Drug-dealers are finding the always-on culture a chore
economist.com
economist.com
Not true. There are many operations - most obviously tg group based ones - with specific hours and customer requirements (at minimum a solid reference by a current customer).
It's perhaps still more common to not be too picky but definitely not by all.
- he had fixed opening hours, 3 days per week.
- changing but legally rented locations
- only access was trough recommendations and only every 3 months or so
It was an exceptional well done operation. However it was cannabis exclusive and Switzerland is not too strict about these things in general. The reason it stopped was not even related to the illegal activiy
It seems to me they are more interested in propaganda than publishing news now.
You mustn't compare a newspaper article to the Platonic ideal of articles, but to the existing alternatives. What paper do you recommend with the breadth and wit of The Economist?
If an article can convey some of the former, you're smarter than before. Not as smart as an expert, of course! But how can one short article turn you into an expert? That is an unreasonable goal. Every summary of a complex topic will contain and gloss over some factual errors.
Take, for example, an article explaining big-O notation and conveying that sorting can't be faster than O(n log n). Now, you, as an expert, say, "Well, that's not true, that only applies to algorithms with pairwise comparison; we can do better if the domain is very restricted and known a priori, etc. etc.". Fair enough. But still better than not having read the article.
In fact, I think that The Economist does exceptionally well on that front. It will introduce a topic to you, outline the major questions/developments/points of contention, summarised from talking to several experts, and then often (quite opinionated) give a verdict.
You should not take it as gospel, obviously, but it would often reflect the consensus of the experts (of a certain school, sure), but also give you enough background and opposing positions that you can do your own research to dive deeper if you so wish.
There's this button on every device that makes it switch on and off. Sheesh. It's almost like the technology makes it easy!
Additionally, if I were a drug user and I could not reach my pusher, I'd expect that the cops have busted him and will now work through their phone.
You might text a guy and anywhere between 1 minute and 4 days later get a response.
It’s a great way to get rippped off though.
Let's take California for instance
* Official conduct that constitutes entrapment under California law
* pressure (examples include appealing to your sense of friendship/compassion or offering an enormous amount of compensation for committing the crime)
* harassment or threats (repeated and unwavering solicitation of the activity)
* fraud (promises that the suggested conduct is legal)
* presenting an opportunity to participate in criminal activity
* initiating the criminal activity
* undercover operations
* reasonable assurances that you’re not being “set up”- For immigrants from (non-EU) countries, it can be hard to almost impossible to obtain a work permit. If the police learns they’re dealing with such a case, they know the perpetrator is probably going to pick up the same business no matter whether they spend one night behind bars or three years. They’re probably going to go back to selling drugs either way. But that means two things: 1. Putting those people (who certainly need a way to feed their families) behind bars is not going to be worth the hassle. 2. The desire to do meaningful work can cause police officers to look away and focus on other kinds of crime (and often prevention) where they feel their work has an actual impact.
- German prisons are usually not privately owned or operated. There’s relatively little incentive to fill them, and each prisoner costs the state money.
- The German justice system is leaning more towards rehabilitating criminals than punishing them. Judges know very well what trade-offs are involved whenever they lock a person away so they tend to hand out prison terms rather conservatively.
They know the drugs will be sold anyways so the logic is to restrain it to a specific place. In Berlin one of them is Gorlitzer Park, the police is circling the park all the time to avoid crimes (other than selling drugs)
It's not really a problem these days since you can order all kind of drugs (anything from weed to coke) from signal/telegram groups and get them delivered to your door, sometimes faster than food deliveries
(In the end I got a new lockset installed on the bike, cost 750 EUR, involved replacing the ignition, the fuel cap and the rear seat lock, only only happened because I brought my registration documents with me on the trip. The bike, at that age and mileage, was only worth about 3000 EUR, to put that in perspective. But the point of the story is a criminal challenging potential criminal activity...)
In more mature markets (which have lenient enforcement), I've found drug dealers to be very professional, with good customer service. I had a delivery guy with specific business hours a decade ago, and within those hours he was extremely responsive, predictable and had a lightning-quick turnaround time.
Maybe, one day, one of the drug lords who is fed up with these inefficiencies will invest a few million dollars to develop an "Uber for drug dealers" (only to get hacked by the DEA on day 1).
At some point telegraass had more than 200k members, which is fantastic for a such a small country like Israel (that would probably put it among some of the largest telegram channels in Israel).
