It's not even in the top 10 most astonishing things about this story, but the amount of money the author's brother made in bitcoin while working hard at the startup game is astonishing:
> “He wrote a white paper on cryptocurrency and why Ethereum was going to skyrocket,” my dad told me. “A number of his friends became rich off of him.”
> None of us know how much Yush made, or where the bitcoin is now, but through his investments, he was able to bankroll at least $50,000 per month on running his new start-up, his former business partner, Nate Argetsinger, told me. Susan Farrington, a former CMU administrator and so-called “college mom” to Yush, told me that when she was between jobs, Yush suspected that she might be struggling.
> He called her up one day and said, “By my calculations, you are probably having some financial difficulties by now.” After much persistence, he transferred $10,000 worth of bitcoin to Farrington. “Honestly nobody has done anything like that for me,” she told me as her voice cracked. “It made him happy.”
This doesn't seem like the "feature" that would get you the outcome you want.
People more exposed to the traditions and practices of securing wealth for posterity will do so with cryptocurrencies, and others get no aid in avoiding the lose of everything. It just serves to reinforce what was, no merit required.
You can, it just takes a bit of work. In fact, you can do so much more because bitcoin transfer can be done in a way that is opaque to tax agencies. It is entirely possible that that is what happened here: I don't get the sense that the money would have gone to the author, or that her family would tell her if they did get the money.
I know we’re going way off topic, but I’d rather keep a higher proportion of my earnings while I’m alive in exchange for losing control of whatever assets I have left over.
I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but consider the implications of this worldview: no one would rationally invest in any business venture that they might not live to see come to fruition, and that higher wealth to invest correlates with being older.
This is simply not true under any standard definition of "rationally." You are assuming a loss function that values only growing the wealth of your family, whereas many other people have different loss functions that lead to different rational behavior.
I never said families, nor did the OP: just that being able to make decisions, protected by law, as to who receives your assets after you die is a desirable thing for long-term productivity. Name 1 other "loss function" that would scale society-wide. Even the charitable impulse requires that there be well established businesses at which the recipients can spend and benefit from the money, businesses which take a lot of time to build without seeing a return on investment.
The other implication would be that people genuinely interested in a cause would invest money in such beyond lifetime business ventures. That could fix some of the perverse incentives with such ventures.
I wonder if she was able to find his Reddit and Hacker News posts. He went under the handle "thebadplus". Nothing particularly interesting under either, though.
Moving essay, and I feel for her loss. It does leave me thinking of him as an enigma, though, and I can't help but wonder why. Yes, he was an enigma to her by the time he died. But she interviewed lots of people who were active in his life when he died and has pretty much nothing to relay on from them. Did they really have no opinions of him? Did he leave no records or discussions of why, exactly, he wanted limb lengthening surgery?
And he wrote and published an essay about her family, presumably discussing his feelings about her, but she didn't feel fit to link it? While at the same time thought it was worth the space to dig up an ancient email of his that references another website, from which she feels the need to quote an unrelated passage?
This essay seems much more interested in pigeonholing his tragic death into a rubric of "victim of hateful white supremacist MRA thought" instead of allowing him his own voice. She should consider, perhaps, that responsibility for his death might fall on broader social trends instead of relying on simplistic explanations pointing to a maligned sect which it's unclear he even adhered to when he died.
heartbreaking. I don't really agree with any of the rationalizations Yush's sister puts forth here, as I'm sure he wouldn't have either, but... at least in this age of political division, family bonds prioritized over disagreements in the end.
>at least in this age of political division, family bonds prioritized over disagreements in the end.
Eh, sort of. This reads to me like a long-winded explanation as to why her brother was smart in many ways but really too dumb to see that he was wrong about the source of his insecurity, that the true cause for all of his grief was not only completely outside the control of her tribe of identity, that it was actually a common enemy that she continues to battle.
The writer touched on this point when she mentioned him analysing the physical world and her analysing social structures. It seemed that he approached this as merely a technical problem he needed to fix rather than analysing the underlying structures.
I’m into speculation here, but perhaps he lacked the intellectual breadth to consider other angles to what was going on. I find that technically successful people often think that complex social issues can be reduced to and solved as technical problems. That in my opinion misses huge amounts of complexity and nuance.
I don’t think it is correct to say he critically appraised the situation, at least sufficiently. Would we think the same if eg a black person sees that white people were more successful professionally and therefore resolved to whiten their skin? Would we all just say “sure, that’s what you’ve got to do!” and not wonder why they need to in the first place? Where should the change come from?
