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Last [Chat] Out of Saigon

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  • Options
    VariableVariable Mouth Congress Stroke Me Lady FameRegistered User regular
    people do use tinder to date, I have seent it

    BNet-Vari#1998 | Switch-SW 6960 6688 8388 | Steam | Twitch
  • Options
    TraceTrace GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam We Registered User regular
    would totally watch a seinfeld in the modern day

  • Options
    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    Bogart wrote: »
    simonwolf wrote: »
    It's the age part that really makes me wonder what is going on in their marketing department, honestly

    Article I read said the company thought young'uns needed a lower price point. So it's not a massive price hike for the old, it's a discount for the young.

    I mean, they can spin it that way, sure

    But the end result is still a system where once the crystal in your palm changes colour, you're suddenly paying up to four times the price for the younger crowd

  • Options
    redxredx I(x)=2(x)+1 whole numbersRegistered User regular
    Trace wrote: »
    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal
    News in this year's Global Drugs Survey that internet drug dealing was on the rise will have alarmed, surprised or intrigued many people. But the very first thing bought and sold on the net was a bag of marijuana – over 40 years ago.

    In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

    In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

    Since then it has been, as the Grateful Dead might put it, a long strange trip, and drug users have, with the help of chemistry and neuropharmacology and telecommunications, stayed several steps ahead of the law.

    Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal have been sold online. In 2013, some people are asking: why even break the law when you could just commission a Chinese lab to synthesise a synthetic marijuana substance (technically, a cannabinoid receptor agonist) that's shown in laboratory conditions to have some of the same effects as marijuana? The law has struggled to keep up.

    That question is also being asked by unscrupulous dealers, who are happy to import and sell these untested, rare compounds of unknown purity, dissolve them in acetone and spray them on an inert herbal carrier material which they sell online to anyone with a credit card. They have little regard for the consumers of these untested drugs, which were never even designed to be drugs in the first place. They can lead to sickness, high blood pressure, and even kidney damage.

    Last year researchers found 73 new drugs on the market, sold by almost 700 websites in Europe. But what are they? Most people over the age of 30 will remember when the drug menu was limited to marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Today, the pharmacopeia is bafflingly novel and in many cases legal.

    By simply examining drug laws, it is child's play, one clandestine chemist told me, to work around those strictures and create a legal drug: one that is chemically similar to a banned substance but is not itself proscribed. Even easier is to examine published medical research papers for anything showing increased locomotor activity, or activity at the serotonin or dopamine receptors, since they will be likely to work, in some way or other, as drugs.

    And if they've only been tested on rats, who cares? Young people are queuing up to be guinea pigs.

    Of the 73 new chemicals that were discovered last year 50 were cannabinoid receptor agonists, often developed for use in legitimate pharmaceutical research known as "structure-activity relationship" tests. The endogenous cannabinoid system has profound effects on mood, appetite, blood pressure and many more essential functions. Firms such as Stirling Winthrop and the labs of John William Huffman at Clemson University in the US produced hundreds of these drugs in their legitimate search for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. But they escaped into the grey markets in 2008 and a moral panic began – guaranteeing their increased use.

    The first batch of legislation banning new cannabinoid receptor agonists came in 2010, when the mephedrone (also known as M-cat or meow meow) craze was in full flow. About 170 were banned in technically complex legislation, outlawing entire chemical families and ring substitutions. Even the most recent legislation in February failed to prevent innovation. In fact, it fostered it. No sooner was one batch banned than dozens more were on sale – the very same day.

    Today, the number of new drugs available is accelerating at such a rate that police and toxicologists can't even identify what they are, because they have no reference samples available to compare them with. And all across the net, there are millions of drug deals taking place.

    As William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

    repost because this is awesome

    It's annoying because those drugs aren't better or safer or well understood anything particularly good.

    Like, now there are 300 things that cause a response similar to LSD. But, unlike LSD, most of them can kill you.

    There's 25 or so things that are basically heroin but worse.

