I miss the days when new coins at least attempted to pretend they contain some sort of financial innovation. There was at least a possibility of something of substance there.
Now it's all celebrity endorsement, hype and lies.
And having the US prez jump on that bandwagon and ride it while in office is just mind-boggling.
Fad intangible assets is pretty mind boggling to me. If you are thinking someone is the next Shakespeare while they are alive then you are probably going to be wrong and when you are right their coin should warrant a future value that is marginal compared to whatever the teeny bops actually prefer in a hundred years.
IIRC this was an available bet on Polymarket, where bitcoiners kept insisting it already happened, ever since the executive order was issued, but that's crypto folks for you. (I didn't look up how and whether that resolved)
I was a big enough believer in crypto to literally start a company in this space only to leave it completely disenchanted and deeply pessimistic about the direction of the industry. I felt that there were many real legal and regulatory challenges that governments just didn't want to deal with. No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
Now we're in a situation that's so much worse than I ever imagined -- Trump coins are vehicles for naked bribery and corruption with a sprinkle of encryption on top. I was worried about black markets, Trump has literally been using his office to grant access to top holders of his scam coin.
This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
+1 to this - exactly the same experience. I started a company in the space because I believe that the decentralized technology and its ability to have world impact is truly amazing.
But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.
We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.
>No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
what ever gave you that thought? There are countries that do this right out in the open. The rest of the countries do it in various shades of gray to not be right out in the open, but still visible for those that can see in higher bit depths of gray than black and white
I mean, how much details do you need for this to be understood? Every tinpot dictator openly run black markets, are the definition of corrupt, while many openly operate or support terrorist organizations within their borders. Depending one looking at the US from the point of view of someone living in a country they have rained freedom down on for the past quarter century probably feels the same towards the US. Launching missiles from a remotely operated drone blowing up buildings while incurring civilian casualties definitely has the feeling of terrorism to me. They just hide it under the veil of defeating terrorism shades of gray.
I really feel like your comment was much more noisy than mine ever was.
John Adams told us the Constitution is intended for a moral (or virtuous) people.
The point is the law isn't self enforcing. People have to insist upon Constitutional order, not because of (blind) faith in it, but because the alternative is tyranny. Not anarchy.
Does this country deserve Constitutional order? The People abandoned it by electing someone virulently and openly opposed to it.
The regulation you seek is utterly meaningless in an autocracy. Or even in a unitary executive theory of Constitutional order.
But in the specific case of Trump, among the most untrustworthy liars America has produced, what does Constitutional duty mean to him? What does it mean that he took the oath of office? He said the words but no serious person believes he took an oath.
People still have no idea what we've done. And what is yet to come.
The POTUS is a psycho. And the replacements aren't good people either.
100 days down, 1369 to go. It's going to get much worse.
> This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
I really wonder how you come up to that conclusion especially that there is more than a degree of regulation. If regulation will not apply for the top anyway, then it's better to remove all regulation.
Removing crypto regulation only benefits those at the top and scammers, since it gives them one-sided control of the market with few consequences. Which is exactly what's happening.
That this is even remotely surprising to anybody is the only surprising thing about it. He took bribes via his hotel last time. He takes massive donations from Bezos and Zuck and others to his inauguration fund or presidential library or whatever other slush funds he can use to skirt anti-bribery regulations.
Let's not forget the MBS overriding the advice of the Saudi investment board to give $2 billion dollars to Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner. Funds with hefty fees that have barely been invested.
The fact that Bitcoin (and kin) turbocharges corruption, and its success is a direct result of doing so on a wide scale (the whole point is to undermine state power by dwpriving it of control over currency) is proof to the armchair economist Bitcoin supporters that it is "sound money" and things like facilitating a market for circulation of child porn at one end and open political grift at the other, are welcomed as signs that the *experiment" is working as intended in their winner-corrupts-all bitcoin maximalist worldview.
Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.
Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.
Neither will bans and prohibitions, unless you are willing to go full north korea with cameras everywhere and computers locked down. And you'll probably fail with that.
Of course you can. 20 years in prision for using Bitcoin. Not a lot of people would wanna risk that. And when 99,99% chooses to not touch it with a pole the value will collapse. Then a few people can sit there with Bitcoins that no one wants to buy from them.
Is it a good idea? Mayne not. But obviously one can crush Bitcoin if one wants.
“Under the company’s rules, the Trumps and other World Liberty investors are not allowed to sell their coins on the open market, though the company has said it might eventually lift that restriction if other buyers of the coin agree.”
I don't see much references to "the swamp" anymore now that we have a sitting president doing a crypto grift. I thought dark money and mysterious figures pulling the strings is conspiracy worthy but I guess not when it's Trump.
Well, he drained the swamp, now he's doing what he does best, paving it over and building a soon-to-be-failed casino.
Say what you will about "the swamp" (not a big fan myself), but as a metaphor it kinda works since a swamp may be noxious and filled with unsavory swamp creatures... but it's still an ecosystem where competition and co-evolution amongst these swamp species in response to external environmental changes would still be expected.
Or, the conspiracies have been proven true, but it's not with those who the conspiracy-lovers would have expected. Not woke, not Soros, but Trump and his gang were running the exact racket. So I suppose now suddenly the racket is good, doublethink by the book.
You joke about these things but I'm afraid that's where we're heading.
Trump will close off as much opposition as he can in the next two years. Then spend a year convincing people that term limits aren't required by the constitution. By then we'll have had so many scandals and constitutional crisis events that just get ignored that it will happen.
Am I being overdramatic? Because this feels different. It feels openly hostile.
I don't think you're being overdramatic. At this point, I'd give 50/50 odds that Trump will install himself as a Putin-style dictator (if we're not already there). "Elections" will happen, but the outcome will always be the same at the national level.
No. That isn't enough. The only way to avoid another Trump is to not elect one.
The solution liberals recoil against for some reason, is disassociation. We should have threatened our Trumper friends and family with permanent disassociation before the 2024 election.
Most would still persist, unpersuaded. They're likely lost for our lifetime. But perhaps enough would have taken the social cue of ridicule and ostracizing as serious enough to not vote for a psychopath. The farther back, the more effective it would have been.
Instead, we keep thinking they can be persuaded with reason, despite all evidence they've abandoned rationality.
We can't legislate the outcome you want. What you want comes from virtue. And America is out of virtue. People voted for a rapist, a felon, and vile insurrectionist.
