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.
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.
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"...
A quiet but apparently amicable distancing may be the most someone feels safe doing.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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@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.
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I cant believe I have to outline this for some....
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.
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.
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.
OK - WTF?
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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??
"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
Is it of value for you to link to something important? Lacking information on this.
Thanks
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?)
What I am saying is that any normal parent will protect their kids.
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 probably shouldn't be surprising that the good old fall guy spectacle works though - Lee Harvey Oswald was a resounding success.
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?
SBF: steal money from Wall Street, best not do anything
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.
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.
you are of the stance "there's no collective madness, just evil rulers"... it's naive
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.