Popular Dark Web Market Disappears, Users Migrate In Panic (vice.com) 217
An anonymous reader cites an article on Motherboard: Like the changing of the seasons, a natural stage in the dark web marketplace life cycle has once again manifested. Nucleus market, which primarily sold illegal drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and cannabis, has disappeared: The site is unresponsive, and the market administrators have not made any announcements about planned downtime. This has forced vendors to migrate to other sites and panicked users to figure out where to go next, all amidst a whirlwind of rumours and speculation of where Nucleus -- and its cash -- has gone. 'Nucleus is an awesome market. One of the best. Hope all the admins are ok and nothing serious happened,' someone identifying themselves as a vendor wrote in a comment on the news site Deep Dot Web. At the moment, it's not totally clear why Nucleus' website is unresponsive. It could be an exit scam -- a scam where site administrators stop allowing users to withdraw their funds and then disappear with the stockpile of bitcoins.
Well... (Score:2, Informative)
And nothing of value was lost.
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If you are a client at a dark net site then you don't know who you are dealing with and you have to accept some risks.
So there's no point in complaining.
Not necessarily... (Score:5, Interesting)
Coincidentally, I just came across this Ted talk [youtube.com] from Alex Winter the other day. It was most excellent. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) He made a very compelling argument for the value of privacy in the marketplace, why Dark Web vendors such as Silk Road (which he made a documentary on [deepwebthemovie.com]) and others are battling to protect it, and why privacy needs to be protected.
Are you happy right now with private businesses, credit bureaus, banks, and the government all logging, monitoring, and referencing your entire financial history? Would you like it any more if any of these institutions were hacked, and all your data was made public? If you aren't, then you should be mourning the loss of a private marketplace.
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Coincidentally, I just came across this Ted talk [youtube.com] from Alex Winter the other day. It was most excellent. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) He made a very compelling argument for the value of privacy in the marketplace, why Dark Web vendors such as Silk Road (which he made a documentary on [deepwebthemovie.com]) and others are battling to protect it, and why privacy needs to be protected.
Right. The idea behind such sites are to make money by doing things that are illegal.
Are you happy right now with private businesses, credit bureaus, banks, and the government all logging, monitoring, and referencing your entire financial history? Would you like it any more if any of these institutions were hacked, and all your data was made public? If you aren't, then you should be mourning the loss of a private marketplace.
First: you are using a very specific meaning to the phrase "private marketplace", something that actually never existed except as a rendezvous between two (pseduo-)anonymous parties trading non-traceable goods. Even that case isn't private as the people involved can be traced and identified.
In reality what one can have is transactions that are reasonably private, limiting information sharing on a need-to-know basis.
Why deposit? (Score:3, Interesting)
I need some technical background here. You hear about exit scams a lot - my question is, why do users deposit funds into an account controlled by the market? Outside of escrow, Bitcoin seems to remove the need to have anyone but you hold your money. And I'd imagine that escrow is very short-term and for relatively small amounts. So what is the technical reason that people hand their money over to a market?
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Dark as in darknet means the participants are thoroughly anonymized. What good is a market that's hard to find? Thats the brilliance at work, you can do something completely illegal, at a spot easy to find, and hide behind your computer thanks to freely available software.
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Your argument would indicate the market and its customer-base has a huge value once established (and I agree). That would be an argument against a scam by the admins.
Re:Why deposit? (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't make much sense to me - a law enforcement agency could certainly afford to transfer $500 to the market if that's all it takes to earn trust.
They earn trust in the sense that if they don't deliver the $200 worth of goods they promised, or violate the site's rules in some other way, part or all of that $500 deposit held in escrow will be forfeit. The deposit is a "hostage" to guard against fraud and minor infractions of the rules by normal members of the community; it says nothing about whether they're acting on behalf of law enforcement. For protection from law enforcement the site relies on the anonymity of its operators and members and encrypted, onion-routed communications, not deposits.
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The only reason people *should* have money there is because a transaction is in process. Maybe people never bother to transfer the remainder back to their own wallet, I don't know. If you're the type of person where you make one transaction every few weeks or months then there is no reason to store any balance on the site other then when you are actually ordering.