America may not deserve Constitutional order, and therefore we are losing it.
as a "crypto" enthusiast, this is sad to see that he is making this industry looking really bad - obviously he doesn't care, money is money. In the future, maybe even now, we are going to have those associating crypto to Trump ..
The lack of regulations in crypto make these scams legals without any fear of any repercussion
The thing is though, once you regulate crypto then what’s the point? You are left with a highly inefficient/expensive and immutable database.
Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But this is a stupid thing to solve for, because without trust and regulation you can’t even have a functioning society.
I'm 99% against crypto and think it's mostly a tool for wasting limited human innovation capital, enabling fraud, terrorist financing, ponzi scheme gambling, and pump and dump rug pulling.
There are a few areas where I find crypto interesting or useful:
- The existing banking and payments industry is too Christian / Mormon. It extra-judicially regulates anything it views as "vices". This industry is supposed to be dumb payment rails with hooks for FinCEN to stop crime. It's not supposed to be your pastor. If anything, business integration with regular payment rails would help them be better regulated.
- "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations. If you look at it long enough, it doesn't even feel like crypto. Just a new type of efficiency.
The latter may make the former a non-issue, especially if the existing fintech industry receives more competition from upstarts that don't have to pay the legacy gateways and their frictionful fees.
> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance.
This seems to be 'regulatory arbitrage' rather than anything concrete to do with the tech though. i.e. there's nothing inherent in a stablecoin that can't be done more simply, it's just currently a way to skirt bureaucracy and fees, which are already diminishing in many places.
> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations.
Yeah, these seem like a really good (potentially the only one) use case for crypto. Note that these are really just replicating dollar (and potentially euro) dominance for a new age, and whoever ends up winning here will probably be the new Visa/Mastercard (with all of the problems that entails).
>seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations
Barely. If $1m of crypto moves from one private wallet to another how do you know who's doing it or what the purpose is? Could be something legit, could be paying for drugs/terrorism - no definite way of knowing.
I was under the impression Circle with USDC was trying to be very FinCEN / AML compliant. That you had to agree to their terms to be able to use the token, that you couldn't transact off of a regulated exchange, and that they do plenty of KYC to know what's going on.
I'm not sure of the details to be honest. Certainly if I want to change normal US$ in a bank into USDC then I have to go through KYC etc. If I then transfer it to a private wallet and then send it to someone else's wallet for an iffy transaction they'd see on the blockchain it was me but not necessarily who the other wallet was.
A way to make it less traceable is to transfer it to an iffy crypto exchange, change it and then withdraw it somewhere else. Some of those are not very good at keeping records and the like. Like I use mexc who can change usdc and when I wanted to do my tax return they said they couldn't retrieve transactions over 18 months ago - they delete the data they say. And mexc isn't the worst.
> scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology
the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally (unlike tradfi), nobody is hiding anything (until we go to Monero and similar, but that's different). What's however happening, and we come back to the first point, is the lack of "rules" so that in effect financial "crime" is legal.
Some people believe Trump is accidentally advancing things by revealing what needs to be banned. Money in politics, transactional diplomacy with aggressive states, powers of the Executive incautiously delegated by Congress, etc. Cryptocurrency is now on that list. Maybe we should call for a halt until we figure out what’s going on.
No, the current system does not work for most of the people hence the "just nuke it" option sounds like a rational one.
Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
The Canadian elections are structurally different though. Not everybody changed their mind, the Conservatives won more seats than before. What happened was that Bloc Quebecois and NDP voters broke ranks to vote in a Liberal MP for their riding, to block what seemed like a surefire supermajority for the Conservatives. This is possible when you don't have a 2-party system with deeply calcified divisions.
> the current system does not work for most of the people
Bullshit. America is the richest country on earth. Your unemployment is remarkably low. Your disposable income is relatively high. And all the issues you complain about, like housing, are worse outside the US than in the US.
Moreover, a lot of the MAGA people are NOT working class struggling families. There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
It's not just simply economic. I'd say it's more like there are many groups of people who do not feel represented by their government. Some of these groups are quite opposed to each other. Add to that politics and media that have become intentionally divisive and you get a society where everybody is mad about or scared of something.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude. They've been conditioned to believe that geriatric white dudes are the only ones capable of holding the office. So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman, the natural choice was to select the old white (orange) guy.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
> Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.
> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman
Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
> There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.
Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.
You can’t see why average Americans would want a change from many of the Biden Administration’s policies? It has nothing to do with racism, xenophobia, or transphobia. A lot of the policies were just objectively bad for average everyday Americans.
Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
That's all well and good, but that money would never be spent here. That's not how our budget works. It's our defense budget, determined ahead of time, and America's defense budget is huge
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
It’s true that the large majority of aid came in the form of weapons that the military industrial complex wanted to replace anyway. However, there has still been many billions of “cash” sent, totaling over $40 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at. For example, from two years ago:
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-e...
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
> the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission)
The data are known to show that the primary effect was in reducing the risk of hospitalization, severe disease, and mortality. Why, then should the lack of effect on transmission be the end-point that determines the appropriateness of mass immunization?
Because ordering people to take medical treatment is a big deal. If it reduces the hospitalisation rate then it's rational to take for oneself, but requiring it for a bunch of things was overkill.
And I say this as someone who thinks Biden was a pretty good President.
The closest I've seen to a convincing explanation of this came from a recent Some More News episode. The host argued that, while Democrats at the Federal level have pretty fucking clearly been far better for normal Americans this century (and longer, but let's consider the last 25ish years) with things like the CFPB and ACA and bringing down fentanyl overdose death rates (to say nothing of economic performance under Democrats versus Republicans, going back quite a bit farther than this century), they have simply not done enough, and the perception is still, by death through a thousand cuts, that things are getting worse.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
Honestly, no. Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no". To be fair though, he excelled on that one pretty consistently throughout his term
> Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no"
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
Biden’s record is public and the number of bipartisan bills passed under his admin is extraordinary in this day and age. No serious ranking of presidents puts Biden low at all.
> This is all because they don’t like immigration?
You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why.
Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.
It's not new and it's far more broad than that. The staggering government corruption and incompetence has been ignored for decades. You can't just pretend that this is suddenly new and one sided if you want to solve the problem.
This just isn’t true, it is easy to find blatant corruption tied to politicians at all levels from both parties. Look at California, New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, look at the Biden family, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Letitia James, the Democrats are just as corrupt, the mainstream media just reports on it less.
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
I think it's naive not to see the "both sides" card get pulled anytime there is a criticism of the right. All the "centrists" come out to hold water for conservatives when their policies are clearly and specifically failing.
