Have you noticed the new load spinner for archive.today? It seems 10x slower to load, even for the homepage. I'll try contacting the admin.
Edit: emailed them-
> Hi there,
I've contacted you in the past from a different email address and found you were responsive and helpful.
> Dear webmaster@archive.is,
> Over the past week or few weeks, I've noticed the new loading spinner at archive.is and other associated websites. The time to load even the base index homepage, much less an article, has skyrocketed.
> Your resource is so useful and I rely on it so much, I really miss being able to read articles thanks to only you and your special efforts.
> Also, wsj articles submitted for scraping no longer compete.
> But the big concern is the increase in loading time.
Hiding money that a court orders you to turn over in crypto is a great way to be held in prison for context of court until the end of your natural life.
Thanks to US pressure, Swiss banks are no longer as secretive as they used to be. They'll quickly give up information about any American when requested by the government.
To add, anyone under indictment and bail is closely monitored. They can't just transfer money to a Swiss Bank without raising an alarm.
HNers enjoy cooking up movie-plot schemes that are dumb in reality.
In my country, there's a guy who actually did it. An anarchocapitalist named Daniel Fraga. Just a completely surreal guy. Police would show up to his house and he'd film himself calling them parasites of the state to their faces. Used to make videos criticizing the system, the government, the courts, the judges. Eventually tried to expose corruption. Government tried to freeze his accounts and discovered he had $1 in them. He had gone all in on bitcoin. To this day I believe the government has not seen the money. One day he just kinda disappeared. He's either in some paradise enjoying his billions or dead.
“With Bitcoin I can hide anywhere and access my fortune with just a password!”
…But he made such a public deal out of it that some criminals figured they can access a fortune by kidnapping this guy and making him reveal the password.
People tell me he's alive because they can see his BTC wallet moving funds. So either he's alive or someone rubberhosed him with the fabled five dollar wrench and he gave up the keys. I know it's probably the latter but I want to believe it's the former.
I'm not seeing the market manipulation unless it's some quirk of the formal definition rather than the informal meaning of the term?
I was under the impression that he had an old fashioned value play, levered up to the moon using total return swap (these do have real uses) which blew up on him.
Unless he deliberately mislead his brokers should was it illegal?
the functioning of the market is dependent on everyone having faith that what is in the market is actually correct information. that's the entire reason the SEC was founded in the '30s, to restore confidence after 1929; if the market is believed to contain widespread fraud, then no one will invest and the market will essentially stop working.
as a counter example, the Chinese markets are rife with accounting frauds, scams and scandals; and the market doesn't really track with the Chinese economy as a result because no one believes it is accurate
The article seems to be fixated on how he lied to his finance sources, and acts like that was the only thing he did wrong.
If you read the SEC lawsuit [1], the problem is less that he lied to his finance sources and more about what he did with the funds, which was blatant market manipulation:
"Archegos, through Hwang and Tomita, effected this scheme by dominating the market for its Top 10 Holdings, as well as by “setting the tone” (i.e., engaging in large pre- market trading), bidding up prices by entering incrementally higher limit orders throughout the trading day, and “marking the close” (i.e., engaging in large trading in the last 30 minutes of the trading day) and by other non-economic trading, all with the goal of artificially inflating the share prices of its Top 10 Holdings."
I mean, obviously he lied to his finance sources. It's not like he was going to tell them that he was using their funds to manipulation the market.
> The complaint also alleges that, as part of the scheme, Archegos repeatedly and deliberately misled many of Archegos’s counterparties about Archegos’s exposure, concentration and liquidity, in order to get increased trading capacity so that Archegos could continue buying swaps in its most concentrated positions, thereby driving up the price of those stocks. Ultimately in March 2021, price declines in Archegos’s most concentrated positions allegedly triggered significant margin calls that Archegos was unable to meet, and Archegos’s subsequent default and collapse resulted in billions of dollars in credit losses among Archegos’s counterparties.
> The SEC’s complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges Hwang and the other defendants with violating antifraud and other provisions of the federal securities laws. The complaint seeks permanent injunctive relief, return of allegedly ill-gotten gains, and civil penalties. The SEC also seeks to bar individual defendants from serving as a public company officer and director.
I think the essence is he bid up the price of some not terribly liquid stocks by buying a lot of them. He then borrowed money against those overpriced stocks he held.