    There are whole classes of drugs that are basically weed, but are much more addictive and dangerous.


    Just let people get fucked up. Christ.

    They moistly come out at night, moistly.
  • Options
    SummaryJudgmentSummaryJudgment Grab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front door Registered User regular
    WaPo has a great article this morning about "the bourbons of Justified"

    Show does such a great treatment of that. I'm still learing to like them. My brown liquour experience so far is just Jim, Jack, and Crown though (all undrinkable except as shots or with Coke).

    If I want to learn to like Bourbon where should I start? Four Roses or Buffalo Trace both came up in the alcohol thread. ..

    Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
  • Options
    TavTav Irish Minister for DefenceRegistered User regular
    are we talking about how fucking stupid Tinder's monetization was because I'm salty

  • Options
    TraceTrace GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam We Registered User regular
    redx wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal
    News in this year's Global Drugs Survey that internet drug dealing was on the rise will have alarmed, surprised or intrigued many people. But the very first thing bought and sold on the net was a bag of marijuana – over 40 years ago.

    In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

    In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

    Since then it has been, as the Grateful Dead might put it, a long strange trip, and drug users have, with the help of chemistry and neuropharmacology and telecommunications, stayed several steps ahead of the law.

    Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal have been sold online. In 2013, some people are asking: why even break the law when you could just commission a Chinese lab to synthesise a synthetic marijuana substance (technically, a cannabinoid receptor agonist) that's shown in laboratory conditions to have some of the same effects as marijuana? The law has struggled to keep up.

    That question is also being asked by unscrupulous dealers, who are happy to import and sell these untested, rare compounds of unknown purity, dissolve them in acetone and spray them on an inert herbal carrier material which they sell online to anyone with a credit card. They have little regard for the consumers of these untested drugs, which were never even designed to be drugs in the first place. They can lead to sickness, high blood pressure, and even kidney damage.

    Last year researchers found 73 new drugs on the market, sold by almost 700 websites in Europe. But what are they? Most people over the age of 30 will remember when the drug menu was limited to marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Today, the pharmacopeia is bafflingly novel and in many cases legal.

    By simply examining drug laws, it is child's play, one clandestine chemist told me, to work around those strictures and create a legal drug: one that is chemically similar to a banned substance but is not itself proscribed. Even easier is to examine published medical research papers for anything showing increased locomotor activity, or activity at the serotonin or dopamine receptors, since they will be likely to work, in some way or other, as drugs.

    And if they've only been tested on rats, who cares? Young people are queuing up to be guinea pigs.

    Of the 73 new chemicals that were discovered last year 50 were cannabinoid receptor agonists, often developed for use in legitimate pharmaceutical research known as "structure-activity relationship" tests. The endogenous cannabinoid system has profound effects on mood, appetite, blood pressure and many more essential functions. Firms such as Stirling Winthrop and the labs of John William Huffman at Clemson University in the US produced hundreds of these drugs in their legitimate search for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. But they escaped into the grey markets in 2008 and a moral panic began – guaranteeing their increased use.

    The first batch of legislation banning new cannabinoid receptor agonists came in 2010, when the mephedrone (also known as M-cat or meow meow) craze was in full flow. About 170 were banned in technically complex legislation, outlawing entire chemical families and ring substitutions. Even the most recent legislation in February failed to prevent innovation. In fact, it fostered it. No sooner was one batch banned than dozens more were on sale – the very same day.

    Today, the number of new drugs available is accelerating at such a rate that police and toxicologists can't even identify what they are, because they have no reference samples available to compare them with. And all across the net, there are millions of drug deals taking place.

    As William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

    repost because this is awesome

    It's annoying because those drugs aren't better or safer or well understood anything particularly good.

    Like, now there are 300 things that cause a response similar to LSD. But, unlike LSD, most of them can kill you.

    There's 25 or so things that are basically heroin but worse.

    There are whole classes of drugs that are basically weed, but are much more addictive and dangerous.


    Just let people get fucked up. Christ.

