I just started the book this morning. About halfway through as they’re first morphing into an actual exchange. Was genuinely surprised how much of a little cult the effective altruism movement is Like I thought it was just some college idealism, but seemed integral to a lot of his early funding.
You’re right. The early venture capital was effective altruist.Originally Posted by BCR
Michael Lewis lives near Berkeley and prolly goes for long walks thru the Stanford campus. He’s a liberal and was smitten or at least bitten.
I love all gods children.
Sam needed an unethical piece of shit lawyer to help navigate the "regulatory compliance" landscape, and do whatever it takes to make FTX look legit. Friedberg was the man for the job.
Sadly there will always be companies looking for unethical and shady lawyers. As long as Friedberg doesn't get disbarred -- and it doesn't look like he will -- he will always have a position somewhere.
Sad!
Thus far, this Caroline Ellison is quite pathetic in book. When a psychiatrist says how fascinating all the EA people were, yet calls her boring, you know you’re boring and pathetic. I don’t even know how he got a MD psych to discuss patients like this? Did they all sign disclosures? She clearly signed it before she read it unless she takes some hero turn later in book.
yeah EA comes off like scientology for the 'gifted and talented' rich kids.
im not even attacking its premise, i think its fundamentally positive / insightful, but its just terminally naive in terms of its basic ability to sanity check shit (see: 'gifted and talented' rich kids).
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
whether or not sam experiences civilian life again or not comes down to todays testimony basically;
sam just said a lot of what the prosecution is coming after him for was an effort to stave off a 'run on the bank'.
the AUSA immediately objected over his use of the word bank and the judge sustained it but the jury heard it and you cant really unring that bell.
lots of plates in the air here but the jury could very easily decide that he was trying to prevent a total catastrophic implosion, and that could be enough to get him off the hook to some extent.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Sam has the campaign donations trial next. We will see if there is any point.
How normal people (jury) perceive this is the wild card. Our worlds don’t intersect with theirs so who knows.
Had a chance to finish the book yesterday. I’m glad I read it, but kind of expected more. The fact that Lewis was actually there as this all went down felt like it was going to be amazing.
I’ve heard him say even after being there months, before this broke, he really didn’t know what he was going to write. I get that. You can only write the story that’s there.
His more popular books tend to have a certain theme. A group of smart guys taking on the conventional thought of a certain period of time.
The banks issuing sub prime loans are an easy target to pit your protagonist against. HFT firms were an easy target, because there was no skill in the game beyond their tech guys.
They just were able to frontrun smart peoples plays. Or dumb peoples plays. Didn’t matter if you were buying or selling, they’d just take their cut with no risk. The techs and engineers shaving microseconds were the stars really.
Moneyball was perfect in all ways. A completely different approach through analytics to combat big market free spending teams that most hate.
All had enjoyable anecdotes from characters that everyone thought were crazy, but were actually the smart guys in the room. In the end, the guys calling them crazy were the dumbasses and dinosaurs.
This is a different story hard to wrap your head around. He meets this rising star who almost overnight is worth $20 billion. So you meet this kid, and he likes him and all the EA stuff is kind of admirable on its surface, but the fact he’s amassed this fortune overnight gives his aloofness charm.
These kids are the biggest nerds ever. Of your integral characters, you have the coder who doesn’t speak. In many ways he’s the most interesting character because Sam seemed in awe of him, while the rest were in awe of Sam. You’d love to write about this kid, but you have nothing because he doesn’t speak. You have the nerdiest girl alive who is I’m sure smart, but in her position more because she got lucky and was banging SBF. She’s not running a billion dollar hedge fund smart or even close to it.
The Nishad dude isn’t interesting. He has reservations at times, but is too intimidated to rock the boat.
It’s basically all about SBF, and who knows who this autistic kid really is? Like he’s brilliant, but is he also a sociopath in addition to autistic?
