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> one party was busy making “bets” on Kalshi

This would arguably be much more severe -- and quite likely already happening -- than the whole "congress trading stocks" thing because most of those (besides the sports ones) tie very directly to government actions in a way that the economy or a large company in generally doesn't as predictably.

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It's definitely already happening and should lead to a congressional inquiry if we had a functioning congress: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do
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Isn't the whole idea of prediction markets to let insiders bet on things so that you'll get insider info leaked?
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Maybe this is fine until it incentivizes easily-achieved but adverse actions that would greatly harm the public.

For a silly example, I would imagine the streaker from this year’s Super Bowl is either (a) a complete idiot, or (b) put a significant amount of money on a “prediction market” of there being a streaker at the Super Bowl - more than enough to cover his ticket, legal, and medical costs.

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Yes and no. AIUI there's generally a lot less liquidity available in prediction markets, which limits the profitability.

Even if you have perfect clairvoyance, you still need someone to take the other side of the bet.

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If the US wanted to end the fentanyl and xylazine and nitazene epidemic, it would legalize the controlled manufacture, sale, and usage of the drugs being adulterated. This won't happen, because the 50-year-old War on Drugs is a load-bearing pillar of the US government.
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Xylazine and fentanyl are already legally distributed in the US. I believe Xylazine is still unscheduled.

https://www.dechra-us.com/our-products/us/equine/horse/presc...

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Those are the adulterants, not the drugs being adulterated such as heroin, meth, and MDMA.

For the most part, no customer wants fentanyl. The dealers like it because it's a cheap booster for cutting the drugs that their customers actually do want to buy. It just has this unfortunate side effect of making small overdoses lethal.

That's why "ending the fentanyl crisis" is a curious goal. We had a perfectly good War on Drugs going on, but fentanyl is making the illicit drug industry too dangerous. You'd think that if we wanted to stop drugs, and we knew how to do that, we'd stop drugs. Instead we're stopping fentanyl, so we can get back to the regularly scheduled version of the War on Drugs that was always intended to last forever.

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I live in Seattle, decriminalizing drugs didn't turn out that way here.
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Can you elaborate?

Do you mean that drug dependence has become more visible? That petty crime has increased?

One fun thing about harm reduction policies is that, as a result of fewer people dying, more people are on the street. So while you don’t see people in the morgue on your daily commute, you do see them down the alleyway. This side effect may be more unpleasant for you, but that’s only because you’re not personally inconvenienced by the corpse sitting in the freezer at the coroner.

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"controlled" is key. Seattle decriminalized drug use. That's a tiny part of a larger solution rooted in harm reduction.
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Singapore kills drug dealers. That works much better.
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Idk, if the number of people executed increases over time, maybe it doesn't.

https://www.afr.com/world/asia/singapore-executions-touch-22...

This article cites Singapore saying the existing laws mostly get low-level users and not kingpins because kingpins operate outside of the country.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/singapore-drug-executions/

Decriminalization of drug use doesn't have to mean decriminalization of anything else. Thieves and murderers should be prosecuted regardless of any state induced by the voluntary ingestion chemicals.

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Decriminalization without legalization is something I can't support. If it's not illegal for me to have and use a drug, them why should I be forced to buy it from criminals? Either legalize it, or go whole hog on criminalizing it. Execute the dealers and put users into mandatory rehab, or let people buy it in shops. Any of these half measures are intolerable, they exist to make sure the situation is in a constant state of tension, to nobody's benefit but the governments.

Ideally we would pick one or the other on a drug by drug basis. Executing people for selling weed isn't something I actually want, but neither do I want them simply imprisoned or fined either. But with shit like fent? Trying to find a single policy to fit both drugs is inane.

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There's a significant number of people who want their life micromanaged and a significant number of people who want to micromanage other people's lives. The need to have a sense of control and therefore safety manifests itself in weird ways in various populations and can't be contained without a lot of sustained, continuous effort, just like the other base desires of humankind. I just wish the federal government didn't have a hand in it, and then all the people who want to execute weed smokers can do so in their own states and leave the other states alone.
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Neighbouring countries including Thailand and Indonesia also have the death penalty for drug trafficking. It is almost impossible to visit parts of those countries without being receiving unsolicited offers of drugs...
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I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not.

Anyway: Capital punishment is an elegant solution.

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If we're having a serious conversation about effective drug policies, it would be remise to not discuss Singapore. For some reason the conversation online is always about America and European countries, as if the rest of the world doesn't exist.
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I think it usually doesn’t come up because Singapore is a very complicated country, perhaps the most “outlier” country on the planet. Most people in the US (even well-educated ones) don’t know nearly enough about the social, cultural, and historical dynamics to speak on it intelligently, let alone compare and contrast it to a country like the United States.

Might as well talk about drug policy in South Sudan to be honest.

Edit: I will say I do have one Singaporean expat friend who finds capital punishment for drug possession vile, and cites it as one of the reasons she no longer lives there. Along with the crushing wealth disparity between the servant class and the working class. Not that it adds much to the conversation except personal flavor.

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Decriminalizing public intoxication didn't turn out to be a good idea.
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It's like if Canada wanted to end gun smuggling and school shootings, it would legalize the controlled manufacture, sale, and usage of the guns being banned. But they won't.
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If I squint gun control doesn’t look much different than legalized drugs. They’re both just a question of how restrictive the regulation is.

There are still legal ways to have a gun in Australia and many other countries that “ban guns”. They don’t have total bans, they just have more restrictive regulations than the United States.

Consider how we regulate alcohol or marijuana as examples of how legalization of drugs works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control

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I mean, prohibition works while legalization just makes more people use whatever you legalize and increases the negative externalities of its use. You see that almost universally (alcohol, drugs, sex work). The exception is it gets rid of the black markets and some (but not all) of the violence associated with them.

So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal is to stop overdoses and addiction then absolutely not.

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Alcohol is legal. We don't have gun battles between gangs of smugglers, or between them and the cops. We also don't have people dying or going blind from trying to drink wood alcohol.

But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.

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Watching the dynamics of the vote count on this post throughout the day has been interesting.
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> bets

Investments on Kalshi!

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--one party was hoping we'd stop talking about Epstein
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> reactionary

they want to overthrow the Jacobites

> accelerationists

how's that going to work ?

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Reactionary accelerationists want a local war of some sort so they can grab war powers and then roll back all the US's post-WW2 social progress (and most of the New Deal too).
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My understanding is accelerationists or liberals to go full hog so that they can go "see".
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