who made the key moves to remove democracy and install himself as the autocrat. Putin was not just a cog in the system. He was the central force making these intentional decisions that caused this outcome. If Putin didn't want to make Russia an autocracy, and instead he as an individual preferred democracy, then that's what would have happened.

1990s Russia is quite dissimilar to other situations in history where there isn't one person causing the outcome. For example, regarding Japanese history of 1930s/1940s, it was not one kingmaker, it was a long chain of events and decisions involving many people. Your thinking would be correct if applied here.

It's true, however, that Putin's moves wouldn't have been possible without the situation that he found himself in ... a weakened Yeltsin, dire economy, and nationalist sentiment after the apartment bombings. Putin capitalized on these things to get power. But once he was in power, it was mostly him.

Putin is a mafioso who happens to own a government, an army, and a secret police force. He's like Sinaloa but wildly more ambitious, with fingers in all kinds of enterprises, criminal and otherwise.

There is no chance he could have become president without the support of the Russian mafia, which is the biggest in the world.

It would be hugely surprising if he didn't owe some very unpleasant people - like Semion Mogilevich - for it.

Trump: steal money from tubes, tamper at will.

SBF: steal money from Wall Street, best not do anything

Good.

We need all crypto executives to begin sizing up jumpsuits for their role in creating unregulated crypto companies that do nothing other than scam people.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they still grind these scammers into jail. This is just the start.

It is not true that all crypto companies are scams, and especially not true that all crypto executives belong in jail.

What actual, not theoretical, uses of crypto, aside from unregulated speculation, do you believe are non-scam uses?

Buying drugs from the internet. Or are the kids not doing that anymore?

You don’t need crypto for this - I’ve got a friend that pays his plug on Venmo or CashApp just fine

Having something you can transact with and store value that isn't completely vulnerable to your government's monetary and foreign policy/capital controls

So... Crime?

You're describing "isn't touchable by laws". Which means crime.

Games, collectibles, lending, money markets, exclusive virtual clubs, international payments, trading are just a selection of activities I’ve personally engaged in on chain in ways I could not have off chain.

Also whether or not you like speculation, many people do and it’s not a crime.

I’ve done all of the above off chain; sorry to hear that you couldn’t.

Yes. So far, just for August:

"August 10, 2023 -- Bittrex settles with SEC for $24 million"

"August 7, 2023 -- Bitsonic CEO arrested for allegedly stealing $7.5 million"

"August 7, 2023 -- Rumors swirl that Huobi executives have been arrested, exchange is insolvent,"

"August 7, 2023 -- Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi raided by authorities"[1]

Crypto companies are running out of safe havens for unregulated activity. SBF was arrested in the Bahamas. Mainland China shut down most of the Bitcoin miners. Britain finally decided that the Financial Crimes Authority, not the Gambling Commission, had jurisdiction over crypto. The SEC and the CFTC stopped feuding and decided to just handle it as ordinary crime. Cyprus stopped being the safe haven for financial crime within the EU. There's still Bulgaria and Israel, and maybe Russia, but operating in those countries has its own problems.

[1] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Amazing how this libertarian, anarchistic, decentralised system has devolved into centralised exchange and corruption, and still without having any actual use or exchange value save for speculation.

Hong Kong lamentably revoked its prohibition of offering crypto to retail investors and is positioning itself as the place to be for virtual asset trading platform operators. :-/

https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2022/10/20221031/20221031_102428...

At some point it becomes fascinating to study what makes a person this smart (allegedly) so resistant to learning from a simple actions -> consequences chain of events. This guy is supposed to be good at logic? But then again, they had millions of dollars unaccounted for just sloshing around because "it's just how business works". So there is that.

Hubris. Nobody's immune to it, and being smart can make it worse as everyone around you reinforces it.

He’s just a sharp fool. It’s someone who is good at the kind of smarts that lets them multiply numbers quickly, and this has led them into a trap of believing that they are a genius who’s never wrong.

These people have very rigid mental models of the world, as they tend to not question their own understanding.

I will still be extremely surprised if the dude gets more than a 2-year open door no prison better than budget hotel prison sentence.

I wonder if the series of events will have any precedence or influence for other notable trials going on at the moment.

> Members of the press, including counsel for The New York Times and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, had filed letters objecting to Bankman-Fried’s detention, citing free speech concerns.

> The final straw, according to prosecutors, was Bankman-Fried leaking private diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to the New York Times. Ellison pleaded guilty to federal charges in Dec. 2022.

> The government added that Bankman-Fried had over 100 phone calls with one of the authors of the Times story prior to publication – many of which lasted for approximately 20 minutes.

It seems someone at The NY Times is very sympathetic to him.

> It seems someone at The NY Times is very sympathetic to him.

It's more likely (and all but certain) that persons involved with him or his ventures have meaningful influence at the NYT. Sympathy has little meaning in the presence of structural interests.

> "It seems someone at The NY Times is very sympathetic to him."

Has their coverage of him been positive? I've not read any of it so I don't have a clue, but in a hypothetical situation where you're a journalist at NYT who thinks he's a guilty & idiotic asshole, if he wanted to call you and start chatting away wouldn't you still take the calls and accept any documents he leaks to you despite not being sympathetic to him?

It feels like to make the claim in your last sentence you need to show one or more articles that paint him sympathetically since his arrest, not just the fact that one or more journalists haven't refused to speak with him?

Yes, very sympathetic IMO. Publishing parts of opposing witness Caroline's diary at his request, an act that was viewed as witness tampering [1].

Allowing him to speak at DealBook summit after he lost customer funds: "The DealBook Summit included Sam Bankman-Fried, who said he was “deeply sorry” about the collapse of FTX. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Andy Jassy and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine also spoke." [2]

In general you don't give a storytelling platform to your enemies. Ever seen a NYTimes article titled "Vladimir Putin: In His Own Words"?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/technology/ftx-caroline-e... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/technology/ftx-caroline-e...

> [Sam Trabucco] also writes crossword puzzles for The New York Times [0]

> US prosecutors have not said Trabucco was involved in any wrongdoing even as he worked in Alameda's C-suite with several execs who are now facing a slew of charges. [1]

hmm

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Trabucco

[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/meet-sam...

Writing some crossword puzzles for the Times is about the smallest quantum amount of "juice" a person could possibly have.

How does someone get such a job? It’s not like the nyt puts out an online app, screens thousands, then picks a random individual. It’s always going to be through personal networks.

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but the NYT crossword does in fact accept, use, and even encourage random people to submit crosswords.

I mean there's only like one person who has the job of "Crossword Making Guy" and it's Will Shortz, the crossword editor for the NYT.

If you want to get your crossword published by the NYTimes, all you have to do is write a good one and submit it.

I've met a guy who has a couple of crosswords published by them. He didn't have personal connections with anyone, he's not anyone special, he's a regular guy with a regular job. What did he have to do? He liked crosswords and tried writing them, then submitted them. They got accepted and published, that's it. There's no shadowy cabal of crossword writers secretly running the world.

