SBF is finding out

Every where I turn, there’s another interview with Sam Bankman-Fried. He’s been chattering away like a chimpanzee on meth to anyone who asks for a few minutes of his time.

Bankman-Fried has spent the past few weeks in his Bahamas estate, giving numerous interviews to reporters and making dozens of social media posts trying to explain how his company went from being one of the biggest and most-respected crypto exchanges to filing for bankruptcy after it could not meet its customers’ withdrawal requests. The company owes its top creditors $3 billion, according to bankruptcy filings, and investigators have sought answers on whether it used customer funds to lend money to Bankman-Fried’s investment arm, Alameda Research.

Bankman-Fried has said he made grave mistakes but has denied any malicious wrongdoing.

Yeah, “mistakes”. Is that what we call gross negligence, incompetence, and profiteering? Sure. “Mistakes.”

All those “mistakes” are adding up to this result:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested Monday in the Bahamas after U.S. prosecutors filed an indictment against him.

Good.

I felt a little twinge of the Christmas spirit

It was tiny, mind you, but for just a moment I felt a little holiday joy.

You all know who Dave Chappelle is — once a ground-breaking comedian, now a cranky, transphobic, anti-woke whiner. He still gets comedy concert gigs, but you know his audience has shrunk to just the kind of people who don’t mind a bitter, cruel joke about trans people. He put on a show in San Francisco, which is still his kind of place, a venue where he could pack in the tech bros who usually aren’t very socially conscious, and he brought on stage…Elon Musk. I followed this online, expecting in my grinchy, cynical way, that this was the crowd that would applaud a transphobe and a greedy bumbling billionaire.

That I simply MUST hear!
So I paused.
And the Grinch put his hand to his ear.
And I did hear a sound rising over the snow.
It started in low.
Then it started to grow…
But the sound wasn’t cheery!
Why, this sound sounded angry!
It couldn’t be so!

They despised him! They hated him! They booed that motherfucker for ten minutes straight!

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
Maybe Christmas,
I thought
doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!
And what happened then…?
Well…in Who-ville they say that the Grinch’s small heart Grew three sizes that day!

Well, maybe a size and a half. I’m not that easy.

The icing on the cake was seeing Chappelle stoop to defend Musk by insulting his audience. They must be poor! They must be the people he fired!

All these people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, you have terrible seats.

That’s Dave for you, the once great comedian, reduced to mocking people for being poor, as he panders to the richest man in the world.

Good night, Elon. You’ve fallen and won’t be getting up again.

“Get a job,” they say, and wonder where the artists went

Research in the UK reveals a decline in the proportion of people employed in creative work. That’s not good.

The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.

I wonder why. The article doesn’t get around to giving a good explanation; there’s one waffling attempt to wave it away by saying that there is a smaller pool of working class people to draw from now, as if everyone is just wealthier now so naturally you’re going to have fewer lower middle class people going into the arts. But then, I’m confused by what they also say:

The finding raises questions about why years of attempts to make the arts more open and diverse have not had more impact – people who grew up in professional families were four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work, the study found.

But then, if everyone is generally moving up to the professional class, shouldn’t there be a flowering of the arts in the UK? I don’t think we’re getting the full story here. I’d want to know the change in proportion of creatives from the whole population, not just a single class. It makes the story uninterpretable to leave that out.

I would suggest though, that from the American side, part of the story has to be the transformation of education from an endeavor to help people learn more to one that’s all about landing a good job. And that change is driven by the fact that higher ed has become so expensive that it’s pricing itself out of reach of the working class. Even in the 1970s, as a member of a working class family, college was not encouraged — in those years, I could pay for it with part-time and summer work, but it meant delaying getting a good union job in a trade for four years, and that was lost income. Now you go to college, it means racking up $100,000 in debt. You better not major in poetry or literature or dance with that kind of debt hanging over your head! Computers and chemical engineering, on the other hand…

I’ve got this

Classes over! All grading to date completed! Freedom is in sight!

OK, I have to compose two final exams by Monday, and grade them next weekend. This won’t be too intimidating, though — my plan is to make the final machine-gradeable, mostly multiple choice and math problems, so with a little preparation I can just log in next Saturday, see all the scores waiting for me, and then I plug them into a spreadsheet that spits out letter grades.

So, next weekend…margaritas and tacos and lounging about, playing with spiders and data. Until then, one last push.

Now I’m feeling old

My wife was tidying up old papers, and found this letter. My daughter had written it to her grandparents to thank them for some Christmas presents (and also to share the family excitement, that her older brother had gotten a ball python). Grandma had put the date on it, and we got it back after they died.

Written when my daughter was about the same age as my granddaughter is now, 26 years ago. Jebus, but time flies by, and leaves me all old and sentimental. I may need to mope for a bit.