These comments are oddly common, but I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may." Who is being informed here?
Not every correlation deserves to be published in the press. If you think about it, it is weird that they even make articles out of statements that only "may" be true.
Errors are fine when they are due to a random process. When the press pick up claims because they are likely to attract readers it's a different story. Errors are not random, they are the result of an optimization process and are very unlikely to happen on the other side of the claim. (For example consider the overwhelming number of articles that have been published with the title "Scientist may have found life on mars" over the past 30 years)
For this reason, "may" in a press article, doesn't carry the same meaning regarding uncertainty than "may" in common language. Which is why I why I disagree with the comment I was replying to:
> I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may."
Now, I agree with what you said about uncertainty, and I don't think there is a real disagreement here.
I am being informed about the public opinion. Which I value more than articles. (Don't come me at with AI, I'm well aware that it makes all human communication bad and pointless in theory and more and more in practice, thx.)
I think it means just that, which is why I used TL;DR? The article points out the correlation between mafia prevalence and lack of fentanyl overdoses and some speculation on whether those two things are connected.
From what I understand this uses overdose numbers. They should also not be assumed to be comparable across countries (recording practices vary widely), but if they tell the same story as wastewater monitoring there may be something to it.
Either way, the constipation would affect different users at different times, so I don't think it would matter to the data. In other words, your idea stinks ;)
"For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, 'I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing.' So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia."
When AI can write screenplays like this one, then it's game over.
Soon after John Stewart Mill we assessed that markets are not perfect.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Yes. Everybody here should be or get acquainted with Herbert Simon - he is both "Logic Theory Machine" and "General Problem Solver" and "linked lists", and "bounded rationality" and "satisficing".
People would benefit from learning some control theory too. A little tinkering with (even abstract) PID controllers can quickly disabuse one of the notion that feedback loops settle instantly.
I think you are right, but doesn't that mean the consequences of fentanyl do not weigh in on society as badly as junk food? Dead people do not cause extra costs for the rest of society
I can understand where is your cynical take comes from, but even from that perspective I would say you're wrong. Having people around who are burden to their families, friends and society is a "good" thing.
When you grow up in a society and see results of gambling, tabacco, alcohol and drug addictions around you that usually deter you from a getting into it. It does not deter everyone, but society actually sees the consequences.
Same with junk food and obesity - when you have people in your family struggle with weight, diabetis and tons of related health issues that's give you more healthy outlook on life.
This is why drugs that kill people fast are so dangerous - because you dont see addicts around you who sttugle to find meaning in life for years because heroine burned their brain. People just start to use and die, fast.
It's not even just about food or drugs. This is how Russia wage a war for 5 years with 400,000 people dead via mercenary army. Society dont see the scale of war because almost no one returns so people keep selling their life for $50,000 thinking its a good way to make money or get rid of debts.
You just need to keep your customers alive long enough.
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
For big pharma it is great business! Life long debiliating condition, that requires medication to manage... acceptable risk to customers is around 5% yearly mortality rate!
Oxycontin was built on the idea of turning a drug (MS Contin) for the terminally ill (too small a market) to a lifelong dependency for as many people as possible, and each taking as many milligrams as possible.
I know several doctors who mourn the addiction issues with Oxycontin because it was so useful for a lot of cases. Give someone some Oxycontin, then you can address the root problems, and then get them off - works very well... Now they won't give it to anybody - those addicted know exactly what to say to sound like the people who really need it.
Maybe the mafia saw the population curves and realized how precious each customer is now and will be in the future. Something tech companies would be wise to think about...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
There's also the reality of some glimmer of patriotism and care for one's neighborhoods. If Italy nosedives into a fentanyl epidemic, that will both decrease the public image of the Families (which isn't completely negative throughout Italy), and decrease the quality of live where they live.
Sure, they're OK with some heroin addicts. I'm suggesting they drew a line in the sand.
In this market, a better high for less money will attract lots of customers, even if it is less healthy than the alternative.
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
"less healthy" is a bit of an understatement; they're not selling cigarettes that will kill you in the long term (or even the medium or short term). Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
Increasing the potency of some drug with fentanyl is an interesting choice, because by the time the user *knows* how strong it is, there's some likelihood they're already dead.
Thanks. That is alarming. I wonder what the long-term side effects would be even for one time, which my kid underwent. She is not the same anymore. She used to be so joyous.