The NYT keeps offering him rope in the form of a sympathetic ear, and SBF keeps hanging himself.

If the NYT is his friend, I would hate to see what his enemies have in mind for him.

He had also been using a VPN to "watch sports" but the VPN was registered and located in the Bahamas. And had tried to offer a witness a "bag of cash."

All perfectly ethical if it can reduce shrimp suffering on a population basis by getting him free and able to buy a tank and as many sea monkies as possible to provide positive micro utility to each and every one.

I never thought of it that way, but SBF is certainly mission-driven in some way. He even remembered to remove his shoe laces before the cops took him into custody.

Wait, doesn't using a VPN to watch sports imply that you are violating the terms of agreement for some website? Is that a reasonable argument you could make in a court?

> Wait, doesn't using a VPN to watch sports imply that you are violating the terms of agreement for some website?

No, unless the terms prohibit VPN use.

> Is that a reasonable argument you could make in a court?

Even if it were a civil offense against the website owner in question, yes, it would be a reasonable argument to make in court in a hearing over adherence to your bail conditions if it wasn't a violation of your bail conditions (which generally include “don’t commit any crimes” as well as any special conditions, but generally don't include “don’t commit any torts”.)

The judge cites this as a compelling reason to throw SBF in jail:

> Judge Kaplan: This defendant tries to go right up to the line - his use of the VPN to watch a football game over an account he wasn't authorized, there it is..

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/169008001856562790...

>it shows the mindset…

Ex-fucking-xactly.

The law is not code and judges ain’t linters. Playing the legal equivalent of ‘not touching you, can’t get mad’ and pushing the line when you are already being given a privilege of bail is a bad idea.

I don't think SBF ever offered a witness a "bag of cash".

The only reference to the phrase I can find is [1], where SBF's lawyer appears to be contrasting the case with another that has been submitted for reference/comparison:

[SBF's lawyer Mark] Cohen: In one of the cases, the defendant offered a bag of cash to the witness. We don't have that here.

[1] https://matthewrussellleeicp.substack.com/p/extra-bankman-fr...

This guy just keeps on giving. Incredible.

For those with questions about federal bonds, return of money etc. check this out:

https://twitter.com/al_mu7ami/status/1690124304447344641?s=2...

That says nothing about return of money, let alone cetera.

Never should have been allowed out. Absolutely braindead move from the judge.

Federal system presumes all individuals charged with a crime be out of custody.

This is the strangest story. Sam is clearly autistic, highly intelligent and was likely suffering form a variety of other maladies, many of them [I had thought] induced by massive overuse of stimulants. Either he is still abusing drugs or the delusions of grandeur / smarter than everyone else perception is just part of him.

As soon as the entire thing broke I expected him to be on a plane to Dubai like the 3AC founders. He didn't and kept insisting he could fix it. He was actively seeking to raise funds. It was baffling, who would give $ to someone that just liquidated billions? Why would he stick around? He likely has many millions hidden in a variety of wallets. I am not sure he fully understands what he has done and why it is wrong. This could be narccissm, could be something else. With that said, he broke a million laws and cost regular people billions. He probably needs to go to jail.

I always saw him, Vitalik and to a lesser extent Cobie [in a different way] and Hoskinson as part of the crypto brain trust. He was definitely the sketchiest of them though.

Based on some of his more candid interviews, especially ones shortly after the collapse, it seems SBF doesn't have much of a moral center. Whether or not he's also autistic, I can't say, but he clearly does consider himself to be superior to most everyone else, and his altruism was anything but sincere.

One example: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...

I'm open to the fact that he could very well be a psycho or socio path.

Highly intelligent? How?

He got into Jane street.

And he also got into jail for not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and may soon be getting into prison for being the ringleader in a highly unsophisticated ponzi scheme.

Intelligence 20, Wisdom 3.

Pretty good summary

but aren't intelligence and wisdom positively correlated?

This is why I’ be careful to say “analytically intelligent” in cases like this.

Didn't see much of that going on either where FTX was concerned.

He graduated from MIT with a degree in Physics and a minor in math. That's not nothing.

>This is the strangest story.

Not if you reject the premise that he's "highly intelligent", though this would mean questioning the hallowed Hacker News axiom of "rich = smart".

He graduated from MIT with a degree in Physics and a minor in math. That's not nothing. Then he built himself up to be the 41st richest American before the age of 30. That takes a certain type of intelligence, no matter what negative opinions we hold on the guy.

Clearly autistic? How did you come to this diagnosis?

Watch his interviews, he comes off as autistic to me. Open to the fact I could be wrong but he is definitely sitting on some sort of spectrum. I am willing to accept that it could also just be all the drugs he was on.

This wasn't his first round of meeting the judge about bail related violations too IIRC.

The thing with stupid people is they think everyone else is stupid except themselves.

A product of an environment of infinite entitlement. Maybe he has a Twinkie defense?

To be That Guy™, the Twinkie Defense isn’t just some dumb meme. It was literal defense used in double murder trial.

In 1978, San Francisco supervisor Dan White went into city hall and shot killed mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.

At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies. The jury ended up acquitting him of premeditated murder, and instead found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassina...

To be That Other Guy™, the problem with your contribution isn’t that it might be seen as pedantic, but that its also wrong.

> To be That Guy™, the Twinkie Defense isn’t just some dumb meme. It was literal defense used in double murder trial.

It is a dumb meme that has evolved around a misleading name a reporter gave to the defense at that trial, which has morphed into an myth about the nature of the defense that you now repeat as fact, despite linking sources explaining that it isn't.

> At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies.

No, he didn't, as your own first source notes. His recent switch from being a health food nut to eating junk food (the context in which Twinkies were incidentally mentioned) was brought up as one of several external behavioral indicia of the longer tern mental breakdown the defense claimed he was going through, not its cause. And that longer term breakdown was context for the acute break they (and the psychiatrists called as expert witnesses) claimed White experienced that was the center of the diminished capacity defense.

To be absolutely precise, the claim, as evinced by the diet of Twinkies, that he was depressed, was still an absolutely outrageous, abusive and mendacious justification for the premeditated homophobic murders that he committed in cold blood. But it is true that eating Twinkies was presented as the symptom not the cause.

(I'm familiar with the entire saga.)

TL;DR: There was no need to mention it if it wasn't relevant.

It was a doublespeak pathos appeal while simultaneously feigning apology and taking ownership in order to dodge around the requirements of 1st degree murder under then California law. The media made only a small reductionist mischaracterization of the defense's strategy apart from the truth of what it really was: a red herring and a canard misdirecting blame away from the hateful, agro murderer who got a 7 year slap (-2 years for good behavior) on the wrist and topped himself 2 years later.

California's legislature subsequently amended statutes to make it easier to get convictions for 1st degree murder as direct result of this case.

not exactly. This misinterpretation of what happened during the Dan White trial is all the fault of Paul Krassner

https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Myth-of-the-Twinkie-de...

A better summary is the defense presented an argument that Dan White was massively depressed (Vietnam combat vet, just lost his job), and eating massive amounts of Twinkies was 1 of the symptoms of his depression.