Of course, that said many people feel to need to conform to a situation while wanting it to be different. It’s messy. Height is a particularly odd case as it’s on the border of being an unchangeable physical characteristic. Maybe the real reason he wasn’t taken seriously was because of his race but he knew he couldn’t change that?
Oh no, not at all. I just mean questioning why he felt the need to be taller, rather than accepting the need and moving straight to the technical “how” part of what operation to get.
> Westrich said that she sees many more men with height dysphoria than women. Men she’s counseled, she said, often “feel like they’re at a disadvantage. They feel like they’re not taken as seriously in terms of work environment. They feel like romantic partners don’t see them as being as attractive as they could be if they were taller,”
Short people, ugly people... these things definitely have a real effect on people's careers and lives and they'll be the last to get their 'social justice cause d'jour' moment.
“Cause d’jour” (du jour) is rather dismissive. Why do you say this? Do you think that there are too many groups clamouring for their rights? Why do you think this might be the case?
Cause Célèbres are absolutely a thing; their focal point varies by era. There are some very clear ones being pushed now, driven by, I suspect, a combination of algorithmic analysis, political necessity, and economic realities.
Remember when the height of social justice activism was Prohibition?
If you want to take it as dismissive, that’s on you. Please don’t go making assumptions about what I believe if I didn’t outright say it.
It’s not my place to compare the many people clamouring for dignity, but I am pointing out that there is definitely an unwritten hierarchy in play here.
How do you see this hierarchy? I’ll be frank - it seems to be the groups of people who have been most marginalised for centuries or longer, and the amount of time we’ve spent talking about them is far less than they’ve been oppressed.
Well, putting aside your refusal to spell out what you actually think, in the 20th century the major social groups agitating for rights have been women, black people and LGBT people. I would hope and expect that they all come above short and ugly people in this hierarchy.
Short and ugly people have never been legally denied property rights on the basis of their shortness and ugliness, or denied the right the vote, or forced into segregated schools, or suffered police persecution.
I’m not denying that short and ugly people are at a disadvantage but it’s obviously on a very different scale to the above and not as a result of deliberate state policy.
What exactly is your problem with them being towards the bottom of this hierarchy?
In a world where the ideal man doesn't have to conform to the traditional stereotypes or masculinity (tall and strong), short people would have far fewer reasons to worry about their height, don't you think?
And the mere fact that women don't have to conform to similar expectations should tell one that the cause of short people is very much tied to breaking up sex stereotypes and roles that we have today.
I would point out I'm not exclusively referring to men here, which it appears you've taken it as. Short and ugly women also have lesser luck in life.
I do agree that in general the loosening of the shackles of societal expectation will make space for changes, but I don't think it would actually have an appreciable effect.
Not that it likely matters now, but the brother sounds like a high-functioning schizophrenic - super-bright kid morphing into an increasingly erratic and alienated adult. Especially without any hallucinations, it's tough to diagnose and looks like a mix of depression, mania, OCD, etc. There's the flight-of-ideas component that frequently allows for great creativity, but frustration as the world can't keep up with their changing visions and priorities. They also tend to be narrative-builders - nothing just happens, everything has a cause, often malignant, byzantine, and vast. Because they always feel 'on' and 'deliberate' everything else must be functioning that way too, so everything is a personal attack. They increasingly can't work with others and try to work as brilliant loners or establish themselves as the visionary leader.
> Rather than blaming a greater system of patriarchy and white supremacy for these double standards, under which we all suffer, he blamed feminists like me.
I can't help but feel that even through a tragedy, the author still hasn't budged from her side of views.
In what direction do you think she needs to budge? Does she need to admit that women do, in fact, prefer assholes? Or that the domestic violence she suffered was her fault?
I don't think he is insecure. The author admits that she barely talked to him during the time he wanted the surgery. It seems equally likely that he was secure while wanting the height extensions to get a leg up in life. You don't have to be insecure to want something better for yourself.
People within their group or even people of the majority pop in near homogenous countries still have all kinds of insecurities. If those people grew up in other societies outside their group they may or may not have different insecurities, but we can’t know.
Interestingly the USSR used to be known for limb lengthening surgery, although I heard it was very much in a Soviet tradition.
Just to clarify this position, do you believe that insecurity about physical appearance is the result of patriarchy and not a hundred thousand year genetic predisposition to find desirable mating partners for survival?