That can work if greater fools come and buy the overpriced stocks back off you but didn't in this case, ending with the stock prices falling back down and the lenders getting stiffed.
Imagine you have a house and you go to 5 different banks and take 5 different mortgages.
One mortgage is safe for the banks because they can take back the house. Low risk means low rates.
If you could take 5 mortgages, that would be very risky for the banks so they wouldn't give you a loan or charge much higher interest.
Hence you can't take more than one mortgage.
But what if you lie to the bank when you apply for mortgage?
Well, to prevent that we made lying to the banks about such things a crime.
Hwang is accused of a variation of that: he got loans from multiple banks without telling them about other loans i.e. lying to banks.
He made leveraged investments into lousy stocks and when he got called on those loans, he couldn't repay them and banks that gave him loans lost billions.
This is also effectively the same crime that got Donald Trump a $450 million penalty in the recent New York civil fraud case.
To get those five mortgages, maybe you could just exaggerate the value of the property by 5x? Lenders would think there’s ample collateral, but in fact the property is over-leveraged.
Unlike Hwang, Trump’s scheme didn’t blow up and result in massive losses for the banks. But the underlying fraud was the same.
I'd like to meet Bill Hwang and ask, "What the heck were you thinking?"
All those paper profits would have to be converted into real money at some point, and the massive sales would have dampened the share prices, negating the point in the first place.
He was trading like a WSB subscriber but with actual billions in capital. From what is known publicly, the guy lived frugally and wasn't a status or prestige chaser. He seems more like someone with an excessive risk appetite who got in over his head.
I also find it interesting that Bill Hwang amassed over $30 billion, and no one would have known if his family office hadn't fallen apart. This makes me wonder how many Wall Street billionaires are hiding in plain sight, only known by industry peers.
The problem was that eventually he (through his brokers hedges) owned enough of these equities to cause massive slippage if he cashed out. He knew this, so he couldnt really cash out, even though he was up massively on paper. And then his stocks had a bad couple weeks and he wasnt up massively and the banks tried to unwind and discovered the massive slippage problem he already knew about. I think in basically every case like this it just comes down to getting in too deep and the only way out looking like doubling down. When the options are "5% chance of success if I double down or 0% if I dont" you double down because why would you care if the banks lose more.
>> All those paper profits would have to be converted into real money at some point, and the massive sales would have dampened the share prices, negating the point in the first place.
Sometimes I fear the 401k plans in the US will collectively do the same. Is there any way to see the net inflow and outflow of these plans?
Right there in our Lord's prayer is some financial advice:
> And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
In the original Greek of Matthew's prayer, the word is "ophelilema", as in financial debt. There are other words for more metaphorical debts like when breaking rules, which were notably not used.
Akhshually Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic. So even if Matthew wrote his Gospel in Greek it may not necessarily be the most accurate translation of what Jesus actually said. /end pedantry
In any case, the "gospel of prosperity" types in Christianity are second only to the "secretly a sex pest" types in regards to how obnoxious they are and how much of a black eye they give to Christianity's reputation.
> Akhshually Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic.
Actually, like most people in the world, and especially people in "border lands", if he existed, he probably will have been multilingual. Aramaic for sure, but he might also have spoken some Hebrew, Greek and maybe even Latin.
Sure. But if you claim to follow the man, it means following the book, and the book is - once again - very clear on certain topics, regardless of who put the words down.
There’s a very big difference between being a Christian and preaching to the world about it constantly. Out of the 2.4 billion only a fraction insist on letting you know it in everything they do.
Well it depends on whether you consider everyone that claims to be or is assumed to be by default, a Christian, and what exactly you mean by “constantly.”
A true Christian will by definition be preaching the gospel to the lost and dying world at every opportunity
Usually people use words so that other people will understand them. If your internal definition doesn't match nearly anyone else's, maybe you're using the word wrong.
Isn't that all language is? An appeal to what others think you mean? This ofc is why people like to push definitions in different directions. I think you're saying, "Christian should mean XYZ," while I'm pointing out most people don't hold your meaning. If you want everyone to adopt your definition, you need to give a compelling reason. However, I've heard so many other people who call themselves Christian claim that all the other so-called Christians are not really Christian, that I don't really trust any particular Christian's definition. It's easier to just say, "Christian means someone who claims to be Christian".