Dan White's lawyer appeared on an episode of Star Trek https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/11/us/melvin-belli-dies-at-8...

I think this would be more of an "affluenza" case.

Maybe he should try the the Naughton defence: Arrested for various "related to chatting up a child online and crossing state lines to meet up", his defence was that he was involved in role playing the life of a successful high flying executive, in other words, himself. It was at least persuasive enough to get him a hung jury, which is often as good as getting off entirely.

There was a 250M bond posted, IIRC - does this mean his guarantors lose the money?

Would they only lose the money if he fled and didn’t appear for court?

not if he shows up

I don't think so. He hasn't fled. The 250M is to make sure his butt shows up.

I may be wrong, but I believe that bail forfeiture would be a separate order from revocation/remand, with its own hearing. The summary of the revocation order (the full document isn't up yet on CourtListener) refers to remand to custody but not forfeiture.

I think it can occur for both failure to appear and other violations of bail conditions, but I don’t know, on practice, how common forfeiture is for violations of other bail conditions.

They only guaranteed the personal surety bond. No one put up any cash. There was no corporate surety bond imposed as a condition of release.

https://twitter.com/al_mu7ami/status/1690124304447344641?s=2...

So what's with $250m bail? Will the judge take it? Or only if he escapes?

1. There never was $250m.

2. Generally speaking, you only lose your bail money if you don't show up to court when a judge tells you to.

The 10% is non recoverable I believe. This means his parents essentially paid $25m to keep him out of jail for 6 months.

Courts seem to be getting somewhat tougher on white-collar crime.

- This.

- The Supreme Court just stopped the deal that would have let the Sackler family, the OxyContin pushers, off the hook personally.

- Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.

- Trump goes to trial, too.

2/4 of those aren't exactly as you're thinking of them.

> The Supreme Court just stopped the deal that would have let the Sackler family, the OxyContin pushers, off the hook personally.

Note, they didn't stop the deal. They temporarily paused it while they hear the case later this year. [0]

> Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.

Wasn't directly rejected, the judged asked questions which gave answers that hunters team felt they didn't agree to, including that he is still the subject of ongoing investigations. [1]

> At one point, Noreika asked whether the investigation was ongoing, to which Weiss responded that it was but said he could not share any further details.

> Noreika also raised a hypothetical, asking whether Biden could face charges of failing to register as a foreign agent and whether the agreement blocks his prosecution on such a charge. The defense said it believed the agreement would prohibit him from being charged, and the prosecution then disagreed.

> Clark was overheard telling a prosecutor, "Then we'll rip it up," most likely in a reference to the plea deal, as they discussed the disagreement during a brief break before he eventually relented.

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-set...

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/hunter-b...

> - The Supreme Court just stopped the deal that would have let the Sackler family, the OxyContin pushers, off the hook personally.

Paused, and is reviewing an appeal after a court approved the deal.

> - Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.

It wasn't really rejected, there was no deal at all. The two parties didn't have the same understanding of a key term of the deal, the judge pointed it out, and then the parties weren't able to agree on that term.

Happy to hear about the Sackler case, this is the first I've heard of that decision.

Just finished a couple shows about it. I wonder how much of Dopesick and Painkiller are true. If even 1/4 of it is, the entire family should be in prison for the rest of their lives, and that's being lenient.

> this is the first I've heard of that decision

That's because it's not true. The deal was not stopped. It was only delayed, but I wouldn't place blame on parent for getting this wrong; the media has done their best to imply otherwise.

If you're just speculating, it's useless. If you have info, then please share.

The order is here, issued yesterday (August 10): https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/081023zr1_98...

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and stayed the lower court order pending their own decision. What they agreed to hear:

    > The parties are directed to brief and argue the
    > following question: Whether the Bankruptcy Code authorizes a
    > court to approve, as part of a plan of reorganization under
    > Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, a release that extinguishes
    > claims held by nondebtors against nondebtor third parties,
    > without the claimants’ consent.

I think you can fairly describe this as the Supreme Court agreeing to scrutinize the Sackler bankruptcy deal, and it's possible they will end up throwing it out. But it's also possible they'll decide the opposite.

They've stopped the deal from going into effect, which is what I think what the previous poster meant.

You're right that they haven't thrown out the deal, but they've prevented it from going forward without further scrutiny as the Sacklers and their lobbyist thralls would have wanted.

Right, I know. My issue is/was the certainty with which we assume one outcome or another. It creates unnecessary drama. I think it's fair to lobby for one outcome vs. another, but complaining on some msg board does not serve that purpose. The only purpose it serves is creating some illusion or perception of some guaranteed outcome (when there is no guarantee, only probabilities). So, if one is inclined one should give money to lobbyists or pacs that can bring about the desired outcome instead of lamenting uselessly.

Pretty trivial web search: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/supreme-court-purdue-p...

The ruling class would love for you to think the supreme court stopped the Sackler deal but they absolutely did not. They only delayed it.

You might not be part of the ruling class. But you're definitely an élite

Sacklers aren’t even getting prosecuted even though their fraud is responsible for killing thousands of people. If we compare the amount of harm SBF did to society vs Sacklers, it isn’t even on the same scale.

Why do you say they're not getting prosecuted. The decision yesterday restores their exposure to prosecution.

Civil liabilities from victims only . It only restores their financial liability

There are no criminal case against Purdue officers.

Prosecution means criminal case by the government that unfortunately will never happen in here

Company pleaded guilty to three felonies but no officers/directors were ever charged.

No, it restores, for now, their exposure to civil liability.

Is that different than being prosecuted for such liability? (Not my field, so perhaps I have terminology wrong)

Yes.

Prosecute = criminal = prison

Sue = civil = damages (liability)

Edit: unless you are a pedantic ass. They use different definitions.

This is inaccurate; civil cases are also prosecuted. E.g., from the California Rules of Court, which defines a “civil case” by its prosecution:

"Civil case" means a case prosecuted by one party against another for the declaration, enforcement, or protection of a right or the redress or prevention of a wrong.

https://www.courts.ca.gov/cms/rules/index.cfm?title=one&link...

> killing thousands of people

Hundreds of thousands.

https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

I thought it was remarkable that Biden forgave millions and millions of dollars in student loan debt because the colleges were supposedly fraudulent but his DOJ didn’t see fit to file any charges.

My understanding is that SBF's bail was put up by his parents (pledging their home) and family friends, at and out of Stanford, who put up their own funds. What happens to that?

Presumably it gets returned once he is behind bars. I'm not an expert though.

It does get returned. The money is not a punishment, it's just to make sure he shows up when told to.

If he doesn't show.......

How did he get $250m for bail to begin with?

He didn't have to put up $250m, it was sufficient for family and associates to pledge their houses which are worth much less than that

Because bail numbers are fake. He put up a house and some other money but nowhere near $250M.

Incorrect. You don't understand the system. There is collateral posted against a bond for the full amount; if he skips town the people who posted bail collateral are responsible for the full amount, $250 million.