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While I have no personal experience with this type of market, they have to have some arbitration mechanism where the money goes through the market itself. That will involve queuing and a sizable amount of cash in the hands of the market itself at any time, and especially when they still accept payments but do not send them onwards. My guess would be that this can be a lot if it takes hours to days for the users to notice. The second additional possibility is that the market offered to anonymize Bitcoin (by
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Knock, knock on Nucleus' door . . . (Score:2)
"What?"
"Who?"
"Dave's not here, man!"
Fuck The War On Drugs. (Score:2, Insightful)
Washington State (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't "do" cocaine or meth, but here in Washington State, I buy my weed at the store and smoke it on my front porch as the cops drive by and wave.
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Re:Washington State (Score:5, Insightful)
And the whole process of states that have legalized without turning into dens of villainy and despair is casting further doubt on the whole of the drug war.
We've gone from "you've got to be fucking kidding me" to gallows humor when the sum total cost of the drug war is calculated.
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I'm against criminalization of drug use, but I don't for a second believe that pot legalization is representative of all legalized drugs.
I don't think drug users should be in jail, and certain drugs are clearly not a threat, but there are drugs out there that cause very nasty habits. Legal or not, they can destroy lives, just like legal alcohol does.
We should not downplay the effects, but remain objective about the benefits of decriminalization, including spending less money on jails and more money on a mo
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The justification raised for harsh penalties for marijuana use (like the recent life sentence in Alabama) was that it was a "gateway" drug, and that use would lead to other "harder" drugs being used. So again, you'd expect an explosion in drug use in states that legalized.
Except that didn't happen, and drug use numbers before and after legalization remained about the same across the board for all drugs, and I have every reason to suspect that much like the gateway theory, the notion that hard drug use would
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Considering that "weed" is less harmful that alcohol, nicotine, medication abuse and things like sugar and fat and even stress or lack of exercise, that is how it should be. The whole "War on Drugs" is utterly irrational and far more harmful than what it fights. Of course, a lot of people have careers in continuing this insanity (including the DEA, the prison industry and the legal industry) and the public has now been lied to for so long that it is really hard bringing rationality back in.
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Re:Washington State (Score:4, Funny)
You sound like a real winner. What does that have to do with anything?
Jealous much?
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You sound like a real winner. What does that have to do with anything?
It means that he doesn't have to use a "Dark Net" site to buy his mostly harmless intoxicant; he can do it like he obtains and consumes his beer.
And the state earns taxes on the sale helping fund the ... whatever Washington funds with those taxes.
Really, is it that hard to understand, or are you just too stupid to make the connection. Maybe you're high?
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I can't Up-Mod on topics I've commented on, but if I could, I would.
Damn! (Score:2)
Is there no honor among thieves?
Two Guys From Quantico Drug Bazaar (Score:4, Funny)
My guess (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that it's "down for maintenance" while the feds move the server(s) to their offices.
Once that's done it'll be back in business, with a little extra "oversight" *cough*.
dogfooding (Score:2)
Re:One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One can only hope (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing batshit crazy about it. We have to preserve our precious bodily fluids!
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Or ISIS
Re:One can only hope (Score:4, Funny)
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The (1/10 of one percent) rich have what at most 500 billion dollars in assets? You could kill all the undeserving rich, take all their assets - and how long would that last 2 months? Yah. Feel the Bern.
You're way off in your calculation. The top 1% in wealth starts at > $15 million (this was in 2007, it's certainly higher now). So, even assuming a totally flat distribution above 1% (which is *definitely* wrong), we're talking 15,000,000 * 0.001 * adults_in_USA. I don't know what population number they use for these calculations, but plug in any reasonable number for the USA and you're looking at a minimum of several trillion dollars.
You're absolutely bonkers if you think the top 0.1 % of the the wea
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And the problem with letting them keep it all is that sooner or later we're going to run out of everyone else's money.
You can't have a 1% without other people having money.
Most of the wealth of the rich is in things like stock, which has a variable value and isn't actually durable goods. Without the stock price being maintained at a certain level, they deflate like a dry rotted tire.
You can't have the rich in the current economy without people who buy things. There is no economy if there are only robots making things that no one else can pay for. If that is the case, they sit in the warehouse and become a net expense.
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You want a social safety net get it from local and state government.
Yeah, and that would work great in a country with a few million people...but not in one with 300 million. That "local safety net" concept just doesn't scale the way you think it does.
