Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill • Hacker News Board

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#431

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #421

wat10000 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.

> It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone Undemocratic is insufficient for removing a governing body per se . (Courts are technically undemocratic. That doesn't make them bad.) Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.

We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#432

Post by georgemcbay » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

smcin wrote: post #424

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #389

Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently? I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the House at the moment. At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again eventually) to make that argument. I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to…

I think you're referring to "abolish the Senate filibuster rule"? recent lobbying.

Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.

(Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)

The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population of the US would end up and how the system would act to give the minority far too much power rather than protect them from having too little.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#433

Post by mothballed » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #427

almosthere wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised a lot of people missed this, but hemp growth actually causes thc plants to lower their cbd because of unexpected pollination. you can't grow them in the open near each other

There's a lot of confusion here. The hemp products in question are not, like, hemp rope. They're just pot that is classified as hemp because they are harvested and processed in such a way that keeps the D9 THC below .3% at the time of testing. If you were to go look at a growing operation for someone making THCa flower and then go look at a growing operation for someone making regulated legal marijuana, they would be…

The humorous part though, is that the 'legal' growers screaming about the 'unregulated' competition and for this law, are actually the outlaws breaking federal law and totally non-scrutinized by federal regulation (other than the fact it's outright illegal).

It is the absolute worst case of gas lighting. The literal, federally unregulated criminals were screeching that the people obeying the law and following the regulations (even if in a way legislators didn't expect) were unregulated cowboys who were 'skirting the law.'

It's absolutely comical if you think about it. And somehow, this argument actually won.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#434

Post by henryfjordan » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #393

henryfjordan wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newsom recently banned hemp-based THC at the state level anyway, so there's no real change in California. https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/us-states/california/n... They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for pesticides and s…

> They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. This is not at all what was happening. These aren't some special strains or cultivars where there is a remnant of THC that is getting squeezed out from a large quantity of plants to make a small quantity of product - they are same strains and cultivars being used by the legal dispensa…

oh, I didn't know that. That's even more nefarious than I thought. Thanks for the info!

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#435

Post by brightball » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #279

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

More than a decade later, the GOP has still yet to present an alternative healthcare plan to the ACA. Actual leftists have continued to push and argue for a true single payer system. The ACA Is far from perfect but it was a significant step up from what we had before, and the party that spends all of their time trashing it has never made any sort of serious attempt at creating any sort of alternative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920924

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#436

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #431

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone Undemocratic is insufficient for removing a governing body per se . (Courts are technically undemocratic. That doesn't make them bad.) Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.

We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.

> We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken

You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative body and you'd still have the same problem.

You could abolish the Senate and have a unicameral House. But then we'd never have survived 250 years as a democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)

> I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought

The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2013/09/30/227292952/a-short-history-of-...

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#437

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

hemp_is_canvas wrote: post #399

wat10000 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.

There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good. It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.

Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation?

Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#438

Post by cthalupa » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #430

the_gastropod wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACA was literally dreamed up by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. This idea that it was some partisan thing Democrats forced on the country is hilarious. It was always a bending-over-backwards compromise solution to maintain the for-profit system. There’s a reason that, after 15 years freaking out about it, Republicans still have no plan for replacing it. Virtually any change, outside of more soci…

Party lines... Senate: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s396 House: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2010/h165 There's always been a plan to replace it with the only economically viable plan that can reduce the cost of healthcare. The same plan Dr. Ben Carson has been talking about for years. It's the only solution proposed by anyone from either party that would work.

Ben Carson has been talking about a variety of half baked plans for years. He has gone back and forth over and over on who is funding the health savings accounts, what he plans to do with medicare and medicaid, etc. None of these ever-shifting plans have ever been able to answer all of the questions, which is why they are ever shifting.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#439

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #437

hemp_is_canvas wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good. It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.

Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation? Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.

> the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism

Source? The President and--until like 24 hours ago--the House have been leading the charge on illiberalism and populism.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#440

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #406

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair. If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and…

"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair." Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have b…

> We are a democratic republic of states.

I made no comment about what "we" are ...

The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.

Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.

> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state

I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.