A bank wouldn't lend people money on those terms, why on earth should a judge?

If he doesn't have/can't borrow the full bail amount, I see no reason for him to be out on bail. Normal people don't get this kind of privilege.

Because we don’t have debtors prisons anymore ?[1].

A bank is private business they can choose how to go about their risk and reject anyone for any reason the criminal justice system needs to be fair to all the participants in it .

—-

[1] yes , there are plenty of people in jail only because they are unable to post bail or some other fees but that is not the same debtors prison

Because courts and bail bondsmen have lots of scope for chasing, catching and detaining people that aren't available to banks.

He didn’t.

The bail amount is the penalty for violation; while in the state systems it tends to have a simple mathematical relationship to the price the defendant pays for a bond (often regulated to around, or sometimes fixed at exactly, 10%), in the federal system it is more fluid.

His bail was secured by ~$4m in collateral. If he flees from trial, the people who bailed him out would be held legally responsible for the full $250m.

I'd love to see this clown destroyed

Wow quite a character.

Perhaps I shouldn't expect rational behavior from someone who ran a cryptocurrency exchange, but this decision is utterly bewildering: judges tends to take even the perception of witness intimidation seriously, and there's no light in which releasing someone's diary (versus than attempting to have it admitted as ordinary evidence) isn't meant to be intimidation.

But that was the whole logic of crypto.

"The USD is going to go to zero someday so I might as well steal everyone's USD today"

For real though. Give me all your soon-to-be-worthless real dollars in exchange for magic beans. But uh, if the beans are so good, why do you want my dollars?

He is an interesting person in that way. I've been casually analyzing the situation and his actions from a personality theory point of view.

It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend")

But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style.

That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way?

Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices.

He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out.

Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc.

His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck."

In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction.

(This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)

> It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere. He sees it more as a unique series of situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach.

This is a remarkably generous framing. Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?

> Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?

There were about 26 billion reasons for that, at one point.

e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it

Latin American cartel leaders have notched similar amounts of wealth, how do we evaluate them?

Well, we evaluate them rather differently than the Sackler family, that's for certain.

Ironic as they’re in the same line of work.

You have to be careful going down this path because, for example, there are people in USG carefully constructing and maintaining bridges (so to speak) with those people every day, and this has been true for at least 50+ years.

If you are looking for a stereotypical "bad person" example, IMO it's at least a good idea to have an accompanying "bad context" or "bad environment" condition, or your own assessment will tend to be full of ethical blind spots.

So was Ponzi an unrecognized genius instead of a fraudster? Money is not a high score in life, and money fraudulently stolen from others even less. This American logic of "guy stole so much money he is rich, lets treat him as better than others" is completely insane, and if you believe it, you deserve to get your money stolen by the SBFs of the world.

I didn't lose any money to SBF, or any other crypto schemes, for what it's worth.

Practically every fraudster or white collar criminal has gotten away with a pretty large sum of money right up until they haven't.

Every single one that caught is an idiot - they misunderstood the system they were trying to rip off, they misunderstood and/or didn't think through what checks and balances exist in the system to catch things after they happen. They are idiots.

> e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it

I mentioned the same thing, it doesn't seem to make any difference in situations involving extreme consumer-advocacy flex, I mean who are we to attempt to get two completely separate lines of thought to coexist ;-)

Remarkable generosity? Eh...to me that would imply giving to him this or that.

If literally describing how SBF's mind seems to work is "giving", then I have to say...

...damn you must judge people so hard. :D

"Generosity" in the context of arguments refers to excessive obeisance, not literally giving someone this or that.

> ...damn you must judge people so hard. :D

I'm advocating for not judging hundreds of thousands of people more harshly than you appear to judge SBF. Again: what makes him different?

> excessive obeisance

Eh, it's not excessive or obeisant. It's simply a straightforward commentary on how the guy seems to think.

Written in earnest, mind, for other community members, some of whom are awkwardly attempting to Judge-Judy their way through the situation.

What does that really contribute, all the commentary on how evil this person is?

Is it supposed to _not_ look like projecting? Eh...I don't think that's working too well. And the news headlines do a way better job anyway.

> I'm advocating for not judging hundreds of thousands of people more harshly than you appear to judge SBF. Again: what makes him different?

This doesn't make sense.

Also, give me someone to compare him to if you are looking for comparative logic. Otherwise do the comparison yourself, it's clearly not that kind of comment.

If you think he's not different because you think just like he does, then you may have an everybody-thinks-like-me problem.

I don't think you need eight move look-ahead to know you should obey the law or else you will go to jail.

Legal scholars aren't in agreement about everything... but knowing the state of the field deeply does protect them from making more obvious legal mistakes, or whatever he's been doing.

You are being overly generous here, he's the son of law professors, ignorance is not a defence for him.

Alternatively, his ego is too big for his own good. Intelligence without experience combined with a large ego can present as stupidity to onlookers. A little bit of wisdom would have done him a lot of good.

Too bad that impeccable puzzler’s logic led him to defraud people out of billions and to confess to doing so repeatedly and in real time after he had been apprehended for doing so.

Oh well, hate the puzzle, not the puzzler.

My guess vis-a-vis the morality is that he naturally ignores it. Try being hardcore logical (not just rational, but like A + B = B + A stepwise logical) and hardcore moral at the same time, you'll be torn forever. And if you don't naturally learn a sort of turn-taking approach for those modes via your upbringing, good luck learning it later.

Unfortunately, ignoring moral perspectives & decision points is effectively the same as "being without morals". And I really mean unfortunately--this is a problem for all of humanity and we keep looking for individual evil scapegoats, but eventually we need to reconcile this.

In practice there's also this extra innovator's dilemma: Yield to known industry practice and reap ethical rewards as a natural part of the process, or lean into the novelty & growth curve and possibly reinvent huge swaths of custom, ethic, and morality which were previously vague.

I don't think people appreciate how close we've come to that happening at various points in history, and to what degree.

If you do take that second path, almost by definition you immediately blind yourself to huge swaths of moral decisionmaking. This is more especially true if you are forced to look at your customers as "audiences" or similar groups.

These groups are effectively perceived at higher levels as cohesive organisms. Groups are known to demonstrate a more primitive subjective morality than most any individual (i.e. individiuals may be smart, humans in large groups not so much), and this can greatly restrict a founder's own willingness to address morality-related issues by more than a couple inches, so to speak, here or there.

I think most any business owner probably understands this view, though in the context of this huge story I'm sure it wouldn't be easy to admit.

But you are right that in terms of individual human perception, the puzzle _must_ be solved, and often in a very subjective manner no matter what resources may be available. That's a huge issue.

There’s no inherent conflict between morality and logic. Even with the vaguer definitions you seem to be using related to business processes, running a business that others (customers, regulators, outsiders) view as morally clean will always provide advantages over one that isn’t perceived that way.

You're referring to big-picture practices and conflicts, which are different.

