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Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

nytimes.com

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Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#21

Post by PeCaN »

harlanlewis wrote: post #6
tacos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest pothead team at Microsoft was the Internet Explorer guys. So if you want another 20 years of calculating bounding rectangles incorrectly, by all means let's get the rest of the company baked.

Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!

A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs.

¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc

² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#22

Post by encoderer »

Roboprog wrote: post #13
eunoia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massively underserved. I live in Denver and have friends with ownership stakes in local dispensaries. The quality of their software solutions (mainly POS/Compliance) is laughable. Edit: This ( http://www.mjfreeway.com/ ) is the defacto standard. I kid you not it went down for 2 weeks ~a year ago after scheduled maintenance went wrong. At the time it had ~50% market share, this left dispensaries around the country doi…

Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation? Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???

Depending on the state, plants need to be tracked from seed to sale. That is just one aspect of it that I'm familiar with. I'm sure the compliance burdens beyond that are significant.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#23

Post by ethbro »

PeCaN wrote: post #21
harlanlewis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!

A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.

Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#24

Post by TallGuyShort »

Roboprog wrote: post #13
eunoia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massively underserved. I live in Denver and have friends with ownership stakes in local dispensaries. The quality of their software solutions (mainly POS/Compliance) is laughable. Edit: This ( http://www.mjfreeway.com/ ) is the defacto standard. I kid you not it went down for 2 weeks ~a year ago after scheduled maintenance went wrong. At the time it had ~50% market share, this left dispensaries around the country doi…

Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation? Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???

Not that familiar with it, but part of the issue is that financial institutions above a certain size won't do business with them because it's still illegal at the federal level and they're afraid of the ambiguity. I wouldn't be surprised if that affected what PoS software they could use.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#25

Post by blackguardx »

joefkelley wrote: post #12
Drakim wrote: post #4

What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.

Yes, it's still very much illegal federally. It's still a Schedule I controlled substance. The federal banking system / IRS refuses to interact with marijuana businesses, the postal service won't mail ads for it, the DEA continues to raid growers, etc, etc. Edit: as others have pointed out, I was incorrect in lumping in the IRS with the rest of the federal banking system. The IRS does indeed accept money from marijua…

The IRS explicitly states that you need to declare bribes and income from illegal activities [1]

"Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity."

[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#26

Post by ethbro »

Shank wrote: post #9
Drakim wrote: post #4

What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.

Federally, it's still illegal. However, there have been statements that they aren't prosecuting or pursuing legal action in states that have legalized it [0]. [0]: http://www.denverpost.com/2013/08/29/federal-government-wont... Edit: For the record, it would still block you from getting a US Government security clearance, and you can still run drug tests on employees and decline them for failing.

IOW: at the federal level illegal by law, ignored for recreational amounts by executive order (and thus possibly changing when a new executive branch is elected).

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#27

Post by xxpor »

joefkelley wrote: post #12
Drakim wrote: post #4

What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.

Yes, it's still very much illegal federally. It's still a Schedule I controlled substance. The federal banking system / IRS refuses to interact with marijuana businesses, the postal service won't mail ads for it, the DEA continues to raid growers, etc, etc. Edit: as others have pointed out, I was incorrect in lumping in the IRS with the rest of the federal banking system. The IRS does indeed accept money from marijua…

The IRS doesn't refuse to interact with anyone. They want their money no matter how you made the income, and if you're in the country legally or not.

Remember, what they ultimately got Al Capone on wasn't racketeering, bootlegging or murder, it was tax evasion.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#28

Post by nathanasmith »

joefkelley wrote: post #12
Drakim wrote: post #4

What is the legality of marijuana on the federal level in the US? I was under the impression that even if marijuana is legal on a state level you can still get in trouble for it.

Yes, it's still very much illegal federally. It's still a Schedule I controlled substance. The federal banking system / IRS refuses to interact with marijuana businesses, the postal service won't mail ads for it, the DEA continues to raid growers, etc, etc. Edit: as others have pointed out, I was incorrect in lumping in the IRS with the rest of the federal banking system. The IRS does indeed accept money from marijua…

The absurd thing is that while marijuana being a schedule I drug which in the DEA's own words:

>> Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.[0]

Cocaine and methamphetamine are both schedule II.

Now I understand the difference is that Schedule II means there are some medical uses but to lump marijuana in with "the most dangerous" but not meth? That just seems ridiculous.

[0]https://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#29

Post by Analemma_ »

ethbro wrote: post #23
PeCaN wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.

Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

> was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

"Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#30

Post by eunoia »

encoderer wrote: post #22
Roboprog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I wonder how dispensaries are different than any other retail / pharmacy operation? Can they treat the product like cold/allergy pills that have to be watched, or does there have to be legal information specific to each "SKU"/item-type???

Depending on the state, plants need to be tracked from seed to sale. That is just one aspect of it that I'm familiar with. I'm sure the compliance burdens beyond that are significant.

A combination of federal illegality (which affects banking heavily) and special compliance requirements necessitates custom industry solutions AFAIK.
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