Mine was an honest question because I was concerned about my kid. She recently udnerwent a 30-min GA, even so, her behaviour has considerably changed. Her personality as well. So, I am not sure why it was being downvoted, and the snark in your comment is also undeserved.
Everytime you deal with nominal professionals you should be concerned, because their professional ability is not granted. People who deal with bodies deal with an immensely complex and subtle mechanism: they do not know it as well as needed, and their regard is easily not too different from that of Robert Liston in their evaluation of compromises - your due diligence does realistically involve verifying that values are aligned (otherwise they may decide that they can sacrifice something that for you is critically vital).
> I am not sure why it was being downvoted
Neither do I - I did not.
> snark
Good: since we are here, can you kindly explain what "snark" is, because I find the term in the guidelines, I have no idea how to interpret it, I asked it a few times and I got downvoted for the question?
Sometimes, text gives off a different vibe than intended. for instance:
"Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs" is a very obvious statement that anyone with a primary grade education should know. So, if an obvious statement is stated, it constitutes a snark, <as if the other person is too stupid to realize that>. But given your new comment, it appears you didn't mean that.
(You were probably downvoted because supposing that a specific drug could have been a cause of damage, when potential causes of damage abound, may not sound sensible.)
I think you now understood that with «Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs» what was meant is "If we interpret your questions as "could they have administered anything toxic", the answer would be "what they do is administering substances relevant to toxicity"".
I would approach the situation (just "my two cents") by trying to redirect towards health by maximizing healthy conditions. They do not sell "health pills" - but when one has had to take them, try to counterbalance that "compromise" with healthier lifestyle.
Yes, you require analgesics for general anesthesia, it’s not optional.
The reason synthetic opioids like fentanyl are used is because they actually have less side effects. Opioids can cause a histamine response, digestive issues and constipation. Newer synthetic and hybrid opioids cause that less, so they’re preferred in hospital settings.
There’s essentially no long term risk with the small doses required during surgery. The main risk is, of course, acute respiratory depression, which kills you. This is how opioid overdoses happen. This doesn’t happen under GA because the dose is tightly controlled, and your airway is supported anyway; you’re intubated.
There's always a continuity there ("the dose makes the poison"), there's no known substance that will reliably kill you if you're exposed to a single molecule of it.
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
1.53 × 10¹⁵ molecules per 1mcg. Which is 15 orders of magnitude larger than a single molecule. If 2mg of fentanyl is considered potentially lethal that would place carfentanyl at 20mcg, though I’ve heard conflicting reports on potency with some placing it at 10x not 100x. So roughly 16-17 orders of magnitudes.
I don’t take fentanyl but I regularly take signaling peptides where the doses are typically in the mcg range and still rather potent - though with signaling peptides the response curve typically flattens out so bigger doses don’t necessarily mean stronger effects - they can be saturated. Depends on what you’re signaling though.
I had correctly predicted my hypersensitivity to semaglutide (ozempic) so started using it for treating autoimmune issues at a dose of 25mcg and I still ended up with temporary gastroparesis.
>>>>Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
Fentanyl is not a better high. It's decidedly less euphoric than traditional opioids. It's just dirt cheap, ridiculously potent so it's easier to traffic, and doesn't have any agricultural footprint. The market pressure for fent is completely on the supply side.
Fentanyl has the least euphoria associated with it after buprenorphine, it’s more sedating than anything and not particularly enjoyable.
Heroin, oxycodone, codeine, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, and morphine are all much more euphoric highs than fentanyl.
Fentanyl is manufactured and sold purely due to logistics, it’s much easier to smuggle a lot of doses of a drug when it’s active in the microgram range.
Now we have the unions, we have the gambling - and they're the best things to have - but narcotics is the thing of the future. Now if we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but ten years from now.
I think it’s what customers want though as it gets you higher and closer to that high they’re always chasing. That it can kill you is a marketing feature if anything.
There were rumors that that the "Chapitos" in Sinaloa purportedly banned the production and sale of fentanyl in their territories.
There were signs warning of this and if I remember correctly, they murdered two major fentanyl cooks, put their bodies on the side of a road, along with a warning sign and two huge piles of the drug around the bodies.
Drugs are a lot more geopolitical than people realize. Who brings drugs in and why drugs are coming into your country are important questions that nations have to ask.
This was the way it worked up here (in QC) with the 81s. If you sold shit that could draw attention to you, your organization or suppliers, you were swiftly taught not to. They had decent quality control, but as their grip slipped so did quality. Now we get fentanyl overdoses weekly.
