domain:abc.net.au
sodiummuffin
13m ago
I was talking with some friends and family and they mentioned that full legalization of drugs would stop cartels from existing.
Other people have discussed the drugs aspect, but would it work even if drugs were so freely available and untaxed that cartels had no competitive advantage? Or would they just move into the next-most profitable criminal enterprise without it making a drastic difference to the harm they inflict? A quick search finds this pair of statistics:
The Mexican Employers’ Association, Coparmex, says extortion cost businesses some $1.3 billion in 2023.
Fact check: Do Mexican drug cartels make $500 billion a year?
The results are all over the map, ranging from $6 billion to $29 billion in estimates released since 2006. But none of them pegs Mexican drug traffickers' revenue at "half a trillion dollars," as Perdue claimed.
Now I am no expert of the subject and these are literally just the first results that came up, but it sounds like extortion is already a significant fraction of their income. Even if the drug income vanished (and remember they don't have to exclusively sell to the U.S. and Mexico either), how much would they be able to ramp up protection rackets if they were devoting their efforts to them instead? Sure it would cost them money, but would it really weaken them so much as to (for example) allow the Mexican government to wipe them out?
OliveTapenade
25m ago
I find it helps to think of tradition as a river, rather than something static. Tradition is, inherently, a record of change. To be 'traditional', to be part of a tradition, is to be aware of and shaped by all the river's upstream flow. It is not to be exactly the same as the part of the river that was upstream, and neither is it to recreate the conditions upstream perfectly today.
Magusoflight
30m ago
So this place is kinda dead now eh? What happened? There’s a ton of stuff happening in the culture war and the main thread is wildly boring with posts not at all topical
dragonfly
32m ago
As a trans person in a more normie space (ie mostly offline), my vote is the more progressive the space the worse the mental health (but then, I rather would say that). Causality seems to go both ways, though.
Actually, leave the trans bit out and I'll happily stand behind "In my experience people in more normie spaces have better mental health than those in very progressive spaces, ceteris paribus." Not as sure about "very (online) progressive vs very online right" though -- I suspect "very online" is doing most of the heavy lifting there, in the same way "people in an cult" presumably have worse mental health than normies for basically any x[citation needed]. And obviously this is just my personal experience.
hydroacetylene
38m ago
Premodern childbirth is less dangerous than is popularly imagined(although still much more dangerous than modern hospital births). Informed people might trot out the 1-2% per birth statistic but this is almost certainly an overestimate because it's calculated based off of recorded births, which were mostly of aristocrats, who started giving birth much younger than peasant girls.
anti_dan
39m ago
This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.
On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!
hydroacetylene
42m ago
'Medieval peasants got half the year off' is a misconception based on the religious calendar of the medieval church, which allowed agricultural labor monday-saturday, less major feasts(impossible to estimate exactly how many but 36 is a normal median estimate from religious scholars- you could probably add a few more for feasts of local importance, and of course statistically 1/7 would happen on a Sunday anyways). This adds up to slightly more working days per year than the modern M-F minus a half dozen holidays workweek. Those days were, of course, much longer.
As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.
oats_son
45m ago
I live in rural Illinois. I think the owner just has to get a liquor license. The owner used to own the grocery store and the gas station both, but let go of the grocery store because it didn't make hardly any money at all. Apparently the liquor license stays with the person, not the business. I think you can buy vodka at Casey's, too.
anti_dan
47m ago
A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
52m ago
With the British there Russia couldn't really do that much and didn't really want to conquer India. But without the British there, it's almost free real estate like all the khanates and small states in Central Asia that Russia swallowed up. It would be a feeding frenzy like Africa. The mountains in Afghanistan are certainly a problem but not impossible to overcome, invasions were launched down from Afghanistan into India from time to time.