I found the Jane Street stuff most interesting. The story about him bludgeoning his coworkers bad bet to the point his bosses told him he went too far. His remarks about not really feeling emotion and learning to fake it. I think Lewis struggled to grasp the kid, hence so much about the games he loved, because for a normal person, it’s kind of the only way to understand the kid. This was all a game to him in some weird way.
I don’t have the criticism most do regarding the book. I don’t feel he necessarily went too soft on the kid. I don’t think he really knew him well enough to judge him. Not sure anyone does.
If I have a problem with the book, it’s that it was rushed.
The Big Short came out like 2 years after the Stearns crash and the meltdown and he started from a point of knowing who was correct in the situation
Flash boys is like 5 years after the formative beginnings of HFT.
Moneyball wrote about a process and a season that has already occurred where you can make a concrete evaluation of the process.
This shit just happened in November of last year. He had to shift at the end of the book from writing one book to a completely different book. But it’s like he kept most of the first book, and when it came to explaining the aftermath, there is basically no one from the inner circle left on the island. He’s left telling stories from some Chinese girl who clearly wasn’t in the inner circle of decision makers. It’s hard to write an Act 2 when all the actors are gone.
He got a whole bunch of money from a publisher who found out he was embedded already with FTX when this all went down, and it feels like it was rushed to beat the trial. It seems like the story would have been better told after the trial and some time to reflect on the whole thing.
Idk, maybe it’s an amazing story while at the same time being not all that interesting. Was FTX a great company? It wasn’t a ponzi, it could print money, but the notion it made $400 million a year. It was only around a few years and seems to have lost to hackers almost exactly what it made.
His net worth is based on a million of this token that he’d struggle to sell as he owns half of them in existence and pieces of companies yet to be anything and these dozen NFTs and a bunch of stuff that could drop 70% tomorrow and no one is shocked. Alameida’s entire solvency hinges on FTX’s value.
It even feels the trial is rushed. You hang a hundred years over a bunch of nerds, they’re going to roll and give you what you want. But SBF seemed to be the only one who ever understood his process. Given they seemed $7-$8 billion short, and have already recovered $5 billion of it, with a lot of stuff still out there, where he falls on the spectrum of evil seems well short of a hundred Wall Street execs who never got prosecuted. Half the money owed was owed to hedge funds who were betting on SBF, not saving for a house. I feel like whether that bet would have been profitable is unknown, but is likely it would have been.
That is kind of my takeaway from all this. The book, the trial, all of it. It’s hard to make a judgement on whether he was making bad bets or good bets.
He’s 100% guilty of misappropriating funds and it seems his trial is going horribly and he’s going to do 100 years. Lying to people was completely acceptable in his game.
At the end of the day, I bet all the shit he had invested in will be well in excess of what was misappropriated even if many are complete failures. Doesn’t mean he had the right to do it.
It’s kind of like Ross Ulbricht story. If I have a kid with a drug problem, I’d still rather him be buying drugs from Silk Road if he is going to buy drugs. We have 100k dead a year from fentanyl mixed by ghetto kids with no review system. His initial feeling about the drug trade I entirely agreed with, but then he started trying to take out hits on people and deserves his time.
SBF is guilty, but he didn’t try to kill anyone, and I suspect if shit didn’t blow up, he’d have made a lot of people a whole lot of money
guilty on all counts.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Damn that was a fast deliberation and verdict hand down.
I see it caught a lot of the vloggers off guard...they weren't even near court cuz they assumed it would be handed down tomorrow at the earliest.
All the crypto squirreled away ain’t gonna score him any more fresh vegetables at the commissary.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
look at young tine just poking his beak in here
i am up like a private tutor for 3 months in my kids bitcoin so were gonna need you to beak down partner
i actually ordered wendys tonight to suss out the competition and i can honestly say it was the absolute worst burger ive had in a decade.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
This has entertainment potential, no?
or will it be quashed?
oh wait, I don’t care about political corruption anymore. see, I thought I was being next level and instead imma be bored
how did you burger though their bacon game is elite im concerned you didnt burger right its like going to lugers an ordering salmon
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