Who these days are more a front org for the CCP/triads who seem to be running much of the criminal underworld in Canada with their network of smuggling and money laundering.
My theory is that the CCP/triads leveraged drug addiction within the HA and killed anyone that objected, and everyone else got rich...
I'll be honest, this was helpful for me even as someone who lives about 2km from the Quebec border. I was uncertain as you don't often see it in the Hacker News context.
I'm afraid some crime syndicates have found out they can just steal it from hospitals, some 80 vials went missing from the ospedale israelitico in Rome during the summer and there are already reports of an increase of users in the outskirts of the city..
Fentanyl is made by Mexican cartels from Chinese precursors. I suppose there aren't many Mexico's with massive organized crime networks in Europe to pour deadly drugs into their countries.
Guinea-bissau is basically a narco state, much more so than Mexico, and has deep ties with latin-american cartels. They transport their drugs in the sahel with the help of jihadists. The same jihadists get funding from moroccans to smuggle their hash. These networks got deep networks within Europe (e.g. in Belgium and Netherlands). It might not be as bad yet but could turn worse quickly.
I always assumed this was an america-only drug that no one actually does or at least not to the excess that it's claimed by the publications using it for the normal fear journalism purposes.
2/3 of all ODs in US. More deaths per year than gun violence and car collisions combined, which are both quite high in US. Seventh most common cause of death overall. Over a quarter million people dead since 2018.
No one "does" fentanyl, it's a highly addictive addictive that is secretly added to other things. Even so, 50,000 - 70,000 Americans per year die to it per year (more than suicide and gun violence many other things).
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
I would argue that fent became an issue only after the oxycontin et al. peddling was slowly curtailed; together with fent precursors becoming absurdly cheap to procure and process, compared to other opiates. Users originally hooked on the pills needed a replacement, and as suddenly the chemistry got much cheaper, everyone switched to fent. The physical volume of illicit substance you need to smuggle is also lower with fentanyl, so I'm sure that would have played into this trend as well.
If you want to find where to point the finger to, the systems that let prescription opiates be prescribed with such reckless abandon is a good superficial target. Getting political here - if you want to find the very root cause of all this, I would present the institutions that prevent the implementation or otherwise erode preexisting social safety-nets as the culpable party.
I’m open to being corrected, but I thought fentanyl was a direct byproduct of the “drug war”. Compared with heroin it is easy to smuggle because it’s high potency, doesn’t require trade routes from Afghanistan, etc. So it’s basically an adaptation to the US law enforcement environment.
I’m sure there are other factors too, but if there had been good “clean” opiate availability I suspect things would look different presently.
- While drugs laced with fentanyl are also a problem, lots of people _do_ knowingly consume fentanyl. In fact, it has replaced Heroin in the US 'market', for example. It is also a contaminant in other drugs (cocaine, meth), due to how easy it is for fentanyl to stay in crevices, etc. It is also 'snuck in' to counterfeit pills, which is the only aspect you mention.
- The traffickers physically moving fentanyl into the country are overwhelmingly Americans. Pre 2019 traffickers used to get this straight from China, but stricter controls in China have shifted things to be staged in Mexico instead.
- The demand and traffickers are still largely American, and it is a "symbiotic" problem. US drug demand is empowering Mexican cartels and making everyday Mexicans less safe (the cartels also get most of their guns from the US). At the same time, powerful Mexican cartels mean it is much easier to "stage" fentanyl in Mexico then import it into the US than the older model of importing it directly from China.
They’re not coming here and forcibly injecting people. Maybe we should be asking ourselves why so many are choosing the oblivion offered by drugs similar to and including fentanyl.
The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.
> Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.
The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.
Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.
But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.
When doing the right thing regarding things like addiction are tried in the US, there seems to be a habit of learning the wrong lesson. Attempts to apply the successful Portuguese model have failed because decriminalisation by itself is just an enabler of what _really_ helps, which is all the follow-up support.
And don't get me started on how public health interventions in general seem to end up treated as moral hazards or wasteful in the US, even when they're _saving_ money...
Decriminalization isn't necessarily the optimal solution.
For hard drugs, something closer to Sweden's Systemboaget [0] where the drug is carefully controlled (and taxed!) by a state monopoly, with the proceeds of this monopoly being used to fund rehabilitation efforts or other support/public-health efforts might be better.
