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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

#41

Post by spraak »

milesokeefe wrote: post #36
nathanasmith wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Methamphetamine is routinely prescribed for ADHD under the brand name Desoxyn, it absolutely has medical use.

But it's manifold more dangerous than cannabis

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

#43

Post by spraak »

vegabook wrote: post #18

Wow Microsoft is tickin' all the cool boxes under Nadella. Never seen such a radical, and it seems, effective, corpo image turnaround. Open source? Check. Ubuntu on Windows? Check. Contribute to BSD? Check. Progressive on pot? Check. Defeat the bots? Check. Gates on chickens? Check. This company is sick/dope/ice cold cool.

Getting ratchet with the times

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

#44

Post by spinlock »

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?

As an observer I always assumed it was purposeful. MS was _not_ a company that conformed to other people's standards. After all, they're just now putting a POSIX compliant shell in their OS. They were playing a monopoly game not trying to offer an alternative.

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

#45

Post by chris11 »

mikestew wrote: post #31
joefkelley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IRS refuses to interact with marijuana businesses That's not even remotely true, as even 30 years ago the IRS happily took my money, and did so without telling anyone else where the money came from. I mean, maybe it's changed since, but when it comes to "IRS won't take my money", ima gonna have to pull the "citation needed" card.

Are you saying that you made money selling drugs, told the IRS that the money was made illegally and nothing happened? I've heard that the IRS definitely focuses on collecting tax money and not how it was made, but I thought that people technically never admitted to anything when declaring illegal income sources. It looks like the applicable part on a 1040 would be line 21, which just asks for "other sources of income".

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

#46

Post by yarou »

nathanasmith wrote: post #28
joefkelley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cocaine and its related metabolites have accepted medical use. Particularly by ENTs and such.

Schedule I drugs have no known medical use and high abuse potential, which marijuana currently falls under. Whether or not you agree with that classification is an entirely seperate issue.

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

#47

Post by at-fates-hands »

eunoia wrote: post #7
kbenson wrote: post #2

This makes sense. As a big player in enterprise, Microsoft is recognizing that there's a new industry that's vastly under served.

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…

>> Amateur hour.

Dude, when nobody wants to be affiliated with your business or be identified as someone who's supporting your business, you have to do what you have to do.

It's not like companies are clamoring to support this industry. Yes, people are falling over themselves to invest in these companies, but with federal issues hanging over these places, the cash only aspects and how society looks at these companies (yes, this is slowly changing too) they are in a tough spot to find good software support.

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

#48

Post by ChristianBundy »

colemickens wrote: post #40
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.

Really? This? Again? There's a reason tech companies don't drug test and I'd argue that flies in the face of the tired stereotype you're offering up. edit: It's funny to watch HN's reactions to anything related to cannabis. You'd think people here watched Reefer Madness and haven't bothered to inform themselves about any actual facts or know any actual consumers of cannabis since then. The implication that someone sm…

The FBI found the same thing: http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/05/fbi-director-dont-le...

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

#49

Post by yarou »

spraak wrote: post #41
milesokeefe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methamphetamine is routinely prescribed for ADHD under the brand name Desoxyn, it absolutely has medical use.

But it's manifold more dangerous than cannabis

Alcohol and tobacco are several orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything currently scheduled.

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

#50

Post by semi-extrinsic »

blackguardx wrote: post #25
joefkelley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's just hilarious! Are you saying drug dealers actually report their income and pay taxes off it?
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