Queens of the Stoned Age | Hacker News Reader

Queens of the Stoned Age

gq.com

38 pointsDiabloD312 comments

Nice, but a) it seems a bit odd to let a GQ reporter do a profile on you if you're making a killing in an illegal business and b) there are a million delivery services in NY and "high end" really doesn't mean much in that context . . . .

Good for her but wow, that's a hell of a lot of downside risk and I can't imagine why you'd jack it up a notch unless, say, legalization was even on the table in NY. We have a very restrictive (and new) medical marijuana statute without a lot of movement in the direction of legalization any time soon.

Yes, they just painted a target on their back. Doesn't make any sense. And naming your customers...

How the hell can you spend $15K a month on yourself, every month? Even in New York, at $500 a day - every day - that's only possible with some seriously over the top habits. Habits that the typical stoner (direct quote: "watch TV all day") would find hard to keep up. I guess it must be a combination of a bad case of frequent fashion retail therapy, expensive restaurant/delivery addictions, frequent expensive holidays taken in style, opulent real estate rental, art collection, taxis everywhere, and cocaine. None of these things (except perhaps discrete art collection) are intelligent if running such a business.

Ahah, 15K a month is very very trivial. Though you'd spend it mostly on the weekends. Also, it doesn't have to be on yourself. Buying expensive bottles of champagne for your friends could easily rack up 15K in one night.

If you're living "nice" $15k a month might not even pay for the hotel room you live in.

>None of these things (except perhaps discrete art collection) are intelligent if running such a business.

I'd imagine that for most people those are the exact reasons for running such a business.

Believe or not some women can drop $20,000 on clothes and handbags and come back home with less than 4 pounds of stuff.

"Most of the other units are Airbnb rentals."

Now there is some fodder for the anti-short term rental crowd.

Wow, that's great, so all the NYPD needs to do is grep through their text message database for "Can you come over?" sent to the same numbers over and over along with their other "code words".

There are secure methods of transmitting data that would not raise the suspicions of police or be trivially greppable.

Very surprised such "sophisticated" criminals let an obvious mistake through a published article. They should have bought a pentest from a reputable firm.

There are a lot similar services in NYC that allow you to text a number to summon a deliver person to your home. The only thing that makes this one unique is that they hire models.

I'm sure the NYPD is aware that these services exist, and I doubt it would be difficult to identify most of the larger ones and shut them down if the city cared enough to allocate the resources to do so. The fact that that isn't happening is probably an indication that no one cares. If that changes it will probably have to do more with the unpaid taxes than anything else.

Machine learning just on text message metadata can probably be surprisingly accurate on classifying relationships and situations like friend, lover, employee, breakup, drug dealer, prostitute.

Compare

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/13/phone-cal...

which included some manual analysis and use of telephone directories and some automated analysis. (Their data set was tiny and derived from opt-in contributions.)

http://webpolicy.org/2014/03/12/metaphone-the-sensitivity-of...

I'm still hoping to see, and maybe help bring about, better technical and legal protections for communications in my lifetime, or at least better technical protections.

Oh come on, is this seriously HN material? There is absolutely not verification and your source outing their most prized celebrity customers? Fake news galore.

If you think the submission is inappropriate for HN, please flag it and move on.

In particular, please don't use the empty "fake news" meme to dismiss it, regardless how low the quality is. It doesn't add anything substantive as the phrase has lost all meaning other than as a perjorative dismissal.

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