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Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

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

#111
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation please? The profit that Colorado and other states are reporting makes it hard to believe the black market is even a shadow of its former self in those states.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-20/californ...

If they hadn't made it so expensive artificially then the illegal guys couldn't make enough profit to make it worth their time to sell illegally. The California canibus market is a terrible example of what a market should be.

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

#112
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skripal? There's a lot of contention and contradicting evidence that suggest it was a false flag.

Absolutely false. I didn't know Russian propaganda had reached into HN. Study Exposes Russia Disinformation Campaign That Operated In The Shadows For 6 Years: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/16/878169027/study-exposes-russi...

Did I miss the mention of Skripal in that link?

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/04/the-skripal-case-two-yea...

http://johnhelmer.net/austria-confirms-opcw-report-on-skripa...

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/15/mainstream...

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/the-impossib...

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

#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 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. Aim would be to colonise other planets as soon as possible to decrease risks of civilisation destruction by technological offshoots.

I strongly believe that most of the alien species that achieve interstellar flight and escape the great filter must be benign, united, and highly intelligent for these reasons.

I also believe humanity’s chances of escaping the great filter is ~0%.

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

#114
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To underscore your point, here's an example of how easy it is to get god-tier military hardware in Mexico from one of the many people breaking bad across the border in the US. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/arming... This fella in Texas was selling .50-cals and miniguns straight to the Cartels for years. There are likely many, many more like him. Mexican think tanks have spent years trying to f…

There was an absolutely trivial solution: send a few fighter planes to blow up the haciendas and spray herbicide on the plantations. But the US government prefers to profit and make political hay from the drug war.

I think a lot of it has shifted over into meth as well, with the availability of cheap precursors from China, and loose security on ports.

Can't stop it at the source anymore.

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

#115
post #68
post #58

Small armed drones could be the game-changer the AK-47 was. Before the AK-47, revolt against an army with machine guns was almost impossible. "Whatever happens, we have got ... The Maxim gun - and they have not." Post AK-47, the guerillas usually win, or at least can keep the struggle going on indefinitely. The combination of drones for assassination and Bitcoin for payment could force everyone with money or power in…

Drones are easy to jam. The communication link and GPS are most obvious targets.

Progress marches on. Autonomous visual navigation have been available for some time. Face recognition can be done with smartphone hardware. Inertial guidance for drones is available but still a bit pricey.[1]

This is going to be a major problem for the golf industry. It's the ideal target environment - high-value targets, no place to take cover.

[1] https://www.uavnavigation.com/products/ahrs-imu/polar-300

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

#116
post #2

Short-range air defense (SHORAD) is going to be a huge growth area for defense contractors over the next several years.

I wonder if we can repurpose mm-wave 60GHz panel antennas and SDRs for cheap short-range radars. Then combine with a commercial infrared camera for multi-mode target acquisition. Put those on a mount with servos to control a PKM or M240 machinegun, and mount the whole setup on the roofs of buildings. Critical infrastructure anti-drone air defense guns at fairly low cost.

Then you just get stealth drones (fixed wing). Bondo, styrofoam, electric ducted fans, frequency hopping radio links, all easily doable. Only hard part really is range. For that, I could see hybrid electrics that power down the gas/nitro engine for stealth.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publicly traded? How does that work for illegal operations? And as far as I'm aware crypto currencies really aren't profitable anymore, ignoring needing an internet connection, leading to tracing the transactions back to this hijacked dam.

The only issue for an illegal operation would be paying dividends, where they need to get their illicit cash to the shareholders. This is solved by obtaining cryptocurrency and issuing that to shareholders whose record of ownership is tied to a cryptographic tradable share such as using the erc20 standard or erc1404 standard (for programmers that haven't really had an opportunity to see whats going on, these are just…

The laundering of money using compute and electricity is a very interesting idea that I hadn't thought of before. It's certainly within the cartels power (as quasi-state entities) to obtain cheap/free electricity and start mining. Given the billions and billions in cash just sitting in warehouses, Cartels would presumably be very interested in any way, even with a 50 or more percent haircut, to turn this dirty money into clean money in a legit bank account. While a mining operation won't have enough capacity for probably even 1% of that amount of capital, you would have to imagine that cartel leaders would still probably be interested in such a scheme.

A fascinating idea, thanks for sharing

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

#118
post #2

Short-range air defense (SHORAD) is going to be a huge growth area for defense contractors over the next several years.

You'd think that broadband directed antennas would be pretty good at this already. The technology has been around for decades. It would be fun to maybe convert bill gates mosquito lasers (amp them up obviously) to shooting down drones if they get in illegal airspace.

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

#119
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's talked about this on stage, where easily could have 1,000 to 100,000 of them with just a tiny amount of C4 - and then have them swarm at one or many targets using AI or other training/data.

Killbots is a scifi short based on this. Don't watch if you're squirmish though.

*squeamish.

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

#120
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drones are easy to jam. The communication link and GPS are most obvious targets.

There no reason it can't use Google maps to travel and be autonomous with facial recognition. Star-Tracker Algorithm for Smartphones and Commercial Micro-Drones - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7070887/ The short distance drones can travel is a big problem, you can backtrack to the launch location. Committing murder for money is mostly unheard of outside of Hollywood. It happens but it's generally somew…

Mexico is way past that point. Some of the drug cartels operate openly.
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