Great punchline, after describing "Dealing, with stress":
> “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...
> 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.
So have a lot of drug dealers. Many of them have been physically beaten, shot at, shot, stolen from, and lived their lives practically as soldiers from a young age. You can leave but the price is high.
No doubt! I admire those willing to spend years of their lives working towards a singular goal even when they know all the while a) they will eventually have to carve out some novel approach in their area, and b) defend it to a panel of experts. Well done to all of them.
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.
Mastering dealing with completely artificial stress isn't a substitute for real work experience. In fact, it gets in the way because as a manager you have to actively coach them into unlearning those unhealthy habits.
> some corporate sales agents 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.
This is a charged topic but I do want to point out there is a delta between the actual impact of drugs and the impact that is publicized. In my opinion the war on drugs has little to do with drugs itself and it's more about power and control.
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.
You're probably a useless parasite if you're the typical person here. I know some real mid-level drug dealers and they're usually troubled people but they have a better sense of justice compared to pricks like you.
Not saying you’re wrong (I have never met a drug dealer in real life) but I have a question - shouldn’t it be much easier for drug dealers to sell their product vs say, a furniture salesman? After all, there are no furniture addicts but there are plenty of drug addicts, right?
Users sometimes have their choice between dealers, so the sales and personality skills will materially impact their reputation and ultimately sales volume.
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.
LOL dude, the only reason it's "dark" is because the government has created a "black" market.
I sold cocaine for many years, and now I'm a vegan who travels everywhere by walking or bicycle. In fact I live by a code of not destroying anything that isn't destructive to other ordered (and especially living) matter. You wouldn't know me, because for my own safety I avoid associating with anyone that thinks like you! There are plenty of awful people right here on this website and it's evident from their posts, so you have it wrong if you think drug dealers, some of whom are professional about what is an entirely consensual transaction, are any worse than the typical American slob or FAANG parasite.
I'm awfully sorry to have caused offence to the drug dealing community, and rest assured, I don't wish to besmirch their raw sales acumen.
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).
A lot of college grads these days are drug dealers. The high margins, low capital investment, and large client base at college make for an increasingly attractive alternative to college loans, or filling the gap between actual expenses and grad student stipends.
I just imagine the quotes from this article are cherry picked to line up with the author's thesis.
Lolz, 'these days' as in making the argument to someone who would normally be against such actions that the economics increasingly tilt one way for rational actors. Obviously dealers on campus have been a thing as long as there have existed items to be dealt on campus. : P
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.
Funnily enough the margins are pretty bad, especially adding the risk.
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.
It's more that it's hard to hit higher margins without the same lack of capital investment. You can get started dealing with just a few hundred dollars.
I worked at a rehab, and every 'career' drug dealer I've ever met would say the author is more into writing about drugs than knowing about them. No one makes a living selling drugs by being fussy about their customers and their hours (just as no one in this story is a "serious" drug dealer.)
>No one makes a living selling drugs by being fussy about their customers and their hours
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.
A few years ago this was the exact situation I had with my cannabis dealer.
- 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
Just yet another reason i dropped the economist. Over the last year i noticed articles getting continuously worse. And every time it was an article I had deep background in such as politics in latam or crypto currency’s the articles were easily to prove factually false. If the articles i did have deep understanding of are wrong i can no longer trust the publication.
It seems to me they are more interested in propaganda than publishing news now.
Any newspaper or magazine article will be deficient if you have deep background knowledge about the topic at hand.
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?
It’s okay for an article to be slightly vague or not in depth. It’s not okay for it to be factually wrong. It’s better to not read it at all at that point
But that is not true. When learning a field, you must first learn the terminology. Then the big picture and general rules of thumb. Then the details and exceptions.
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.
Unfortunately this seems to be how a lot of articles at the economist are produced now. Im having trouble finding any news now that the economist has also gone way down hill.
Foreign Affairs is fantastic. It takes more concentration and has less content, but for the small portion of the news audience that read news to be informed, I highly recommend it.
We hear from time to time about how Mexican drug cartels are using drones and submarines to carry their product across the border, or co-opting local cell towers for their own communication needs. But the rest of the supply chain, and especially the last mile, seems so low-tech. It's just a mishmash of people connected by random chat apps.
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).
That reminds me of telegrass [1], which is highly organized place on telegram to order cannabis (not sure about other drugs though) shipment in Israel (cannabis is illegal in Israel).
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.
They don't need to do that. The majority of (monetary) value add in the supply chain is large-scale refinement and transportation of the drug product from a region of lower economic value to a region of higher economic value (i.e smuggling). Both the production and last-mile distribution are very decentralized and limited in terms of monetary compensation.
