Treasury Nominee Yellen Is Looking To Curtail Use of Cryptocurrency (arstechnica.com) 267
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory scrutiny over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen's Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals. "Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern," Yellen responded. "I think many are used -- at least in a transactions sense -- mainly for illicit financing." She said she wanted to "examine ways in which we can curtail their use and make sure that [money laundering] doesn't occur through those channels."
UPDATE: Yellen's written remarks the next day also suggest America "consider the benefits of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the potential they have to improve the efficiency of the financial system."
But they still also add that "At the same time, we know they can be used to finance terrorism, facilitate money laundering, and support malign activities that threaten U.S. national security interests and the integrity of the U.S. and international financial systems."
UPDATE: Yellen's written remarks the next day also suggest America "consider the benefits of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the potential they have to improve the efficiency of the financial system."
But they still also add that "At the same time, we know they can be used to finance terrorism, facilitate money laundering, and support malign activities that threaten U.S. national security interests and the integrity of the U.S. and international financial systems."
Yep (Score:2, Funny)
This administration is going full law and order. Better hide that weed (still a federal offense) and get a haircut.
Re: Yep (Score:4, Informative)
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Cannot say I am surprised. Biden and Harris both made their political bones as Tough On Crime (TM) politicians.
He will be put into line shortly. While they are "tough on crime" they are also great lovers of regime change. The primary finance channels for our regime change operations at present are via Bitcoin.
Due to the global nature of cryptocurrencies, you cannot curtail their domestic use and the same time continue to ship 0.5M+ a year into Navalny's personal kitty on which he does not pay any taxes while pretending that he is tough on corruption and money laundering.
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Found the Russian troll.
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I'm so tired of this kind of reductive crap.
Re: Yep (Score:2)
User name checks out.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Funny)
Correct and bananas are a type of aircraft ridden by purple cows.
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it funny how a story about a career central banker wanting to rein in a mechanism of bypassing central bankers is in any way noteworthy. Of course she does. I happen to agree with her mostly, but again...what'd y'all expect out of her? Ron Paul?
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I find it funny how a story about a career central banker wanting to rein in a mechanism of bypassing central bankers is in any way noteworthy. Of course she does. I happen to agree with her mostly, but again...what'd y'all expect out of her? Ron Paul?
The newsworthy part is now that she is head of the Treasury Department she will have a lot of power to do something about US citizen's ability to use cryptos. The rest of the world will carry on as usual.
Re:Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The newsworthy part is now that she is head of the Treasury Department she will have a lot of power to do something about US citizen's ability to use cryptos. The rest of the world will carry on as usual.
That is pretty naive to think financial policies enacted by the largest economy in the world won't affect people outside of the US. It would be like thinking no one outside of Europe has had to consider how GDPR affects their company.
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Yes, but no country in their right mind would use the Chinese currency as reserve currency, not while it is the plaything of the CCP.
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Honestly, I see it as quite unlikely. China built most of their success off of a manfucaturing advantage drawn largely from mass quantities of cheap labor. That edge has evaporated with a shrinking working class due to the one child policy (a trend not projected to end for de
Re:Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The newsworthy part is now that she is head of the Treasury Department she will have a lot of power to do something about US citizen's ability to use cryptos.
Who the hell actually uses cryptocurrency for legitimate transactions? I bought some things through eBay over the weekend, used PayPal for that. Bought lunch at Zaxby's, put it on my credit card (earned 2% cash back, go me). Did some shopping at Target, used their store-issued debit card to save 5% (woo hoo). Found an album I've been wanting on Discogs, used PayPal. Later this month I'll make my car payment by electronic debit from my checking account, and I'll pay next month's rent using an old fashioned hand-written check (because they're still behind the times with all this newfangled electronic payment stuff). If so-and-so "banned" crypto, I'd.. uh.. not really even notice.
Cryptocurrency exists so people can play a fantasy stock market game with real money, and for clandestine transactions that traditional payment processors want no part of. Most folks who aren't into either of those things simply can't fathom a use for it.
Re:Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Who the hell actually uses cryptocurrency for legitimate transactions?
Microsoft accepts BTC, so does Newegg, Starbucks, Whole foods and a bunch of others. I have no idea how many people actually use it for things like that, but if it is used for money-laundering like we all believe, it has to be used to buy real products at some point.
