notch656a

Breaking the law does not make you dishonest.

Being paid to do something illegal gets you most of the way to the jail sentence to actually doing it, most of the time. So after the boss narcs you out for not doing the deed you'd be looking at jail either way.

This guy has some great stories about sailing there and other tiny places in tiny boats.

  In 1974 his boat was the first to land on the world's most isolated island, Tristan da Cuhna. He had built the 6 meter long boat Bris in his mother's basement. The island has no harbor but the boat was lifted up and placed on the beach. There he got a job as a math teacher. 

https://www.yrvind.com/

https://www.yrvind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ex_lex_eng...

NGOs commonly are just employment schemes for wealthy first worlders. They aren't ignorant to the fact the solution they are providing isn't practical, they're just going with whatever pays their fat salary while generating donations. That is, that very little benefit winds up in the designated beneficiaries is by design rather than accident.

"Fun" fact. As of ~2004 roughly 1/3 of the male populace were soon-to-be-convicted sexual abusers of children, including the mayor.

But the EU also has citizenship by investment, it's just reserved to the even more rich. If anything opening it up to the lower wealth makes things more equitable, not less. IMO the most equitable world is open borders, so ideally the amounts would keep pushing lower.

https://www.henleyglobal.com/citizenship-investment/austria

EU and other entities are trying to choke off their income by cutting off their visa-free access which reduces the value of the passport, driving the country further towards the direction of poverty. Previously Vanuatu was able to make income via virtually unregulated banking but FATF cut that off too.

That is a great interview. But it turns out Coffeezilla got tricked here by letting SBF turn back to the fiat funds.

SBF did not admit to fraud. The TOS specifically defines 'e-money' separately from digital assets. As soon as customers liquidated their digital assets to withdraw real money, they were no longer protected by the digital asset part of the TOS. The comingling of fiat / e-money is not disallowed by the TOS. Only comingling of digital assets was prohibited.

Coffeezilla was so close to pinning SBF here but by letting him wiggle out by dropping the digital assets and focus on comingling of e-money during withdrawals (which was not protected) SBF escape again. That is by liquidating the digital assets by the TOS, FTX was then allowed to commingle their e-money and the 'fungible' withdrawal process was not against TOS. Coffezilla should have pinned down SBF about digital asset withdrawals instead of fiat withdrawals. If he had forced SBF to admit BTC, ETH, etc withdrawals were comingled then he would have had a fraud admission, and actually Coffee started out with that before SBF quite quite genuise-ly redirected to fiat withdrawals.

I think this was a carefully crafted redirection by SBF to trick Coffee into thinking he got his 'gotcha' while SBF again escaped.

SBF can easily escape the first world and probably even the arm of the law.

But what is life like for someone living outside the law who stole billions from angry people including likely many criminals? His life expectancy would not be long.

IANAL but my understanding is reckless disregard is mens rea, whether the result of that disregard was intentional or not.

I read the TOS. SBF is deliberately getting people to focus on "e-money" part rather than "digital assets" like crypto.

Y'all got tricked by focusing on the wires and fiat currency path. The TOS make it clear that's all play money. Only digital assets appear to be protected by TOS. Coffeezilla managed to lock him down on that by using the correct terminology and asset classes, but most of the interviewers did not.

Based on the TOS customers agree to, it's not clear to me there was ever any agreement Alemeda couldn't bet the farm using customer fiat as collateral. Digital Assets appear to only apply to non-fiat digital assets -- the TOS seperately defined fiat balance as 'e-money' with significantly weaker as far as I can tell protections.

That is to pin him on fraud it may be necessary to show those that delivered crypto outside of the margin / borrowing TOS had their money stolen. I think Coffeezilla got him to admit this, but even then I think he may have weasled out of it by only talking about dollars which don't appear to be protected by the contract. He is crafting a very carefully executed story where he tricks you into thinking you have a 'gotcha' but all he did was admit to stuff customers agreed to in TOS; and thus you see the real intelligence of SBF as a master of redirection shining.

I am fascinated to learn more about the apparatus that checks pedestrians leaving the US. I understand there is doubtlessly unseen stuff going on there. Do you have any materials or primary sources I can look at to understand what you're talking about? It has been my experience when crossing after scanning my passport the officer goes from jovial to shocked/unexpected (I don't look like or act someone who would have a flagged passport) which leads me to believe there is at least in many cases no advanced warning to them a flagged individual is approaching.

Now I know the government must surely have these systems but I think it may be doubtful how effective they've set it up to be to stop people leaving the country if by foot. The flow of people leaving the border in general is just way lower scrutiny, in my experience living in a border state. I would be shocked if the average say non-violent felon fugitive has much trouble leaving if they're not on a flight manifest.

You may be right. I don't have anywhere near Sunny's problems but I do have a flagged passport after I fought in the militia YPG in Syria (legal, but I seem to have been put on a list which has caused me endless issues with CBP). Alarm bells ring to the Nth degree when I enter, but as far as I can tell they don't have much mechanism to investigate pedestrians leaving. I'm guessing if they do have something it only focuses on some exceptional cases (like perhaps Sunny).

