I disagree, it is will within the scope of HN especially if we're to prevent this sort of thing happening again from a founder/person on the ground level.
The other guy is wrong, good and human progress can be paired well with technology and business solutions. It's called social venture, and it's possible. It's just not what the valley focuses on.
lets talk about drug dealers. The drug market isn't really a free market. THere isn't really easy competition, the means of production is difficult for people to get into. The participants don't really want to do it sometimes, but is forced to.
In fact, if the gov't legalized drugs, and let big pharmaceuticals produce these drugs, i reckon it'd drive the scarcity of the drugs down, leading to their devaluation, and the market would correspondingly collapse (as its no longer seen as the forbidden fruit).
On driving prices down, yes, on the market collapsing, you have clearly never interacted with an addict.
Selling drugs to an addict is in no way creating value for society. None. You're taking money that was hustled/stolen in order to leave someone worse off than if they got clean. It might be that legalization is better than the black market but what I'm contending here is that "just because you made money, does not mean you were serving society".
Did you read my comment? Please define what you mean by "value, "worse off," and "serving society." Don't just throw those terms around expecting everyone else to share the exact same values as you.
Some examples: life, truth, and/or pleasure. If it's a combination, how do you prioritize?
Discussing "X has no value" is absolute garbage if you don't discuss "value."
I'm pretty new around here and the last thing I want to do is be starting political/moral/religious flame wars in a post about LivingSocial.