> This is all because they don’t like immigration?
To win the libs, women, colored, foreigners, woke, dei - as long as they can satisfy their general hatred for "others" they are ok with collapsing America.
A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.
How did you feel about the Biden family’s blatant corruption? Do you really think that Hunter Biden was an amazing artist and brilliant corporate energy sector lawyer that is just falling on hard times now like the rest of us? It’s a weird coincidence that he can’t sell his paintings anymore now that his Dad isn’t politically relevant anymore.
Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.
This is important, and most partisans will get caught up in a discussion about whose corruption was worse. The bigger issue in my mind is that no one wants to police their own side, which leads to absurd flip-flopping hypocrisy every time the other party gains power. "Less bad" corruption is still a very bad thing, whoever you believe to be the more corrupt. But our current political system doesn't seem to have a way to wrestle with this.
IDK, I think actual democratic voters tend to be far more on the "hammer the button even more enthusiastically" side of the "ah, but if you press that button, the Bidens will also be investigated!" meme-cartoon.
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
To compare Hunter Biden, a private citizen, making a few paintings, to the actual president of the country grifting with crypto to the tune of billions, is rather something. Especially after watching the 2 billion dollar bailout that Jared Kushner got from the Saudis during the first term.
Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Hunter Biden blatantly and corruptly sold his father’s influence. There’s even evidence that Joe got his “10% for the big guy” on these dealings. It’s a massive disgusting scandal.
For the record I can’t stand when either side pulls this crap. The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end. They’re dividing us into tribes and playing us for fools while the political class robs us blind.
Hunter Biden, as far as I know, didn't hold an official title within his father's administration. Jared Kushner, on the other hand, did hold an official title within Donald Trump's first administration.
Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.
For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.
Why can’t we just agree that both are really, really bad? The amount of mental gymnastics that each side does to justify such blatant corruption is astounding.
All corruption and law breaking should be investigated and prosecuted as appropriate. I don’t care what side they are on. Our entire political class is full of corruption. For the record I’m also not a fan of the Trump meme coins, Jared Kushner’s actions, or various Republican politicians at all levels that are blatantly corrupt.
So if Don Junior starts selling finger paintings to Russian oligarchs and Saudi royals you’d be okay with it since he’s not officially part of the administration?
Edit: to clarify further, in the context of the reply below -
The thing that's particularly bad about this comment is that it pours scorn on a group of people that is defined by their class and intellect, which is just the kind of sentiment we don't want to see on HN. By all means, criticize politicians and others in power. Let's not scapegoat people at the very bottom of the heap for all the ills of the world.
Politics-related threads are generally the worst on HN, and if we're going to have them, people need to take extra care to follow the guidelines. In particular, we don't want HN to be a place where it's normal to attack people for their class or intellect.
That's quite unfair. Trump's support cut across a wide swath of (mostly white) Americans, including educated and/or well-off coastal and Midwest voters. Many, many people who considered themselves well-informed, in the mainstream, and in their right mind, voted for him. And nothing changes until you can convince those people of the truth, which is that they screwed up.
Also, nothing changes while the wedge being driven by the powers who want a populace divide has power, on both sides.
It's by design that those splits happen, when the desk jockeys earning six-figures are seen (and a lot of times, see themselves) as a completely different caste of people than the factory workers, gig workers, etc. it sucks all the air out of the room from real issues: less fortunate people left behind, lack of opportunities, the encroaching of work precarity which will eventually turn even to the current high-earning workers. It completely erases any reasonable public discourse about the real causes of all the social malaise symptoms we experience on the day-to-day.
It's harder to give any sympathy to people voting against their best interests, they've been swindled, bamboozled, and are completely oblivious to the bamboozle, which makes it all the more frustrating. Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
> Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
The issue is that this isn't a new phenomenon. This has been happening since at least Reagan (over 40 years ago). That cross-section of America has decided to vote against their interests in every major election for decades. I'm over it.
And instead of recognizing that like normal people, they want to push the onus onto literally anything else (immigrants, trans people, higher education). Fuck that. And fuck them for continuing to want to drag us back to the stone age.
It's not but it's designed to not be a new phenomenon. People are kept uneducated, ignorant about the world, how it works, why does it work, how society works, etc.
They are fed lies and don't have the capacity to understand they are lies. It's partly their fault (for the lack of curiosity) but it's also systemic, such a phenomenon can only happen in this scale if there are systems fostering, and procreating it.
Not saying your feelings are invalid, at all, they are absolutely understandable but it's also the reaction wanted by the ones keeping others uneducated: a larger divide, an ever increasing gap between the people most similar in society. It's divide-and-conquer, we waste our time and energy raging against folks who are purely ignorant, not against the ones keeping them ignorant and easily manipulated. We lost our temper trying to converse with them, which further increases the division.
Not here to give any solutions or tell you to change behaviours, applying in real life a more measured approach to reach these people is really fucking hard, frustrating, etc. but just saying that the reaction of "fuck'em" is exactly part of the strategy for continuing dividing and conquering us.
I don't disagree that those in power don't necessarily see this divide as a bad thing. And I gave a ton of leeway to those who voted for him in 2016. But a lot has changed since then.
what's even worse is not just how stupid things are, but how mean they are as well. And I absolutely not saying that calling them stupid is a solution, but it's THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND. Seriously. The last 8 years have been chalk full of articles and pieces on how Democrats can reach those people, and they all essentially say the same thing: They like that he's an asshole. So fuck them.
I thought this election had much lower turnout than the last? That coupled with the fact that incumbents lost globally due to inflation, it isn't surprising that Trump won.
Pretending it was because we didn't baby the MAGA voters enough is misguided, IMO.
Lower turnout for Democrats, not Trump. Most of the stories about some demographic skewing right in 2024 are exaggerating the trend because most of those people voted for him in 2020, too, but many Biden voters stayed home.
(I’m not saying that nobody changed their vote, only that looking at percentage point changes distorts the view unless you factor in disproportionate no-show rates.)
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said the quiet part out loud recently: the efforts that he characterized as fighting voter fraud were straight up suppression of votes in Democratic majority districts.
Exactly. The characterization that the entire margin was caused by Democrats staying home is hiding the fact that many were fraudulently disenfranchised.
"the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."
Many of those voters aren't ill-informed, they're simply ok with a dictatorial jackass running the county, so long as that dictatorial jackass looks and acts like them, and does the things that agree with their world-view.