Its gaining popularity in the UK and is starting to show up sporadically, but the opiod epidemic provided pretty extreme fuel to start the fire in America. No idea if itll ever take off here to the extent heroin did, depends on the economy I guess.
it’s an issue in that not everyone using it even knows they are using it. maybe you think your plug is a great hookup for grey market pharmaceuticals. or are they?
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out.
customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
based on documentary style interviews I've seen of drug addicts in Lithuania, there's supposedly no more old school heroin left on the streets, it's been pushed out by fent.
Simple supply and demand. Why risk smuggling heroin when fentanyl is 100s of times more potent, meaning its way better bang for their buck all other things being equal.
Does lithuania not have methadone or prescribable diamorphine? They should reconsider if not, not everyone is going to make it sober, much cheaper and better outcomes to being pragmatic about it.
Unpredictable market forces the black market is subjected to. Europe doesn't have as much fentanyl for the same sorts of reasons America doesn't have as much ketamine.
That’s arguably true, but nowadays Mafia or the plural “le Mafie” (the Mafias) is often used as a catch all term for such organised crime groups in Italy, with the Sicilians referred to as the Cosa Nostra.
“Le Mafie” includes Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia) ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia), Camorra (Napolitano mafia), Sacra Corona Unita (Pugliese mafia), Banda della Magliana (Roman mafia), Mala del Brenta (Veneto mafia) and others (but I’m no expert, I’m from Milan).
It’s CLV (customer lifetime value): the integral of the MRR. Something most companies mentioned on HN should understand though it feels like Apple is the only one that takes it seriously
(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)
Yes, this is the problem I was referring to. There is internal opposition but the exec team will clearly turn over in the next few years (due to retirement) which will inherently bring in a team more aligned with the CEO’s objectives.
The services ads at the top of the Settings app (when you get a new iPhone or add another device to your account) have been there for years and long predate Ternus.
The Mafia may also have shorter horizon:
- Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death
and then stop being customers.
- Fentanyl is a much more debilitating drug than heroin and much cheaper.
So Fentanyl customers are less able to gather the money for the next fix, and don't need as much (less revenue).
More than simply being alive, they want customers who can stay employed and so continue to pay higher prices over a greater number of years. Cocaine and pot are horrible but their users can maintain a working life for years or decades, making them more profitable drugs in the long term.
Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.
The slope of addictive drugs with negative side effects starts with alcohol, then comes nicotine, pot, cocaine, crack, fentinal .... and then all the really exotic modern stuff. It is a spectrum. Some argue that there are upsides, and there are certainly uses for all these drugs, but no sane doctor would say they have no downsides, that unrestrained use is ever a good thing.
Alcohol has greater negative side effects than pot, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or pot. I’m not sure what you mean by “exotic modern stuff,” but if it includes hallucinogens (what people usually mean by modern/exotic drugs) then they’re not really addictive at all.
I ask because the scale reads more like a morality scale than anything based on actual negative effects, either in the individual or society.
Also if the family has some addicted to “normal” drugs it’s acceptable; but if they get fentanyl from you and die the next mafia family reunion will be spicy.
To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.
The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.
Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.
When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)
Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.
Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.
I normally can't start apps from spotlight. It literally has forgotten that the applications folder exists, so I have to open it up in finder and scroll to the app to start it.
I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.
Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.
The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.
That is too bad - how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity? I hope he doesn't start trying to monetize privacy.
where do you get info that Ternus is about increasing number of ads? i've missed that evidently, I was at Apple engineering for several years, so for Cue i believe it just from observation, but no sense of such for Ternus.
This didn't happen under Ternus, but Apple really needs to undo Creator Studio. It's a bad idea. Not good. Keep iCloud+ responsible for generation limits across every app. Keep apps as a one-time purchase.
> IN “The Godfather”, Don Vito Corleone refuses to engage in the heroin trade because he considers it “a dirty business”.
The movie was well-planned by Francis - but the mafia is a mass-murder organisation, without exception. Japan finally got the better of Yakuza for the most part (it is nowhere near as powerful as it was once); Italy still struggles, in particular with regards to Ndrangheta. So any article that attempts to white-wash the mafia in Italy - nope, sorry, not even good movies such as the godfather should disguise the mass-murder organisation. See how they bombed Giovanni Falcone to death, let's not forget that; and more recently how Ndrangheta executed women (2026; see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o) who stopped being silent about the genocidal activities of Ndrangheta. Let's put it short: the mafia needs to be eliminated completely. It's not easy since they infiltrated so much in Italy and in parts elsewhere (just study how Capone in the USA got big, then you realise that the USA has an even bigger problem here - plus, fentanyl too), but it has to be done. There is no alternative unless you want organisations to undermine the state and continue its genocidal tendencies. You can be sure they are also involved in smuggling weapons, thus contributing to genocide outside of Italy directly as well.