The Ottoman Empire, China and Japan were some of the strongest non-European states in this period and mostly avoided colonization. India was colonized and if it were not colonized by the British probably wouldn't have been that strong.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
Where do you live that you can buy vodka in the gas station?
anti_dan
54m ago
This appears to be a consistent failure mechanism with all "high skill immigration." Because there are clear metrics, they are clearly game-able by motivated by people who are from a worse country and have no buy in to the social contract of the country they are moving to.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
Don't cartels also do a flourishing trade in pirated media, as well? The mafia did a flourishing business in selling untaxed cigarettes and gas in its heydey, too.
hydroacetylene
58m ago
Meth might become necessary to compete. Adderall is already very popular as a study drug; making meth generally available would almost certainly make it far worse.
Without wading into my opinions on ADHD, this is almost certainly bad. The drugs do have some side effects; universal stimulant use becoming an artifact of molochian competition is a bad thing.
Now, coke, MDMA, etc would also likely become popular as party drugs, and these come with their own bad effects.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
59m ago
· Edited 43m ago
Ah. Yeah, Sichuanese food seems rather overrepresented (I'd intuitively chalk it up to it having become the default hotpot flavour, and hotpot being the default social activity - the same "hotpotty" spice mix is also exceedingly good at masking bad flavours, compared to most other Chinese flavouring templates).
And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.
Breakfast food is pretty standardised in every culture though. Go to the UK and complain about twenty different places all serving sausages and baked beans.
In the week I spent around Shanghai most recently, as far as I can remember I didn't touch anything Sichuan at all, without actively trying to - from what I can still recall, the things I had were either local to the areas I went (neither Shanghai's blanched seafoods, nor the fungal wastes of Anhui, nor the kind of rich pickle stuff in the middle of the two were at all similar to what you describe) or some variant or another of Northern (copious amounts of yang rou chuanr, a pretty good "Lanzhou hong shao" noodle bowl, the ongoing fad that is biangbiangmian).
Spookykou
1hr ago
I lived in Beijing for a year. It could just be that my Chinese friends loved Sichuan, but outside of the foreign quarter I would constantly get taken to different Sichuan restaurants that all had basically the exact same menu. And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.
dragonfly
1hr ago
I know the idea has been discussed here before that when women compare themselves to men they're only looking at the most successful/attractive x% with the rest basically invisible. I could see that skewed comparison making transition look more appealing, for sure.
For what it's worth I do remember back in the day in MtF trans spaces there used to be pushback like "You're not gonna be a young attractive woman; you should decide about transition based on your feelings about being a wrinkled old woman vs a wrinkled old man." No idea if that still goes on. I rather suspect not.
oats_son
1hr ago
Yes, they were. But aren't they identical in voice lines to the real Chinese soldiers you meet in some factory or other? I don't remember. I do think putting in some caricatures (or, really, just throwaway characters that aren't fleshed out and don't need to be fleshed out because they have a specific purpose, "angry and want to kill you in a language you don't understand") with a handful of voice lines is probably different from making a movie with caricatures that take a ton of screentime. But it did disprove my notion that you can't make caricatures of non-white ethnicities.
I think Fallout 3 does interesting things sometimes, so I'm glad it exists, but Bethesda sucks at writing, so I can't recommend it to anyone. Sad!
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.
China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu (...)
Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.
yeschad.jpg
Although I have no idea what they are doing at night that would so disrupt their sleep, light is expensive.
Edit - I guess threshing, shouldn't skim so much.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
Same with indigenous Australians. Demand sharing from family and friends is speculated to have roots in hunter gatherer societies.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
Tolstoy had the following to say about the peak of the peasant work year.
The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.
To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).
In the current system they could theoretically come in on an O-1. In practice, the expertise may be too narrow to be legible to the US government.
What a coincidence. Detergent is locked up where I live also.
I went to Home Depot recently. I hadn't been in a while. Shocking how much was locked up. The installed metal gates across many shelves. For the most part not even that expensive of stuff. But I know that the organized shoplifting gangs target them in particular, do they're presumably responding sensibly.
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