caturopath

The new management found many billions of assets of various asset classes https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-... When FTX thought it was broke, there were really billions of dollars of stuff they were too much of a mess to come up with.

That isn't to say that 'all the money was there' or that the conduct wasn't deeply criminal and unethical, but a huge part of the shortfall was really just terrible books.

Perhaps bananas will turn out to be a Giffen good.

The famous John Ray (emergency CEO) quote from a court filing was

> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.

which seems likely to be an understatement.

It seems like for your theory to be better, it should fit the facts better (not saying it doesn't). Whether it seems agentic or not doesn't seem very relevant to whether it's what happened.

You could also think of it as 11 minutes each for defrauding each of 1.2MM people. I don't know whether either of those sentences are good ones, but there does come a point at which a narrow violent crime should be punished less than a huge non-violent one. FEMA uses about 7.5MM for a human life for certain cost-benefit analyses (much lower values are used in many of the countries where most FTX customers lived): is there a sense in which doing a billion dollars of damage is in certain ways comparable to 130 killings? Surely some people who lost money would have used that money in part to save someone's life.

Exactly.

That doesn't seem to be the case at all. A lot of the sympathetic content occurs _after_ the scandal and arrest, and Lewis has continued to take the same tone in interviews. Further, an inordinate amount of time is dedicated earlier in the book to a problem at Alameda that Lewis draws parallels to the scandal that took him down, clearly working toward his thesis. Lewis is one of the most-read living authors: they could have gotten a crack team of editors to help him revise the book in no time if he wanted to. It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. It's not even an implausible view.

They aren't suggesting they'll charge appreciably more; they are suggesting they'll charge the same in different ways.

I'm not sure this is the message of this story. There are tons of computer systems involved under single-payer systems.

*offended or pleased by _how well_ the leader manages...

I am a lot more offended or pleased by whether the leader manages a 60MM budget and a 1B endowment than their 500k salary.

There's this weird thing where charities are judged by how much they cost to run and pay their employees to even a greater degree than other organizations, and even by people who would resist that strategy for businesses. It's easy to imagine a good leader executing the mission way more than 500k better than a meh one, and even more dramatically so for 'overhead' in general (as though a nonprofit would consistently be doing their job better by cutting down staffing for vetting grants or improving shipping logistics or whatever).

Headlines get changed to things that actually reflect the link's content all the time. Is flagging not a way for users to try to get that done? (I would have guessed so, but I honestly don't know. I certainly didn't flag this post.)

Though the headline is sadly correct, the article is about a study that is random crap that doesn't speak to the well-known issue.

It's almost as if clicking on photos with a mouse isn't a very good way to measure night walking behavior, isn't it?

That would tell us a lot about where participants from their pool click on images, but I'm not sure it tells us anything about any questions worth caring about.

We all know that women are and must be more wary while doing things like walking alone at night, but we aren't going to learn about it from clicking on pictures with a mouse.

It's sweet you are willing to be so generous, but I think you are just being optimistic about how bad the state of external validity in social science research is.

> Each participant looked at 16 images and were told to imagine themselves walking through those areas.

Jesus Christ.

I'm not sure what that tells us, but not much.

If the labels on the heatmaps were reversed, I wonder if I would have updated the other direction at all the issue.

Love Think Python, I have recommended it to so many learners: it balances the various concerns of a new programmer book really well. Allen Downey has a bunch of other books with somewhat similar approaches too https://greenteapress.com/wp/ -- some I do think he might have gone too far in the low-rigor side, but all the ones I've reviewed have been pretty good.

(I was sharing a table at a conference with Allen some time ago and told him how many times I'd recommended or bought people his books, and I think he thought I was bullshitting him.)

I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation.

Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.

The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.

I know that feeling and I'm sorry to hear about your frustration.

That being said, I think the critique you're getting may be more fair to your post than you think. You bring up things like college debt and high medical costs, which are not US-like in most of the places with the lowest birth rate, and the day care situation, which often isn't either, in previous paragraphs.

I do think that even if we don't note that the post was likely US-centric, we'd struggle with the fact that it's the poorer people in the US are having more babies than the richer ones when trying to apply your explanation.

I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have more kids on average than richer ones, and poorer countries on average have more kids than richer ones. (People don't seem to have fewer kids because they're poor; they seem to have fewer kids because they're rich!) Despite major housing issues, people live in bigger, fancier houses than ever, homeownership rates in the US are higher than most of the history of the US, and homelessness, though tragically common, still only directly affects a tiny minority of people, on the order of a fifth of a percent, which is not the sort of thing that seems very connected to the widespread change to having fewer children.

Why not just increase power to the main deflector?

Instead, just don't suck

I hoped this article would be better than the title, but it wasn't.

> If you’re a normal person you’re better off just going offline and seeking actual connections.

The majority of US folks find relationship partners via apps these days. It's nearly the only actively-looking place remaining.

This is among those topics where I don't expect the opposite result to be reported.

I expect you think you're thinking clearly, but you're not.

Right.

So, an explanation would describe why it works the way it does in practice. Lots of people have tried in this comment section and article to provide such explanations.

I don't think what you're doing provides a "why", really -- a good explanation is hard to vary and still explain things and can explain more than just the phenomenon in question. If the situation were different, if salaries tended to follow a market index or the size of the working population or whatever, I could provide a statement of the same form as yours instead.

> placeholder for a certain amount of value per year. As inflation rises, the nominal salary I pay has to increase to maintain that value

I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean by value here, exactly. Value to the employer? That doesn't track the CPI. I think you must mean value to the employee, which is what I think is not explained by your explanation, as price isn't derived from value to the producer that way. Think about it in the market for apples rather than the market for labor, for example. Obviously it does work different in the labor market, but you have to say what the relevant differences between the market for apples and for labor are to explain things.

That is not really an explanation. You are just stating how things are in a non-explanatory way.

> should expect

Should why, though? You didn't explain why they should have this expectation, rather than any other.

> There's no particular reason these two should be in lockstep

There is a pressure to keep these in lock-step: if you are paying lower than market rate, your employees have an incentive to go sell their labor elsewhere for more; if you are paying higher than market rate, you have an incentive to cut their pay (if you lose them over this, you can still replace them for less money). There are many reasons why such a basic price theory analysis is so incomplete as to give the wrong conclusion, but it's a real reason these things would be in lockstep that requires explanation why as to how it is inapplicable or incomplete.