Please no more white-washing articles of the mafia as glorious heroes "because they keep fentanyl out of Italy". (Besides, this is not even correct to begin with; fentanyal at the least right now, plays a very small role in Europe at best; in the USA this is different. See how Trump tries to blame Canadians for Fentanyl, smuggled via eggs, which is another one of his non-stop lies about Canadians.)
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
it is absolutely critical to watch Gomorrah in Italian. The English dubs are comically poor quality (think of how MS Word used to emotionlessly read text aloud).
The Godfather overly romanticized the mafia and made them out to be "violent but in a principled way" people and nothing could be further from the truth.
It's complete fantasy that the mafia didn't deal hard drugs.
Well, I don't buy the "principled" part either, not at scale.
But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.
There is no need to stay "on the good side of the law." They pay off cops. They pay off the judges.
If they can kill with impunity they can certainly do the same with drugs.
Large-scale crack cocaine gangs existed too with substantial levels of organization but they still sell crack.
They're mostly unintelligent thugs motivated by greed. And I think the "Why would they kill their own customers?" implies they think that far ahead. Which is probably true as well for most major corps. They'll take short term profit over quite literally anything.
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief..."
> They're mostly unintelligent thugs motivated by greed. And I think the "Why would they kill their own customers?" implies they think that far ahead. Which is probably true as well for most major corps. They'll take short term profit over quite literally anything.
I disagree. "Unintelligent thugs" wouldn't be able to keep organized crime organized. There's necessary overhead that gives rise to administrative class, paperwork, meeting, planning, contracts, etc. that's fundamentally true to humans - it's how villages turned to cities, countries, nation states, international organizations too (in fact a criminal organization is probably more similar to a nation state than a corporation).
Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
> "Unintelligent thugs" wouldn't be able to keep organized crime organized.
You're just speculating. Go listen to the John Gotti tapes. Go read The Five Families, The Sicilian Mafia, or Excellent Cadavers. These aren't deep people. There are no Michael Corleone's. They're all Sonny's.
Most "mafia" is local bookies and theft rings. Organization doesn't require intelligence. Nor does holding people up with a gun or threatening their family if they go to the cops. It's not "smart" to record politicians with their mistresses, it's just the thing you do if you want to commit more crimes.
> Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
Except tobacco companies, Wells Fargo, General Motors, Boeing, Purdue Pharma (I don't think getting your customer base addicted to drugs and dying from an overdose is "smart"), etc.
Not understanding how your actions may effect others (or simply not caring that they do) is a sign of a lack intelligence. Not understanding that your safety and wellness is directly tied to the safety and wellness of the people around you can only be excused if you're a toddler.
There is not that much difference between the state and a mafia. The fact that the mafia has successfully managed to keep out fentanyl shows just how much democratically elected states are failing their citizens. This outcome is not surprising.
This is a bit of a straw man “do the ends justify the means” statement, with hints of anarchism read between the lines.
Western democracies haven’t really prioritized “war on drugs” (for lack of a better term) over the last probably 10ish years. Yeah there’s still funding and initiatives and some lip service.
Instead the focus has been largely infighting and major political factions fighting for political power in the next generation (“tech bros” political class for one)
So it’s no surprise state-sponsored (and just demand driven) drug trafficking into the US hasn’t received much action.
There is some hope though. With rare earth mineral access being a major national security priority, and many cartels controlling those areas in SA, the converging interests may produce some net positive. Background: https://youtu.be/q_n-74ifBZs?is=nw5g-mmPmKphGH2W
A war on drugs can only be won through heavy penalties on the users and the political classes refuse to come down hard on the users (themselves, their children) but rather come down hard on the dealers (poor people) or traffickers (foreigners). For this reason we never really had a war on drugs, just lip service towards one, hence a failure of government.
I've had a friend pass from an OD, when consuming what he thought was cocaine, which was actually laced with fentanyl. I wonder if the Italian mafia has a more profitable cocaine market, and don't want it contaminated, as is likely to happen with fentanyl, as the cocaine market, which I assume is recreational, would contract.
The Singapore model is also to be a 750km^2 microstate island. American laws around drugs have always been punitive and you could fit Singapore inside your average county.