Some places are richer than others and need little or no safety net, other places aren't so lucky and need more help than they can generate. It has always been this way, and always will be this way. It's a simple fact of life.
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Actually, the countries that Bernie Sanders loves are the size of US states. So why couldn't a US State manage its own program? It might actually work better.
Putting everything through a large Federal government considerably increases the waste due to administrative costs and makes health care into a permanent Federal level hot button issue that we really shouldn't be having at that level. You want to be talking about foreign relations, defense, and global trade at that level, and it would help if you co
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Are you actually defending Federal heath care with the VA system? You know... the one where people with terminal illness never get appointments and then *die* of treatable illnesses so that Federal officials can get bonuses?
Actually, the VA system is an excellent argument for why the Federal government sucks at health care.
Of course, we can't shut down health care in the VA system, promises have been made, but please don't pretend that having to keep that promise means that is an argument that the governme
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Are you actually defending Federal heath care with the VA system? You know... the one where people with terminal illness never get appointments and then *die* of treatable illnesses so that Federal officials can get bonuses?
Yes, because it is not perfect it should be scrapped. Great thinking.
The fact is the VA serves millions of people per year and the vast, vast majority of them them get quality care. FFS, people die in private hospitals from all sorts of shit (nosocomial infections, anyone?), but do we scream to shut those hospitals down?
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So yes. Disband the VA.
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It would be far more rational to purchase Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance for the vets (as payment for services rendered) and let them go to the hospital of their choice. The cost savings in bureaucracy, maintenance, etc... would be tremendous. It would bet that the cost of hospital and mental health care would drop and the care would improve tremendously.
Sure, get them to put it on the ballot and I'll vote for it.
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That's why people can move. There are small Scandinavian countries that are "roll" models here in the states - so population isn't really the problem.
Maybe you missed the part where I said, "...that would work great in a country with a few million people...but not in one with 300 million. That "local safety net" concept just doesn't scale the way you think it does."
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Re the some places richer than others -- that's why people can and do move.
Some people cannot afford to move, or can't afford to move to where they'd like to. Will you give me the money so I can move to Beverly Hills or San Francisco and live there? Or is being too poor to move just tough shit for those who can't afford it?
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How about you let the states decide; then people will live in the states that best suit their personality.
How about "no"? Because some of those stat
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It's the liberal BS that states that Blue States are supporting Red States.
Except those pesky numbers and facts disagree. Red states use more than they give back, and this is not hard to substantiate. Blue states produce more than they take, also not hard to substantiate.
Blue states generally higher per capita of people with college degrees, lower teen pregnancy rates, lower incarceration rates, higher per capita of home ownership, lower infant mortality, better "neighborhood advantage scores", higher personal incomes, and so on. Blue states invest much more in education, investme
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It also includes farm sub
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The best solution is to give these voters what they want.
If it was only them, sure, but why should their children suffer because their parents are idiots? These children will grow up to be our doctors, engineers (and yes, even politicians), and I for one want them healthy and well-educated. So no, you don't get to fuck over a generation of children because their parents, Mr and Mrs Goober, are too stupid to make good decisions.
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small-government, uneducated morons or fools (like me) would be relegated to the fringes of society and could safely be ignore.
I already ignore people like you for the most part.
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The social safety net is covered under the general welfare clause.
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Most of the "wealth" of the rich isn't in per year earnings like income or dividends, it is simply in held stock assets.
If you lower the price of Microsoft stock, for instance, Bill Gates deflates by billions of dollars.
Stock isn't income, it is an asset that has variable value.
Does Bill Gates have income? Absolutely. He certainly has diversified and probably has some safer investments in some bonds and such which provide millions for living expenses per year that is more like a salary or annuity, but he
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And this in turn will reduce the wealth of everyone else that owns Microsoft stock, which likely means retirement funds and the like start losing money. I sympathize with the "1%" movement and "stiggin' it to the man!" sounds good on the surface, but there are a lot of follo
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So no. You would get a fraction of what you think you would get. Keep dream
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There are, what, 500 billionaires in the US? Say 640 for easy calculations.
There are 320,000,000 people in the US. Those billionaires are 1/500,000 of the population which equals what? 0.005 of one percent.
