> The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user
Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.
That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.
> I see a lot of doomsday predictions, but 4 months in, I’m barely seeing any signs of a protracted recession.
Perhaps the trillions of dollars of stimulus money that has been distributed has something to do with it? Or maybe the generous unemployment benefits the federal government has passed out over the past four months to ensure people could pay their bills and purchase things to stimulate the economy?
Without those things we'd be in a completely different scenario. Things may get worse yet, we're not exactly winning the fight against COVID-19 in the US.
And those enhanced unemployment benefits expire next week, so far the Senate and White House are wanting them ‘means tested’, so it looks like they may fall off without renewal.
> I've also never really seen them seriously recon with the question of what you do with people who cannot compete, and at some point I feel like that crosses the line into intellectual negligence.
It absolutely is intellectual negligence, and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out. The standard answer trotted out is "charity" which is disingenuous at best, and completely impractical at worst.
There's nothing wrong with pointing out the logical flaws of people who secretly wish they were feudal lords or a pater familias in Ancient Rome, and wildly overestimate what their position or level of success in a theoretical 'Libertarian Society' would be.
Offices cost more than cubes. An office needs a door, ceiling, lights, lighting control, sometimes a sidelight (window), floor/wall finishes, HVAC, along with a couple receptacles and a data opening. This costs more than an 8x8 cube.
It cost $150 to have an office framed, dry walled, taped and muddled, and painted? Please explain how this is possible, the 5/8th drywall for both sides of the wall is practically that much for materials alone.
That stuff doesn’t exist when a space is being completely remodeled either. I work in construction doing tenant improvements, so I see a lot of construction drawings.
That's non-trade price, probably something like $US42 each. So, couple hundred bucks for that, then the rest (taping, joining, painting). Then the electrical.
But you understand, there's not a lot of difference in the lighting and power. Not fair to add that to the cost of offices, and then pretend its free for cubicles.
My office buildout was 10 years ago. Prices change. Do we really think drywall in bulk is going to exceed $5000 per cube?
Cubicle groups are either fed from a whip coming out of the wall, or the whip coming out of a poke-thru device. It’s a single connection point, and the devices can be snap-in for ease of installation.
Power poles are less common, but still used sometimes. It costs less for open area lighting vs lighting an office.
You can buy decent cubes for $2000, with full-height walls.
I’m not a fan of working in an open office layout, fwiw.
They are also dead-simple to install. It's like IKEA furniture levels of complication.
At my old job, we devised a way to make an "office door" out of a section of cube wall that was only attached on one side with a rubber sheath used to hide the seams. It actually worked out pretty well.
The cubes I've assembled use solid core cable whips that are rated for 40 amps (like you'd hook up an hot water heater with) and serve four units. We never had power issues even though we all used pretty beefy hardware (think Xeons and Quadro RTXs) with dual monitors, a UPS, cube lights, etc.
Many offices are full of only laptops - those are drawing ~200 Watts peak, and then may another 100 for a couple of monitors and peripherals. That's many more users. My office has literally that - boxes with 4 sockets each in the middle of a shared space which we all run our power-bars to.
Sure, the open-plan ones of today are amenable to a low degree of wiring. The types of employees made to sit in those offices are amenable to a low degree of wiring.
The average office that has cubicles, though, is also one that’s wired for per-employee power delivery.
Or, I could say it as the reverse: if you know you’re setting up an office to have fixed workstations (e.g. a CG art department in a video game studio; or any department in a company with a pipeline whose main software is a hog, like desktop publishing), then you’ll likely set up with cubicles rather than open-plan, because a workstation kind of implies gradual personalization with bunch of surrounding cruft that needs floors and walls and shelving.
(I have a feeling that even in FAANG, the people who use workstations aren’t sitting in open-plan areas. Anyone care to speak to that?)
And, because of this, the “standard” kind of cubicle partitions are expensive, because they’re also expected to work to handle part of the wiring requirements for power delivery. If they were just plyboard, they’d be cheap; but they’re not just plyboard.
You're all missing the biggest expense: real estate.
The space required by that door could add 25-50% to your total space requirements compared to cubes of the same size.
And that's before we add human perception as an element... offices the size of a cube are a horrible experience. They need to be considerably larger to feel like the same amount of space.
Has anyone commenting ever actually bought or sold drugs before? Every single dealer or customer I've ever met has been through someone else, or someone I knew. There's relationships and trust vouching, just like any business. Credit is extended, and paid back. Transactions generally occur in homes or cars.
The comments here are acting like all real world drug market transactions occur between strangers, which is so far removed from the truth we might as well be talking about something else.
A good way to describe selling weed is 'the only MLM where people actually want what you're selling'
Where I live (big city) there are numbers you can text and it's a different guy every time. It's like ordering pizza except you get in their car for the transaction. You are usually waiting 20min at most. The whole operation is eerily professional. Back in my home town it was a guy you knew who may or may not be around or that other guy your friend knew who's house you could swing by. For weed in particular you tend to get more of the small town style dealers even in big cities just cos it's nice and people are used to it but for hard drugs people don't care, they want their drugs in the most convenient way possible.
The first time I heard of this kind of system it was for black tar heroin distribution in the US from a specific Mexican town that basically franchised the drug trade. [1]
Super interesting stuff. Google Xalisco or pick up the book Dreamland for more.
I haven’t personally but certainly know people who have.
The experience sounds quite pleasant if that’s what you’re interested in purchasing.
Fire up tor, mix some bitcoins around, look at a bunch of listings, send some bitcoins and an address, wait a few days, and get a package by post with some high quality drugs in it.
For the record, the people I know who’ve done this tend to be particularly technically inclined.
A former friend of mine who is now in prison for possession of heroin used to buy heroin from The Silk Road as if it was Amazon, just pick any listing and hope for the best.
He wasn't busted via Silk Road btw, he was just busted when he was pulled over in his car with it. No need for sophisticated hacking when you can just nab them for any hallucinated traffic violation
Why would an irl dealer rip of a potential customer? Do you have any idea how profitable selling weed is? Wholesale->retail is 100% or more markup, and you have virtually no overhead (bags, gas, time). Reliable customers means reliable cash flow.
I do. When you buy on the street that person was barely able to come up with 170/220 for an O. They sell for 10 dollars a gram to reach 280. They lose weight in sticks and water. They need to end up selling you a .7 for them to make 80/100. Some add water / some use really cheap weed.
Once you find a dealer who buys 500/1000 dollars worth (to make that 100% markup) they don't stand on a corner because those people get robbed / arrested. But they expect customers to buy larger amounts.
Hmmmm. Street dealers make the most per gram, but do the most hustle and probably make the least overall in terms of profit. The middleman buying and selling between the growers and the dealers makes decent money with little risk, while the growers themselves tend to make the least by weight, but make decent profit. Especially factoring in the expenses of growing and the risks they take. The middlemen, like with most businesses tend to be the biggest winners as far as making money vs getting caught and going to jail goes. They just need to have some starting money and their job ends up being pretty easy as long as they don't get caught. By middlemen I mean the ones buying multiple pounds off growers to sell to street dealers or to have street dealers hustle for them with.
Though here at least, with dispenseries and legalization, that's all changed.
The package of the black market thc cartridge will list if it has Vitamin E Acetate?
There isn't vitamin e acetate in nicotine e-liquid because vitamin e acetate is used as a cutting agent in black market thc carts, and not used in e-liquid at all.
You can't regulate the black market, but you can make it smaller or eliminate it by legalizing marijuana.
Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.
That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.