Re:Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're being paid in BTC, there's not much utility in being able to spend it at legitimate merchants. Buying that cup of coffee would require going on Coinbase (or whatever they're calling themselves this week), turning my real money into BTC (and getting hit up with an exchange fee for my trouble), then paying Starbucks the result of the current BTC-to-USD-plus-transaction-fee that their payment processor spits out. ..or I could use my credit card and get 2% cash back. *shrug*
I think most of the ransomware/money laundering/drug dealing folks are simply cashing out their earnings on exchanges. Can't imagine there's many of them going "Gee, meth sales have been great this week, I think I'll go get a coffee."
Even transaction an US capital gain/loss report (Score:5, Informative)
Of course wallet software could automate that calculation but they don't at the moment.
Re: Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
The only difference is that the dollar is artificially stabilized by the government.
Otherwise it would be just as unstable as Bitcoin.
Bitcoin no longer decentralized, security broken (Score:2)
The newsworthy part is now that she is head of the Treasury Department she will have a lot of power to do something about US citizen's ability to use cryptos. The rest of the world will carry on as usual.
Not quite, the rest of the world will carry on as the Chinese government permits. Well, for bitcoin at least, where 70% of the miners are located in China and dependent upon cheap electricity from the government. Basically bitcoin's security model was voluntarily discarded by the community. The adoption of exotic ASIC hardware centralized mining, maintaining the blockchain, and made a government backed 51% attack possible. Lets say reversing transactions the government disapproved of.
Now I admit the Chin
Re: Bitcoin no longer decentralized, security brok (Score:2)
What security model are you speaking of exactly?
As far as I can tell, the 51% attack is a inherent fundamental flaw.
(Serious question.)
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What security model are you speaking of exactly? As far as I can tell, the 51% attack is a inherent fundamental flaw. (Serious question.)
According to the design a 51% attack cannot be performed because the mining community is decentralized both in terms of the people involved and geographically. This all assumed that people would only need their regular computers to engage in "mining", which also maintains the blockchain. A bad player that is an individual could not establish a cartel large enough, a bad player that is a government could not find enough miners in their jurisdiction. We have broken both of these decentralization assumptions.
About bypassing tax man not central bankers (Score:3)
I find it funny how a story about a career central banker wanting to rein in a mechanism of bypassing central bankers is in any way noteworthy.
She's concerned about "illicit financing" and "money laundering". That is taken care of by requiring US citizens to use a US-based exchange that confirms the identity of users. That will also make the IRS happy.
So she is not going to shut down crypto, she's probably going to go after anonymity.
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Well put really.
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Her statement is not as a central banker, but as a tax collector (treasury department). She shouldn't care less if you use bitcoin, but in the position she is going for this time she will care that you don't use bitcoin to avoid taxes. Read her response.
Re: Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:2)
I find it odd that terrorism is the reason to want to ban crypto. Not the fact that crypto currency consumes mode electricity in one day than a third world nation consumes in an entire year. These miners burn electricity where the cost of power is cheapest (coal) in order to turn a profit. Nobody is mining at the most expensive renewable rates on the planet. That is a serious carbon footprint problem for an administration wanting to combat climate change.
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In December, Trump's outgoing team at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—a unit of the Treasury Department focused on money laundering—proposed a new set of rules to tighten the screws on cryptocurrency-based money laundering.
Under the new rules, cryptocurrency-based exchanges would need to file transaction reports with FinCEN any time a customer made a cryptocurrency transaction worth more than $10,000. This would mirror existing rules requiring conventional banks to report when customers make cash withdrawals or deposits worth more than $10,000.
Even more controversial in the cryptocurrency world, FinCEN wants to impose new record-keeping requirements for transactions involving users who manage their own private keys—dubbed "unhosted wallets" by FinCEN. Under FinCEN's proposal, if a cryptocurrency exchange's customer sends more than $3,000 to an unhosted wallet, the exchange would be required to keep a record of the transaction, including the identity of the customer who initiated the payment.
These new rules didn't take effect before Trump left office, so the incoming Biden team will need to decide what to do with them. The Biden administration could sign off on the existing rules, rewrite them, or scrap them altogether. Yellen's Tuesday comments suggest that she is unlikely to scrap the rules.
Re:Cryptocurrencies *are* a scam, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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They have again. [wikipedia.org]
They have again [ca.gov] and again [wikipedia.org].
And they will again [joebiden.com]. They said so [youtube.com].