I'm insecure about my looks because I'm happier when I see attractive people and I know I can't give other people that happiness.
I believe that's my position. If the social structure of humanity is based on genetic necessity, I wouldn't think to frame it as any one group of individuals making decisions that harm others.
I think people in these discussions over-assume that patriarchal is consciously intentional. So we're confusedly agreeing?
> The social structure that results is emergent, not designed.
... yes, and the undesigned structure that has emerged we are labelling "patriarchy".
> the social structure of humanity is based on genetic necessity
... requires a lot more unpacking. Is this asserting that culture doesn't exist and material conditions are irrelevant? All behaviour is only genetic? I don't think that's what you're claiming, but I can't parse it otherwise.
Definitely. It feels like there's a difference in our interpretation of the context of the word "patriarchy". I have most often heard it used as a condemnation of a group of individuals who are also disadvantaged by the social structure. Similar to the way "idealism" is commonly used to disparage positive future thinking.
I would sure rather a society where no one has to feel like they're in a fight for survival where the only way to win is someone else losing.
The same sorta pattern repeats a lot. Even a lot of quite toxic MRA stuff is basically dudes redescovering core feminist concepts but then not seeing the forest for the trees.
But her emphasizing with his point would logically only lead her to put further (even all) blame for his death on him, and wouldn't result in writing more "balanced" or wise but simply spiteful and patronizing, which I think this does a good job avoiding.
Did I interpreted the parent wrong? How did you interpret it?
He said "One in which the author does not assume her brother should blame a greater system of patriarchy and white supremacy."
My interpretation was that the person was not affected by the racism or the society norms and the author is wrong, I pointed out that her stories about the racism and the rest are confirmed by statistics, so I am not sure why the OP is so sure that the author is wrong, does he have more information?
Yes the article is subjective and the author can be wrong but a random guy wants to disprove the author because his political views disagree with the author.
I don't know, and I don't think which side is right is really important. More that I felt that neither side compromised even through tragedy (just basing it from this article).
TL;DR: Brother with height insecurities gets rich off cryptocurrency, pays for leg extension surgery, dies rather suddenly of pulmonary embolism during recovery.
There is more then that, like why did he want the operation and why did him and his sister fall apart, we are imperfect creatures and some/most of us care too much about what society(or some group of people) thinks about us.
We spend a lot of time reading or watching fictional stories but I always enjoy reading about real life stories, things that most of the time are not told, try to empathize with the people in the story etc.
There was rather more to him - and the article - than that, and I found myself rather moved by the way the author described her brother's life. By contrast, your comment seems unkind and unnecessary.
>When my brother died, I was too shattered to write his obituary. There is little record of his 29 years of life; it simply vanished. When I type “Yush Gupta,” Google autofills “Yush Gupta death,” a brutal reminder that even on the internet, a space where nothing is forgotten, Yush is a mirage, slowly disappearing.
Something tells me that the author of this article wouldn't exactly be thrilled to come across her brother's posts on lookism or reddit. She should be grateful that she can't find anything.
If you read further, she did actually mention finding other things in the article:
> And I learned that he had written an anonymous essay about our family published in a Men’s Rights anthology, in which he lamented over a society that values the “emotional pain” of women over the burden men have to provide for them. He complained that women were inferior in logical ability, and that women in abusive relationships are not held accountable for their decision to stay, while pressures upon men are overlooked and ignored.
> After his death, my dad shared an email with me in which Yush had cited the deeply misogynistic Red Pill constitution—a manifesto that claims “Feminism is nothing more than a female supremacy movement posing as one of humanist egalitarianism”—as relevant commentary on psychology and sociology.
> “He wrote a white paper on cryptocurrency and why Ethereum was going to skyrocket,” my dad told me. “A number of his friends became rich off of him.”
> None of us know how much Yush made, or where the bitcoin is now, but through his investments, he was able to bankroll at least $50,000 per month on running his new start-up, his former business partner, Nate Argetsinger, told me. Susan Farrington, a former CMU administrator and so-called “college mom” to Yush, told me that when she was between jobs, Yush suspected that she might be struggling.
> He called her up one day and said, “By my calculations, you are probably having some financial difficulties by now.” After much persistence, he transferred $10,000 worth of bitcoin to Farrington. “Honestly nobody has done anything like that for me,” she told me as her voice cracked. “It made him happy.”