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.
You've clearly not bought drugs (also lol pusher) - drug dealers are notoriously late, slow, uncommunicative, and often you dont have a bunch of other options because to your point, you're in a low trust situation.
You might text a guy and anywhere between 1 minute and 4 days later get a response.
For what it's worth I was a pothead in my youth, but then again you have it easy in Germany since you just need to go to a club or to a park (every city has at least one hotspot) to get offered all kinds of stuff on the streets.
Fair, but again that would be a low trust situation - buying drugs from someone offering on the street is a great way to have an undercover cop arrest you.
No, entrapment has to show you never would have done the thing without police involvement, simply offering drugs to you wont generally meet that bar!
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)
* Official permissible conduct not subject to California entrapment law
* presenting an opportunity to participate in criminal activity
* initiating the criminal activity
* undercover operations
* reasonable assurances that you’re not being “set up”
Cops don't do this kind of sting here. They don't give much about consumers - in Berlin and Hamburg you can smoke on the streets - unless you happen to be either in Bavaria or at a pusher house during a raid.
Police in Northern Europe typically spend their time going after large dealers, producers, etc. Arresting low-level dealers happens too of course, but believe it or not, police over here don't consider the # of arrests to be their primary KPI.
Good question. I’d guess it’s probably a mix of several contributing factors:
- 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.
Lots of places in Europe allow it in restricted areas. There is a children park in the middle of Paris known for being almost exclusively used by drug addicts and dealers.
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
I can only speak of my own experience here in Switzerland. But nobody minds if a corner of the park is a little more busy as long as everyone is nice to each other. You don't consume where you buy so there is nothing really not kid friendly about it. Also parks where this things happen are usually not exactly tiny playgrounds but actual parks.
FWIW, at one point I had my bike locked up in Hamburg, and had lost my key. I still had the key to the (small) chain I brought with me, but not the key. When I was fussing around my bike - I no longer recall exactly what I was trying to do - the local drug dealer actually came over to question what I was doing :)
(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...)
> You've clearly not bought drugs (also lol pusher) - drug dealers are notoriously late, slow, uncommunicative, and often you dont have a bunch of other options because to your point, you're in a low trust situation.
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.
I don't think the culture and drugs are linked in any way, shape or form. I've met a number of drug addicts over the years and they all came from very differnt backgrounds: poor as hell, filthy rich, uneducated as well as highly educated and everything in between. Most[] of them shared one thing in common however: whatever misfortune they have in their live, they blame it on someone else. Most often that's the "government". Note the quotes here, by government I don't mean the government as any institution but more as a global conspiracy of evil masterminds that controls their lives and actively work against them at every step they make(which is a surprisingly common belief). At least see that as the common denominator across all the cultures in the last 50 years or so - the hippy movements, the heavy metal movements, the punk movements, the rap movements, and whatever is happening today(I've lost interest and so I have no idea what is popular today). It's an easy way to be part of a community and have the feeling that you are fighting back by doing the exact thing that you are told not to do, without suffering from(immediate) consequences, the way you would if you crash at 200km/hour for instance. And because producing and distributing drugs is illegal, then drugs are clearly not part of the status quo, so that cannot be a part of the conspiracy, right? I'm aware that's an oversimplification of the issue but you can go down that rabbit hole almost infinitely and you can see how that ties all cultures together.
[] 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.
You’re also kind of easily disproving the thesis of the article. Drug dealing has always had an “always on” culture and this is nothing new or novel.
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.
As an on-call SRE, this sounds familiar. One-person rotation and all hours is a well-known recipe for burnout. Of course professionally as a software programmer the risks are somewhat different, so I imagine scaling an SRE team is a bit easier (assuming you have revenue/funding). I am extremely grateful that the company I'm at has a follows-the-sun rotation as well being on a well-sized team (imo the ideal size is 8). I've done ops on a tiny team and it burned me out real quick.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread> “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.
I sold cocaine for many years, and now I'm a vegan who travels everywhere by walking or bicycle. In fact I live by a code of not destroying anything that isn't destructive to other ordered (and especially living) matter. You wouldn't know me, because for my own safety I avoid associating with anyone that thinks like you! There are plenty of awful people right here on this website and it's evident from their posts, so you have it wrong if you think drug dealers, some of whom are professional about what is an entirely consensual transaction, are any worse than the typical American slob or FAANG parasite.
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?
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrass
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.
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
* Official permissible conduct not subject to California entrapment law- 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.
[] 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.
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.