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Ironically, the people who have been doing the best job at making it difficult to use a gun are the right-wingers themselves, by buying up all the ammo. Go figure.
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Literally none of your links have anything to do with taking away guns.
Translation: "I didn't visit or read any of the links."
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Do you really think it is insightful to pretend that curtailing access to new arms while old ones break, wear out, etc isn't 'taking away guns.' Anything which limits the ability of the people to form a well trained militia and bear arms is 'taking away our guns' and a violation of the 2nd amendment. You are positing a strawman argument wherein 'take away our guns' means what, a literal door to door siege? Ridiculous, that would be a bloodbath.
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As far as I am concerned, the US is a war zone. Have you looked at the number of imprisoned people. Literally even China told you to take it down a notch. ;)
Not even Stalin did reach those numbers.
And then you look at the news, and think "Yep. War zone.".
Yeah, we should probably do like China and just execute everyone, right?
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If past history teaches us anything, they'll wait until the next mass shooting event to announce that legislation. That what Clinton and Obama did, anyway. Usually, there is a spike of "guns are evil" mentality right after one of those events, before people remember that the only person who can really protect you from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
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Good guys with guns are willing to fill out some paperwork and not bitch about it like a bratty child.
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Oh, jesus christ. Not more of the "good guy with a gun" bullshit. Those good guys with guns cause more death than they prevent.
https://giffords.org/blog/2020... [giffords.org]
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You might want to read it again. They don't say good guy with a gun doesn't work. They say it causes more deaths than it prevents. The article specifically point out that for every 1 case of self defense with a gun, there are a greater number of accidental deaths, and an even greater number of suicides. The say that a gun used for self defense in a burglary is 4 times more likely to be used against you by the intruder. And a bunch of other statistics like that.
In the case of cops, I think the defense for co
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Hahaha never! Conservative thought changes on almost geological timescales, in the States they've barely refreshed their rhetoric since the civil war.
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This is a leftist administration. We expect them to tell us what to do, like leftists always want to.
This admin is left of extreme loony right-wing... pretty much in the center.
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This admin is left of extreme loony right-wing... pretty much in the center.
I'd say it's more of centre-right edging flat out into right wing. Not what loud, annoying rightists think is right which is anything slightly to the left of certifiable, but it's basically right wing by almost all measures. They wouldn't be out of place is the more moderate end of the Tory party in the UK, that's for sure.
Competition is not allowed (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's not actually printed.It's more editing a number in an excel sheet.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Competition is not allowed (Score:5, Interesting)
States may only make gold and silver tender for payment of debts.
Feds aren't thusly limited except that they must coin for the states.
Greenbacks were debt instruments e.g.
It says nothing about exclusively for non-US currency.
Read it again.
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Inflation took off to the moon once the gold standard was abandoned, and the metal seized.
Roosevelt removed gold from circulation in 1933. This was followed by deflation, not inflation.
Nixon permanently removed America from the gold standard in 1971. This was the result of inflation, not the cause. The cause was the Vietnam War.
Re:Competition is not allowed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people continuously act like it is the 70s again, or that the 70s is coming back any minute now. Gold Standard! God is Going To Punish Us With High Interest Rates Because We Abandoned the Gold Standard!
We have had record low interest rates for as long as I can remember now. But I can remember CONSTANT predictions of runaway inflation any minute now that a Democrat is in office.
Give it up. You don't know what you are talking about.
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It didn't come back in the 1990s.
It didn't come back in the 2000s.
It didn't come back in the 2010s.
You would think that after 30+ years of being wrong, people would move to a different theory rather than doubling-down on crazy.
But hey, fourth time is the charm! Or fortieth. Or fourhundreth.
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I have never understood the argument that tying your currency to gold limits inflation.
It is a silly academic argument anyway. There is not enough gold in the world to back every dollar.
Even if there was, it would require America to buy all the world's gold, which would cost every American family tens of thousands of dollars.
Instead of nice houses with a car in every driveway, our nation's wealth would be metal in a vault.
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BS. What got inflation started in the U.S. was when Lyndon Johnson decided to have guns and butter. The deficit spending required taught Congress they could buy their next election by manipulating the currency. Nixon did nothing to reign it in, nor did Carter. Then we get to Ronald Reagan. He decided he could have guns and butter too, and proceeded to really amp the deficit spending. Enter Bush, a caretaker. Clinton presided over a bounding economy because of the tech boom, and dearly wanted to piss off the
Re: Competition is not allowed (Score:2)
Hate to tell ya, but take a peek at the gold course over the last few decades. You call that stable??