That's because the "prosperity gospel" faction (also called "pray and display" and "gab and grab") is so very open about money and the good life, it's in fact their core part of religious practice.
When a regular person says "heaven has blessed me with this and that", that's making a statement of fact, that person says he has this and that and he credits the deity, nothing more. But when a prosperity gospel guy says such, that person is engaging in theurgy. He believes that the deity blessed him in such and such a manner and by publicising the fact the deity must necessarily bless him with much much more money.
Positive thinking and "law of attraction" is less overtly Christian but made from the same cloth and just as detestable.
If you find that theology distasteful, childish or blasphemous you are not alone.
Probably because if you're actually into Jesus, as in, what is taught by him in the Bible and not the bastardized evangelical prosperity gospel white Jesus that Americans are into, you wouldn't really seek out money apart from having enough to live on.
Also worth noting that being active in an organization like a church provides one with a sizable community of people, many of whom are probably at least doing okay, and depending which church, can be quite wealthy and they will automatically find you more trustworthy because you are in "their group," so fraud is baseline easier to execute. And, in the odd event you are caught out, a well performed "reformation" will have you as a in-good-standing member of that community again, and probably benefiting from the charity of it's members in short order.
This is a big part of why MLM/pyramid schemes, the Mormons, and the state of Utah are so deeply intertwined.
And I mean, let's not leave out the obvious one: people big on magical thinking aren't generally the best at critical thinking.
This is not to say that religious people are the only ones who can be scammed, that's of course nonsense. But people who believe things like "god has a plan" and indulge in the just world fallacy freely and "everything happens for a reason" are on balance just plain easier to manipulate, and even if as that one quoted pastor says, that Hwang is a true believer, well that could just mean he believes his schemes are god's plan, that his actions are god's creation, that what he has done is what he was put on this earth to do, and all that. He could be a swindling liar or a true believer, it doesn't matter. How many people have done diabolical things in our history believing whatever deity they believe in had created them to do it? It's just motivated reasoning. You believe in a just and mighty god, and you have ideas for how to do anything, steal from people, amass wealth, harm people, whatever, and it just so happens that you find all the passages from your god that cosign what it is you already wanted to do? No kiddin, weird how that always works out.
i prefer calling up clergy and asking them when i have questions of this sort. I'm non-religious but in order to talk about it respectfully i sometimes have questions.
(disclaimer: I'm an atheist American who was raised sort of "Christian by default" but whose immediate family virtually never attended church and never identified with any particular denomination)
I'd guess at some social function of the equalizing narrative of universal/original sin and Jesus being the scapegoat for it. Being highly reductive about it, I can imagine the prosocial lens and the antisocial one.
Through the prosocial lens, it says that we must all be humble regardless of our propriety or material accomplishments, because even the greatest and purest of us are not above sin. We must respect the struggle of our fellow fallen man against the unrelenting pull of temptation to commit transgressions, and remind ourselves to demonstrate Christlike mercy when they fail.
Through the antisocial lens, it says that you might as well lie/cheat/plunder/exploit/murder and beg for forgiveness if you're caught, because you're considered tainted in either case. In an odd way, the stereotypical evangelical redemption/rebirth narrative arguably values greater sins more than lesser ones: "if the blood of the Lamb can cleanse this sin from me, then your salvation is certain".
Nothing wrong with gambling (i.e. wagering real resources against an uncertain outcome), the entire financial market / all of capitalism is a chaotic orchestra of millions of gambles.
I know it's an irrelevant aside, but can I just say, since the article decides to lead with it, that the painting created from his vision is utterly underwhelming. How you could take such a vision and turn it into something so mundane is beyond me. I almost wonder if it's just the classic money laundering through painting valuatiom shtick.
> The artwork, commissioned in 2016, is rendered in metal mesh by renowned South Korean artist Seungmo Park. Park also created a larger-than-life depiction of Olympic sprinter Sebastian Coe for Nike’s headquarters in Oregon and the façade of Gucci’s flagship store in Seoul.
I noticed the texture looked odd when I zoomed into the photo. I suspect Park did the best he could, but the medium itself seems poorly-suited for the vision.
He definitely committed fraud, but at least it was against counterparties that were unequivocally aware of the tail risks and capable of managing them. He didn’t directly fleece retail investors like SBF, Madoff, etc..