Also, think about businesses where morality simply isn't a day to day concern of customers, not because they are rotten customers, but because their set of concerns is another facet of the benefit spectrum. "I am their customer because of X and Y." Not _your_ X and Y, but theirs.

In that light, perhaps you can see how much of a blind-spot crutch it can be to end up defending morality as a kind of forced issue by dint of your own subjective focus, which while commendable, isn't the point here.

It's an issue of what else there is.

This is also probably very difficult to understand if you yourself naturally focus extremely hard on giving a clean deal to your customers. As is common in that mindset, maybe you often find yourself the martyr, taking a loss here or there to quietly test your own generosity in that way, for example. Or maybe you enjoy mentally pairing yourself with "good people", those you rate via your conduct system as individuals with whom you feel more free to conduct the generous business that makes you see the world in a better light.

In such a case, of course you have a good argument for branding around that personality facet.

And at the same time, you are still way different from a lot of other businesses...

...which from even this beneficial-morality lens can't be said to come out the worse by some basic psychological calculus. "Be like me" still isn't a fair business assessment tool.

(I know it can be a bit of a frustrating heartbreak to have access to those morality tools, and enjoy demonstrating that benefit in a crooked world...and then hear that a successful business can focus on entirely different facets and psychological processes without cheating their customers...)

It’s certainly true that branding as morally pure isn’t usual beneficial, but even businesses that brand themselves as sinful or evil have internal processes to maintain moral principles. Often to a greater extent than non profits that are selling morality. An example: casinos request regulation to enforce rules about payout odds, while unregulated casinos create mathematical proofs that their outcomes are honest. They also often run programs to provide assistance to customers suffering from gambling addiction. These actions aren’t because casinos are “pure” or making sacrifices; it’s because the expected payouts to the owners are higher by enforcing these processes.

It’s also important to remember that customers are not the only agents that matter to an entity’s survival. Public opinion, regulators, employees, shareholders, etc also matter. One instance of this in crypto is the lack of assassination markets. There’s been theoretical work on how to build anonymous assassin markets since the early 90s but no one has done it even though there’s proven customer demand. Why? Because for someone with the ability to build such a market, there exist better options that have higher payouts due to lower regulatory enforcement, easier access to capital, cheaper labour, etc. Again being “pure” has nothing to do with it since people with those skills do build dark net markets that sell other illicit services which are viewed as not really wrong by a large percentage of the population and as less severe to regulators than assassins.

Have you watched _Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery_ ? Is it possible SBF is actually quite stupid, except perhaps for some cleverness with math?

Stupid is generally part of every personality. :-)

It's the issue of "which sets of perspectives have you basically ignored all your life, which are also relevant right here, now" that tends to make a person appear stupid in a given context.

It's simpler than that. He's a trust fund kid with wealthy, well-connected parents who assumes nothing bad will happen to him so does whatever he wants. He's also of above average intelligence enough and enjoys "flexing" that intelligence in the avenues he thinks will benefit him most.

This, except that I haven't seen any serious reason to believe that he's unusually intelligent. He certainly thinks he is, though.

IDK if simplicity is really the go-to judgment process for learning from people like this. I mean if you really want to chase that argument--it's simpler than even that. He's human! Therefore he does stupid human things. He's only human after all! (ad infinitum)

Imagine though, if SBF had a reasonable, nuanced opportunity to understand his blind spots long before he got into business.

I've coached people who think just like SBF, discussed the same blind spots, and most of those people were grateful to reach a new understanding. But you'd never get that far if you said, "you have the mindset of a trust fund kid, end of story."

So, that's definitely a thing, to be able to un-simplify a broad generalization, and turn that into problem-solving leverage where others may fear to wade into details.

Or he's just a narcissist and because everyone has told him he's the smartest person in the world, he has no appreciation of the limits of his knowledge and at this point he simply can't see it.

What are the first principles here?

Your post seems like a pretty long winded way of saying he is a fool. It's not hard to understand that when you are facing a federal criminal trial, you shouldn't make the judge mad.

> What are the first principles here?

One of his first principles might have been (example):

"Leaks really work well. I leaked some stuff, it got me good results, and so logically this path is open to me for problem-solving."

This is how subjective logic works for millions of people every day.

Obviously to you and others, if you don't combine that with some wisdom and foresight derived from broader knowledge on the context in question, it might backfire.

But what happens next is probably this: He'll stay in the game and adjust his subjective logical foundations.

"Leaks can also be very risky AND therefore..."

That's a huge difference between him and other people, he is a speculative theorist by nature. Even now he probably won't discard leaking out of hand.

It's not a life lesson about leaking for someone like that, it's a lesson with specific parameters in a specific context.

Is he reinventing the "leaking" wheel in a dumb way? Possibly. But, he's also making the logic his own, which is extremely powerful as experience accrues.

Especially if it turns out that leaking is basically an art one can master, he could probably find a way to master it, because there's no big-picture roadblock in his mind that says "leaking private info to help your case is bad, the end". This is not nuanced enough, i.e. smart enough, for the way his logic operates.

Since he is amenable to working with details, his thinking style has strong long-term flexibility and leverage advantages. Even if it fails hard sometimes.

Just for illustration purposes though. And, once again, I'm not here to talk about his moral character. I also do not believe that he's consciously choosing how to use his personality characteristics. He's working naturally with what he's got, these comfortable, reinforced patterns of good, bad, and everything in between.

SBF: needlessly gets himself thrown in jail

Galaxy Brains: Masterful gambit, sir

It’s the same energy that sees an obvious Musk adderall no sleep for days ridden emotional decisional fuck up and strokes their chin mumbling something about 4D chess.

As a lawyer, I feel like the slightest bit of legal knowledge makes this even more baffling. The answer to most questions is "it depends", but the answer about doing anything concerning a witness against you in a trial is "heck no".

There's no logical reason to do this. I think the answer is that no matter how smart he may be in some areas, he has emotions like anyone else which sometimes lead him to do stupid things. I think many of his decisions are also rooted in a copious amount of pride which leads him to think he will get away with anything.

(As a guy who has fired legal counsel for huge and obvious ethical breaches, IDK if that first line does what you think it does :-))

> There's no logical reason to do this.

Given your experience IOW. Given his lack of it, there absolutely can be. Again, it's contextual, subjective logic he's working with. Not broad experience or broad knowledge of legal affairs. The comparative strengths are there in both cases, but completely different.

This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded. He's the classic irrational actor.

> This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded.

And one of whose first acts as things broke was to publicly fire his lawyers for telling him to shut up about it instead of digging his own grave with social media posts.

rational behavior

He's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Rational for him may be much different than you or I can comprehend?

He just borrowed from depositors until he was sufficiently leveraged for his personal risk tolerance.

This is the man who said he was willing to bet the destruction of the world against a 51% chance of the world being duplicated, leading to a (under certain questionable population ethics calculations) doubling of total utility.

His risk tolerance is either infinite or, more likely, he doesn't have a clue what it is so he treats it as infinite.