No, gold also has little inherent value. And is mostly belief.
If you want stability, take actual goods. A potato will always be a potato and feed somebody a bit.
Now it's bitcoin (Score:3, Informative)
Next week it's bittorrent
The following week it's Tor
And then it will be anything that's encrypted
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Please, the biggest sponsor of Tor is *checks notes* the US Navy
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Tor is not a Honeypot. Listen to Roger Dingledine explain how this came to pass some time. Your simplistic view is not matched by reality.
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I know someone who runs the IT infrastructure for a decent sized university and they (the university IT department) run their own TOR exit node specifically so they can track what students on their network are doing.
Aaron Z
Re: Now it's bitcoin (Score:2)
Extrapolating from 1 again.
We've been over this nonsense. The Daily Show even did a whole episode on it, parodying that Fox News joke who cried on national television because "Tuh progressives are out to get us!".
Excellent Twitter threads about Bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an excellent Twitter thread [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below).
*** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to overt their eyes! ***
As long as they only enforce it in the USA (Score:2)
Of course, the US Government would never try to enforce US law all around the world, now, would they? Like, that's never happened, right? Cause it would be a dick move. LOL.
Money is moving (Score:5, Insightful)
And we can't take our cut. Kill it.
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Sure they can. Why do you think there's a sudden uptick in financial institutions doing bitcoin stuff? Hell, even Paypal does it.
What happens is most of the transactions take place off ledger. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bitcoin trading network among financial institutions that does everything off ledger. Sure you can transact with anyone, but if they're on the network, then things can happen cheaper and quicker as it takes place instantly off ledger instead of ha
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I don't want to burst anybody's bubble, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The most powerful financial criminals, as usual, will escape unscathed. Despite profiting from driving the entire world into economic chaos on multiple occasions, is there a single instance outside of Iceland where a banker has gone to prison?
Cryptocurrency might be the "wild west", but at least it offers some slight hope to those who want no part of the unholy corporate-government alliance that is international finance.
Not seeing much upside to the continued us of cryp (Score:2)
Other than paying ransom/extortion to threat actors, I am hard pressed to think of why I would want to be involved much less invested in cryptocurrencies as they currently exist.
And in the long run, doing away method of paying international threat actors is better for all of us anyway.
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The price of a currency, or a token wishing to be currency, is of course set by supply and demand like everything else. So the price will be stable when the supply adjusts to match the demand.
That's what central banks are all about - adjusting the money supply to match the demand, thereby keeping the value relatively stable. (But just slightly in inflation territory because deflation can become a feedback loop, a deflationary spiral).
Because the supply of Bitcoin is essentially fixed now, because the incre
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> Your logic is faulty, because bitcoins are not consumed, and they will perform their function at any price point.
No currency of any kind is consumed. Bitcoin isn't special in this way. Dollars or pesos don't disappear when you spend them, they simply move to someone else. All currencies (none of which are consumed) have to control the money supply to avoid runaway inflation. Runaway inflation is really bad thing, almost as bad as deflation.
> they will perform their function at any price point.
>
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Note, by the way, this is not a problem for crypto currency generally. The error is specific to Bitcoin. It's an error in a) how the target is calculated and b) the absolute limit to the number of BTC that will ever be mknes.
Other cryptocurrencies can so just fine by adjusting their mining target (and therefore the money supply) based on value or a proxy for value, such that the target tends to stabilize the value by increasing or decreasing the money supply. They can also set the maximum number of coins t
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Best use case today for bitcoin is to serve as a store of value to protect yourself against inflating currencies.
Your Bitcoin is just a number in your "wallet" on the blockchain (which is just a fancy way of saying distributed redundant mirrors of a database file), and that number having any actual value is contingent on someone else being willing give you their real money in exchange for you instructing the Bitcoin network to send that number to their "wallet".
There's absolutely no guarantee Bitcoin's value won't ultimately crash to zero. People could become fed up with it and move on to another cryptocurrency. Eve
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Best use case today for bitcoin is to serve as a store of value to protect yourself against inflating currencies. It's like gold, but easier to transact, easier to keep full custody yourself, with 100% verification that it's real.
That is, of course, 100% concentrated nonsense.
