> These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.
As I said, modulo "rightfully" which I won't take away from you just for sake of the argument.
> The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people
That's why the previous two remarks are necessarily exagerated. If the government governs and the drug trade drug-trades, pretty much by definition--Isn't that a bit myopic (I'm at a loss for words here, as much as you are).
I mean, the tinfoil hat says: if governments wanted to sustain a deadly drugmarket they could not do it in the open. The counter-point, that nobody would want this, is evidently wrong, and that unreasonable cartells did it only for the money is again myopic, if money is really about power.
> Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (...). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget.
Wow, that's incredible--how one could draw such a black and white back of the envelope calculation cobbled together on a quick google search. Not only is the us-versus-them perspective quite difficult, reducing moral to a binary number. It is also conflating a lot of that in the economic measuring stick that is the dollar.
Seen another way, that's 250.000 tons market capitalization of Mexican cocaine and equivalent substances p.a. (at a guessed street price of $100 per pure gram). This would be a gram per day for 1/10,000 of the population, if they compete in a market of ca. 10 billion potential consumers in the market. Realistically though, the street price is grossly inflated after each border. So, if the inflation would be x100, you'd have to have a 1% share of the population in the developed world (more, if my numbers are too high) being highly addicted daily drug users, who can afford to spend between 10 and 100$ a day. This seems like something is off--my numbers, sure, if Mexico is more of an intermediary than a producer.
Arguably the government is the Mafia.
> These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.
As I said, modulo "rightfully" which I won't take away from you just for sake of the argument.
> The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people
That's why the previous two remarks are necessarily exagerated. If the government governs and the drug trade drug-trades, pretty much by definition--Isn't that a bit myopic (I'm at a loss for words here, as much as you are).
I mean, the tinfoil hat says: if governments wanted to sustain a deadly drugmarket they could not do it in the open. The counter-point, that nobody would want this, is evidently wrong, and that unreasonable cartells did it only for the money is again myopic, if money is really about power.
> Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (...). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget.
Wow, that's incredible--how one could draw such a black and white back of the envelope calculation cobbled together on a quick google search. Not only is the us-versus-them perspective quite difficult, reducing moral to a binary number. It is also conflating a lot of that in the economic measuring stick that is the dollar.
Seen another way, that's 250.000 tons market capitalization of Mexican cocaine and equivalent substances p.a. (at a guessed street price of $100 per pure gram). This would be a gram per day for 1/10,000 of the population, if they compete in a market of ca. 10 billion potential consumers in the market. Realistically though, the street price is grossly inflated after each border. So, if the inflation would be x100, you'd have to have a 1% share of the population in the developed world (more, if my numbers are too high) being highly addicted daily drug users, who can afford to spend between 10 and 100$ a day. This seems like something is off--my numbers, sure, if Mexico is more of an intermediary than a producer.