Trump was a lock to just steal the money and run anyway.
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Is it even hypothetically legal to pay a politician not to do something?
If we’re legal could do some sort of escrow and settle after the election?
I’m not going to read this book. Michael Lewis’s kid died and he probably fucked up the entire job. This is probably going to end up next to the Blind Side on the list of genuinely terrible Michael Lewis work.
The actually good books: the first one, the big short, flash boys. The mid everything else but this book + the Blind Side. The very bad would be this book and the Blind Side hopefully although he has time to pump out plenty more crap and totally ruin his credibility if that’s what he wants to do.
If I were him I wouldn’t have released this book, or would have entirely reworked it. I can’t believe things blew up the way they did and the first half of the book isn’t getting taken by SBF and the second half of the book being unwinding wtf was going on. Instead it sounds like he got taken and just decided to push publish because fuck it book already done and it was a big advance.
Definitely not buying a pro crypto pro SBF book in early october 2023 and it makes me a lot less likely to buy the next book as well. I’ll definitely be waiting on reviews. Spending a ton of time hanging out with Malcom Gladwell is bad for you.
Yeesh. Again my sympathies to the guy because he’s definitely recently suffered the equivalent of an emotional head injury… (for those who don’t know his 19 year old daughter was killed in a car crash last year) and because of that I’ll give him a pass on pretty much whatever idiocy he produces in this immediate time period.
But he’s working his way to a place where he ends up a has been whose viewpoint I don’t care about. Which is really unfortunate because the man really is a very gifted writer. Which means that when he’s wrong about something reading his stuff is genuinely dangerous.
Nothing more dangerous than someone very persuasive and very wrong.
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Shocking. Just ban this stupid ass fake money bullshit.
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Also how is Matt Levine free, so good:
Isn’t it risky for him to testify? Won’t he be subjected to withering cross-examination from well-prepared prosecutors who will trap him in lies? Well! I mean, sure, probably. But if he does not testify, all the jury will have is (1) the testimony of FTX customers who are like “all our money is gone,” (2) the testimony of all of his closest friends and colleagues testifying “yeah we stole all the money because Sam told us to” and (3) screenshots of FTX computer code that is like “IF you_feel_like_it THEN steal(all.the.money).” His testimony just cannot make things worse! The jury is going to get the prosecutors’ story and it is really, really, really, really bad for Bankman-Fried. He needs to tell his side of the story to have any shot at all. If his testimony has a 10% chance of being compelling and a 90% chance of being disastrous, that is all upside .If he does not testify, that is 100% disastrous.
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In local arena news… OKC taxpayers are going to foot the bill for the new Thunder arena. But! Ownership is chipping in 50M of the estimated 900M price tag!
On Lewis’s book:
Going Infinite reads less as the autopsy of an outrageous work of fraud and more like a pair of conjoined, mildly cautionary tales about the perils of being a misunderstood genius and what happens to an author when he falls under not just his subject’s spell, but his own.
Instead, Going Infinite is the story of how a lonely young boy overcomes his aversion to emotions and inability to connect with other people to realize a beautiful vision, only for those other people to let him down in the end. A lonely 30-year-old boy, that is; Bankman-Fried is repeatedly infantilized and cast as a child throughout the book, and it’s hard to interpret this as anything other than exculpatory on Lewis’s part. It’s as if his bold, novel ways of thinking about the world’s problems must necessarily spring from an untainted and untaintable, childlike cleareyedness. Lewis calls his subject a “baby” and refers derogatorily to bankruptcy lawyers as “grown-ups,” and does this after the collapse in which Bankman-Fried immolated billions in investor dollars. I learned early on in the book that Bankman-Fried and I are weeks apart in age, which lent this Lewis fixation an uncanny cast. It would be weird if people talked about me like I was a baby.
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I’m giving him a pass because his teenage daughter got killed in a car accident… but I don’t think I’ll be reading this book and he has credibility issues now. Hard to trust his viewpoint after this book and the blindside aftermath.
I think Lewis is a gifted writer, but not particularly insightful. Liars Poker, The Big Short and Flash Boys were all very good. But they were essentially just describing shit that happened in an entertaining way. Any time he tries to do takes, it can go sideways in a hurry.
He’s basically a way more talented Nate Silver.
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Not defending this, but the only thing I will say is that the older I get, the more I realize how stupid I was in my 20’s. I don’t think society does enough to recognize that even people in their 20’s to maybe as old as 30 haven’t developed enough to be quite as criminally culpable as a 40 year old. By the same token, people in that age group should not be managing billions of dollars of other people’s money…
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omg yes to this. ffs I was a moron… worse yet there’s like a whole record of it online.
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https://twitter.com/mekkaokerekebye/status/1712132264019251684
To explain:
- “blockchain” is a Merkle Tree
- The version control system used (git) also uses Merkle Trees, produces commit hashes for verification, and is distributed.
- The source code is quite incriminating and was stored in git, which is to say the evidence against him lived forever on something like a blockchain.
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I want this to be real but it doesnt sound real
Don’t they basically have a mountain of texts and Discord logs and what have you of SBF & Friends all explicitly discussing the criming? And I thought someone already flipped? It’s basically over for him unless one of the jurors is a br0.
Yeah they have a lot on him, here’s Levine yesterday on the latest from the trial:
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loooool that’s more Enron than Enron
Enron’s CEO was all like, “Thank you very much! Asshole!” when called out on their inability to produce basic financials. These guys are like, here are some forged documents, have a pleasant tomorrow!