9 ms·
Stories About My Brother
- eugeniub 7y agoOne of the most moving pieces I have ever read.
- danso 7y agoIt'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.”
- pjc50 7y ago> None of us know how much Yush made, or where the bitcoin is now Almost certainly the secrets died unrecoverably with him.
- ur-whale 7y agoIt's actually a feature of Bitcoin I really like: unless you carefully plan for your death, no one will be able to inherit your coins. Inheriting money is the worst possible thing if you believe societies should be meritocracies.
- jcims 7y agoEh, the idea that people shouldn't be able to control what happens to their assets after their passing is, to me, even worse.
- dooglius 7y agoYou 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.
- jcims 7y agoI'm more replying to the parent that says inheritance is the 'worst possible thing'.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI 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.
- lr4444lr 7y agoI 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.
- denzil_correa 7y agoThe 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.
- jackpirate 7y ago
- newnewpdro 7y agoTL;DR: Brother with height insecurities gets rich off cryptocurrency, pays for leg extension surgery, dies rather suddenly of pulmonary embolism during recovery.
- dwoozle 7y agoAnd a guy who was 5’7”, not 5’1” or something.
- andyjohnson0 7y agoThere 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.
- simion314 7y agoThere 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.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoYou forgot to mention that white nationalists are to blame.
- shusson 7y ago> 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mjfl 7y agoI think it adds to the existential devastation of the story...
- pjc50 7y agoI'd hope that this isn't going to become the story, but .. is she wrong?
- shusson 7y agoI 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).
- kdelok 7y agoI'm not sure there's an inherent value in compromise. I certainly see value in a greater understanding of the alternative perspective, but not in accepting it if you disagree.
- nicoburns 7y ago> I don't think which side is right is really important Sometimes one side is just right. Compromise isn't always appropriate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Chris2048 7y ago
- mjfl 7y agoheartbreaking. 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.
- jcims 7y ago>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.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> but really too dumb to see that he was wrong about the source of his insecurity Was he? He critically appraised the evidence: height is proportional to various forms of success, and made a plan to get taller. Sure one could convince themselves that it’s not a problem and be less successful for it on the metrics one cares about. But that’s easier to do if you don’t have some void in life that seems hard to fill.
- bambataa 7y agoThe 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?
- ramraj07 7y agoWhy does it sound like it's always sleazy people who make money off of Bitcoin?
- ur-whale 7y agoNot entirely sure what is sleazy about this young man. Quite the opposite from what I read.
- mikeymz 7y ago>Pulmonary embolisms are rare in young people. In the United States, they are even less common among Asian-Americans than white people. This is a strange opener given that the embolism was related to the limb lengthening. Not quite a bolt of lightening from the blue
- jackvalentine 7y ago> 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.
- bambataa 7y ago“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?
- jackvalentine 7y agoIf 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.
- bambataa 7y agoSo what was your intention?
- jackvalentine 7y agoThere are many causes and only some of them see the light on any given day. Our society has some value hierarchy for which ones.
- bambataa 7y agoHow 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.
- xenihn 7y ago>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.
- brosinante 7y agoIt's still her brother, and it's what made him, him. Why does grieving have to do with being thrilled in any way - we take the bad with the good.
- eugeniub 7y agoIf 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.
- aaron695 7y agoJezebel is the same as Breitbart, trash that is good for sensing how the Alts think, but little else. Height dysphoria? Lets try "breast dysphoria" site:jezebel.com > Prachi Gupta was a senior reporter at Jezebel The disturbing stuff is less the content more the reporting. A shame. There's an interesting story people could use to move forward on in there, but even his sister can't find it while confined to her Alt :(
- gomijacogeo 7y agoNot 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 7y agoI 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.