People voted Trump for different reasons. Not understanding their reasons does not make you smarter. They were not all low IQ. Ignoring a big chunk of the population because they are "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels" will make you loose the next election to whoever decides to listen to them instead to lecture them.
Do that multiple times and you may end-up with a dicator(or at least someone who can become a dictator) sooner or later.
> "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels"
One of the narratives I hear repeated a lot that is simply untrue is around white americans. Trump doubled his numbers for minority (male) voters vs. the last time he was elected.
But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*.
Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters.
The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election.
That is precisely the attitude that those “yokels” decided they would fully back Trump. When people are abandoned by the economic and political system, someone coming in telling them that they will get revenge, is how you get a enthusiastic supporters.
They've voted against their own interests (aka Republican) for the last 40 years and people still have the gall to be like "You can't call them stupid".
I think most people genuinely try to find the best in other human beings but you're right. They've been doing this shit for closer to half a century, at some point you need to call a spade a spade. They're morons and they have outsized influence in the US because of how our political system works.
The creation of the trump coin is a signal to the crypto community that the SEC will stop going after crypto companies. I have read alot of people who ended up going into crypto and some even getting lucrative investment from Andreeson horowitz, lightspeed, etc etc. And then one day, they get a letter in the mail saying they are now a Politically Exposed Entity (PEE). Then all of their banks drop them, they can't get credit and they can't get loans. The SEC put out a letter saying "Come work with us", and when the founders tried, they would become a PEE instantly. There was no recourse with the SEC, and many smart people ended up completely losing their lives. The only way they could get back to 'real' life, was by trying to go into a different industry and 'avoid the eye' which was, who knows?
Now, as the trump + melania coin acting as a grift, instead of "alternative funding mechanism". I mean, you could already 'donate' directly to the president, and even get a tax writeoff for it. Atleast this way you'll have to pay capital gains. You could already pay $1m to get a audience with the president, how is this any different? Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
It's not that i entirely believe all of this, but i would like to provide some counter weight to all the comments that are all just parroting "Grift".
Shouting over and over again, “This is normal” doesn’t make something morally acceptable.
If any of this is (arguably) normal we should tear down the systems that support these norms. They are bad norms. The solution is never, “Welp, people are corrupt, what can you do?” You start making changes in the legal system. Because if you don’t you’re giving the country away as though there were no other course of action.
> I mean, you could already 'donate' directly to the president, and even get a tax writeoff for it.
What? Campaign donations are not tax exempt.
> Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
> the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
donations to affiliated NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are tax-deductible.
>Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
>Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
You aren't giving any money to the president here. It's a way for the president to provide utility to the coin. The coin has a vesting schedule, locking the coins so they can't be sold by the insiders.
> donations to affiliated NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are tax-deductible
Only if they're tax exempt NGOs. Which affiliated NGO do you propose?
> Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
(I'm… pretty doubtful Musk is actually microdosing.)
> You aren't giving any money to the president here.
Per the article: "A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash."
https://archive.md/iHaIo
I miss the days when new coins at least attempted to pretend they contain some sort of financial innovation. There was at least a possibility of something of substance there.
Now it's all celebrity endorsement, hype and lies.
And having the US prez jump on that bandwagon and ride it while in office is just mind-boggling.
Isn't this culture day to day centered on celebrity endorsements, hype and lies?
Seems like what's happening is unsurprising. A nation of spectators, not citizens.
Fad intangible assets is pretty mind boggling to me. If you are thinking someone is the next Shakespeare while they are alive then you are probably going to be wrong and when you are right their coin should warrant a future value that is marginal compared to whatever the teeny bops actually prefer in a hundred years.
> And having the US prez jump on that bandwagon and ride it while in office is just mind-boggling.
I'd suspect there will be a lot of room for "non-official acts" charges related to Trump's pump-and-dump crypto schemes after he leaves office.
And fewer politicians are going to have incentive to stick with him then.
Interesting. I thought you could do this in the open:
https://www.theverge.com/news/646426/a-1-million-per-head-di...
Is the Sovereign Bitcoin Fund bailout scam still on the table or is Bitcoin doing well enough so that it isn't needed any longer?
IIRC this was an available bet on Polymarket, where bitcoiners kept insisting it already happened, ever since the executive order was issued, but that's crypto folks for you. (I didn't look up how and whether that resolved)
Imagine if it was possible for the wrong person to walk into Fort Knox then suddenly all the gold was teleported to a random location.
I was a big enough believer in crypto to literally start a company in this space only to leave it completely disenchanted and deeply pessimistic about the direction of the industry. I felt that there were many real legal and regulatory challenges that governments just didn't want to deal with. No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
Now we're in a situation that's so much worse than I ever imagined -- Trump coins are vehicles for naked bribery and corruption with a sprinkle of encryption on top. I was worried about black markets, Trump has literally been using his office to grant access to top holders of his scam coin.
This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
+1 to this - exactly the same experience. I started a company in the space because I believe that the decentralized technology and its ability to have world impact is truly amazing.
But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.
We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.
>No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
what ever gave you that thought? There are countries that do this right out in the open. The rest of the countries do it in various shades of gray to not be right out in the open, but still visible for those that can see in higher bit depths of gray than black and white
You're not wrong, but your comment lacks so much necessary detail that I find it's just causing noise.
I mean, how much details do you need for this to be understood? Every tinpot dictator openly run black markets, are the definition of corrupt, while many openly operate or support terrorist organizations within their borders. Depending one looking at the US from the point of view of someone living in a country they have rained freedom down on for the past quarter century probably feels the same towards the US. Launching missiles from a remotely operated drone blowing up buildings while incurring civilian casualties definitely has the feeling of terrorism to me. They just hide it under the veil of defeating terrorism shades of gray.
I really feel like your comment was much more noisy than mine ever was.
Don't leave out money laundering! The US is also competitively good at that, post-9/11.
Err, I mean "good at ensuring the absolute privacy and confidentiality of financial clients."
Is that really the lesson?
John Adams told us the Constitution is intended for a moral (or virtuous) people.
The point is the law isn't self enforcing. People have to insist upon Constitutional order, not because of (blind) faith in it, but because the alternative is tyranny. Not anarchy.
Does this country deserve Constitutional order? The People abandoned it by electing someone virulently and openly opposed to it.
The regulation you seek is utterly meaningless in an autocracy. Or even in a unitary executive theory of Constitutional order.
But in the specific case of Trump, among the most untrustworthy liars America has produced, what does Constitutional duty mean to him? What does it mean that he took the oath of office? He said the words but no serious person believes he took an oath.
