I'm not sure you appreciate just how insufferably arrogant a sentence like "I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room" sounds. Especially when you follow it up by calling yourself "a smart detailed person" while dismissing others around you as "normies". If you truly were smart, you'd perhaps appreciate just how difficult it is to even begin to define that word, and also just how much your comment reads like an incoherent word vomit. Who is Susie Q? What petitions? What are you on about?
then why didn't you say what you just said to everybody talking about SBF?
You didn't say it because your reasoning is motivated, you're inventing something to say to and about me to indicate your scorn.
But that is why I wrote in the first place, to say that everybody is heaping scorn on SBF and ignoring what it's like to be asked those questions in a trial environment.
So finally we've arrived at a place where you have the beginning of a chance of understanding what I was saying all along. Sorry it took this long, but I was saying "why is everybody tripping over themselves to register their scorn, when the facts of the matter are more interesting. Facts should motivate juries, not scorn."
I don't live in the world of scorn, and your scorn does not make me feel bad. It makes me think less of you, that you can't engage in a discussion with trying to self congratulate and seek group approval for your distaste for people who are different.
and before you say "I didn't say that", I can't write a million replies to a million people (I actually can, but people don't like to read it) so I'm replying at this point in a multi-message thread to the overall tone of the crowd that you are agreeing with.
Also known as a 'loaded question' (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question>) - I really don't think that questions like "Did Alameda have an essentially unbounded line of credit?" are all that loaded. SBF simply did not want to answer the questions.
I was disabusing him of the notion that he might be the smartest person in that room. Smartness is across various axes, for one, but mainly, the presumptuousness and the sheer confidence of the assumption rubbed me the wrong way, not so much the content of the argument.
Agreed. I think that some people - SBF included - could take to heart the idea that sometimes they are not the smartest person in the room. Or even that being 'smart' is not the always the most important thing to be at every point in time.
Nor did I want to give such an answer, I just wanted to understand the question so I could give the short answer that was accurate.
I explained how giving the short obvious answer screwed me. You have to grasp the story I told in totality if you want to render judgements based on how smart you know everybody is. Every sentence I included was for a reason, it fits together like a puzzle. There were many other facts I left out because they were unnecessary. But for some reason, you simply look for slim reasons to attack. smh
SBF's case didn't go his way because he was obviously lying and lying and lying ("I don't recall") and equivocating and evading when he wasn't outright lying, because he was guilty. There may have been instances where he was genuinely trying to communicate a salient truth in response to a prosecutor's rhetorical trap, but indulging him in those cases wasn't going to change the outcome. He should not have testified; he should have pled guilty.
I have watched a lot of hours of court cases. The adversarial lawyers are very literally trying to get you to screw up verbally. That’s their job. They could hold of a picture of an apple and say “is this an apple, yes or no.” Or even “is this a photograph of an apple yes or no?” And depending on what they mean the answer could be both.
> A defendant with ASD may shift the topic of the court discussions to a topic which is of interest to them and it can be difficult for anyone to interrupt them. The interest may be one of the individual’s preoccupations. Jurors may perceive this behaviour as an indication that the defendant is deliberately being evasive and trying to avoid answering the question that has been asked of them. As mentioned earlier, they may also go into excessive and unnecessary detail (and often at great length) when asked a question. Their responses may, in addition to being detailed and lengthy, it can also be repetitive
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Like some (most?) of us here, I've got ASD too; I've been in court too, though only as a small-claims plaintiff (got a default judgement against no-show defendent with a negative net-worth, fun...); and yeah, I remember putting a lot of details into what I said in court and the judge seeming annoyed with me - but I thought it was all relevant (still, the judge said I would have won anyway even if it wasn't a default judgement...).
But yeah - if I was was ever a criminal defendent, the prosecution would probably let me talk myself into a trap - or something. Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
I'm not an expert and I left details out to simplify, but depositions had already been submitted.
Sometimes judges will hive off a piece of a case to "a special master" or something like that, to answer a subsidiary question. This was such a thing, the person presiding was a retired judge, and he has "powers" (like kicking me out if I continued to not say "yes or no", which kills my case because I'm the one making the complaint) and his purview was answering the question of whether the petitions had been properly served. All parties to the suit were there, but it was not in a court, and there was no "stand", we all sat around a table. I suppose it was something like a deposition, but the master was there and my attorney was not free to argue directly with their attorney.