That I've heard, on the street, the Mafia is a credible alternative state power in a fair fraction of Italy. Just one not claiming Democratic ideals, nor much desire to become a nation state or adopt a political agenda.
Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.
Public healthcare is keeping illegal Fentanyl out of Italy: there's no incentive to obtain contraband painkillers, which are not considered fun drugs.
You go to the hospital, you get the medications you need (and no more) for as long as you need them, and then you stop (or you deal with chronic conditions under medical control).
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[ 0.13 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadThese comments are oddly common, but I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may." Who is being informed here?
I thought about it. And it's very stupid to imagine uncertainty should be off limits. I hope that isn't what you meant.
I prefer error bars be worn on the sleeve, so I find "may" on display to be refreshing, not dismaying. YMMV
What's your alternate explanation to explain the absence of fentanyl in Italy, and how can my country get so weirdly randomly lucky?
For this reason, "may" in a press article, doesn't carry the same meaning regarding uncertainty than "may" in common language. Which is why I why I disagree with the comment I was replying to:
> I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may."
Now, I agree with what you said about uncertainty, and I don't think there is a real disagreement here.
I am being informed about the public opinion. Which I value more than articles. (Don't come me at with AI, I'm well aware that it makes all human communication bad and pointless in theory and more and more in practice, thx.)
edit: What do you think other people think that may means
Not any speculation but educated guesses from knowledgeable people.
There isn't anything to measure if the poop is unable to leave the end-user.
Either way, the constipation would affect different users at different times, so I don't think it would matter to the data. In other words, your idea stinks ;)
When AI can write screenplays like this one, then it's game over.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Herbert Simon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
When you grow up in a society and see results of gambling, tabacco, alcohol and drug addictions around you that usually deter you from a getting into it. It does not deter everyone, but society actually sees the consequences.
Same with junk food and obesity - when you have people in your family struggle with weight, diabetis and tons of related health issues that's give you more healthy outlook on life.
This is why drugs that kill people fast are so dangerous - because you dont see addicts around you who sttugle to find meaning in life for years because heroine burned their brain. People just start to use and die, fast.
It's not even just about food or drugs. This is how Russia wage a war for 5 years with 400,000 people dead via mercenary army. Society dont see the scale of war because almost no one returns so people keep selling their life for $50,000 thinking its a good way to make money or get rid of debts.
Tobacco is incredibly damaging but because it doesn't kill you right away we tolerate it.
There's probably a rather grim metric that defines time to death ratio for addictive substances somewhere in a government report.
Curiously, this is still relevant to my comment nearby about "slow effect models" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842956 ).
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
Yes. And 70% of Earth atmosphere is nitrogen.
The two figures have about the same relevance to health.
Helthy people do not contribute to big pharma!
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ita/ita...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
Sure, they're OK with some heroin addicts. I'm suggesting they drew a line in the sand.
(It follows straight from the general population decrease.)
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
Increasing the potency of some drug with fentanyl is an interesting choice, because by the time the user *knows* how strong it is, there's some likelihood they're already dead.
for kids?
That a dose not too different from adult posology of paracetamol can be lethal?
Maybe you did not know that "heroin" was developed at Bayer (the informal name came out of the trials after the reports from the testers)...
Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs.
Everytime you deal with nominal professionals you should be concerned, because their professional ability is not granted. People who deal with bodies deal with an immensely complex and subtle mechanism: they do not know it as well as needed, and their regard is easily not too different from that of Robert Liston in their evaluation of compromises - your due diligence does realistically involve verifying that values are aligned (otherwise they may decide that they can sacrifice something that for you is critically vital).
> I am not sure why it was being downvoted
Neither do I - I did not.
> snark
Good: since we are here, can you kindly explain what "snark" is, because I find the term in the guidelines, I have no idea how to interpret it, I asked it a few times and I got downvoted for the question?
Sometimes, text gives off a different vibe than intended. for instance:
"Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs" is a very obvious statement that anyone with a primary grade education should know. So, if an obvious statement is stated, it constitutes a snark, <as if the other person is too stupid to realize that>. But given your new comment, it appears you didn't mean that.
I think you now understood that with «Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs» what was meant is "If we interpret your questions as "could they have administered anything toxic", the answer would be "what they do is administering substances relevant to toxicity"".
I would approach the situation (just "my two cents") by trying to redirect towards health by maximizing healthy conditions. They do not sell "health pills" - but when one has had to take them, try to counterbalance that "compromise" with healthier lifestyle.