It's a meme. On WallStreetBets, /u/ControlTheNarrative found a "trick" to borrow $50k from Robinhood and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational ("I repeat this until I am sufficiently leveraged for my Personal Risk Tolerance.") I am making a comparison to SBF, who found a "trick" to borrow almost a million times as much from investors and depositors and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational.

He has publicly stated that his philosophy was ignoring risk completely in pursuit of the best expected value. (Whether becauae its true, or because it was a forn of attention-seeking edgy rationalism, or what...)

No judge is or has taken Trump's witness tampering seriously.

Chutkan seems to be taking his potential witness tampering within the scope of the case assigned to her seriously.

checks he is still not in jail after that "IF YOU COME AFTER ME I COME AFTER YOU" tweet.

Because it's vague and no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed. It could be interpreted to mean anything about anyone anytime. I agree that it was a veiled threat, but consider the court's prompt and decisive response to the protective order request before going into snark mode.

To be sure, Trump's own counsel adheres to an entirely different standard than that which they seek for their client, arguing in one brief that a meme tweet of a smug Joe Biden sipping coffee and saying he likes his dark was evidence that the current administration is out to get the defendant.

> no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed

This is mixing up different things.

The protective order is about disclosing information obtained from discovery provided by the prosecution. No one is arguing that the tweet above was contempt of court for violating the protective order. As you note, it was written before the protective order was in place, but also obviously before they obtained discovery from the prosecution. So he was incapable of leaking anything from the discovery at that point in time.

The complaint about witness tampering or intimidation doesn’t stem from the protective order. Rather, it was a condition of his release after the arraignment, which did happen before that tweet. Witness intimidation is actually a violation of federal statute (18 USC S 1512), so is _always_ not allowed, regardless of the timing of any instructions or orders from the judge.

And the fact that its one Tweet with no specific target or concrete threat without any additional evidence supporting it being witness tampering that has yet been offered (usually, it would be the prosecution that would seek bail revocation, if the conditions are violated, and the judge would hold a hearing for evidence, etc., if necessary.) Its not specific, and directed at a particular witness the way SBF’s actions were, you'd need some kind of more extended pattern or additional evidence to meet the probable cause threshold.

House arrest? Multiple friends of mine have reported spotting him at SFO over the last few months.

Here's a video from someone (who I don't know) from late March: https://twitter.com/sidtriv/status/1641641533240905728

He was permitted to travel to New York under the terms of his bail to meet with lawyers.

FTX advertised on fortune cookies at my local Chinese takeout restaurant. I'm not sure what else needs to be said.

I have one that has the FTX ad on one side and on the other side says "In hindsight, it was inevitable."

The fortune cookies tried to warn you!

Didn't Larry David appear in a FTX commercial and in the commercial famously didn't buy into what they were selling?

Aha! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWMnbJJpeZc&ab_channel=TheWo...

i know it's been said before but why did anyone ever think this guy was responsible enough to handle all that fucking "money"

He stood on stage with all the right people said all the right shibboleths!

should have been a politician!

and critically had the right background.

Well-spoken and connected dude with MIT and Jane Street on his resume

Talking to Jim Cramer on CNBC with 8 computer monitors behind him. Super articulate kid who got in with the right crowd.

A high charisma stat can get you far until someone calls your bluff and you actually have to fight and know stuff.

Appropriate, given the recent release of Baldurs Gate 3! Bravo for the comment.

But he knows his stuff, he's unethical and deliberately negligent, not incompetent.

Then why’s he behaving with such incompetence throughout this entire prosecution?

He's technically competent. But he also seems to think the entire world works like computers do.

Same reason he sucks at League, he isn't good at everything.

> Talking to Jim Cramer

Talking to TV-personality and confidence man who made up his successful trading record should not result more credibility, but less.

The rise of Jim Cramer absolutely baffles me. His RoR is freakishly low - I have a savings account (with government backed deposit insurance) that performs roughly as well as his choices. The rational play is to ignore him. But for some reason, dude has become something of a shitty king maker.

I’m trying to make a joke about putting cats like SBF on the throne in an outhouse but can’t pull anything together.

There’s a fund that does the exact opposite of what he shills and it does pretty well iirc.

Inverse Cramer

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/sjim

Except there are thousands (at least) of people in that set.

You're not doing his cult of personality operation justice.

Cult of personality and appetite for risk, legal or not

The same puzzle-crunching brain looked good on the way up. It's like The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

well-connected and lack of ethics allowed him to build up a reputation and take risks that others wouldn't. He basically a mix of Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes, everybody loves hyping up a young prodigy type

Mix in right place, right time plus a bunch of amphetamines and you have your answer.

I figure the people giving him their money were just betting they were in at the relative top of the Ponzi. Everyone knows these are scams, they're just hoping to hit the jackpot and drop the bag on some other sucker before it all falls apart.

For the same reason morally bankrupt people are elected in politics, or in any leadership role. Connections, charisma, money, power, lies, and the willingness of people to believe and follow them blindly, or the desire to join them on the ride.

I remember seeing an interview and I thought how creepy he came across.

What happened to the theory that he'd never be jailed? The expert analysts were so confident.

if he wasn’t an idiot he wouldn’t have been, cant control stupid

unless the theory was about collusion in the executive branch and white house, then you still have an independent judiciary

Same thing that happened with the expert analysis of LK99. It turns out that the real experts tend to be quieter.

In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages.

Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.

I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out.

There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is.

I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much.

Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.

>even people in fields associated with better logic

This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system.

Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript.

The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you

I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason?

Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true.

So... what's the point of your snide comment?

I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely.

As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.

To be fair, prosecutors were trying hard to keep him out of it.

It's certainly true that prosecutors love when defendants keep talking publicly about the case. It makes their job much easier.

The people saying that were presumably making predictions about whether or not he'd be found guilty with a jail sentence (which hasn't yet happened), not that if he does something as stupid as witness tampering he wouldn't have his bail revoked (which is what has happened).

Personally I always thought it extremely likely he would get a prison sentence, but I think you're being premature to act like people who didn't think that have already been proven wrong.

If he really owned the entire judiciary of the US and Bahamas his bail wouldn't have been revoked.

Honestly, it sounds like his influence absolutely helped him get cushy terms of release. It was just after _repeated_ and _willful_ violations of the conditions of bail, that it was revoked. This was not his first run-in with the judge over his bail conditions, it's wild that he was allowed more.

What are you comparing it to? There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. I am curious what are the normal thresholds before you get bail revoked.

> There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail.

The Other Guy has the sense to do vague and diffuse public messaging that (so far, without more of a pattern or additional acts) that has still gotten him warned about continuing it.

I think you missed the threads they're referencing. I see from your other comments you think there's a lot of hot takes in this thread. The threads around the time he was charged were full of nuclear takes about how the justice system was broken, how every minor development in the case meant he would get off scott free, etc. It also brought the antisemites of HN out of the woodwork to share conspiracy theories (given that SBF is a Jewish person who committed a financial crime). They were the roughest threads on HN I had seen at the time. (There were still good, insightful comments, but they were diamonds in the rough.)

This is more or less an injoke. I completely see where they're coming from.

