JamesianP

You're giving an example of a child not motivated by ideology to prove everything is an ideology? Or is the example to show that everything can be instinctive too? If so how can you argue with certainty that anything is ideology?

What if the banker considers those choices made in financial self-interest to be against their own personal ideals (of being selfless etc) but did it anyway?

I'd say "caring only about money" is the complete absence of ideology since it just chases personal benefits. Just operating on basic instincts using more sophisticated mental skills. There are some who claim that they engage in such behavior because profit-maximization is for the moral good or whatever, but I wouldn't make that as the default assumption.

As for the "weirdness" you refer to, the company was arguing that banks indeed do not care only about money, but impose costly political agendas too. Hence the supposed value proposition.

surely that's already patented

They would make money by colluding with one of the players and taking a cut of their winnings. Or sometimes they just get hacked.

It does make sense that in a lot of player-versus-player games, online makes it more risky.

I can't read the article (but gazing at the words, I almost feel like I can...) but I'd guess that all of their software needs are covered by other software systems licensed by the govt. And that this ban is more to make people stop using free cloud services instead of them.

Looks like an Audi. Perhaps a bit of Porsche in there (i.e. more Audi). Makes sense when you consider the Audi people they hired.

I certainly agree with the sentiment that it is an improvement though. And that modern high-volume passengers cars (with some exceptions, like muscle cars) have in the past been so ugly.

Can someone explain this trick to me. How can I benefit from a tax break on money that I gave away? given that I don't have the pretax money anymore either (you'll recall earlier in the story I gave it away..).

Are they giving it to themselves somehow? At best I can imagine they get their name on a school or something, a nice thing but hardly the same as still having the 100 million or whatever bucks in their pocket.

I saw a couple highly-viewed youtube channels that made a big deal of it at the time. Either skeptics of crypto or contrarian types generally.

and it hasn't spent billions in investor money to subsidize our banana-purchasing experience.

Which is somehow even more embarrassing.

> Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to.

> They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky.

This becomes immediately clear the first time you meet them. They're just a herd operating in a situation of high risk and uncertainty by following what the rest of the herd is doing. That's why, periodically, they all run off a cliff together like lemmings.

The Bahamas has a total population of a smallish city and surely a national budget to match. Grabbing 500M anonymously (while letting everyone run around for days thinking it was a hacker) doesn't make much sense either. Did they put their entire country's budget on the exchange or something?

If you abandon your ideals when it conflicts with your own self-interest, it is not ideology at all, just self-interest. You are criticizing integrity here. such as it is..

> If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.

Depends who's money you're playing with. If you profit on the way up and only your customers lose on the way down. Then high-risk strategies are (unfortunately) always better.

My trading strategy has never made me billions nor lost billions. Yet I kinda feel like there's a solid possibility many of these fools will end up waaay better off than me. Assuming they can stay out of jail.

VC's also have a high risk tolerance. Not every investment is even expected to pay off. So yes from their perspective, they took a risky bet and lost.

But they'd still have a case as victims if FTX signed contracts and then violated them. Or broke laws which cost them money.

There is a saying that you invest in the leadership not the company. So the whole personality hype probably was indeed big for getting investment as well as keeping investors from insisting on putting their own "guys' in charge (maybe they didn't even have any experienced crypto people yet).

Overall though, this isn't really surprising. I think generally no one really knows what's going on in a private company like this if the CEO is the founder and has all the power. It's exceeding possible and common for them to mix personal and company finances. Probably the norm.

As I understood it, Google Drive was mainly just the storage that was previously free with Google Docs (from 2006 or something).

I thought the point of shadowbanning was to trick the poster into thinking their posts were visible while they were hidden from everyone else.

Here it seems like the poster and anyone else can directly search for the poster's account or the "filtered" post and still see it. But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.

It would be more analogous to some state announcing it will not bail out a state-sponsored corporate enterprise, and instead allow it go bankrupt in a downturn. From another perspective it is sanity, protecting taxpayers from being on the hook for speculation. The entire complaint here hinges on some kind of butterfly-effect argument, plus the precise wording of a "guarantee" that was only pointed at vaguely in the article.

They were corporate bonds from a partly-govt-owned corporation. And the rating was only A1 which is good but well below the AAA that US savings bonds get. Meta just sold some bonds that got rated at A1.

Well I mean it is an objectively solvable problem.

Personally I vacillate between fear of the future and optimism of the future. Peers expressing the opinion that there's nothing to feel bad about helps my perspective a lot more than people acting like they think someone just died when I suffer a setback.

There is a loss, and people (especially more recently it seems?) sometimes are unable to cope at all with loss. I do agree it's unhealthy and extreme to put it that way. A dead loved-one is never coming back. That is a pain you must learn to live with. But you can get another job, perhaps even the same one again.

Perhaps the pseudoscience label is used too sparingly. When people treat something that is not science as science, that is pseudoscience. Modern society is awash with it, as was 19th century medicine.

I'm not sure how much real science they have in psychology in particular. I'm sure there's some, like I've heard they can use fMRI to analyze the language region of the brain to identify what kind of speech disorder you have. But certainly a lot of publications cross the line.

We can still be fair and say they do help a lot of people with therapy, even if they don't really understand why. Historically craftsmen were ahead of scientists in making working technologies. They weren't necessarily peddling in scams and nonsense, they were just not backed by real science.

At least one bright side. The victims definitely have a case against FTX and gang, but not against me or other taxpayers..

Certainly that's true of the overall sector. But crypto as a technology has some advantages and some disadvantages, same for traditional banking. People were arguing even before the crash that FTX was combining disadvantages of both.

Obviously all their planning did not account for issue #3 either way. But perhaps their concern was simply having actions like #2 exposed, and more generally the value of their company (which goes hand-in-hand with the value of their various tokens) exposed. In that infamous interview, the guy talked about manipulating the prices of crypto using a small float as one tactic.

> An interesting part of Madoff recoveries were through settlements against originators/feeder funds because they « ought » to have known it was a ponzi.

Did the judge say that? I would think the logic was that they were effectively getting stolen money as gifts. Like when a scammer gives their victims' money to their own family. Doesn't matter if they were in the dark or even spent it already.

As I understand it, if stolen/scam money is used to buy something it's not the seller's responsibility because money is legal tender. On the other hand, if a stolen item is sold, the issue of knowing where it came from does becomes important.

Or just to people losing money who would have lost more had Alameda not bought from them on the way down.

I think the "gambling" you referred to was their point, not the accounting games they subsequently played to try and get back into the black.

How about various forms of IP? They're just intangible rights. They give you a certain monopoly, which is one (admittedly odd perhaps) way of describing a cryptocurrency (or anything encrypted when only you have the key).

The fundamentals for your ponzi coins are so bad they might as well be worth zero, so why would that insignificant value difference matter anyway?