However, the main purpose of it's creators, as the story goes, was not for profit but to promote cannabis legalization in Israel.
If you've already made 95% of your profit in the central steps of the value chain, taking an increased risk to increase efficiency of last mile distribution is not worth it. Especially when centralization in an uber for drug dealers type of application heavily increases the risk of being neutralized and prosecuted by law enforcement rather than decentralized street level dealers who can never effectively compromise those higher up in the supply chain.
When I quit, it took a few months for my leg to adjust to not having phones in my pocket constantly vibrating.
The lifestyle is terrible for your health.
They want to push that FaceTime and location tracking contribute to dealers feeling as though they’re “always on”, but that’s largely false.
Before these were commonplace, if a dealer wanted to get a hold of someone they’d call them, page them, or otherwise “find” them. There are new tools now, sure, but the always on culture, I’d argue, has always been there.
Depends on where you are in the food chain and how much you need to work.
[] There are a few exceptions which are a consequence of stress combined with fame for instance but those are the exception, not the rule, at least in Europe and North America.
> “There is never a break. You are always on…always at the beck and call.”
> As a result, dealers are feeling under pressure and overwhelmed. Liam, a part-time, on-and-off dealer from the south of England (the name is assumed), says the job consists of “being harassed, basically, all the time”. He has returned to college—though the pressures of connectivity have followed him there. In the past year his lecturers have adopted Zoom and other online teaching methods. “Now, my lecturers can message me whenever they want,” he says. Of the two careers, he considers that “definitely education is more stressful”.
And that, kids, is why we hire college grads, and not drug dealers...
C'mon, you had a decent point going until you went for the lazy punchdown. Do you know any drug dealers personally? My guess is no, because I have met drug dealers who absolutely wipe the floors with most of the tenured corporate sales professionals I've met in my life, in terms of raw sales acumen (leaving ethics and society aside for a moment). I'm not the only one who notices this.
At least in the operations space all the stress is generally transitory; fix the problem and move on. Plus you don't usually schedule outages three years in advance.
A fairly important caveat. (Though, granted, some corporate salespeople may actually be worse for society than drug dealers.)
Pharmaceutical sales agents are drug dealers.
People sell incredibly dangerous and addictive substances legally all the time. Arguably this site is full of button mashing dopamine dealers.
The worst part about illegal drug dealers is not the substance they sell. Dangerous destructive things have value and utility, including the worst drugs (to a degree). It’s the lack of transparency and resultant lack of accountability that does the worst societal harm.
Despite the efforts of many governments, including the US government, Pablo Escobar was a force to be reckoned with. His power was built on the drug war.
Just because you have a primed customer base at your disposal doesn't mean your duties have been downgraded to being a cashier.
You need to be personable, appear tough enough to be too much trouble to rob, reliably have good products, and simple to reach/do business with.
There's a reason why Malcolm Gladwell picked the crack business in The Tipping Point. A great book you should read if you ever want to know how analogous drug businesses are to corporate america.
If you’re an adult living in the US, I’d wager you probably have and just didn’t know it.
The whole point of the joke was that according to this one individual, education is more stressful than drug dealing, thus presumably getting through the education system is a better indicator of stress resistance than drug dealing.
(I personally find that hard to believe, but all I know about drug dealing I know from Netflix shows, and The Economist, of course, so what do I know.)
FWIW, even if that individual was mistaken, and drug dealing is more stressful than getting a degree, I would still recommend a college grad over a drug dealer for most jobs, if that is all you know about them (individual cases vary).
I just imagine the quotes from this article are cherry picked to line up with the author's thesis.
But it's funny you bring up Feynman. I actually have it on very, very good authority that most of the LSD in the southwest for decades came from someone at Los Alamos who would put an eyes only sign on a lab for a project name that didn't exist to get privacy. When you combine that with the YouTube video of Feynman playing the bongos and singing about orange juice, along with his well known subversion of lab security rules... I'm not saying Feynman made LSD, but I bet he knew who did.
The relatively small amounts these kids deal maybe contain a 10 to 30% margin. Maybe 50% when you don't like your clients. Considering they do packaging, delivering and hold the risk that's not a lot.
Then check Amazon for random locally warehoused China stuff. Margin easily is X3 or more.
Kids are just uncreative
Sorry, but curious and a bit ignorant. What sort of business venture are you referring to with this?