You're forgetting how "He donated to democrats so he'll get off scott free"

Yeah, stupidest hot-take I ever saw in this case.

No politician will stick their neck out for someone based on past donations if:

1. There is little hope for future money

2. The donor is universally reviled

If anything, that donation history made the recipients even more likely to turn on him. They must distance themselves.

There is time when you cut your useful idiots loose. And when they have run out of money, or you can make example of them makes perfect sense.

The opinion that I believe s most close to the truth re: favors for donations, is that politicians value constancy and dependability more than short term cash injections. One needs to be playing the game for decades before you can start earning 'get out of jail' type favors.

People who were arguing that then probably now would argue that the politicians found a workaround: just having him not charged for bribery and campaign finance crimes. No need to investigate the recipients if the alleged crime is ignored!

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/prosecutors-drop-another-cha...

Keeping up to date with the news can be challenging I guess. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/08/sam-bankman-fried...

Isn't that limited to the small portion of funding that was via straw payments, as the extradition terms allows money laundering charges?

Both articles seem to be in agreement that the campaign finance charges are being dropped because of the extradition treaty with the Bahamas. The second article indicates that the government intends to work around that limitation by charging it as wire fraud. From my perspective that kind of workaround seems like overzealous prosecution, not deliberate under-prosecution as the GP poster implies. But what do I know.

Staying in the Bahamas after the thing blew up but before institutions started to spin their wheels was not the wisest choice a man could make. If he acted faster he could have pulled a Jho Law.

There is no chance that he doesn't spend a large part of the rest of his life in prison. The crimes and financial amounts mean 30+ in federal jail.

Quit frankly, if SBF would keep his darn mouth shut and stop doing completely irrational stupid things - he probably would remain out on bail at least until his trial.

He's become his own worst enemy it seems.

if he thought the leak will help his defense then it's not irrational at all, even if he has to pay for it now

It's irrational in that his defense was mostly he was in easy over his head and had no intention of defrauding anyone. His actions are making that angle impossible.

being in over his head while being "manipulated by an evil ex" still sound pretty rational. pretty desperate, but not too inconsistent at least.

The problem is the Court of Public Opinion matters not one bit.

His attorney's could have spun that defense in court. What was there to be gained by his actions? Nothing... in fact, it appears it only served to make his situation worse.

It appears to be an exceedingly myopic decision: Preparing for trial at home instead of in confinement would be far more beneficial to his defense groundwork.

well if they bet the farm on "blaming the ex"... who knows?

That would be an incredibly shortsighted legal strategy given the trial hasn’t begun.

Far more likely is he feels a compulsive need to “clear the air” and has zero clue that it’s extremely damaging to his legal defense.

“Shut the fuck up” is literally the best advice any defense lawyer gives.

It’s embarassing just how often it’s ignored.

Running a large fraud for a long time is a pretty stupid thing. He’s just being called stupid instead of a genius now that people have more context into his dealings.

He's mostly being called stupid for his activities after his fraud was uncovered.

He just can't seem to shut up.

>have more context into his dealings.

More like, now that he isn't making a profit.

Problem is, the personality traits that lead people to commit crimes in the first place are the same personality traits that lead people to eviscerate their own defense. The unfortunate truth is that most people who have the self-control to engender the best possible outcome for their case don't find themselves in court to begin with.

This is entirely a self-own, because he was trying to intimidate a witness.

If SBF had done the "normal" white collar criminal move of hiring a really expensive team of lawyers and doing what they told him, he'd be free as a bird.

But I guess SBF isn't your "normal" white collar criminal - he's a special kind of stupid.

Your honour, only a truly innocent man, panicking, afraid, would act so absurdly!

He’s Stanford special

He attended MIT.

SBF is just the fall guy. They always catch the one who took it just a little too far in order to placate the masses and pretend that someone is policing the stock markets.

For the record the guy is guilty as sin but so is everyone in crypto.

Do you seriously believe everyone who use’s cryptocurrency is a fraudster? Your claim is ridiculous, in the USA alone over 34 million people own cryptocurrency and approximately zero of them have stolen billion of dollars of assets.

Some people conflate cynicism with wisdom.

Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial.

I think a lot of people still predict that he will be set free from any wrongdoing after the trial because of his massive donations and money laundering for the political class.

>Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial.

SBF is going to prison.

What does he have left to exchange? He has no friends but his parents (who will most likely end up indicted as well from the looks of it).

The feds will hang him up high as an example of doing something, while Goldman and BofA get rich on the exact same market.

By “expert analysts” did you perhaps mean “random Internet conspiracy theorists”?

His level of stupidity has been shocking even to people who has a low opinion of his competence. Contrast his case with Do Kwon, and you can see why people thought he would escape imprisonment.

This guy is going to jail for at least 20 years. He knows it too, and is doing crazy stuff because that’s all he has left. He is going to sell his life story to the highest bidder and set up a Twitter handle where he can post via snail mail like Ross Ulbricht. SBF is a total piece of shit and deserves whatever he gets.

I have this (unresearched) hypothesis that people who enjoy having a lot of control will do anything they can to continue to behave that way. Even if you’ve taken away all the levers except the one labelled “kick self in the groin” they will pull it.

I anticipate the former president doing this a lot in the next year. Any time the right move is to do nothing, he will find a way to do literally anything.

I don't know that you need the condition "people who enjoy having a lot of control" -- having other people or forces take control of your life is a hard situation for almost anyone. People respond as you say-- if hurting themselves is the lever they have left, they'll often pull it. And sometimes that means "hurting" in a very literal sense, like cutting themselves.

You're describing a dysfunction of the dopamine system

You can see it in people with unmedicated ADHD for instance, who prefer the stimulation of something toxic (a fight, drama, etc.) To boredom, even fully aware of the consequences of starting a fight.

>The government requested that Bankman-Fried be remanded to a jail in Putnam, New York, where he’d have access to a laptop with internet access for defense preparation, as opposed to sending him to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, the facility closest to the courthouse that has limited internet access for prisoners.

It's a lucky thing that the other low-profile prisoners in the Metropolitan Detention Center have no need to prepare their defenses.

Even as he violates the conditions of his bail and gets thrown in jail, his privilege persists.

Lucky indeed. Spent 8 weeks there.

It does something to you when it's July 4th and you look upon the Statue of Liberty, who is looking past you, through a federal detention window.

Can’t imagine. Bad enough having to see it from NY or NJ.

Ah the old switch-a-roo...

Sorry to hear that. Curious what the situation was if you’re comfortable sharing

Messaged you.

SBF's lawyers sent the judge a document authored by a person who works at the detention center stating how the conditions were very poor. Not good enough for SBF apparently. There is some strange irony in being detained for alleged wire fraud and then demanding access to the internet.

Here it is

https://ia601508.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.5...

Do I get it right that all SBF had to do to stay out of jail (at least until trial) is exactly nothing, and he still failed at that?

Yes, surprisingly. He had fairly strict communications restrictions as part of his bail deal, only to harass a witness indirectly in the press in some of the few ways left he could contact the outside world.