People still have no idea what we've done. And what is yet to come.
The POTUS is a psycho. And the replacements aren't good people either.
100 days down, 1369 to go. It's going to get much worse.
>No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
There's an old saying that goes something like there is crime, there is organized crime and there is government.
> This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
I really wonder how you come up to that conclusion especially that there is more than a degree of regulation. If regulation will not apply for the top anyway, then it's better to remove all regulation.
Removing crypto regulation only benefits those at the top and scammers, since it gives them one-sided control of the market with few consequences. Which is exactly what's happening.
"If we can't stop serial killers, let's legalize murder!"
It takes a lot of character to admit you were wrong and see the error of your ways. Congrats!
anyone from europe recognizes this immediately as some form of thieving monarchy, it really is ludicrous that is still possible in 2025
As long as you have the Enemy you can run the Grift. Tale as old as money, at least.
This article is soft peddling corruption, and it confirms that Trump takes bribes via his cryptocurrency operation.
That this is even remotely surprising to anybody is the only surprising thing about it. He took bribes via his hotel last time. He takes massive donations from Bezos and Zuck and others to his inauguration fund or presidential library or whatever other slush funds he can use to skirt anti-bribery regulations.
Let's not forget the MBS overriding the advice of the Saudi investment board to give $2 billion dollars to Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner. Funds with hefty fees that have barely been invested.
https://www.reuters.com/world/kushner-has-discussed-us-saudi...
These corrupt assholes don't even try to hide it.
His son is currently on a tour of eastern europe presenting his crypto 'opportunity' to 'investors'
I mean, he took bribes last time via his hotel operation. This just is an upgrade.
I prefer the term, "alternative funding mechsnism" ;)
Thats all Truth Social was. By buying the public stock you could in a way funnel money to Trump that did conflict with campaign finance laws/limits.
People arent buying Truth Social stock because they think its actually worth 5 billion dollars.
> People arent buying Truth Social stock because they think its actually worth 5 billion dollars.
Well, if you see it as the private presidential corruption fund, it might well be worth well over 5 billion tbf.
The fact that Bitcoin (and kin) turbocharges corruption, and its success is a direct result of doing so on a wide scale (the whole point is to undermine state power by dwpriving it of control over currency) is proof to the armchair economist Bitcoin supporters that it is "sound money" and things like facilitating a market for circulation of child porn at one end and open political grift at the other, are welcomed as signs that the *experiment" is working as intended in their winner-corrupts-all bitcoin maximalist worldview.
Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.
Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.
Furious words and threats won't stop bitcoin.
Neither will bans and prohibitions, unless you are willing to go full north korea with cameras everywhere and computers locked down. And you'll probably fail with that.
You're beating your fists against an ocean.
Touch some grass.
Of course you can. 20 years in prision for using Bitcoin. Not a lot of people would wanna risk that. And when 99,99% chooses to not touch it with a pole the value will collapse. Then a few people can sit there with Bitcoins that no one wants to buy from them.
Is it a good idea? Mayne not. But obviously one can crush Bitcoin if one wants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
"Is it a good idea?"
No, not "obviously one crush" and nor are there no consequences if one were to try.
https://archive.md/qlbDM#selection-49.0-49.64
("Georg Ritter von Flondor, and what his unhappy life can teach us")
Except it's multinational. China declared bitcoin illegal in 2021 but it still seems to exist.
“Under the company’s rules, the Trumps and other World Liberty investors are not allowed to sell their coins on the open market, though the company has said it might eventually lift that restriction if other buyers of the coin agree.”
I have heard this one before.
presumably this is what the web 3.0 crowd who backed Trump, including our own hosts, had in mind
Yeah, our host is a big trump supporter
It's time to realize that our "industry leaders" are bad people who are actively enabling fascism in the pursuit of personal power.
I don't see much references to "the swamp" anymore now that we have a sitting president doing a crypto grift. I thought dark money and mysterious figures pulling the strings is conspiracy worthy but I guess not when it's Trump.
Well, he drained the swamp, now he's doing what he does best, paving it over and building a soon-to-be-failed casino.
Say what you will about "the swamp" (not a big fan myself), but as a metaphor it kinda works since a swamp may be noxious and filled with unsavory swamp creatures... but it's still an ecosystem where competition and co-evolution amongst these swamp species in response to external environmental changes would still be expected.
It’s simple, see. I can’t believe nobody has explained this to you yet. Your swamp creatures bad, my swamp creatures good.
Republicans straight up lie, but their base is too ignorant to see that. Not to mention the propaganda machine that is Fox News brainwashing them.
OR they aren’t ignorant, and are fully aware of things, and instead are scum.
No one is this ignorant, but if Republicans keep killing education, we'll get there one day.
Or, the conspiracies have been proven true, but it's not with those who the conspiracy-lovers would have expected. Not woke, not Soros, but Trump and his gang were running the exact racket. So I suppose now suddenly the racket is good, doublethink by the book.
I feel like the amount of projection from this group of people will be the source of behavioral and political psychology books for generations.
"If you're doing something legally or morally wrong, create opponents to accuse of the same things before what you're doing comes out."
Every accusation is an admission with these folks.
What can be done to stop this flagrant grift?
Develop USA2.0 with various bugs fixed: no presidential pardon, supreme court reform, term limits, FBI removed from executive branch, etc.
Gonna need a Civil War 2.0 first.
You joke about these things but I'm afraid that's where we're heading.
Trump will close off as much opposition as he can in the next two years. Then spend a year convincing people that term limits aren't required by the constitution. By then we'll have had so many scandals and constitutional crisis events that just get ignored that it will happen.
Am I being overdramatic? Because this feels different. It feels openly hostile.
I wasn't joking.
I don't think you're being overdramatic. At this point, I'd give 50/50 odds that Trump will install himself as a Putin-style dictator (if we're not already there). "Elections" will happen, but the outcome will always be the same at the national level.
[flagged]
No. That isn't enough. The only way to avoid another Trump is to not elect one.
The solution liberals recoil against for some reason, is disassociation. We should have threatened our Trumper friends and family with permanent disassociation before the 2024 election.
Most would still persist, unpersuaded. They're likely lost for our lifetime. But perhaps enough would have taken the social cue of ridicule and ostracizing as serious enough to not vote for a psychopath. The farther back, the more effective it would have been.
Instead, we keep thinking they can be persuaded with reason, despite all evidence they've abandoned rationality.
