Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones • Hacker News Board

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#141

Post by kumarvvr » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:05 AM UTC

grugagag wrote: post #72

Legalizing all drugs would kill these cartels almost instantly. People who do drugs do them anyway and find a way to even if they’re illegal. If drugs weren’t illegal all that money wouldnt end up in mexican cartels pockets.

The fear of punishments probably keeps many kids / young adults off drugs. The fear of incarceration and a criminal record probably does more to keep people off drugs than actual incarceration.

I find the argument for legalizing drugs as some sort of a benevolent all-in-one solution a complete idiotic solution.

Drugs like Heroin, Meth, Cocaine, etc should absolutely be banned and IMV the scope and scale of punishments increased.

Humans are notoriously incompetent or weak-willed to make rational choices in many aspects. They are emotional, impulsive and irrational.

Imagine being able to obtain drugs at market prices and being able to sell to children in schools, illegally of course. Can you not see what is happening with alcohol?

Drugs are a social evil and must be dealt with. Legalization is not the solution. It will increase drug use exponentially.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#142

Post by kumarvvr » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #140

kumarvvr wrote: post #137

The next worst case scenario is autonomous drones, that do not require radio or gps inputs. Navigation can be done with crude inertial navigation systems and advancing AI can identify and fly to targets with increasing accuracy. Causing general chaos or exploding in crowds will not require AI though. The only counter measure against those will then be an EMP system, Blinding lights to disable cameras, etc. The next e…

SLAM is already functional for drone navigation, more or less. As for blinding lights, that can be fixed by using many different sensors and wavelengths, as well as high-quality optics and imaging sensors with high flare resistance and high dynamic range. As for EMPs, a drone that isn't remote controlled could feasibly be put in a Faraday cage. I'd make a prototype, but I don't really want to contribute to future ass…

Well, that scary to hear.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#143

Post by perl4ever » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #43

perl4ever wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allied bombing is a thing that happened, but sometimes it seems like people really strain to relate anything to something shameful associated with Americans. In this particular context, if you're thinking of WWII, it's kind of odd for a person not to think of and compare the concept to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

Parent just listed two of the most brutal single attack conventional bombings of a city in history. This could be due to some agenda to shame the Allies for their involvement in WW2, or it could just be because WW2 is really the only time in history it was done on that scale and the Allies happened to win the conflict. I'm going to go with principle of charity and assume the latter...

It would be absurd to attribute every mention of Dresden or Hiroshima or whatever to an anti-American agenda. People simply inhabit an environment where that is what comes to mind. Maybe people don't see the similarity I do, or maybe the thing that I think relevant is obscure. But I'm noting that it sometimes seems strained and odd, from my personal perspective. Blaming an individual here and now was not my intent. I'm more saying, look at the bubble english speakers inhabit, I wonder how we got here, since most people doubtlessly aren't acting out of a conscious or malicious agenda.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#144

Post by cakeface » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:09 AM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #29

sixothree wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a hundred thousand of these things. Ugh. I don’t wanna know if that’s in our future.

On the bright side, you don't need to bomb everyone. Future wars could be more efficient.

I think that this is a great point. It's also a little scary when you think about the data sets that exist out there for advertising. Any way that someone targets an ad could be the selection criteria for these efficient wars.

My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#145

Post by stephentmcm » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:09 AM UTC

rexpop wrote: post #93

stephentmcm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not going to be the case. Assuming both the US and Mexico simultaneous legalized all drugs, what happens to all the illegal jobs the cartels currently have? Their people, money and weapons don't vanish and what we see when cartels take a hit income is violence increases and the cartels look to other methods of making income using they're existing tools. Protection rackets and kidnappings are alread…

Wow, your response is literally "let them hold us hostage, it's safer than upsetting the status quo."

>Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.

For the record I'm pro-legalization, but just flipping the status quo overnight isn't going to fly here.

Saying "just legalize all drugs" doesn't solve the problem, someone still has to make the drugs, can we just give all traffickers amnesty for past crimes and make their operations legal? Maybe? But it's not something to hand-wave away.