*unsurprisingly

The dude is not a textbook narcissist, and if he's a sociopath he does a very good job of hiding it, but his grandiosity and self-certainty is off-the-scale. This is exactly what people like him (self-myth-believers) do.

Yes, for whatever reason he went on clubhouse and started explaining his side of the story. That’s a nightmare for most lawyers.

Doing nothing is very hard for most people. Doing nothing takes discipline!

He's an entitled psychopath with two Stanford law professor parents. I'd say he's been getting away with things this whole life and doesn't feel the need to stop now. Maybe reality will catch up with him when the sentencing happens

We all know where this is heading. Just let him go already.

That was quick. Imagine he was a politician (or a son of a politician... looking at you, Hunter Biden). That would take another several years of investigation and then he'd be let go.

What a headline, I literally LOL'd.

Weirdly I think he's trying to protect her from a harsher sentence now that they're both fucked.

Just because she fully cooperated and tells a sad story doesn't mean she isn't guilty.

I'm pretty sure he's trying to ruin her career for good, ala "scorched earth strategy." She admits in her diary that she feels incompetent for leadership, having a natural tendency to defer.. etc. Now no firm will ever think about hiring her in an important position.

What hypothetical firm would say, "she pleaded guilty to multiple felony fraud charges, but hey, let's give her a chance anyway. Wait, what's this? She wrote in her diary that she has doubts about her leadership ability? Never mind!"

I'm pretty sure that part of her plea bargain with the SEC charges will be a lifetime ban from the financial industry and its unlikely any other major company would hire her either.

I think the best path forward is probably memoir and the redemption story circuit and maybe some kind of fraudster turned consultant gig. I'm sure there are already agents trying to get her to auction TV and Film rights to her side of the story.

> "fraudster turned consultant gig"

This is exactly what I meant and it happens too often. If she doesn't serve much if any time for this, she continues her career as an "expert" and that's not enough of a punishment. She's just as guilty as Sam Bankman-Fried. That she cooperated is irrelevant. That she plays dumb should make it worse for her. She will not be sentenced until the investigation is completed and her cooperation is no longer required. I'm hoping they make the right call and give her at least the same as him.

Are you even a leader in fintech if you’ve done zero crimes?

Martin Shkreli comes to mind. I think he joined a large company's advisory team even after the uproar, but before his conviction. If you have the intellectual chops and enough charisma I don't think the finance world cares that much. Probably because cheating is commonplace in finance.

>Weirdly I think he's trying to protect her from a harsher sentence now that they're both fucked.

You do realize that Caroline Ellison has already pled guilty[0] and worked out a deal with Federal prosecutors, yes?

Releasing her diary won't change that plea or the deal she made with prosecutors.

As such, I'm not clear how SBF doing so will make any difference whatever for her. If you'd expand on that, I'd be much obliged.

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/sam-bankman-frieds-girlfriend-ftx-...

[flagged]

So the "probable cause" is that SBF is meeting with journalists and sharing evidence that might bring into question the credibility of the prosecution's star witness? Hmm I thought witness tampering was more serious like trying to pay the witness off or making false accusations or intimidating them something.

I mean all this guy's co-conspirators have been bought off by the prosecution to testify against him. I can't help but feel like his action's are at least understandable. Unless he's supposed to save all his ammo for the actual court case and attack the credibility directly there. I'm obviously not a lawyer but I didn't realize such subtle actions were considered witness tampering... wouldn't we want to know all the details about a witness? If there's real reason to be worried about someone's credibility wouldn't we want to know about it?

Without knowing better, I'd probably be fighting tooth and nail in whatever way possible to not by martyred alone while my co-conspirators walk with a slap on the wrist because that's how criminal justice works, whether I deserved it or not.

EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not making any statement as to whether I agree or disagree with SBF or whatnot. I am just trying to understand what actually happened here and surprised that speaking with journalists falls under witness tampering. TIL.

I don't feel strongly on this, but you could read it as an intimidation tactic: I have so much over you that I can print your diaries in the NYT... just see what I have in my pocket if you really cross me.

> Unless he's supposed to save all his ammo for the actual court case and attack the credibility directly there.

Yes, that is how he could attack the credibility of a witness without ending up in hot water. He would have to introduce it into evidence, and hazard the court rejecting it. If it was accepted, then yeah, they could tell the jury about Ellison feeling like she may not be cut out the run Alameda (for all the good that would do, I suspect not very much).

If you try to bypass this process unilaterally, then the court isn't going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

I wouldn't normally approve of anyone writing this sort of comment, but fuck it:

Do not bother reading comments in this thread.

The hot takes are already ridiculous, and I honestly don't know why I either bothered to start reading, nor why I bothered to point out the flaws in 4 different comments already.

I can't actually imagine what interesting things could be commented about it at this time that isn't just rehashing people's opinions of him that've been said a thousand times already, so I'm closing the thread and won't be coming back to read the inevitable 1000 comments that are coming.

I'm just leaving this comment here in the hope that, if others agree enough to upvote it, maybe some of you will be spared wasting time like I just have.

> The hot takes are already ridiculous, and I honestly don't know why I either bothered to start reading

The ridiculous hot takes are why I start reading!

That's fair enough, enjoy!

Come back when this thread has 1000 comments and the "more" link after the first thread.

Hint: it's often a good idea to use something like hckrnews.com to read stories after a significant delay. That gives time for the middlebrow comments[1] that shoot quickly to the top some time to get rebutted and sink.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224

I think the standard way our justice system treats defending yourself publicly as witness intimidation is faulty. In the previous instance, his talking to journalists should be protected first amendment activities. And then later, with the diary, I don't think his intent was to intimidate her or to change her testimony, but rather to defend himself to the public. I don't think those two things are the same.

On the other hand, I'm very open to the idea that stealing someone's diary and publishing it is itself illegal. I'd want to know more there. Also, what I personally believe to be an overly-expansive definition of witness intimidation is pretty standard and he should be held to the same rules as others. So while I think the justice system generally needs to change on this, I think the judge is correctly applying the normal practice here as they would to anybody else.

> I don't think his intent was to intimidate her

It doesn't matter what the intent is. She's a witness and trying to pull this shit is a huge no-no, as the judge rightly ruled. He should have known better.

Your response doesn't contradict anything I wrote. I wrote that the judge was correct in sending him to jail for witness intimidation because they should apply the same standard they do in every other case. I just don't like the standard!

Edit: Quick correction. I suppose your first sentence does disagree with my view on whether intent matters. But I'm pretty sure "intent" shows up in the statute. You also seem to disagree with the prosecutor who argued that intent DOES matter and that his intent here was to intimidate the witness.

You don't have the right to defend yourself in public while awaiting trial. He doesn't even have the right to leave his house; the idea that his speech can't be restrained is fantasy.

I of course didn't argue that his speech can't be restrained. I think there are limits, as you do. We just disagree over where the line should be drawn. Certainly you agree he has some right to talk about the case, when it's not witness intimidation, right?

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