We can't legislate the outcome you want. What you want comes from virtue. And America is out of virtue. People voted for a rapist, a felon, and vile insurrectionist.
America may not deserve Constitutional order, and therefore we are losing it.
as a "crypto" enthusiast, this is sad to see that he is making this industry looking really bad - obviously he doesn't care, money is money. In the future, maybe even now, we are going to have those associating crypto to Trump ..
The lack of regulations in crypto make these scams legals without any fear of any repercussion
The thing is though, once you regulate crypto then what’s the point? You are left with a highly inefficient/expensive and immutable database.
Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But this is a stupid thing to solve for, because without trust and regulation you can’t even have a functioning society.
I would actually say that scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology at the moment.
(Unless you count speculation/gambling).
I'm 99% against crypto and think it's mostly a tool for wasting limited human innovation capital, enabling fraud, terrorist financing, ponzi scheme gambling, and pump and dump rug pulling.
There are a few areas where I find crypto interesting or useful:
- The existing banking and payments industry is too Christian / Mormon. It extra-judicially regulates anything it views as "vices". This industry is supposed to be dumb payment rails with hooks for FinCEN to stop crime. It's not supposed to be your pastor. If anything, business integration with regular payment rails would help them be better regulated.
- "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations. If you look at it long enough, it doesn't even feel like crypto. Just a new type of efficiency.
The latter may make the former a non-issue, especially if the existing fintech industry receives more competition from upstarts that don't have to pay the legacy gateways and their frictionful fees.
> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance.
This seems to be 'regulatory arbitrage' rather than anything concrete to do with the tech though. i.e. there's nothing inherent in a stablecoin that can't be done more simply, it's just currently a way to skirt bureaucracy and fees, which are already diminishing in many places.
Yeah this is what I don’t really get about the stable coin hype.
In Australia for example, we are almost cashless now and most bank transfers are instant and cheap - no blockchain required.
Digital currency is a good idea - unclear what value the blockchain part actually provides?
> "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations.
Yeah, these seem like a really good (potentially the only one) use case for crypto. Note that these are really just replicating dollar (and potentially euro) dominance for a new age, and whoever ends up winning here will probably be the new Visa/Mastercard (with all of the problems that entails).
>seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations
Barely. If $1m of crypto moves from one private wallet to another how do you know who's doing it or what the purpose is? Could be something legit, could be paying for drugs/terrorism - no definite way of knowing.
I was under the impression Circle with USDC was trying to be very FinCEN / AML compliant. That you had to agree to their terms to be able to use the token, that you couldn't transact off of a regulated exchange, and that they do plenty of KYC to know what's going on.
I might have the wrong assumptions?
I'm not sure of the details to be honest. Certainly if I want to change normal US$ in a bank into USDC then I have to go through KYC etc. If I then transfer it to a private wallet and then send it to someone else's wallet for an iffy transaction they'd see on the blockchain it was me but not necessarily who the other wallet was.
A way to make it less traceable is to transfer it to an iffy crypto exchange, change it and then withdraw it somewhere else. Some of those are not very good at keeping records and the like. Like I use mexc who can change usdc and when I wanted to do my tax return they said they couldn't retrieve transactions over 18 months ago - they delete the data they say. And mexc isn't the worst.
> scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology
the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally (unlike tradfi), nobody is hiding anything (until we go to Monero and similar, but that's different). What's however happening, and we come back to the first point, is the lack of "rules" so that in effect financial "crime" is legal.
the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally
There's a public ledger I can visit to see who's bribing Trump this week?
Illegal Internet stuff in general is an application of Bitcoin. That includes money laundering, drugs, porn (in communist places like Texas), etc.
Apparently before Bitcoin was Liberty Reserve, which was a centralized database.
Some people believe Trump is accidentally advancing things by revealing what needs to be banned. Money in politics, transactional diplomacy with aggressive states, powers of the Executive incautiously delegated by Congress, etc. Cryptocurrency is now on that list. Maybe we should call for a halt until we figure out what’s going on.
The amount of corruption and incompetence ignored by his base is staggering. This is all because they don’t like immigration?
No, the current system does not work for most of the people hence the "just nuke it" option sounds like a rational one.
Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
The Canadian elections are structurally different though. Not everybody changed their mind, the Conservatives won more seats than before. What happened was that Bloc Quebecois and NDP voters broke ranks to vote in a Liberal MP for their riding, to block what seemed like a surefire supermajority for the Conservatives. This is possible when you don't have a 2-party system with deeply calcified divisions.
> sounds like a rational one.
But history has showed (with NSDAP and others) that it is not.
> But history ...
You see, you lost a good chunk of voters there.
Many are just voting for their candidate to hurt other people whom they don't like.
> the current system does not work for most of the people
Bullshit. America is the richest country on earth. Your unemployment is remarkably low. Your disposable income is relatively high. And all the issues you complain about, like housing, are worse outside the US than in the US.
Moreover, a lot of the MAGA people are NOT working class struggling families. There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
It's not just simply economic. I'd say it's more like there are many groups of people who do not feel represented by their government. Some of these groups are quite opposed to each other. Add to that politics and media that have become intentionally divisive and you get a society where everybody is mad about or scared of something.
How do you explain the majority of 18-25 yo who voted for Trump?
Also from polling the ones who did not vote were also leaning towards Trump. So participation was not the issue.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude. They've been conditioned to believe that geriatric white dudes are the only ones capable of holding the office. So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman, the natural choice was to select the old white (orange) guy.
Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
> Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.
That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.
> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman
Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
> There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.
Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.
They're not getting ahead, so... they're burning it down.
You can’t see why average Americans would want a change from many of the Biden Administration’s policies? It has nothing to do with racism, xenophobia, or transphobia. A lot of the policies were just objectively bad for average everyday Americans.
Can you give some examples of policies that were bad for ordinary, everyday Americans?
Many people disagree with the Covid response.
Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
> Many people disagree with the Covid response.
Who was president in 2020? Who did the first round of stimulus?
People who disagree with the Covid response may have been voting for RFK as much as Trump.
That's all well and good, but that money would never be spent here. That's not how our budget works. It's our defense budget, determined ahead of time, and America's defense budget is huge
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
It’s true that the large majority of aid came in the form of weapons that the military industrial complex wanted to replace anyway. However, there has still been many billions of “cash” sent, totaling over $40 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at. For example, from two years ago: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-e...
No, that's military support. We sent $26 billion in 2022, which is less than 3% of our defense budget. That's peanuts in a conflict like this.
