pearjuice

What I still do not understand is why the whole SVB episode isn't a bailout and didn't just introduce much more risk into the system. Yes, the stock went to 0 and investors did not get compensated (if they didn't already cash out when they saw it coming due to inside information) but the gaping hole in the books was filled due to government intervention and explicitly lifting the 250K FDIC limit.

Why would any bank look at SVB and NOT think "oh, time to take more risk for more profit; the government will prop up the FDIC limit if we fail anyway". Saying that taxpayers won't pay for this is a joke too. The burden of filling the insurance gap won't come out of the pocket of other banks or their shareholders. Even though the FDIC receives no federal funding on paper, they seem to be fully invested in treasury securities and can borrow directly from the treasury, against rates not available to the common Joe. It's a perverse relation which the taxpayer contributes to.

This comes after news that there were "material weaknesses" found in their financial reporting the last few years. They also failed to "design and maintain an effective risk assessment process to identify and analyze the risk of material misstatements". Finishing it off with massive outflows of customer funds - larger than anticipated - which has "exacerbated and may continue to exacerbate liquidity risk". Will they survive?

(source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/credit-suisse-finds-material...)

Who would have thought people would be having more fate in synthetic dollars of which the backing value is a total mystery or outright fraud than synthetic dollars backed by actual dollars stored in regulated American banks. This Monday is going to be interesting.

Appreciate the honesty and transparency but sadly VC isn't chasing the profits from being a cloud- or app-server-provider. Looking at the profiles of the VCs which participated in funding rounds, most of them are exit-oriented. A16z's portfolio proudly opens with "exits". Intel Capital is also very proud of their ~50% IPO or acquisition stat. Hopefully you can work on Fly forever but history has learned that probably won't be the case - and that's not judgemental.

The only problem I have with Fly is that it is VC backed. It's receiving a lot of developer love now, but wonder what happens when it eventually gets acquired by a behemoth in a few years and the same fate as Heroku is bestowed upon it.

It seems to me that after web3 collapsed, VC is looking for a new balloon to pump and cash out on.

Construction scams? More like government approved construction scams. In recent years, the Turkish government issued many exemptions for projects that were built or expanded in violation of the official buidling rules. For a small fine (which yielded the treasury almost three billion euros) they could do whatever they wanted, going against all requirements and obligations for safe building which is nature-disaster resistant.

Setting up an automated paywall hosting system using a third party payment provider is honestly a minefield waiting to explode. The business owner knew this:

>Over time, this set up proved risky with legal liabilities. So last year I migrated to Stripe Connect’s direct charges model where customer payments would go directly into sellers' Stripe accounts

Sadly, he thought he could keep existing users on the old scheme:

>there were still legacy sellers that depended on Flurly for their living. Thus I "grandfathered" in these accounts and let them keep using the old Flurly system

So it was just a matter of time before one of these accounts were used for selling non-compliant things or doing illegal transactions. So it's not Stripe which ruined his business as the title indicates; it was one of Flurly's customers breaching Stripe's TOS and still being linked through Flurly's Stripe account. Only logical they shut him down, a risk the owner acknowledged in this blog post.

I find it remarkable that after the pandemic bump, zoom stock value is basically back at where it started. Peaking at almost a x10 price increase pre-pandemic to pandemic-top, investors are now stating "zoom is worth almost as much to us as it was pre-pandemic". Meaning that in a business sense, they seem to have captured near zero value of the entire pandemic-boom in their stock price?

I've completely detached coding for fun and coding for a client/employer. For fun? I write (almost) everything in a single file or however I seem fit, git commit -am "asdf" and use a bare-bones deploy script on a 10$-or-so VPS on which I can ssh and update an nginx config manually if I want to. For work? I jump through whatever hoops the latest CI/CD Kubernetes configuration expects from me, combined with a multi layered microservice architecture and write enterprise-grade Java with Amazon Managed Grafana monitoring in HIPAA ISO SCAMPI compliant environments.

I'm not saying working can't be fun but I have a mental model of what "most fun" I can extract from "coding" and whatever nets me the highest amount of money in the shortest amount of time.

That's actually clever. The exact reason why being an API wrapper for a prompt engine is a fad.

As someone who doesn't step foot in America much, I honestly cannot comprehend the "tipping culture". It's expected and almost mandatory as it's an integral part of workers pay but not absolutely mandatory or legally enforced. So any "rules" or customs are on a "you should know" basis. I've seen many receipts with an empty "tip amount" line above the total.

Is there no consumer movement or workers organization whatsoever lobbying to just have the tip incorporated in the salary and purchase price?

Lots of people have been saying Tether is a fraud for years now. Even some very smart and highly regarded people; patio11 comes to mind. Yet in all those years, Tether had no major depegging event, bankrun or any other noteworthy chain reaction whilst big frauds unwinded, hacks happened and over-collaterized bubbles popped. I'm not saying Tether isn't a fraud, but I feel the chance it falling as an unbacked stable coin is long gone. More likely they will end up OFAC sanctioned (such as happened with tornado cash) for roleplaying as the federal reserve.

If anything, the pressure on Sam might result in him turning on Tether/Binance/other-frauds with key insider evidence for reduced sentencing. The guy's a pvp gamer at heart so probably min-maxing with his lawyers what he can do as a criminal informant.

