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Popular Dark Web Market Disappears, Users Migrate In Panic (vice.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on Motherboard: Like the changing of the seasons, a natural stage in the dark web marketplace life cycle has once again manifested. Nucleus market, which primarily sold illegal drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and cannabis, has disappeared: The site is unresponsive, and the market administrators have not made any announcements about planned downtime. This has forced vendors to migrate to other sites and panicked users to figure out where to go next, all amidst a whirlwind of rumours and speculation of where Nucleus -- and its cash -- has gone. 'Nucleus is an awesome market. One of the best. Hope all the admins are ok and nothing serious happened,' someone identifying themselves as a vendor wrote in a comment on the news site Deep Dot Web. At the moment, it's not totally clear why Nucleus' website is unresponsive. It could be an exit scam -- a scam where site administrators stop allowing users to withdraw their funds and then disappear with the stockpile of bitcoins.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable response... If you are batshit crazy.
Which was very unfortunate. Making cocaine illegal is what created the Mexican drug cartels, and subsequently made them crazy rich and extremely powerful. Which they still are.
If we made cocaine legal, not only could we tax it, but we would pull the rug right out from under the drug cartels. They would dissipate from a simple inability to compete with the legal market. History has proven this to be true. People sometimes imagine that the illegal vendors could offer lower prices than the legal vendors, and hence the drug cartels would remain just as strong as ever...this is patently absurd and has been shown to be false in practice as well as in theory.
Well, advocate for single payer healthcare first - because dealing with multiple insurance agencies costs a lot of money. In Canada, the average doctor's office spends about $30k/year dealing with the government for medical service payments. In the US, it's roughly triple that. These are costs - staff mostly, who do nothing but all that.
Second, denying even the poor medical care is actually very bad economically - because the poor then have to use the ER (which by law is free). ER is the most expensive medical treatment available - you'll spend three to four times as much money treating someone coming into the ER for a medical condition that could be treated at say, a doctor's office. So yeah, having the poor be able to go see a much cheaper doctor at a walk-in clinic saves a ton of money over having them see the doctor in the ER.
Of course, since they're poor and can't afford medical insurance, WE ALL PAY THROUGH THE NOSE for their care because they can only use the ER.
And of course, because they can't pay for followup care (not covered since it's not emergency) they go back to whatever their miserable lives take them, get ill again, and again, we pay top dollar for ER medical care for them. Heck, we could probably get them really good care for the money spent healing them in the ER.
And the whole process of states that have legalized without turning into dens of villainy and despair is casting further doubt on the whole of the drug war.
We've gone from "you've got to be fucking kidding me" to gallows humor when the sum total cost of the drug war is calculated.
Coincidentally, I just came across this Ted talk from Alex Winter the other day. It was most excellent. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) He made a very compelling argument for the value of privacy in the marketplace, why Dark Web vendors such as Silk Road (which he made a documentary on) and others are battling to protect it, and why privacy needs to be protected.
Are you happy right now with private businesses, credit bureaus, banks, and the government all logging, monitoring, and referencing your entire financial history? Would you like it any more if any of these institutions were hacked, and all your data was made public? If you aren't, then you should be mourning the loss of a private marketplace.
This is only because of prohibition, prices are artificially inflated because of artificial scarcity and risk. Even without insurance, one can buy a supply of hydromorphone at a pharmacy for far less than one can buy heroin on the street - even though the hydromorphone is higher quality, much more potent, and overall safer than street heroin. Millions of Americans walk around hopped up on legally prescribed opiates and amphetamines and don't suffer from any of these apparent evils that we hear about in the endless government propaganda. Fuck, do you have any idea how many elderly people walk around with a morphine pump keeping them doped to high heaven 24/7? And when was the last time grandpa robbed you to pay for a refill? Oh, and most illegal drug addicts would suffer withdrawal before robbing someone, because they're not shit bags - some shit bags are drug addicts but by no means are all drug addicts shit bags. Drug use and a lack of decency are totally unrelated. And yeah, fuck us white libertarians who hate a system that disproportionately cages minorities, while destroying families and creating poverty. If you seriously think locking someone up for nothing other than using drugs is OK, you're a fucking twat that lacks any human decency or morality.
Riiiiiight....and we've all seen how well the "cut taxes to the bone" model has worked in Kansas and Louisiana. Both states are nearly bankrupt, are deeply in debt, and can't afford to pay for basic services like schools, police, roads, and other "socialist" infrastructure.
No one like paying taxes, but they're a necessary thing in a modern society. It's a fact, and no amount of voodoo tax-cutting theory will change that.
Some people complain that everything was great 100 years ago where there was no taxation. Yeah, there were no taxes 100 years ago, and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
A standing army, the FDA, the EPA, clean, drinkable water coming from every faucet, 24-hour emergency rooms, fully-staffed hospitals waiting to give you life-saving care, fire departments, 12 years of public education, child-abuse investigators, controls on what toxic chemicals can be poured into your drinking water, nationwide 911 service, a national highway system, social services, drug treatment centers, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, community colleges, public schools, water and sewer systems, parks and recreation services, food inspection, electrical utilities, gas service, a National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, foster care services, School Breakfast Programs, State Children's Insurance Programs, Unemployment insurance, Worker's Comp, Senior Community Service Employment Programs, street lights, mass transit, zoning, planning, building permits and inspection, housing and development programs, road maintenance, the State Board of Health, building inspections, building and fire codes, disaster relief, FEMA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, flood mitigation, pollution inspections, drug treatment centers, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the Library of Congress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and on and on and on.
Frankly, I like those things. I I like knowing that the medication I take has been tested. I I like knowing the food I eat has been inspected. I I like having 911 to call for help. I I like roads and sewers and electrical service. I I like Social Security.
I'm no fan of taxes, believe me, but that's how things are paid for- the roads we drive on, emergency services, the Post Office, libraries, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, etc etc. Taxes have enabled this country to be able to pay for the things that make it a good place to live.
If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've been to countries where taxation is almost non-existent, and most of them suck. Most of them are NOT places you'd want to live unless you were fairly well off in comparison to the rest of the population, and often not even then.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Nope, big city, born and raised.
Nice straw man though, I am glad you made him for me. See the vast majority of drug users have never committed a single B&E. In fact, the best evidence we have is that, even the few that do, mostly wouldn't if not for bone headed drug laws that are entirely ineffective at anything but filling prisons and increasing crime.
Hell, even Heroin users have been found to be able to hold down jobs and not require or seek out illegal income when they are able to get high at reasonable prices with safe product.
All in all, there is little to no evidence supporting any real benefit from drug laws, unless you consider jobs for white suburban guys in the prison system to be a benefit. In fact, going back to the arguments in congress about marijuana in the 1930s, its pretty clear that job creation was one of the primary motivating forces at the time; the biggest and most well known proponent of marijuana laws, for example, was the head of what would later become the DEA. His main motivation was fear for his own job after the end of alcohol prohibition.
Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
But seriously, thanks for bringing out this straw man, he is one of my favorite to set alight
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> hydromorphone is higher quality, much more potent, and overall safer than street heroin
Even worst.... "Krokodil", that nasty "street drug" that has been killing and disfiguring people in the most horrible ways.
Turns out that is because of impurities in home manufacture. The actual drug is much much safer than many other opioids , and making it available in a grade fit for human consumption would actually save lives.
That is what really gets me.... how inhumanely callous prohibitionists are. Their policies have been nothing but harmful, yet they just sit back and smug over their victims suffering.
No houses burned before meth was made profitable. Now half the burn units are idiots who tried making meth. How is that not an atrocity? How do you blame that on the idiot addict and not the politicians who should have known better?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"