US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

I’d rather the regime let Assange go, and pardoned Snowden. Allowing something most states already allow is weak sauce as far as populism is concerned.

do you know how many poor people get caught up on mj charges every year in this country? not to mention this will lead to prior charges being expunged from people's records. but sure let's prioritize those two guys.

Very short sighted thinking. If they beheaded Sam bankman fried there will be a clear message to not commit financial crime, and the aspiration and motivation would almost zero.

The gesture of the freeing these two brave whistleblowers is much more important than you think. Noam Chomsky calls this censorship flak of his five filters.

> If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation.

SBF was willing to repeatedly take double-or-nothing bets at 50/50 odds even though the expected utility of each bet is the same as not betting at all and the combined odds of bankruptcy very quickly asymptotes to 100% with increasing rounds.

Literally beheading him won't put off the next person like him. His current punishment is probably enough to put off anyone sane.

Assange isn't a whistleblower just by founding WikiLeaks any more than Musk is a brain surgeon by founding Neuralink, he's the figurehead.

Manning and Snowden get that title, but not Assange.

No he was not. You think he'd repeatedly do Russian roulette with half the bullets? He had the odds with him with his legal advisors.

Madoff's sentencing is why SBF's parents taught him to disregard the law. If you don't understand the idea of figureheads being important, what would happen if the president was shot, or if Dali lama was chosen by china? America would still keep going as would tibetan Buddhism. The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone. HN is a platform and I'm sure we'd still exist without it, assange definitely does deserve credit.

""""The whole time that we were dating, he was also my boss at work, which created some awkward situations," she testified, according to The Wall Street Journal. Describing Bankman-Fried's attitude toward risk-taking, "Ellison recalled on the witness stand how Bankman-Fried once spoke of a coin-flip scenario where if the coin landed on tails, the world would end. But if the coin landed on heads, 'the world would be twice as good.' Bankman-Fried [said] he would take the bet if there were a chance of making the world better, Ellison said."""" - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sbfs-ex-girlfrie...

> what would happen if the president was shot

Judging by all the presidents who have been shot, at most an airport gets named after them or a statue gets built.

> or if Dali lama was chosen by china

Not much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_Panchen_Lama_controversy

> The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone.

"Seems"? Plenty of new ones listed on the Wikileaks website.

> assange definitely does deserve credit

For what? Snowden went to… a newspaper. Didn't need Wikileaks. Plenty of whistleblowers did the same before Wikileaks. It's a new brand, but not a new thing.