Why is he pardoning a drug trafficker?
It's better to ignore the rational reasons to oppose them and focus on the emotional ones. For starters, people are repulsed by their cruelty.
A developer builds a platform like eBay but without censorship that can be used by the drug trafficker
It's not the same thing
The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Or: I can remove that ingredient but it goes against my principle of not accepting constraints.
> Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online. Selling drugs offline, gangs and violence will get involved.
Instead we think of “the average person” and project that on everyone.
You looked at the small libertarian interest group, and based on that projected how everyone is. Now you look at hacker news and you’re projecting how everyone is. This projection is where our reasoning fails.
The purpose of eBay isn’t to facilitate illicit transactions, doing so is abusing the platform.
SR was very much for illicit transactions.
The manhattan project was very intentionally an attempt to create a WMD, it wasn’t a side-effect of something else. You don’t have a point here.
In instances where it takes more than his signature (e.g. the wall) he has failed to make good on many promises but he definitely put in effort to trying to make them happen.
People need to stop thinking of politicians as their friends and having parasocial relationships with them. They're public servants and should be treated as such.
Source?
And it seems people don't particularly like Trump, but vote on him because he seems to be the only one that wants to do something about illegal immigrants:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/trump-policie...
And I understand that it's even frustrating for legal immigrants, who waited for years to get citizenship, that illegal immigrants don't have to do anything and get it right away.
Societal taboos for example can create a division like this. You can see this divide between truly anonymous forums vs moderated conversations online.
The weird thing here is that a cashier would test it!?
I am not sure about the legal standpoint, but from a moral one I would have felt bad running the business knowing it's regularly abused to harm others and I am not doing anything against it.
So, either the old government is in power of the mainstream media, or people are secretly on the right and don't speak out about it. Or maybe a combination of the two.
You made a false dichotomy, but I’m sure you can figure that one on your own.
There’s also the other aspect where you align your views to the views of your group.
There are places in the US, where being a Republican is absolutely the core of what you are, and you will adopt and genuinely love any candidate from that party.
What? In my experience his supporters literally never shut up about how they are the silent majority. The irony seems entirely lost on them.
Also buying bitcoin, exchanging to Monero, installing Tor, understanding the risks, etc. Is much more work than just finding the next dealer.
Principles are much more important to a businessman than a gangster.
Online isn't the important factor here.
> One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online.
Gangs and violence aren't there to support a marketplace. They don't help you find customers or customers to find you. They don't improve the efficiency of exchange. They're there to enforce outcomes. Selling drugs leads to outcomes that don't care whether the buyer and seller found themselves online.
It wasn't confusing to me, but evidently the way it was worded confused others.
Well that's the entire principle of price elasticity. The less costly (not only in terms of money, but also in terms of risk and time) something gets the higher the demand, at least up to a point.
But unless you can point to any other group with actual power and money who was pushing for it, the most obvious answer is that the main funders of the crypto PACs were at least ok with it. There's no way they couldn't have subtly squashed this pardon with Trump if it was just the Libertarians asking for it given that they seem to have gotten him to commit to do literally everything else they want.
There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.
There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.
It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.
The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.
If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.
This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).
Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?
"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."
Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.
There is poop in your wallet right now.
Do they really? How? Asking for a friend.
To anyone who voted for Trump because he said he'd be hard on drug dealers: how do you feel about him pardoning a top level drug dealer?
"Some cash has cocaine on it" has no logical relationship to "all cryptocurreny use is illegitimate".
If they wanted to refute the original claim and say that cryptocurrency has legitimate uses or if they wanted to make a separate point to say that cash is similarly only useful to criminals, they failed.
The Democrat agenda has far far higher approval ratings than Democrats, and that says a lot about the current state of affairs.
"We want competent people coming into our country. And H-1B, I know the programme very well. I use the programme. Maître d', wine experts, even waiters, high-quality waiters, you've got to get the best people. People like Larry, he needs engineers, NASA also needs... engineers like nobody's ever needed them"
The rise of the morally bankrupt in America.
They want him to be hard on criminals who do things they don't like. The biggest drug dealers alive are the Sacklers or maybe McKinsey, and they're not in scope either.
Progressives aren't consistent either. No one is. For example, Dems keep screaming about being a country of laws when referring to GOP antics, but want to ignore certain immigration, anti-abortion, and drug laws (in some cases by just refusing to enforce them).
Unfortunately what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.
I thought the "legal tender" argument only worked in regards to debts to the government, though IANAL.
Maybe the pen thing was only to test if the bills were fraudulent, and then the machine in the back of the store could also do drug tests? Or maybe it was all a lie and they were just bullshitting me.
The benadryl thing was a good read
On the other hand, it's clear to me that the correct amount of jail time wasn't zero either, given everything else he allegedly did.
[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
[1] I think about this in the same way that we accept the possibility of bad things happening because people can have private conversations in their own home, or are able to have complete control over potentially dangerous tools and vehicles. IMO the risks are worth the trade-offs and these are important rights to protect in the relationship between people, technology, and government (or whoever wields power).
Civil disobedience is a pretty important part of how we have always dealt with bad laws and bad governments.
That is a good point. The problem isn't with the message, so this time they shot the messenger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MPcGL3Tfac
Here they explain why immigrants rather chose the illegal path opposed to the legal path during Biden's administration.
Now even before Trump came into office, the stream of illegal immigrants have already almost completely stopped:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-t...
So yeah, we can argue about the details, but it is clear that during Biden's administration it was way too easy for illegal immigrants to get into the US, which is unfair for the legal immigrants that went through much more trouble to get there.
Aside from that, the constant flow of illegal immigrants also caused a lot of issues in the states near the borders, and obviously for the country as a whole.
Sorry I really don't like YouTube for political content. Any text summaries of how they get citizenship quickly after crossing illegally?
> it was way too easy for illegal immigrants to get into the US
That's moving the goalposts. You said citizenship, not just getting in.
> which is unfair for the legal immigrants that went through much more trouble
And even more trouble now. So even more unfair...
Sorry, I looked for it but it seems it's not easy to find mainstream newspaper articles about this. It seems this topic is heavily being censored. Which is interesting in it's own right. But it does also mean that I can't deliver all this information on a golden plate for you, and you'll have to do a little bit of research and analyzing and personal thinking, instead of just reading the headlines that the media is feeding you.
Watch the video, it really gives you might insight into the complexity of the situation, or at least how it was.
And how else would you explain that first the borders were constantly flooded with illegal immigrants, and now not anymore? Something must have changed that has made the illegal path less interesting than the legal one.
It could just be the news coverage. Maybe they wanted people scared before the election. Do you have sources with actual numbers? What is the percentage decrease?
> It seems this topic is heavily being censored
Then how are the illegal migrants "easily" getting citizenship finding out about it?
Well isn't this obvious enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-t...
> Then how are the illegal migrants "easily" getting citizenship finding out about it?
They hear it from each other. They know, it's a whole business, with coach busses taking immigrants to the border where they continue a common path take daily by many people. It's all in that video.
Good explanation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/04/18/what-is-...
Another distinction here is that a store is offering a contract. It isn't a debt until the contracted is accepted.