I don't have the answer but flippant comments about how easy it is to dismantle cartels, is offensive to anyone who has fought to do such and likely a disservice to the intelligence of people running them.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#146

Post by vmception » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

phobosanomaly wrote: post #76

vmception wrote: post #6

Interesting map, its crazy how often these groups fracture and splinter! Really wish one of these would go publicly traded and report revenue, leading to real price discovery of these operations and ability to manage risk. There are permissionless systems they can use now to list shares, and if they have a liquidity issue they just need to take over a dam and generate some electricity for themselves for their crypto…

Grain of salt and such, but here's a revenue figure I found in this very interesting 2020 congressional report "Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations". "By some estimates, Sinaloa had grown to control 40%-60% of Mexico’s drug trade by 2012 and had annual earnings calculated to be as high as $3 billion." https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41576.pdf

Ah, crypto markets are big enough to accomodate their needs via mining now.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#147

Post by mdorazio » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #140

kumarvvr wrote: post #137

The next worst case scenario is autonomous drones, that do not require radio or gps inputs. Navigation can be done with crude inertial navigation systems and advancing AI can identify and fly to targets with increasing accuracy. Causing general chaos or exploding in crowds will not require AI though. The only counter measure against those will then be an EMP system, Blinding lights to disable cameras, etc. The next e…

SLAM is already functional for drone navigation, more or less. As for blinding lights, that can be fixed by using many different sensors and wavelengths, as well as high-quality optics and imaging sensors with high flare resistance and high dynamic range. As for EMPs, a drone that isn't remote controlled could feasibly be put in a Faraday cage. I'd make a prototype, but I don't really want to contribute to future ass…

There are plenty of countermeasures, but they're all active countermeasures - ex. a couple guys with shotguns, trained falcons, or your own anti-drone drones.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#148

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

DethNinja wrote: post #113

As humanity gets access to higher and higher technology, more and more smaller scale, non-governmental actors will get access to weapons that can cause asymmetrical damage. We will definitely get to a point where a single determined person can destroy an entire city. I strongly believe this is basically the great filter faced by all intelligent species in the universe. Only way to overcome this great filter is by ado…

Only way to overcome this great filter is by adopting policies that provide equal opportunities to each member of the species and create a non-divisive/united society where everyone practically helps each other

How does this utopian ideal address the lone nutcase who would actually do something like destroy an entire city if he could? The Unabomber wasn't standing up for BLM or fighting income inequality, you know.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#149

Post by generalizations » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

DethNinja wrote: post #113

As humanity gets access to higher and higher technology, more and more smaller scale, non-governmental actors will get access to weapons that can cause asymmetrical damage. We will definitely get to a point where a single determined person can destroy an entire city. I strongly believe this is basically the great filter faced by all intelligent species in the universe. Only way to overcome this great filter is by ado…

> a single determined person can destroy an entire city

That's already true, and has been for a while, if you count medical doctors with a reasonable degree of connectedness.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#150

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #142

sudosysgen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SLAM is already functional for drone navigation, more or less. As for blinding lights, that can be fixed by using many different sensors and wavelengths, as well as high-quality optics and imaging sensors with high flare resistance and high dynamic range. As for EMPs, a drone that isn't remote controlled could feasibly be put in a Faraday cage. I'd make a prototype, but I don't really want to contribute to future ass…

Well, that scary to hear.

It really is. I came to this realization on the way back from a robotics competition, I was editing pictures I took with my new camera. I was reading articles about improvements we could make to SLAM, and editing pictures I took on the trip. When I realized that I had so much dynamic range that was able to completely remove haze and flaring from incredibly bright objects very close with a very middling lens, and combining that with the very impressive results in optical SLAM, it certainly gave me pause. Since then I've done quite a bit of research on this and I haven't been able to find any kind of usable countermeasure.

Hanging out on photographers forums, there's people who have been able to edit out details by substracting up to seven stops, with current consumer tech and optics, and improvements are coming every few months. Canon just demonstrated a sensor with 20 stops of dynamic range. Coupled with IR sensors, far UV sensors, and different wavelength filters to filter out lasers, there's really not much that can be done anymore. Except for kinetic or directed energy approaches, but they are incredibly expensive and incredibly vulnerable to saturation.