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Re: One can only hope (Score:5, Interesting)
Riiiiiight....and we've all seen how well the "cut taxes to the bone" model has worked in Kansas and Louisiana. Both states are nearly bankrupt, are deeply in debt, and can't afford to pay for basic services like schools, police, roads, and other "socialist" infrastructure.
No one like paying taxes, but they're a necessary thing in a modern society. It's a fact, and no amount of voodoo tax-cutting theory will change that.
Some people complain that everything was great 100 years ago where there was no taxation. Yeah, there were no taxes 100 years ago, and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
A standing army, the FDA, the EPA, clean, drinkable water coming from every faucet, 24-hour emergency rooms, fully-staffed hospitals waiting to give you life-saving care, fire departments, 12 years of public education, child-abuse investigators, controls on what toxic chemicals can be poured into your drinking water, nationwide 911 service, a national highway system, social services, drug treatment centers, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, community colleges, public schools, water and sewer systems, parks and recreation services, food inspection, electrical utilities, gas service, a National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, foster care services, School Breakfast Programs, State Children's Insurance Programs, Unemployment insurance, Worker's Comp, Senior Community Service Employment Programs, street lights, mass transit, zoning, planning, building permits and inspection, housing and development programs, road maintenance, the State Board of Health, building inspections, building and fire codes, disaster relief, FEMA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, flood mitigation, pollution inspections, drug treatment centers, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the Library of Congress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and on and on and on.
Frankly, I like those things. I I like knowing that the medication I take has been tested. I I like knowing the food I eat has been inspected. I I like having 911 to call for help. I I like roads and sewers and electrical service. I I like Social Security.
I'm no fan of taxes, believe me, but that's how things are paid for- the roads we drive on, emergency services, the Post Office, libraries, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, etc etc. Taxes have enabled this country to be able to pay for the things that make it a good place to live.
If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
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All that stuff you mention can only be supported by a modern, industrious capitalist society.
Again, people put the cart before the horse, while calling the horse an evil useless asshole plague.
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Having travelled extensively around the world my experience is that countries that are 1st world but more socialist than the US have better infrastructure. Particularly when it comes to the maintenance of their roads.
I drove from LA to Miami back in 2008 and the difference in the standard of repair of major arterial roads between states was huge. You would go from ultra-smooth machined concrete to sections where the slabs had rotated under the traffic giving you mini jumps every couple of meters.
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Riiiiiight....and we've all seen how well the "cut taxes to the bone" model has worked in Kansas and Louisiana. Both states are nearly bankrupt, are deeply in debt, and can't afford to pay for basic services like schools, police, roads, and other "socialist" infrastructure.
No one like paying taxes, but they're a necessary thing in a modern society. It's a fact, and no amount of voodoo tax-cutting theory will change that.
Some people complain that everything was great 100 years ago where there was no taxation. Yeah, there were no taxes 100 years ago, and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
A standing army, the FDA, the EPA, clean, drinkable water coming from every faucet, 24-hour emergency rooms, fully-staffed hospitals waiting to give you life-saving care, fire departments, 12 years of public education, child-abuse investigators, controls on what toxic chemicals can be poured into your drinking water, nationwide 911 service, a national highway system, social services, drug treatment centers, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, community colleges, public schools, water and sewer systems, parks and recreation services, food inspection, electrical utilities, gas service, a National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, foster care services, School Breakfast Programs, State Children's Insurance Programs, Unemployment insurance, Worker's Comp, Senior Community Service Employment Programs, street lights, mass transit, zoning, planning, building permits and inspection, housing and development programs, road maintenance, the State Board of Health, building inspections, building and fire codes, disaster relief, FEMA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, flood mitigation, pollution inspections, drug treatment centers, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the Library of Congress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and on and on and on.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
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and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
...the aqueducts?
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If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
There's one easy way to cut out a couple: Work as a Contract Employee – 1099, instead of being a permanent employee – W-2.
Just don't get injured or become unemployed! Because you chose not to pay into that system, you are not entitled to Unemployment or Short-term Disability benefits. (This is a CA example, but UI & SDI are all state-level).
So go ahead and avoid those taxes. Break a leg!
Re: One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe what you just wrote, why not move to Somalia or Nigeria? It would be your paradise on Earth. But you don't really believe a word of what you wrote, do you?
