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I love how the government dug through the guy's entire life just to find something they could nab him on and straight up destroyed him. That's some G stuff!
by kgantchev 5y ago
I love how the government dug through the guy's entire life just to find something they could nab him on and straight up destroyed him. That's some G stuff!
- slickrick216 5y agoI’m convinced they did this just to get their hands on the Wu Tang album. The Ol dirty bastards in Washington have always been true fans.
- H8crilA 5y agoIt's not like it's easier to seize digital assets such as stocks in a brokerage portfolio. Speaking of which, I guess he's completely broke that they bothered to go after this?
- slickrick216 5y agoHe’s going to get out. Do an excel course on Udemy and be back on the road to being a millionaire in no time.
- babyshake 5y agoIf what you say is true, the Shaolin and the Wu-Tang could be dangerous.
- hereforphone 5y agoNever threaten a Clinton (I anticipate downvotes.. and they'll be reinforcing my position that they're off-limits)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Falling3 5y agoSo if your comment were heavily upvoted you would've reconsidered your position? Or will any outcome whatsoever just reinforce your existing ideas?
- hereforphone 5y agoWhat are my existing ideas?
- happytoexplain 5y agoYour post was, "Never threaten a Clinton (I anticipate downvotes.. and they'll be reinforcing my position that they're off-limits)". Your position, AKA existing ideas, are "Never threaten a Clinton", and "they're off-limits", implying that they have special and unfair power/treatment in the political and legal world, but specifically with regards to the specific outcome of the specific case of Shkreli. The parent's criticism was in regards to your attitude on downvotes, which makes sense independent of whether your position is justified or true.
- cool_dude85 5y agoWhat's more likely - Chelsea's hacker news goon squad is here to brigade you, or nobody is interested in reheated Rush Limbaugh mid 90s slop?
- hereforphone 5y agoAre you aware of the drama between Shkreli and Hillary that I was referring to?
- happytoexplain 5y agoThe fact of a thing doesn't imply causality, and if causality is evident in this case, it still doesn't provide a license for glib sarcasm.
- hereforphone 5y agoDo you believe glib sarcasm should require a license?
- BitwiseFool 5y agoOnly in the United Kingdom.
- anoonmoose 5y agoI, like many people, downvote anything that says something of the nature "I anticipate downvotes", lest you think I downvoted for political reasons
- happytoexplain 5y agoIndeed. It's the purest form of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Joeboy 5y agoI think "I anticipate downvotes" is fine. "If you downvote me I will lean harder into my position" is basically blackmail (admittedly lame and ineffective blackmail), which is why I downvoted it.
- happytoexplain 5y agoI'm a little more strict, and draw the line at pretty much any extraneous assertion that your audience is going to disagree with you. E.g. "Controversial opinion: ...", "The HN crowd will downvote me, but ...", etc. It's an unnecessary injection of negativity, pettily frames one's self as the underdog, and provokes by implying that the people you're addressing are wrong before they've even replied to you. Obviously the internet is largely not a place to give crowds the benefit of the doubt, but it's critical for places with a shred of the expectation of real discussion, like HN.
- nprz 5y agoThis is getting downvotes, but it is true Shkreli got his bail revoked for offering $5000 for every strand of hair collected from HRC.
- happytoexplain 5y agoYou use the word "but", which implies some kind of inverse relationship between your clauses, but I don't see anything to indicate that.
- gota 5y agoIf putting a bounty to harass a person is not a crime it absolutely should be IMHO The day he started that he should be put in jail regardless of being on bail
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"offering $5000 for every strand of hair collected from HRC" Am I alone in seeing this as an act of a sophomoric troll rather than an actual bounty put on someone?
- Joeboy 5y agoI wouldn't disagree with the former interpretation, but publicly offering thousands of dollars for something carries a real risk somebody will take you up on the offer.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoIt's strange because I think if the same $5000/hair offering were made for an average person it would be much more serious. But in my mind someone who is so prominent and guarded by the Secret Service is in virtually no danger from such an outlandish thing. But I do understand how someone would see it the other way and not be comfortable with the risk at all.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
- paulpauper 5y agoThe official story was that this was unrelated to the drug price hike controversy. But it makes me wonder if the outcome would had been different had he not gotten all that negative attention in the first place.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoLol, don't wonder too hard. This is a pattern with the feds. If you go out of your way to piss off the public and be a flippant asshole to Congress, you're gonna have a hard time. Long before they announced any charges, I had a conversation with my dad about how the feds were likely to cook something up on this guy.
- crispyambulance 5y ago> cook something up on this guy. It was PONZI scheme. The only one who did the "cooking" was Shkreli himself.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoI don't disagree, but it is my opinion that the nature of financial regulation in the US means that if you own any significant amount of wealth, you reach a level of complexity where you are probably at least unwittingly guilty of a misdemeanor or felony, and few would withstand FBI scrutiny with agents motivated to find something to prosecute you with. Specifically, I think the law is sufficiently complex that it does allow for a significant degree of arbitrary enforcement.
- ascorbic 5y agoMaybe, but this isn't one of those cases. This wasn't inadvertent or negligent, this was straight up deliberate fraud.
- adamrezich 5y agoanother way of looking at it is, by successfully prosecuting "The Pharma Bro" and making a big deal out of it, now trust in pharmaceutical megacorporations is higher than ever. not a fan of Shkreli but dude was kind of a fall guy for the rest of his industry.
- pope_meat 5y ago30 something percent of the people in the united states' are convinced that the pharma companies are trying to kill them. Which is obviously wrong, the only thing pharma companies want is for you to be sick with an incurable, but treatable illness.
- kelnos 5y agoAs much as this guy may deserve it, I don't think we should be celebrating the idea that if the government has an axe to grind with you, they'll find a way to destroy your life.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoThis is one reason why government should be as small and do as little as possible.