> Many people disagree with the Covid response.
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
Yeah, that's fair.
> the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission)
The data are known to show that the primary effect was in reducing the risk of hospitalization, severe disease, and mortality. Why, then should the lack of effect on transmission be the end-point that determines the appropriateness of mass immunization?
Because ordering people to take medical treatment is a big deal. If it reduces the hospitalisation rate then it's rational to take for oneself, but requiring it for a bunch of things was overkill.
And I say this as someone who thinks Biden was a pretty good President.
The closest I've seen to a convincing explanation of this came from a recent Some More News episode. The host argued that, while Democrats at the Federal level have pretty fucking clearly been far better for normal Americans this century (and longer, but let's consider the last 25ish years) with things like the CFPB and ACA and bringing down fentanyl overdose death rates (to say nothing of economic performance under Democrats versus Republicans, going back quite a bit farther than this century), they have simply not done enough, and the perception is still, by death through a thousand cuts, that things are getting worse.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
Honestly, no. Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no". To be fair though, he excelled on that one pretty consistently throughout his term
> Biden was a really terrible president by any metric except for "isTrump? yes/no"
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
Biden’s record is public and the number of bipartisan bills passed under his admin is extraordinary in this day and age. No serious ranking of presidents puts Biden low at all.
It's not just Biden, it's everything since about, eh, 1970.
It's a complex web of alienations.
> This is all because they don’t like immigration?
You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why. Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.
It's not new and it's far more broad than that. The staggering government corruption and incompetence has been ignored for decades. You can't just pretend that this is suddenly new and one sided if you want to solve the problem.
This both sides thing is so naive. One side is far more corrupt than the other.
This just isn’t true, it is easy to find blatant corruption tied to politicians at all levels from both parties. Look at California, New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, look at the Biden family, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Letitia James, the Democrats are just as corrupt, the mainstream media just reports on it less.
hahahha you just named a bunch of people with no criminal charges. That's it?
hahaha
I don't agree with them but tons of known corrupt Republicans have not been criminally charged. That means nothing.
yea, you're missing the point.
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
It's naive and dismissive of the corruption to think it's not both sides. You're literally only seeing half the picture.
I think it's naive not to see the "both sides" card get pulled anytime there is a criticism of the right. All the "centrists" come out to hold water for conservatives when their policies are clearly and specifically failing.
I didn't say there wasn't corruption on both side, I said one side is far more corrupt than the other.
> This is all because they don’t like immigration?
To win the libs, women, colored, foreigners, woke, dei - as long as they can satisfy their general hatred for "others" they are ok with collapsing America.
No, its because they dislike a elite that ignores them- a decade of deaths of missery while the rulers declared proudly that the line goes up and thus all is good. https://shadac-pdf-files.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...
A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.
How did you feel about the Biden family’s blatant corruption? Do you really think that Hunter Biden was an amazing artist and brilliant corporate energy sector lawyer that is just falling on hard times now like the rest of us? It’s a weird coincidence that he can’t sell his paintings anymore now that his Dad isn’t politically relevant anymore.
Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.
This is important, and most partisans will get caught up in a discussion about whose corruption was worse. The bigger issue in my mind is that no one wants to police their own side, which leads to absurd flip-flopping hypocrisy every time the other party gains power. "Less bad" corruption is still a very bad thing, whoever you believe to be the more corrupt. But our current political system doesn't seem to have a way to wrestle with this.
IDK, I think actual democratic voters tend to be far more on the "hammer the button even more enthusiastically" side of the "ah, but if you press that button, the Bidens will also be investigated!" meme-cartoon.
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
To compare Hunter Biden, a private citizen, making a few paintings, to the actual president of the country grifting with crypto to the tune of billions, is rather something. Especially after watching the 2 billion dollar bailout that Jared Kushner got from the Saudis during the first term.
Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Hunter Biden blatantly and corruptly sold his father’s influence. There’s even evidence that Joe got his “10% for the big guy” on these dealings. It’s a massive disgusting scandal.
For the record I can’t stand when either side pulls this crap. The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end. They’re dividing us into tribes and playing us for fools while the political class robs us blind.
Hunter Biden, as far as I know, didn't hold an official title within his father's administration. Jared Kushner, on the other hand, did hold an official title within Donald Trump's first administration.
Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.
For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.
Why can’t we just agree that both are really, really bad? The amount of mental gymnastics that each side does to justify such blatant corruption is astounding.
Except Hunter Biden’s crimes were relatively minor ones that were massively amplified and distorted by a political smear campaign. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgnl7qdvjno.amp
> The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end.
> Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Feel free to start the ball rolling
All corruption and law breaking should be investigated and prosecuted as appropriate. I don’t care what side they are on. Our entire political class is full of corruption. For the record I’m also not a fan of the Trump meme coins, Jared Kushner’s actions, or various Republican politicians at all levels that are blatantly corrupt.
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What were their roles in the Biden Administration?
Recipients of nepotistic pardons, which is what people find suspicious.
It's now clear that the presidential pardon is just an endorsement for crime, whoever's using it.
He was pardoned because Biden knows that Trump is going to just make up some excuse to go after his family.
In the case of Hunter Biden he wouldn’t need to make up excuses.
He was convicted of several crimes…
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/robert-hunter-...
So if Don Junior starts selling finger paintings to Russian oligarchs and Saudi royals you’d be okay with it since he’s not officially part of the administration?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jared-kushner-post-white-house-...
Remember, they made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm.
It's ridiculous how the US has gone downhill since.
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Please don't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter who it's about. The guidelines contain these relevant lines:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: to clarify further, in the context of the reply below -
The thing that's particularly bad about this comment is that it pours scorn on a group of people that is defined by their class and intellect, which is just the kind of sentiment we don't want to see on HN. By all means, criticize politicians and others in power. Let's not scapegoat people at the very bottom of the heap for all the ills of the world.
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Politics-related threads are generally the worst on HN, and if we're going to have them, people need to take extra care to follow the guidelines. In particular, we don't want HN to be a place where it's normal to attack people for their class or intellect.
That's quite unfair. Trump's support cut across a wide swath of (mostly white) Americans, including educated and/or well-off coastal and Midwest voters. Many, many people who considered themselves well-informed, in the mainstream, and in their right mind, voted for him. And nothing changes until you can convince those people of the truth, which is that they screwed up.
Also, nothing changes while the wedge being driven by the powers who want a populace divide has power, on both sides.