The problem most libertarians have is they never think that they'll be the ones getting fucked. It's never YOUR wife or YOUR child who'll die from some untested medication or contaminated food or unsafe electrical appliance. It'll always be the other guy whose wife or kid dies, and then the Magical Invisible Hand Of The Market will punish that company and force them out of business, so you'll be safe, right?
But it won't be your wife or your kid, no way. And if it IS your kid or your wife, well shucks, you can just take them to court for damages, right? Because that will bring your child or wife back to life, right?
Fuck you, I like the EPA and the FDA. I like public education and parks and recreation services. I like the idea of a School Breakfast Program for kids. I like all the things that make this a great country to live in. It's why people want to come here, fool. How many people in the US want to emigrate to Nigeria or Laos or Namibia or Somalia? NONE, that's how many.
My wife comes from a very poor country in SE Asia, and she's blown away by things like 911, public schools, food testing, public libraries, and all that stuff that you think is wasteful. She appreciates them and is more than happy to pay taxes. Unlike you, she realizes that these things are what make this country so great and why so many people want to come here, and not, for example, to emigrate to Somalia.
Her family had no money for schooling, so tough shit for her, is that it? Let the poor among us fail so that we may climb over their bodies on the way to our penthouses, right?
You selfish, ignorant fucks grow up swimming in these kinds of services and yet still find a way to complain about them. You'd likely be dead of a childhood disease if not for the publicly-funded health initiatives this country has. After all, what did this country ever do for you?
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Those things must not exist as government 'services', they are affront to individual rights, liberties and dignity.
[Citation needed]
Seriously though, the vast majority of the people in this country disagree with you on nearly every single one of those things. And that's why we have them- because people thought they were worth having. You're in the minority here, and not by just a little bit.
However, if you do not like having those things, you are free to move to a country where they don't exist and where you won't have to pay for them. But you won't do that, will you? Why not? Do you not have the courage of your convict
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Re: One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been to countries where taxation is almost non-existent, and most of them suck. Most of them are NOT places you'd want to live unless you were fairly well off in comparison to the rest of the population, and often not even then.
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There are no taxes because there is no economic dynamism to tax. You need to protect property rights from both thieves...and the corrupt who go into power to demand kickbacks.
Once you do that, and a farmer (or industrial equivalent) can feel safe investing in long-term projects without fear of seizure by thieves or corrupt officials, only then do you get a more powerful economy and higher employment with better jobs (compared to dirt floor existence) and only then can you generate enough taxes to do pretty
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Free public education is one of the demands in the Communist Manifesto, after all.
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No, because my point was completely proven by so many responders in this thread.
Re:One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
ONE can hope that.... it wont be THIS ONE.
THIS ONE hopes it was shut down in time to avoid any of that for anyone. The only people who deserve death sentences are the ones who made darknets like this necessary for free people to exchange goods between consenting adults.
Re: One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: One can only hope (Score:5, Informative)
> hydromorphone is higher quality, much more potent, and overall safer than street heroin
Even worst.... "Krokodil", that nasty "street drug" that has been killing and disfiguring people in the most horrible ways.
Turns out that is because of impurities in home manufacture. The actual drug is much much safer than many other opioids , and making it available in a grade fit for human consumption would actually save lives.
That is what really gets me.... how inhumanely callous prohibitionists are. Their policies have been nothing but harmful, yet they just sit back and smug over their victims suffering.
No houses burned before meth was made profitable. Now half the burn units are idiots who tried making meth. How is that not an atrocity? How do you blame that on the idiot addict and not the politicians who should have known better?
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I'm sorry, but there is nothing safe about actual opiates taken for recreational purposes. Yes, pure forms of opiates aren't going to disfigure or kill you from impurities, but the level of physical dependency on opiates is real and quite considerable. This isn't pot we're talking about here. You should only be using opiates for something like actual painkilling, not for getting by in life.
Do I think that prohibition is necessarily the best idea? Not really. On the other hand, I feel about opiates the
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> On the other hand, I feel about opiates the same way I do about many other things that are legal: Legal or not, you should simply never do it unless medically necessary.
Your opinion is noted, I mostly share it. Where I disagree is that this translates into some legitimate power to imprison people because they do something you don't approve of.
Why have a black market? There is no evidence that drug laws decrease use. There was never any real justification for these laws other than looking down on other
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Due to the krokodil epidemic, the Russian Government put very strict controls on the availability of codeine tablets. It's not over-the-counter any more, so obtaining the main ingredient to home-brew your own highly impure batch of krokodil has become very difficult. That is good.