The reason synthetic opioids like fentanyl are used is because they actually have less side effects. Opioids can cause a histamine response, digestive issues and constipation. Newer synthetic and hybrid opioids cause that less, so they’re preferred in hospital settings.
There’s essentially no long term risk with the small doses required during surgery. The main risk is, of course, acute respiratory depression, which kills you. This is how opioid overdoses happen. This doesn’t happen under GA because the dose is tightly controlled, and your airway is supported anyway; you’re intubated.
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
Micrograms (yes still many molecules) could be lethal
I don’t take fentanyl but I regularly take signaling peptides where the doses are typically in the mcg range and still rather potent - though with signaling peptides the response curve typically flattens out so bigger doses don’t necessarily mean stronger effects - they can be saturated. Depends on what you’re signaling though.
I had correctly predicted my hypersensitivity to semaglutide (ozempic) so started using it for treating autoimmune issues at a dose of 25mcg and I still ended up with temporary gastroparesis.
Fentanyl may in some cases kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
The way you state it, there are zero fentanyl addicts in the world today.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
Heroin, oxycodone, codeine, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, and morphine are all much more euphoric highs than fentanyl.
Fentanyl is manufactured and sold purely due to logistics, it’s much easier to smuggle a lot of doses of a drug when it’s active in the microgram range.
There were signs warning of this and if I remember correctly, they murdered two major fentanyl cooks, put their bodies on the side of a road, along with a warning sign and two huge piles of the drug around the bodies.
Who these days are more a front org for the CCP/triads who seem to be running much of the criminal underworld in Canada with their network of smuggling and money laundering.
My theory is that the CCP/triads leveraged drug addiction within the HA and killed anyone that objected, and everyone else got rich...
them's fighting words
Saskatchewan is SK and Manitoba is MB if you want weird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_and_territories_of_C...
If you would sell unaproved medication during covid, you would get several years in prison.
Why someone who sells unapproved medication without prescription, gets released and can keep selling this stuff? Medication thst kills people!!!
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
If you want to find where to point the finger to, the systems that let prescription opiates be prescribed with such reckless abandon is a good superficial target. Getting political here - if you want to find the very root cause of all this, I would present the institutions that prevent the implementation or otherwise erode preexisting social safety-nets as the culpable party.
No, the pain pill debacle of the early aughts actually led to heroin usage.
What caused the rise of fentanyl was the US getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Taliban (or whoever took over) burning the poppy fields.
I’m sure there are other factors too, but if there had been good “clean” opiate availability I suspect things would look different presently.
- While drugs laced with fentanyl are also a problem, lots of people _do_ knowingly consume fentanyl. In fact, it has replaced Heroin in the US 'market', for example. It is also a contaminant in other drugs (cocaine, meth), due to how easy it is for fentanyl to stay in crevices, etc. It is also 'snuck in' to counterfeit pills, which is the only aspect you mention.
- The traffickers physically moving fentanyl into the country are overwhelmingly Americans. Pre 2019 traffickers used to get this straight from China, but stricter controls in China have shifted things to be staged in Mexico instead.
- The demand and traffickers are still largely American, and it is a "symbiotic" problem. US drug demand is empowering Mexican cartels and making everyday Mexicans less safe (the cartels also get most of their guns from the US). At the same time, powerful Mexican cartels mean it is much easier to "stage" fentanyl in Mexico then import it into the US than the older model of importing it directly from China.
The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.
It’s an American problem.
I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.
The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.
Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.
But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
And don't get me started on how public health interventions in general seem to end up treated as moral hazards or wasteful in the US, even when they're _saving_ money...
For hard drugs, something closer to Sweden's Systemboaget [0] where the drug is carefully controlled (and taxed!) by a state monopoly, with the proceeds of this monopoly being used to fund rehabilitation efforts or other support/public-health efforts might be better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out. customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
Does lithuania not have methadone or prescribable diamorphine? They should reconsider if not, not everyone is going to make it sober, much cheaper and better outcomes to being pragmatic about it.
Thus, no surprise that it shows up elsewhere.
(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)
Both these make Apple worse.
citation needed
https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...
Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.
Note that this study is now over 15 years old.
I don't think these very different drugs should be compared equivocally.
And while both drugs have the possibility of abuse; most issues stem from legality - not the chemical effects.
Maybe that will help some people see how ridiculous it is to generalise like that.
Alcohol has greater negative side effects than pot, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or pot. I’m not sure what you mean by “exotic modern stuff,” but if it includes hallucinogens (what people usually mean by modern/exotic drugs) then they’re not really addictive at all.
