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The article tries to paint the two dealers as "a couple of stoner kids" , but in reality Diveroli, the creator of the business, was greatly helped by his family situation: "Efraim Diveroli, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted to be: an arms dealer. It was the family business. His father brokered Kevlar jackets and other weapons-related paraphernalia to local police forces, and his uncle B.K. sold Glocks, Colts a…
The Rolling Stone ought to stick to music.
These are the kinds of useless comments that make Hacker News unpleasant to read.
I personally have been looking for the name of the writing style used in certain articles posted to HN (from Atlantic Magazine, Vanity Fair and few others) since I really enjoy reading these types of articles and they seem to push certain psychological buttons making an engrossing and interesting (not to mention easy to remember) read.
Now I know this writing style is called "narrative journalism" :)
What impressed me is how they overcame their age and the size of their business to compete with the big players, through meticulous hard work and unscrupulous social engineering. With better ethics, I would love to have someone like that on my team: "Diveroli knew how to win them over with a mixture of charm, patriotism and a keen sense of how to play to the military culture; he could yes sir and no sir with the best…
IMO, no. You really ought to check out Michael Yon for phenomenal reporting on the war on terror. In other words, I get it. The Rolling Stone thinks conservatives are the devil. The bias is ridiculous. But if you choose to read that kind of thing that's your business.
I'll admit, I read the first couple pages' worth then skipped towards the ends. This bothered me: "An ATF agent posing as an arms dealer spent weeks trying to wheedle Diveroli into selling arms. Diveroli refused, but he couldn't resist bragging about his exploits; as agents recorded his every word, he talked about hunting alligators and hogs in the Everglades with a .50-caliber rifle. Finally, the ATF agent lured Div…
Because of his youthful stupidity and greed, Diveroli thought what he played the system. If we look at the situation from outside : government got cheap ammo, and there was only one problem - it was illegal, so somebody needed to be scape goated. They needed to bury Diveroli. I liked how FBI raided their offices just on the mere basis of factually wrong whistleblow about Chinese AKs - one gets to wonder how that was…
Diveroli didn't even get bent over - he bent over himself. The article really spells out how clueless these guys were. This image springs to mind (http://www.just-whatever.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/dont...).
Its a minor hobby of mine to learn and reason about military and political history. And you have always keep in mind that everything you see and hear is a lie and a feint, covering another lie and a feint and that truth lies several layers deep. Gears withing gears and feints within feints.
These guys broke all the rules in the book - the government saved their asses by taking them in. Otherwise they would get same treatment as their Albanian partner did. It's not like they were the first to try to one-up their "partners". In this kind of industry one can even gain traction, but one must know that there is always a bigger and meaner fish out there - and that it will come after you.
Talk about hacking the system. It's amazing that everything was legitimate except for the fact that they were reselling Chinese ammunition.
What you said is like saying that Count Victor Lustig's sale of Eiffel Tower was completely legitimate - except for the fact that he was not a government official.
The article tries to paint the two dealers as "a couple of stoner kids" , but in reality Diveroli, the creator of the business, was greatly helped by his family situation: "Efraim Diveroli, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted to be: an arms dealer. It was the family business. His father brokered Kevlar jackets and other weapons-related paraphernalia to local police forces, and his uncle B.K. sold Glocks, Colts a…
local police != federal government
The Rolling Stone ought to stick to music.
Why? They've done some phenomenal reporting on the War on Terror.
RS reports it as some sort of secret hitsquad the government is trying to cover up. http://www.michaelyon-online.com/calling-bullshit-on-rolling...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? They've done some phenomenal reporting on the War on Terror.
Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and GQ have really surprised me with the quality of their reporting over the past few years, in areas like national security where I would not have expected them to cover anything. They may have some liberal bias, but not ezcessively so; especially on a military embed, they are being fee information from "authorities", so if being biased but honest journalists makes them more questioning o…
[for comparison, here's the NYT version (which I believe is in large part based on Playboy) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r...]