The active component in krokodil is desomorphine – an opiate discovered about 90 years ago in a search for less addicting painkillers. As it turned out, desomorphine was w-a-a-a-ay more addictive. It is illegal in most co
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DO NOT search YouTube for videos of flesh-rotting and live-limb-cutting (to avoid sepsis) un-anesthetized. Unless you have a strong stomach.
Here is a link to test your mettle (excitement begins at 2:20. [youtube.com]
But god-forbid that a nipple is visible in a YouTube video (in the US)! That could scandalize someone –especially a child under the age of two!
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I have to place a lot more blame on the politicians. You can talk individual morality all you want, the fact is, when you make something profitable, you incentivise it being done. The addict may have burned the house down and he may be individually responsible..... but the politicians made it certain that houses would burn and will continue to burn.
The existence of people who will circumvent the law is a foregone conclusion, therefore those making law bear responsibility when they increase the harm caused b
Re:One can only hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Another white "libertarian" who lives in the suburbs. Idiot.
Llibertarians are basically anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. I'm always amazed at their childlike gullibility as to how their libertarian society would function primarily to their benefit. Libertarianism just helps conservatives pass off a patently pro-business political agenda as a noble bid for human freedom.
“Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer!” -- Michael Lind
Re:One can only hope (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet, in a Libertarian society, the existence of unions to protect workers from abuses would be completely legal and just as effective, if not more so. There is nothing about that solution that required any government intervention at all. Indeed, the original unions and strikers were opposed by governments and law enforcement which turned out against them at the behest of large business owners.
And once government became the "friend" of organized labor, you started to see the abuses from the other side as well from those parts of the government that were attempting to ensure the union vote on their side.
Even though I don't think that perfect anarchy is ever going to work, there are options with a more limited government. You need government for a lot of things, I just don't think we need it for everything and that is where it is going.
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Waste of time to argue with someone who starts by mis-defining his opposition. The next time you feel the urge, just punch yourself in the nuts.
In other words: 'Never answer a false premise.' It's old advice, but still good.
Re:One can only hope (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, big city, born and raised.
Nice straw man though, I am glad you made him for me. See the vast majority of drug users have never committed a single B&E. In fact, the best evidence we have is that, even the few that do, mostly wouldn't if not for bone headed drug laws that are entirely ineffective at anything but filling prisons and increasing crime.
Hell, even Heroin users have been found to be able to hold down jobs and not require or seek out illegal income when they are able to get high at reasonable prices with safe product.
All in all, there is little to no evidence supporting any real benefit from drug laws, unless you consider jobs for white suburban guys in the prison system to be a benefit. In fact, going back to the arguments in congress about marijuana in the 1930s, its pretty clear that job creation was one of the primary motivating forces at the time; the biggest and most well known proponent of marijuana laws, for example, was the head of what would later become the DEA. His main motivation was fear for his own job after the end of alcohol prohibition.
Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
But seriously, thanks for bringing out this straw man, he is one of my favorite to set alight
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Opiate junkies get to the point where they can't go 8 hours without getting sick. At that point they can't hold a full time job unless they can do it very very high.
On the other hand tweakers will work their asses off to continue to get bags. Until they melt down.
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Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
Mod this up!
This was the sole purpose of the War on Drugs.
Search google news for the recent revelation – made after the malfeasors who admitted in interviews that they created this monstrosity – are all safely in their graves.
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Regular, obviously. The cocaine was removed from the recipe long before diet or zero were invented.
Re: News flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Which was very unfortunate. Making cocaine illegal is what created the Mexican drug cartels, and subsequently made them crazy rich and extremely powerful. Which they still are.
If we made cocaine legal, not only could we tax it, but we would pull the rug right out from under the drug cartels. They would dissipate from a simple inability to compete with the legal market. History has proven this to be true. People sometimes imagine that the illegal vendors could offer lower prices than the legal vendors, and hence the drug cartels would remain just as strong as ever...this is patently absurd and has been shown to be false in practice as well as in theory.
Re: News flash (Score:5, Insightful)
Name me a single cartel previously that could pay off the entire debit of a nation.