She's not going to get sentenced to any time whatsoever. She cut a deal (full co-operation, forfeiture of assets and some fines) and is voluntarily pleading guilty to honor the deal.

His ex-girlfriend and CEO of Alameda really put the nail in the coffin. Turned on him for 250K$ bail, forfeiture of all assets and basically no prosecution (except some taxes) as long as she co-operates. Probably dropped the entire playbook of Sam and made the case irrefutable and ironclad.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23495436/crypto-coope...

When so much money is involved very few friendships or relationships will survive. You can't morally steer someone into the "right" direction by sending frustrated emails when there's generational wealth on the line for the other parties involved. The author should have put his feelings aside and involved a lawyer.

I've tried playing and actually getting into this game a few times (including installing tile packs, walkthrough saves and what not), but the game mechanics are obtuse and have such a high learning curve that frustration is easier found than any sense of enjoyment. For a game focused on being so meticulous and extra-vagant in its mechanics, it's sad that enjoying it or "having fun" seems something completely out of reach with hours of gameplay, reading third-party wikis and starter guides.

>From everything I’ve read, SBF’s mission to earn billions, then spend it saving the world, seems something like this imagined Apollo mission

How can the author pretend SBF his actions are comparable to a "tiny crack in an oxygen tank"? He willingly and knowingly defrauded customers and investors. Arguably as early as years ago and already provably months ago when he started bailing out crypto companies with funds defrauded from customers and funding his (failing) trading firm with customer funds.

Personally with all the lies and deception I'm starting to believe his entry and reign in crypto is one big fraud. There's no record of his geographical Bitcoin arbitrage whatsoever except hearsay. His exposure to tradfi (jane street) is limited and he didn't do anything impactful there. His "baby" Solana is a glorified Excel sheet working on a few centralized nodes. Most of his networth has always been in illiquid coins he created himself. And to see how this drama has unfolded, I find it hard to believe how he is into EA and not just obsessed with having influence and driving up his money-highscore as if it's a game.

Michael Lewis, the author of “The Big Short", is the true winner of this whole debacle. He was/is allegedly following SBF around, working on a book covering his raise to fame and riches and his influence in US politics. Seems he's getting the extra chapters he needed to turn it into a best-seller and another movie adaption.

My prediction: nobody will touch FTX and whatever is left of it will be in legal battles for years to come. Most will get auctioned to recoup the big fish making the most noise and maybe pennies after that for individual users which had funds on FTX. There is near zero value in an exchange-brand which took a reputational hit as big as this.

No surprise whatsoever. They killed a competitor, avoided being on the hook for ~$6B in missing funds and without paying anything they are basically inheriting all FTX customers still happy to trade crypto. FTX or whatever is left will be under massive legal scrutiny for years to come. The "institutional investors" they were attracting and lobbying for are the kind of folks you don't want legal battles with.

Meanwhile, FTX is still operating (!), accepting new users and accepting customer deposits even though it is insolvent. If you haven't been following the crypto news much or aren't on Twitter, you will have received ZERO direct communication from FTX that they are insolvent (not even an email). This is coming from someone who went on the record[0] trying to lobby, blaming the financial industry for lack of transparency and taking on too much risk and publicly lying that FTX doesn't use customer funds to trade (tweets have since been deleted)[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/HaloCrypto/status/1590417311839981569

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried...

Why would they even consider taking them over? They killed a competitor by declaring them as insolvent. The damage has been done. The user funds SBF siphoned out of FTX aren't coming back and doubt CZ is going to refund them out of pocket IF they take them over. The tech behind FTX is probably the same or worse than what Binance has. Customer acquisition happens anyway as the people still wanting to stay active in crypto will probably go to Binance.

>Was this a violation of a corporate policy? Not unless it could be proven that the downloaded message file was moved away from the corporate computer

A bit later

>21:17 Disconnected from everything mid-meeting, laptop goes blank

Clearly his tool was designed and intended to download emails to explicitly take it off the corporate computer. What point is there in releasing a tool for downloading documents ON the corporate computer ("wanted to save some important documents before potentially losing access") when you entirely lose access to that corporate computer in case of termination. This in combination with the cartoons and other rebellious antics as noted in his blog posts I'm not surprised he got fired.

What's a scenario in which Musk will at least recoup his acquisition cost? Even if 10% of Twitter users (and that's a lot) will get on the 8$ plan, revenue is only roughly (100*20M?) 2B$ per year.

As I make that napkin calculation I cannot imagine actually 20M people being active enough on Twitter to justify paying 100$ per year for it. Especially if the price won't be catered to regional purchasing power.

Any ideas about acquisition cost? How do you value a FOSS project?

Turns out, if you're the largest oil exporter in the world you can do whatever you want whenever you want. And every world leader happily shakes hands with them.

Imagine if they weren't wiped and receiving (a snapshot of) the entire Netflix catalogue.

"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions."

- Jul 29, 2022

https://twitter.com/googlestadia/status/1552989433590214656

45 minutes of unsupervised access to your phone? Even if it's a "travel" phone I wouldn't connect it to any other device after that.