I ask because the scale reads more like a morality scale than anything based on actual negative effects, either in the individual or society.
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.
When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)
Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.
Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.
The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.
Convince shareholders that it's been leaving money on the table.
Poor decision making exists everywhere. Size of a company is absolutely no insurance against it. See Tesla for a specific example.
Everything is then run by excel people with metrics. Innovation dies, product suffers and company spirals downward.
He’s been CEO less than a month and everything that’s happening right now has been in the works for multiple years….
The movie was well-planned by Francis - but the mafia is a mass-murder organisation, without exception. Japan finally got the better of Yakuza for the most part (it is nowhere near as powerful as it was once); Italy still struggles, in particular with regards to Ndrangheta. So any article that attempts to white-wash the mafia in Italy - nope, sorry, not even good movies such as the godfather should disguise the mass-murder organisation. See how they bombed Giovanni Falcone to death, let's not forget that; and more recently how Ndrangheta executed women (2026; see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o) who stopped being silent about the genocidal activities of Ndrangheta. Let's put it short: the mafia needs to be eliminated completely. It's not easy since they infiltrated so much in Italy and in parts elsewhere (just study how Capone in the USA got big, then you realise that the USA has an even bigger problem here - plus, fentanyl too), but it has to be done. There is no alternative unless you want organisations to undermine the state and continue its genocidal tendencies. You can be sure they are also involved in smuggling weapons, thus contributing to genocide outside of Italy directly as well.
Please no more white-washing articles of the mafia as glorious heroes "because they keep fentanyl out of Italy". (Besides, this is not even correct to begin with; fentanyal at the least right now, plays a very small role in Europe at best; in the USA this is different. See how Trump tries to blame Canadians for Fentanyl, smuggled via eggs, which is another one of his non-stop lies about Canadians.)
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
> 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
— Orson Welles
In US it should be available on HBO Max.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(TV_series)
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
It's complete fantasy that the mafia didn't deal hard drugs.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
Orson Welles said it best:
"'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed."
But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.
If they can kill with impunity they can certainly do the same with drugs.
Large-scale crack cocaine gangs existed too with substantial levels of organization but they still sell crack.
They're mostly unintelligent thugs motivated by greed. And I think the "Why would they kill their own customers?" implies they think that far ahead. Which is probably true as well for most major corps. They'll take short term profit over quite literally anything.
\- Alan Greenspan
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2009/03/30/...
I disagree. "Unintelligent thugs" wouldn't be able to keep organized crime organized. There's necessary overhead that gives rise to administrative class, paperwork, meeting, planning, contracts, etc. that's fundamentally true to humans - it's how villages turned to cities, countries, nation states, international organizations too (in fact a criminal organization is probably more similar to a nation state than a corporation).
Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
You're just speculating. Go listen to the John Gotti tapes. Go read The Five Families, The Sicilian Mafia, or Excellent Cadavers. These aren't deep people. There are no Michael Corleone's. They're all Sonny's.
Most "mafia" is local bookies and theft rings. Organization doesn't require intelligence. Nor does holding people up with a gun or threatening their family if they go to the cops. It's not "smart" to record politicians with their mistresses, it's just the thing you do if you want to commit more crimes.
https://gangstersinc.org/2013/09/27/5-of-the-dumbest-moves-i...
> Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
Except tobacco companies, Wells Fargo, General Motors, Boeing, Purdue Pharma (I don't think getting your customer base addicted to drugs and dying from an overdose is "smart"), etc.
Not understanding how your actions may effect others (or simply not caring that they do) is a sign of a lack intelligence. Not understanding that your safety and wellness is directly tied to the safety and wellness of the people around you can only be excused if you're a toddler.
Western democracies haven’t really prioritized “war on drugs” (for lack of a better term) over the last probably 10ish years. Yeah there’s still funding and initiatives and some lip service.
Instead the focus has been largely infighting and major political factions fighting for political power in the next generation (“tech bros” political class for one)
So it’s no surprise state-sponsored (and just demand driven) drug trafficking into the US hasn’t received much action.
There is some hope though. With rare earth mineral access being a major national security priority, and many cartels controlling those areas in SA, the converging interests may produce some net positive. Background: https://youtu.be/q_n-74ifBZs?is=nw5g-mmPmKphGH2W
Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.
You go to the hospital, you get the medications you need (and no more) for as long as you need them, and then you stop (or you deal with chronic conditions under medical control).