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Shedding light on the dark web

economist.com

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Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#41

Post by 15charlimit »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #38
Cshelton wrote: post #31

Sellers of drugs, will ALWAYS sell drugs, both illegal and legal. Buyers/Users of drugs will ALWAYS buy/use drugs, illegal or legal. It is an interaction between humans of Earth, no government or entity, no system or blocks will ever stop it. Shut down the internet, it will continue. Short of a massive purge of life, drugs will never go away. If you somehow...were able to shut down the "darkweb", it would move into s…

Now apply this logic to other things traded on the darkweb.

If you actually want to stop the trade of anything, you go shut down the source - not the distribution channel that lets you keep tabs on what's being traded where, between whom.

See the somewhat recent media hysteria and stupidity around craigslist/similar sites and prostitution. The only thing accomplished was driving the distribution channels to other, less visible, less-easily-tracked places. Everything that was happening before is still happening now.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#42

Post by wrong_variable »

Cshelton wrote: post #31

Sellers of drugs, will ALWAYS sell drugs, both illegal and legal. Buyers/Users of drugs will ALWAYS buy/use drugs, illegal or legal. It is an interaction between humans of Earth, no government or entity, no system or blocks will ever stop it. Shut down the internet, it will continue. Short of a massive purge of life, drugs will never go away. If you somehow...were able to shut down the "darkweb", it would move into s…

I think its a reflection of having govt dominated by lawyers.

Economist and social scientists would see this as a failure of markets, and do some analysis to figure out a balanced approach to create some sort of Laffer curve.

I think going the other direction and allowing a free for all situation with substances would be a problem too.

There is a reason why its in my interest to not have my neighbor stockpile chlorine in his basement.

The best example I can think of is the Israeli govt or the Chinese govt. Where the Israeli govt since they actually have a serious terrorism problem, do not have things like the TSA.

The other problem in the UK is old people who have been brainwashed to believe that drugs/homosexuality are terrible. Its going to take a generational purge for the political needle ( no puns intended ) to move.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#43

Post by mistermann »

dopamean wrote: post #11

Any time I read anything about the illegal drug trade I am struck by how much the industry would change if all drugs were legalized everywhere. So much effort is expended to keep things hidden from law enforcement and other criminals that it adds an incredible amount of friction to the purchasing process for the purchaser and the seller. From the buyer's perspective you now have to go into business with some often un…

> It's really a shitty experience for everyone involved.

However, it creates many thousands of very well paid jobs for police, lawyers, prison employees, etc. - you know, the people that create the laws.

Long ago I might have considered that there might be some justification for these laws (or anywhere there's rules really), but nowadays when you wonder why "the way something is" is, it's easier to just assume someone (or usually a group of people in collusion) is running a little rent seeking scam, and you'll probably be right most of the time.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#44

Post by idlewords »

hx87 wrote: post #37
idlewords wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/ See also the very entertaining book by Daniel Okrent.

Even according to that article, Prohibition only worked in a public health sense if you considered a reduction in alcohol consumption an absolute public health good in itself. I don't know about you, but drinking 50 gallons a year of legitimate, old school, high-quality pre-prohibition beer and wine doesn't exactly sound worse than drinking 25 gallons a year of moonshine from questionable sources.

It is an absolute good, in that death rates from alcoholism and its diseases are directly related to consumption rates. Cirrhosis, for example, fell by some 20%. But there are also follow-on effects, like the death of saloon culture, a drop in domestic violence, and lower infant mortality.

This stuff is documented, so you don't actually have to deduce it from first principles.

http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Depew.pdf

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#45

Post by sp332 »

twinkletwinkle wrote: post #14
Cerium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could build a Physical Onion Router. Send package to a node, which opens it to find a smaller package already addressed to another location. Similar to TOR each hop will increase security at the expense of resource utilization.

Doesn't that leave a huge paper trail?

It works if you have a decent volume and can't trace individual inputs to individual outputs. If you get one package and send one package, it's a little obvious.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#47

Post by chc »

ThomPete wrote: post #23
dopamean wrote: post #11

Any time I read anything about the illegal drug trade I am struck by how much the industry would change if all drugs were legalized everywhere. So much effort is expended to keep things hidden from law enforcement and other criminals that it adds an incredible amount of friction to the purchasing process for the purchaser and the seller. From the buyer's perspective you now have to go into business with some often un…

Yes it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The answer none of the people who are for the criminalization is why should a victimless action be considered a crime. Why should otherwise law abiding citizens be criminalized for something as innocent as smoking weed. Even harder drugs would be much easier and economically better, dealt with if it was legalized.

Grouping weed in with meth and bath salts doesn't seem like the foundation for a rational argument.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#49

Post by adrusi »

idlewords wrote: post #36
OhHeyItsE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success. Do you count skyrocketing murder rate and gov't-poisoned hooch in your metric for success?

Sure do. It takes a lot of murder and poison to offset a 20% drop in cirrhosis. Read the paper linked below.

If you're only counting death rates then yeah, the murder is better than the cirrhosis. But the actual experience of living in a society where anyone might be murdered in the street is significantly worse than the experience of living in a society where you can just not drink and not get cirrhosis.

Obviously alcoholics can't just "not drink", but prohibition was never going to be a pleasant experience for them.

Re: Shedding light on the dark web

#50

Post by eatbitseveryday »

Havoc wrote: post #46

This is one of those topics where I've made a conscious decision to not check it out. I have no desire to find out how deep that rabbit-hole goes...

I share similar sentiments. I do not share these articles with people I know (or family) for this reason. But, that doesn't stop them from encountering them on their own.
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