- sixothree 5y agoOr have checks and balances.
- kgantchev 5y agoCan one not be simultaneously repulsed and mesmerized by the government's ability to murk somebody that they don't like?!
- markoman 5y agoOh, does this mean that you're anti-death penalty? White collar crime can exact costs on society close to a Bundy or Gacy type level. Too bad we don't have the death penalty for Corporate crime. Think of what opioids and Purdue Pharma have done to the U.S.
- JaggedJax 5y agoIf you're running a Ponzi scheme, it's best to not draw the government's attention to yourself lest they realize what you're up to.
- defaultname 5y agoHe committed pretty egregious financial crimes. They didn't have to "dig" far. People do understand that most people aren't hiding major felonies or securities fraud, right? Most of us aren't evading taxes. We aren't running ponzi schemes. We aren't defrauding lenders. You can scrutinize the situation of the vast majority of people and come up with nothing beyond maybe a tag taken off a mattress (har). Somehow in the (post) Trump era we have loads of people who really, truly believe it is some sort of injustice when people get scrutiny for the crimes they are actually committing.
- philwelch 5y agoIt's surprisingly easy to commit a federal offense: https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://twitter.com/CrimeADay
- defaultname 5y agoThere's always a logical fallacy in this sort of argument- a) There are loads of extremely specific laws for various very specific problems. e.g. Taking obsidian from an obsidian flow federal park, for instance. b) Ergo everyone commits crimes!. We're all criminals, they just selectively choose what to enforce! b) doesn't follow at all. The vast majority of people will never even be in a situation where it was possible to commit the overwhelming bulk of laws on the book. And that never would regardless. FWIW, criminals think everyone is a criminal. Tax evaders think it's just normal. Thieves think everyone steals. Etc.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"Ergo everyone commits crimes!. We're all criminals, they just selectively choose what to enforce!" I highly recommend watching "Don't Talk to the Police", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE for a different perspective of where the GP is coming from. While it is true the vast majority of the US Code is something that simply won't apply to you (like the obsidian example), there are plenty of laws on the books that are vague and subject to abuse by a motivated prosecutor. One such example is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a massive topic in-and-of-itself.
- titzer 5y agoIt'd be great if the government more regularly caught, prosecuted, and convicted people at this level of criminality. Otherwise the entire society collapses under the weight of abject corruption, because prosecution is a selective enforcement tool used at the whim of corrupt politicians, rather than an automatic mechanism that operates independently.
- pydry 5y agoHe was prosecuted because his ego meant he alienated the fuck out of everybody, including what should have been his allies. If he'd been just a bit less outspoken theyd probably have left him alone.
- rchaud 5y agoThere is no automatic mechanism that operates independently. The prosecution, defense and judiciary are not GPT-3 robots that can mine through centuries of case law in 2 seconds to achieve a perfectly balanced decision. If you want regular prosecution of white-collar crimes, you may want to support better funding for these agencies, so they can actually put resources behind investigating and trying cases where criminality occurs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nickysielicki 5y agoYes, our federal government does act like gangsters. So awesome!
- gamblor956 5y agoIt's disturbing that Skreli openly committed massive financial fraud and you're more concerned about the government doing its job. Skreli's investors didn't sue him because they profited from the fraud. It's the downstream investors who were harmed here, and they can sue Skreli...and the investors who profited from his fraudulent investments.
- nickysielicki 5y agoThe only thing Shkreli is guilty of is risk laundering. Nobody was defrauded. Everyone got paid. He made a huge (relatively stupid) bet that could have hurt a lot of people, but he lucked out and was able to make everyone whole. Actually, a lot of his "victims" made a lot of money. > 4. How much did investors lose? > Nothing. Shkreli partly repaid them with Retrophin stock and several witnesses told the jury they ended up with multimillion-dollar profits. One invested $1.25 million in Shkreli’s hedge fund, got $1.6 million back and 150,000 Retrophin shares, currently worth about $2.9 million. Another said she ended up with a $2.7 million profit from a $300,000 initial investment. https://fortune.com/2017/08/05/why-martin-shkreli-is-guilty-when-investors-didnt-lose/ https://fortune.com/2017/08/05/why-martin-shkreli-is-guilty-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gamblor956 5y agoPeople did lose money: most of the investors were out of money for years after the fraud, suffering actual economic harm, and even then were only partially made whole by Skreli giving out shares of his other company, which materially diluted that company's other shareholders. It was a sheer matter of luck that the other company's stock increased in value enough that some of the victims made profits, years after the original fraud. From a legal perspective, it's irrelevant that on a long-enough time frame the victims ultimately ended up better off. That would be like saying that an attempted murder is a victimless crime if the hospital discovers that the victim has a fatal but removable brain cancer while treating their wounds from the assault.
- crispyambulance 5y agoTo be fair, the only reason he got pinched was because he ripped off some very wealthy and powerful investors/partners in a ponzi scheme. The execrable stunt where he jacked-up the price of a rarely used but life-saving drug from $13/tablet to $750/tablet-- that was perfectly legal.
- kmlevitt 5y ago> To be fair, the only reason he got pinched was because he ripped off some very wealthy and powerful investors/partners in a ponzi scheme. And barely even that. He lost/used their money and then paid it back before they even noticed. While it was wrong, as far as I can make out it was basically a victimless crime. Meanwhile, it seems like price gouging medication people need to stay alive is still perfectly legal in the US. They scapegoated this little twerp to distract from the fact that the system is still badly corrupted and the politicians changed nothing of importance after this.
- bigbillheck 5y agoThe injustice in the Martin Shkreli case isn't that he got prosecuted, it's that so many others did not.