It's by design that those splits happen, when the desk jockeys earning six-figures are seen (and a lot of times, see themselves) as a completely different caste of people than the factory workers, gig workers, etc. it sucks all the air out of the room from real issues: less fortunate people left behind, lack of opportunities, the encroaching of work precarity which will eventually turn even to the current high-earning workers. It completely erases any reasonable public discourse about the real causes of all the social malaise symptoms we experience on the day-to-day.
It's harder to give any sympathy to people voting against their best interests, they've been swindled, bamboozled, and are completely oblivious to the bamboozle, which makes it all the more frustrating. Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
> Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
The issue is that this isn't a new phenomenon. This has been happening since at least Reagan (over 40 years ago). That cross-section of America has decided to vote against their interests in every major election for decades. I'm over it.
And instead of recognizing that like normal people, they want to push the onus onto literally anything else (immigrants, trans people, higher education). Fuck that. And fuck them for continuing to want to drag us back to the stone age.
It's not but it's designed to not be a new phenomenon. People are kept uneducated, ignorant about the world, how it works, why does it work, how society works, etc.
They are fed lies and don't have the capacity to understand they are lies. It's partly their fault (for the lack of curiosity) but it's also systemic, such a phenomenon can only happen in this scale if there are systems fostering, and procreating it.
Not saying your feelings are invalid, at all, they are absolutely understandable but it's also the reaction wanted by the ones keeping others uneducated: a larger divide, an ever increasing gap between the people most similar in society. It's divide-and-conquer, we waste our time and energy raging against folks who are purely ignorant, not against the ones keeping them ignorant and easily manipulated. We lost our temper trying to converse with them, which further increases the division.
Not here to give any solutions or tell you to change behaviours, applying in real life a more measured approach to reach these people is really fucking hard, frustrating, etc. but just saying that the reaction of "fuck'em" is exactly part of the strategy for continuing dividing and conquering us.
I don't disagree that those in power don't necessarily see this divide as a bad thing. And I gave a ton of leeway to those who voted for him in 2016. But a lot has changed since then.
what's even worse is not just how stupid things are, but how mean they are as well. And I absolutely not saying that calling them stupid is a solution, but it's THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND. Seriously. The last 8 years have been chalk full of articles and pieces on how Democrats can reach those people, and they all essentially say the same thing: They like that he's an asshole. So fuck them.
I thought this election had much lower turnout than the last? That coupled with the fact that incumbents lost globally due to inflation, it isn't surprising that Trump won.
Pretending it was because we didn't baby the MAGA voters enough is misguided, IMO.
Lower turnout for Democrats, not Trump. Most of the stories about some demographic skewing right in 2024 are exaggerating the trend because most of those people voted for him in 2020, too, but many Biden voters stayed home.
(I’m not saying that nobody changed their vote, only that looking at percentage point changes distorts the view unless you factor in disproportionate no-show rates.)
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said the quiet part out loud recently: the efforts that he characterized as fighting voter fraud were straight up suppression of votes in Democratic majority districts.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/ken-paxton-voter-...
Exactly. The characterization that the entire margin was caused by Democrats staying home is hiding the fact that many were fraudulently disenfranchised.
"the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."
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Many of those voters aren't ill-informed, they're simply ok with a dictatorial jackass running the county, so long as that dictatorial jackass looks and acts like them, and does the things that agree with their world-view.
That's fair.
People voted Trump for different reasons. Not understanding their reasons does not make you smarter. They were not all low IQ. Ignoring a big chunk of the population because they are "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels" will make you loose the next election to whoever decides to listen to them instead to lecture them.
Do that multiple times and you may end-up with a dicator(or at least someone who can become a dictator) sooner or later.
> "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels" One of the narratives I hear repeated a lot that is simply untrue is around white americans. Trump doubled his numbers for minority (male) voters vs. the last time he was elected.
But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*.
Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters.
The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election.
I thought this Ezra Klien interview taling about election polling data was informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0J7dIlL7c
That is precisely the attitude that those “yokels” decided they would fully back Trump. When people are abandoned by the economic and political system, someone coming in telling them that they will get revenge, is how you get a enthusiastic supporters.
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They've voted against their own interests (aka Republican) for the last 40 years and people still have the gall to be like "You can't call them stupid".
I think most people genuinely try to find the best in other human beings but you're right. They've been doing this shit for closer to half a century, at some point you need to call a spade a spade. They're morons and they have outsized influence in the US because of how our political system works.
Fuck them.
The creation of the trump coin is a signal to the crypto community that the SEC will stop going after crypto companies. I have read alot of people who ended up going into crypto and some even getting lucrative investment from Andreeson horowitz, lightspeed, etc etc. And then one day, they get a letter in the mail saying they are now a Politically Exposed Entity (PEE). Then all of their banks drop them, they can't get credit and they can't get loans. The SEC put out a letter saying "Come work with us", and when the founders tried, they would become a PEE instantly. There was no recourse with the SEC, and many smart people ended up completely losing their lives. The only way they could get back to 'real' life, was by trying to go into a different industry and 'avoid the eye' which was, who knows?
Now, as the trump + melania coin acting as a grift, instead of "alternative funding mechanism". I mean, you could already 'donate' directly to the president, and even get a tax writeoff for it. Atleast this way you'll have to pay capital gains. You could already pay $1m to get a audience with the president, how is this any different? Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
It's not that i entirely believe all of this, but i would like to provide some counter weight to all the comments that are all just parroting "Grift".
Shouting over and over again, “This is normal” doesn’t make something morally acceptable.
If any of this is (arguably) normal we should tear down the systems that support these norms. They are bad norms. The solution is never, “Welp, people are corrupt, what can you do?” You start making changes in the legal system. Because if you don’t you’re giving the country away as though there were no other course of action.
> I mean, you could already 'donate' directly to the president, and even get a tax writeoff for it.
What? Campaign donations are not tax exempt.
> Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
> the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
donations to affiliated NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are tax-deductible.
>Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
>Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
You aren't giving any money to the president here. It's a way for the president to provide utility to the coin. The coin has a vesting schedule, locking the coins so they can't be sold by the insiders.
> donations to affiliated NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are tax-deductible
Only if they're tax exempt NGOs. Which affiliated NGO do you propose?
> Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
(I'm… pretty doubtful Musk is actually microdosing.)
The Feds consider both crack cocaine and marijuana as a Schedule I drug; per the DEA, "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse". https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
> You aren't giving any money to the president here.
Per the article: "A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash."
"druggie" - lol