I've never had CBP check my passport when walking into Mexico. And Mexican officials are always asleep or absent when I pass through their side. No matter, all they require to enter Mexico is a US Birth Certificate (but they don't ask) lol. People leaving by private boat or plane are basically on a trust system; how the hell would they know if you're flying to Hawaii or not if headed to the Pacific, or whether you're going somewhere foreign or to Puerto Rico or the USVI if you're sailing into the Caribbean?

I'm pretty sure there's thousands a day that walk into Mexico everyday without a passport. Hell half the people in line returning to the US claim they "forgot" theirs.

Leaving is easy without a passport. And don't forgot if Sunny can get to the shores of Pakistan, he is a citizen and they must let him in, after which he can easily hide in the tribal areas. All he would need is a yacht somewhere on the multi-thousands of miles on the coastline and some friendly boats in int'l waters to refuel him.

A back-handed compliment is the closest I ever get to a real one on HN, so I'll take it.

Carlos Ghosn agrees with your sentiment.

Satire

That's pretty much my point. It isn't technically infeasible but rather infeasible due to collusion of governments in the form of KYC/AML and other tyrannies against the populace.

Most already banked people could realistically achieve it if KYC/AML and FATCA-like reporting requirements were eliminated. It is not technically infeasible, but as we both pointed out infeasible due to government imposed limitations.

Not to blame the victim, but having all of your money in one jurisdiction is like putting all your eggs in one basket. This is why the federal government loves FATCA, as it makes the banking requirements so onerous for US citizens abroad that a foreign bank can only afford to bank a rich US citizen after compliance costs.

This is not an accident, and the fact the compliance cost far outweigh any tax benefit yet the burden remains make this crystal clear.

Edit: to all the people offended by this comment. Ponder why international banking is infeasible for the domestically banked and then question why that may be and whether the state of things may be for the benefit of governments to better control their populace. Thus you will understand this comment wasn't actually about impugning the common domestic bank account holder but to show some incentives that keep them locked in domestically. If you pointed out why international banking is infeasible then you finally got the point of my comment and perhaps some understanding of why some third world people may be desperate enough to use an evil pyramid scheme environmental wrecking shitcoins like bitcoin or ethereum etc.

SBF between his own prior arbitrage wealth and his family's wealth was set for life as for as necessities. He could move to a single family home in Iowa, find a nice wife, raise kids, send them all to college and generally enjoy barbeques and reading books for the rest of his days if he liked. Without working further, or working for free for charities to create their crypto plugin to donate to feed the homeless or whatever genuinely altruistic goal.

He had the best setting imaginable but still managed to do bad things. Crypto "made" him do do bad things in the same way a deer gun makes one guy point it at a store clerk while others are just using it to feed his family some venison or wild hog.

Felony isn't about the jail sentence, normally. It's about stripping you of your civil rights. That's usually the real punishment.

She'll have incredible difficulty getting a residence visa for almost anywhere desirable to continue working offshore including the Bahamas, working a licensed position, carrying a gun for self defense. She'll have a bad time at traffic stops, be extra hassled by border patrol when she crosses a border, probably not be able to be involved in any future children's field trips and on-school activities, etc. Lifelong retribution, no matter if 70 years from now she is nothing but a sweet innocent great-grandma. Justice.

If crypto people are destroying other crypto people it's basically seen by much of society as beneficial mutual attrition.

> Do companies exist to protect their employees, or to provide something useful for their customers?

Neither. They exist to benefit their shareholders/owners. That's it.

Nah the first world can just rob third world elderly of their retirement by just importing in their most skilled/intelligent workers and spitting them back out when EvilCorp finishes chewing them up and cancels their work visa. No reason to have a child in the first world when the nominal comparative advantage in pricing is a little Bangladeshi child.

Yeah Brazil at least has Mercosur. It's pretty crazy North America doesn't have something similar considering capital can mostly freely flow between NAFTA countries. (although we do have something similar with compact free association i.e. micronesia / palau / marshall islands)

How old are your kids now?

Before 100 years ago there was precious little nation-state level social security, so families were far more dependent upon other family members. Middle age parents needed to support their parents directly, so there was an obvious quid-pro-quo for the grandparent to take care of the child.

Our forefathers changed this dynamic by making this arrangement somewhat invisible, in that we pay social security tax instead. We still take care of our parents, but not directly, and it's by the gun of the tax man rather than by a family arrangement. There is little incentive for this kind of unspoken bargaining of the past where you may take care of shelter and the grandparents take care of a kid. There's an IRS agent waiting with a gun if you don't pay social security, so any unspoken bargaining power is gone and the working age parent basically gets the squeeze from both sides.

No disagreement there, although I think perhaps society should stop treating children as crops to be harvested for the commons. A tragedy of the commons has been created as society claims social security tax from grown children to pay to the elderly, so the economic incentive is to be a free-rider and live off other people's children while having none of your own.

Pretty consistently research has found waiting until at least roughly 30 or so leads to greater average life satisfaction for parents. I'm not going to provide a rigorous or even cited defense here but I spent several days sifting through the studies before coming to this conclusion. I encourage the reader to also study the journals before coming to their own conclusion.

Those countries just offload the cost of the child onto other people. The cost is not low.