Piracy used to be punishable by death. There would be a lot fewer people willing to pull these kinds of stunts if they knew they would actually face consequences.
>then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work
Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.
There were no good people at the end of the USSR fighting for the USSR. They fought for their country in the sense of their individual nations, but anyone fighting for the USSR was fighting for what really was an evil empire.
EW is needed at the front, and these bases were deep within Russia. Lasers are not common technology for anti-drone use yet, and likely kinetic weapons are superior since lasers will not work in any sort of bad weather.
Russia has gone to great lengths to insulate its populace from feeling the effects of the war. For Russians not directly involved in the war, one could hardly tell there even was a war going on. You can see this from interviews with the residents of Sudzha.
Whether or not they value individual lives, putting a hospital out of commission will be something they will need to divert resources to.
Well, if we're ignoring everyone else's descriptions of SBF, Caroline Ellison had a tumblr on which she repeatedly self-identified as a rationalist: https://caroline.milkyeggs.com/worldoptimization
There's also the other time the rationalist community made national news, when a similar cult accidentally gambled away ten billion dollars in cryptocurrency.
That hollow, symbolic win could have been given to them by anyone other than Trump. If nobody else thinks a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when they start chasing after the tiniest morsels.
There are credibility issues if you make promises you don't follow up on, especially very public promises that are completely within your power to carry out; there are no limits on the presidential pardon power, barring that it only applies to federal crimes.
Many were convicted of the same acts and received far lighter sentences. They specifically sought to make an example out of him. That is contrary to the rule of law.
One issue with any potential trial for murder-for-hire is that the allegation as presented in the Maryland indictment has two problematic witnesses: DEA agent Carl Force who acted as the hitman, now in prison for embezzling cryptocurrency from the Silk Road case, and Curtis Green, the would-be victim in this case, who has previously insisted that Ulbricht was innocent of plotting his murder (and was also recently imprisoned for cocaine distribution last year, although I don't think that would be too relevant). Maybe the other allegations might have more meat on the bone, but they didn't make it on to any indictment.
Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.