But think of the money launderers! (Score:2)
It is really amazing how painful banking has become thanks to concerns about money laundering. The whole “know your customer” thing can really be a challenge. I have a charitable nonprofit that cannot get a bank account for the life of me. In year 3-5 it might be easier, but not if I have to keep using my personal credit card for all transactions. All the funds are in a brokerage account it took me 8 months to open, but they won’t let me do a checking account with them (despite having a
Time to curtail those rights! (Score:2)
Would be nice... (Score:2)
Not just money laundering (Score:5, Informative)
Gigawatts of power wasted
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More money for the government (Score:2)
Meanwhile, the banks will continue to print out money by the lorryload, devaluing the dollar to tempt the demon of hyperinflation, and hardly anyone will even care.
Needed for a better economy (Score:2)
The use of many different currencies instead of one, especially one which has existed for a long time and which is the far more commonly used currency, can be a problem for consumers. Latest when some goods can no longer be paid in dollars, but a crypto currency is required, will it become a burden to consumers. While free markets are important for progress should the freedom not get watered down by too many new currencies where every corporation ends up having their own trademark crypto currency. It can on
Right move, wrong reasons. (Score:2)
It is sad that they went for "terrorists" again, to not displease the financial crooks.
Because its uncontrolled instability, and gamblers abusing that, is the problem.
If I were the government, I'd do exactly the same thing to Bitcoin that they already do to other fiat currencies: Stabilize it. If it can be done to the Dollar, then it should be easier, to do it to Bitcoin, due to being able to trace every move by default. Then it would be perfectly usable. Even if with less privacy than physical cash.
Well, a
Money laundering (Score:2)
In bitcoin, which is of course very traceable, they used to do money laundering via tumblers. The idea is that everyone sends money to one guy, and he sends out the same amount (minus his fee) to another account controlled by the submitter, taken randomly from the money sent in. It works great in one sense. But it has some weaknesses:
1. The guys running the tumbler need to be trusted.
2. The guys running the tumbler are doing something blatantly illegal according to US law (and most countries' laws on money
It looks like it is changing (Score:2)
Real Bitcoin transaction are mostly for illegal purposes, but it looks that banks are starting to take over, which is ironic but expected.
Several banks now allow you to have a Bitcoin account. You put dollars in, you get dollars out, you never see a Bitcoin address, you can't actually put Bitcoin in or pay in Bitcoin. The only thing is that the value fluctuates with the price of Bitcoin, and (for now) the bank is supposed to hold at least as many Bitcoins as there are in all accounts. If we start to introdu
Well ... that's fair (Score:2)
A return to sanity (Score:2)
Squishing made-up Internet money that does easy end-runs around terror/crime finance laws etc. like a particularly creepy bug was the norm from the genesis of the Internet until the invention of Bitcoin when the regulators seemed to be asleep at the switch. This is a welcome return to rational normalcy.
Ending cryptocurrencies is even a good idea from an environmental standpoint alone, if there were videogames that required this kind of processing power we would shut them down for environmental reasons.
Timetravelling Trump did it in 2014 (Score:5, Informative)
Just as a reminder, the bill legalizing the growing and use of CBD in cosmetics was signed in 2014 by Obama. 2018 saw a law that allowed for research into other purposes of CBD, but it's still a class 1 (no allowed uses) controlled substance at the federal level.
Trump pardoned 1 weed dealer. He granted clemency to another 11 low-level weed dealers (at least one was a financial crimes guy who was caught for weed), lowering their sentences from life to a decade or more. Further 12 is not all.
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Re: Remember, Trump legalized CBD (Score:2)
Hey, don't insult cesspools of stupidity like that!
They may be stupid, but they ain't total assholes on top.
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But he had a winning smile and killer fashion sense while he was doing it.
This is something I don't understand. Obama always looks well dressed. Yet, Trump, supposedly a billionaire, looks like his suits are off the rack at Men's Warehouse.
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It's because Obama is fit, and Trump has an ass like a dump truck crashed into a school bus.
I'm not saying I'd look any better in a suit, if history is any indication I don't in fact, but that's still the actual answer to your question. Trump is trying to hide the blump.
Re: what this will really do (Score:2)
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Re: what this will really do (Score:2)
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https://aopl.org/Stories/aopl-... [aopl.org]
let me fucking laugh (Score:3)
Re: RegulatorOverreach Killed Nuclear : Bret Kugel (Score:2)