The Dutch East India Company. At their height in the 1600s, they were worth the equivalent of $7.4 trillion today. Not quite enough to pay off the US debit, but more then enough to pay off almost any other country's debt.
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The Dutch East India Company was running drugs in the 1600s. They were huge in the opium business.
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What do you think the net worth of the extended family that owns De Beers is?
You compare earnings to net worth, it's no wounder you're not impressed.
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How long has De Beers operated vs an already dead cartel.
You're believing estimates from groups with agendas. Likely the police estimated gross street price of the drugs moved.
You still don't have a reasoned comparison. Wiki SUCKS for anything remotely controversial.
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You can blame Reagan for dismantling the mental health system, but not for doctors over prescribing opiates and junkies wanting a fix.
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...
Then decriminalize drugs, but keep the "schedule" lists and charge for or refuse (one then the other, not your choice, the junkie's) help when they have medical issues resulting from their abuse of drugs. This is the stick.
If you need psychiatric help to overcome depression, you get it for free. If you turn to "scheduled" drugs, you pay for the drugs AND are either required to pay for treatment (physical or emotional) or are free to go without help. Carrot. Stick. And it's cheaper to just provide the carrot than it is to build a bigger stick. The bigger stick hasn't worked, so it's time for the carrot.
This is based on the idea that the addict can say no. More often than not, the addict simply can not say no. That is why they call it addiction.
Re:Junkies, their handlers, and their dealers (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, advocate for single payer healthcare first - because dealing with multiple insurance agencies costs a lot of money. In Canada, the average doctor's office spends about $30k/year dealing with the government for medical service payments. In the US, it's roughly triple that. These are costs - staff mostly, who do nothing but all that.
Second, denying even the poor medical care is actually very bad economically - because the poor then have to use the ER (which by law is free). ER is the most expensive medical treatment available - you'll spend three to four times as much money treating someone coming into the ER for a medical condition that could be treated at say, a doctor's office. So yeah, having the poor be able to go see a much cheaper doctor at a walk-in clinic saves a ton of money over having them see the doctor in the ER.
Of course, since they're poor and can't afford medical insurance, WE ALL PAY THROUGH THE NOSE for their care because they can only use the ER.
And of course, because they can't pay for followup care (not covered since it's not emergency) they go back to whatever their miserable lives take them, get ill again, and again, we pay top dollar for ER medical care for them. Heck, we could probably get them really good care for the money spent healing them in the ER.
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Well, advocate for single payer healthcare first - because dealing with multiple insurance agencies costs a lot of money.
No. Multiple insurance companies aren't the source of increased costs. A dysfunctional relationship between the companies and the government is. Industry standard practice is also dysfunctional.
For a model of an insurance system that works relatively well with multiple companies involved, see car insurance.
Most health insurance isn't even insurance. It's a badly run buyers club. If
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The poor have no estates to sue to recover the costs of disposing of their bodies when they die in the gutters. The public pays one way or another.
Re: Junkies, their handlers, and their dealers (Score:2)
That's why it should really be called universal health care. Insurance also requires you to pay for other people's treatment but gives you less coverage and requires a copay as well.
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Neither do I and every time I'm forced to hand over my money to an insurance company it's a complete loss to my finances because I will never see any of that money again. Just like a business, I should be allowed to write off the cost of this insurance since it is a cost to me.
Currently you pay three times as much as your insurance is worth, so that people who can't afford insurance can be treated in the emergency room for "free".
Re:Vmod dowIn (Score:5, Funny)
Malware (Score:2)
Posts like that make me wonder: Is this just a prank? Or is it a steganographied command-and-control channel for some malware?
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I've wondered that also, because it appears to have zero value to anyone. There aren't any links, so it's not just spam (unless the links have been filtered out from bad markup or something, in which case whoever runs that has no clue what they're doing). It doesn't have any value as a troll or flamebait type of thing. The only value I could see in it would be steganography. There is no point to writing a program that would post random crap like that unless you just wanted to prove that it's possible, b
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While you probably meant to be funny, this is one of the characteristics of a free society: Some level of crime. A characteristic of a police-state is that the police can go after most crime (and will become more and more like the criminals in the process but never gets punished for their crimes). Freedom comes at a price, but human history shows that it is a worthwhile one to pay and the price of the alternatives is far, far higher. To maintain freedom, the police must be severely limited in what they can