This piece of the story is also a big bowl of horribly unfair spaghetti. Wanna hear it?
There is no such thing as "service" or "serving" where a shareholder petition is concerned, there's no standard for it, it's not a thing. You could do it by mail, etc. because the officers are your fiduciaries and they are to look out for your interests.
As it stood, by total coincidence, when I went to the front desk where paperwork like an actual service would be handled, the "mailing address" so to speak, who is standing right there but the president of the board! So I smiled and said "I've got petitions for you", which she was well aware my group had been collecting, they just thought we'd never make it over the hump. She went cold and like wouldn't take the envelope, was holding her hands away, and told me to leave it at the desk, the desk she was standing by. So I did.
Then she started inventing reasons why these petitions had not been served properly (they were served the way she told me to). In her deposition, this event turned into me "lying in wait, angrily physically assaulting her with the envelope". I was not angry: nobody thought we could get enough signatures but we did, I was positively giddy. I wasn't even showing my inner Nelson, "HAA-HAA", that's what I was covering up with my smile.
In any case: to repeat, there is no standard for service, it's not a thing. But the way we delivered them was the way service would be made. She is also my fiduciary who was obligated to look after my shareholder rights. It cost me about $250,000 in attorney fees to just cover this piece of the case. How can an overfull court system claim that this is something that must be looked into? They had to invent reasons to look into it.
All entirely separate from further time and money wasting whether what we were petitioning was something we could petition (it was, to call a shareholder meeting) and what is allowed to come to the floor at a shareholder meeting (you know who decides that, who courts won't override? shareholders, and they'd be at the meeting) and we were explicitly petitioning to remove board members at the meeting, another of our enumerated rights in the by-laws. We did not have the right to call an election, but all board members being removed triggers an election under a separate clause so... if you're going to make up a standard, it's so easy to see this should be thrown to the shareholders.
The board was simply throwing up one implausible excuse after another to avoid calling the meeting. So many legal questions which weren't even legal questions, for this type of corporation there are no standards for any of it, but the court was entertaining far flung notions borrowing ideas from other facets of industry as sort of frontier justice or something.
It should have been a slam dunk, I don't know why the court didn't just order a meeting immediately because meetings are easy to hold, it's not a big deal, and no matter what, the shareholders were both the affected parties and the arbiters, so why not just let them have a meeting?
oh, the attorney lady was an employment law attorney, and I know of another incident where she claimed somebody had assaulted her with documents. I have a feeling that's her modus operandi in employment lawsuits "they were angry, they might have done anything". Disgusting. And equally disgusting to spend a million in shareholder money trying not to have a shareholder meeting.
> Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
No you just do what your lawyer says, and perhaps that will form part of the defence. But this was Sam's problem, being so confident he was smarter than the lawyers when in this domain he was half an idiot.
your lawyer cannot give you advice every step of the way, and does not anticipate where trouble will arise for you. Even though your lawyer is on your side, he has much more in common with the other lawyers in the room than he does with you.
My lawyer did not anticipate that when he showed me photocopies and asked me "are these the petitions" that I would answer "no they are not". I don't know the standards of the law, "photocopy just as good", and it's second nature to him. I actually fear perjuring myself; my opponent, an attorney completely did not.
I've been in several large lawsuits. My attorneys like working with me, I am incredibly diligent, I research everything I can, I come up with ideas they didn't think of, and most importantly, I seek and follow all of their advice and never mention a peep about the case, etc.
my lawyer still got me into hot water by not preparing for these questions becaused they seemed obvious to him, and the system jumped on board.
“Where does the Super Bowl even begins? In the parking lot? Then I drove there. In the seat? Then I walked there. Was I ever there? Who knows, what is a person other than an ever changing cloud of electrons and protons moving, spinning and decaying at amazing rate… where does my butt ends and the seat begin?…” if you roll Pedantic for 20/20
- Is the system rigged? Yes.
- Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Yes.
- Are most people in the Justice system mediocre? Yes, to the best of my knowledge your honor.
- Is Justice != Law application? Yes, greatest marketing scam calling it Justice Department.
- Is SBF a scammer that had a chip on his shoulder and got rich off other peoples money? All signs point to yes.
- Does he deserved to be in jail? In SBF words, “Yep”.
