In the news

Actual lol

Here's your ticket, have fun?
No idea who thinks that 15 year olds should be locked inside.
I think we did interrail with 16, wife went to Barcelona with friends when 15, fun and adventure was had.

IMHO this is massively overblown.

What's our guess at what Ian Corfield earnt as COO of a NewDay? Next question, do we think that a £2k p/a donation to the Labour Party was a meaningful amount for him?

I mean wtf would that get you from the Conservative Party?

I mean wtf would that get you from the Conservative Party?

A happy ending?

although details are a bit sketchy (washington post article is paywalled so i read some free sources), it seems that the massive rise in cyrpto prices has enabled the solvent liquidation.

so you could say
a) that's essentially luck and;
b) if the creditors still had their crypto assets, they'd be a lot more than 18% up.

agree that on the face of it the sentence looks quite harsh, but otoh SBF played with a lot of fire and got quite burned.

Here's an accessible version of the article of you still want to read it.

https://archive.ph/Lj2bI

Thanks :)

Mate they wouldn't spit in your mouth for £20k in a single lump sum.

£2k/pa would get you a mailmerg response. Maybe a sticker too if you're lucky.

I've had a read of that - it's a decent piece.

ultimately doesn't change my opinion of SBF, however it does suggest some interesting aspects of the motivations of others.

The Guardian is outdoing itself with the Oasis reunion.
‘The classics are de facto national anthems’

He's an amoral chancer, but his sentencing should be revised. The judge can't have considered that the creditors might get all their money back.

the article states that the judge specifically excluded from consideration the outcome for creditors of the bankruptcy.

so yeah - he's got 25 years for what is effectively a victimless crime. and meanwhile similar shit goes on all over the place, just different people and different rules.

I agree that the sentence is absurdly harsh. Enron guy got 12 years. Phillip Green got ummm.... nothing.

I'm not sure Michael Lewis is completely unbiased, I think he was a bit of a fan boy when SBF was still in his rock star phase and wrote a few articles to that effect, but 25 years with no parole does seem super harsh.

I think he mentioned that part of his thinking was to stop SBF doing it again, which he was likely to do given his character. Surely there are a load of other ways to stop him rather than prison.

he's got 25 years for what is effectively a victimless crime

As the article speculates, that's certainly how SBF saw it. Seeing it that way was the biggest part of the problem, if the article is at all accurate bout SBF's way of thinking. And it was only "effectively victimless" through luck, because the crypto market was back up again at the time the liquidation was done, and because FTX and Almeida trading activity having been frozen stopped things from getting even worse. Since a run on crypto was what caught FTX out, the sheer luck of things not having been much worse means that "effectively victimless" is a terrible excuse. I think the key phrases from the article are "numb to risk", "willingness to expose others to risk without their consent" and "willing to flip a coin that might destroy the world".

The sentence is probably unduly harsh, but "victimless crime" is as bad a reason for saying that as "other people are doing this shit and getting away with it".

terrible excuse for what? i'm not trying to excuse anyone, i'm just saying that 25 years without parole seems harsh.

i'm not trying to excuse SBF and i'm not suggesting that the article is unbiased.

i'm not sure what you mean by "as bad a reason for saying that". I was just observing that the creditors were made whole plus 9% pa interest, so as crimes go it wasn't one where widows and orphans were left high and dry - ask the pensioners of BHS about that.

I don't really understand your point.

as for the "willing to flip a coin to destroy the world", well that's not what he was on trial for and as he wasn't president of the USA, it's hard to see the relevance.

it wasn't one where widows and orphans were left high and dry - ask the pensioners of BHS about that.

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan managers and their customers will be relieved, but the fact he was risking doing just that is why "effictively a victimless crime" shouldn't excuse so much.

as for the "willing to flip a coin to destroy the world", well that's not what he was on trial for and as he wasn't president of the USA, it's hard to see the relevance.

You know that was a metaphor. The point is the casual approach to exposing other people to risk.

There's nothing in the press about SBF's sentence being too harsh in the light of the astonishing 18% profit made by the creditors. How come? He was such big news when he was exposed and prior to that he had lots of the top people in his fan club. Why the silence?

yes, and i agree that what he did was wrong, and a crime, and he deserves sanction. i agree that the creditors basically got lucky on the timing of the liquidation of assets, i said that in an earlier post - it could have been worse.

i was just trying to make some comparisons to other destroyers of other people's corporate or invested value, and what happened to them.

i'd guess we mainly agree and most likely have minor objections to the language used :)

as an aside - not sure what the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan were doing investing in crypto / FTX if they were, but that's a different argument.

Yeah I agree.

i'd guess we mainly agree and most likely have minor objections to the language used :)

Yes, that's where we are, I think.

Why the silence?

i'd guess exactly because he had lots of people in his top fan club (on account of he was handing out dollars like confetti).

so there's guilt by association, and those previous top fans now prefer to stay silent and not draw attention to their previous association.

But he was such a phenomenon that journalists ought to be pitching in with contentious pieces about victimless crime and so forth. It ought to be such an easy sell to an editor.

Interesting because of what it seems to say about the impact of legislation:

Thousands of canisters of laughing gas have been collected in the clean up following Notting Hill Carnival - but the number is half what was found in 2023.

Around 6,000 canisters of Nitrous Oxide weighing an estimated six tonnes have been separated from other rubbish left following Europe’s largest carnival on Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday.

Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBKC) told the Standard half as many canisters have been collected compared to 2022 when 12,000 canisters, weighing 13 tonnes, were left on the streets of west London.

Possession of laughing gas with the intent of getting high was made illegal last November, with repeat offenders facing up to two years in jail.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/notting-hill-carnival-clean-up-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-b1178502.html

6,000 canisters of Nitrous Oxide weighing an estimated six tonnes

1kg per canister seems sus.