Mate, I don’t question your intellect or memory, surely you are God - even in a forum where there is no lack of bright people - but your emotional intelligence is severely handicapped, so much that the “functional” part of your self description falls into doubt. You come across as the Simpsons comic store guy. Chill.
smart autistic people have trouble communicating with people who are not precise in a venue which pretends to insist on precision, and here's a vivid example showing how innocent things can go wrong
and you think afterward you need to reiterate the attitude people have that triggered me to write in the first place. Yes, I know. Now read my story, it's a response to what you said, with details that can be discussed which you've ignored, details you should quote as a response rather than just telling me what I already know.
I didn't say I was the smartest person in the room to imply that "everybody should listen to me". I said it to ensure the reader that the troubles that ensued in the story were not due to me being unable to follow what was going on. I followed it, it made no sense without context that they were denying me. It would make no sense to anybody paying attention, but clarification was not possible.
But nowhere in your vast and vaunted store of EQ-that-I-am-lacking do you find any empathy for me and my experience. You just have the urge to tell me I'm wrong, it's my fault, etc. I'm submitting your response as further evidence of my point.
>Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes?
Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - laws should allow for some level of ambiguity, and should be written for outcomes. The enforcement is a negotiation between agents bound by the law and agents tasked with upholding the law.
It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
> . Any analysis tells me that the spirit of your question is to paint me as a bad person
This is why you never should talk about being "the smartest person in the room". Because if you're that kind of person, you will inevitably try to show your genius work, and it will always be severely lacking.
I'm sorry, but you were not the smartest person in the room. You fail to understand what a prosecutor does and why, and you fail to understand what makes good testimony.
Maybe you had the highest amount of raw brain power in the court room, but with no intellectual curiosity or humility, that's like running the fastest CPU with no cooling on an unstable power supply.
>It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation. Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist?
I'm not thinking it's all one way or the other.
A person who is lying/willing to lie will still take every opportunity to tell the truth if it makes him look good.
Separately, an autistic person has trouble understanding and being understood, and then emotions flare and the autistic person is more disconnected.
His autistic answers to questions can look evasive, but they are not necessarily, especially if the truth is actually on his side. There will be many questions he is trying to answer honestly because the truth is on his side, but his awkwardness looks evasive.
He may simultaneously have a motive and willingness to also be evasive and lie.
And then a layer of he-said-she-said, there are always two sides to a story and how to remember and tell it, and the truth lies in the middle (with the lies? hahaha)
If the defendent is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, I am pointing out that much of what people are making great sport of here can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. But at the same time, I don't doubt that there was a strong case against him overall, and he was guilty.
To use a blunt analogy, to me I'm hearing people saying "look at that lying cheating wop eat spaghetti on his private plane and as his last meal!" (I chose Italian because I am) Well, that lying cheating Italian might be named Ponzi (the other reason I chose Italian) and he deserves to go to jail, but it's this bystander jeering that sounds bad to me, that type of attitude can be turned against any one of us.
I agree with you that it's unfair to laugh at what might be Sam's genuine attempts to be honest when answering a question. I appreciate your account of your own experience. The only thing I would disagree with is that there is any kind of "correct" or "normie" answer to questions made by a prosecutor during cross examination. If they are good at their job then they will only ever ask questions that they already know the answer to. The only hope you have in that case is that the judge will allow you to speak beyond what the prosecutor has asked about. I don't think it matters whether you're autistic or normie as you put it. Like you say, most people here would crumble in that position.
The problem with your description is that he only acts like that when he is questioned about criminal and unethical acts he has committed lr when someone challenges him. He acts completely different when he's treated as the smartest guy in the room.
I was eager and willing to watch the whole thing, but it isn't available.
When I read the 2nd hand accounts of it, all I see are people making fun of a person who I see as autistic. That has made me not even read up on all the 2nd hand accounts, so I can't draw the more sweeping generalizations that you feel comfortable making. mea culpa
and any person is going to be more uncomfortable when questioned about the illegal parts. I'm simply saying that will exaggerate the autism experience and make him look extra guilty compared to a smooth talking guilty huckster.
"Did you fly on a private plane to an airport 4.5 miles away from the location of the Super Bowl, the day before the Super Bowl" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
SBF chose to make his character a part of his defense ("Whoopsie daisies I'm just an incompetent nerd who likes muffins and didn't know I was doing anything wrong"), which makes character attacks like that fair game against him for the prosecution.
This is precisely why you shut up, and plead the fifth. You'll be eviscerated on cross-examination when you don't.
Although in his case, he probably should have pled guilty, and begged for mercy, instead.