    I was more

    talking about the first sale of something over the internet was weed.

    synthetic drugs are bullshit.

  • Options
    bloodyroarxxbloodyroarxx Casa GrandeRegistered User regular
    Mobile/PC 40k game


    PASS

  • Options
    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Future Modern Seinfeld Tweet
    Elaine has a basic Tinder account. Debates with the Jerry about whether a particular guy is "swipeworthy".

    stealing this tweet

    #youjustgotmencia'd

  • Options
    CindersCinders Whose sails were black when it was windy Registered User regular
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Bogart wrote: »
    I dunno, maybe people will pay £14.99. Maybe the demographics skew heavily towards the young so the drop-off in old uggoes using the app isn't noticeable. How many dozens/hundreds of swipes does someone make in a day, anyway?

    The point is that it's super counterintuitive to price it like a free to play mobile game, where you offer free to grazers but squeeze every drop out of hardcore users, because part of the huge selling point of any matchmaking/hookup service is the huge user base. Why bother paying for premium service for unlimited swipes when there's a far more limited, market imposed cap on the total number of people in your area to swipe ON? I'm sure that they expected users to drop off as a result, but the high price to stay on board will probably result in the service itself having significantly less value. Basically I think Tindr is being very, very shortsighted.

    Just to be clear I don't think it's reasonable to say it should have remained free forever. These things have to monetize one way or another. Just that this way was probably the dumbest way to do it.

    Disagree. Conventional dating sites cost for than $15 a month and do fine. I think a pay wall is a good thing on a dating site. It weeds out the people that aren't serious. I think that ok cupids biggest problem is being free.

    But conventional dating sites offer more in terms of matchmaking, algorithms, quality control, etc. Tinders whole appeal is that it's NOT SERIOUS. it's about finding someone to mash your genitals against whose conveniently local enough to not make it a huge pain in the ass (unless that's on the table, of course).

    Oh it's a hook up tool? I hope it goes out of business then.

    Because it's a hook up tool, or because it's charging money?

  • Options
    CindersCinders Whose sails were black when it was windy Registered User regular
    Trace wrote: »
    redx wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal
    News in this year's Global Drugs Survey that internet drug dealing was on the rise will have alarmed, surprised or intrigued many people. But the very first thing bought and sold on the net was a bag of marijuana – over 40 years ago.

    In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

    In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

    Since then it has been, as the Grateful Dead might put it, a long strange trip, and drug users have, with the help of chemistry and neuropharmacology and telecommunications, stayed several steps ahead of the law.

    Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal have been sold online. In 2013, some people are asking: why even break the law when you could just commission a Chinese lab to synthesise a synthetic marijuana substance (technically, a cannabinoid receptor agonist) that's shown in laboratory conditions to have some of the same effects as marijuana? The law has struggled to keep up.

    That question is also being asked by unscrupulous dealers, who are happy to import and sell these untested, rare compounds of unknown purity, dissolve them in acetone and spray them on an inert herbal carrier material which they sell online to anyone with a credit card. They have little regard for the consumers of these untested drugs, which were never even designed to be drugs in the first place. They can lead to sickness, high blood pressure, and even kidney damage.

    Last year researchers found 73 new drugs on the market, sold by almost 700 websites in Europe. But what are they? Most people over the age of 30 will remember when the drug menu was limited to marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Today, the pharmacopeia is bafflingly novel and in many cases legal.

    By simply examining drug laws, it is child's play, one clandestine chemist told me, to work around those strictures and create a legal drug: one that is chemically similar to a banned substance but is not itself proscribed. Even easier is to examine published medical research papers for anything showing increased locomotor activity, or activity at the serotonin or dopamine receptors, since they will be likely to work, in some way or other, as drugs.

    And if they've only been tested on rats, who cares? Young people are queuing up to be guinea pigs.

    Of the 73 new chemicals that were discovered last year 50 were cannabinoid receptor agonists, often developed for use in legitimate pharmaceutical research known as "structure-activity relationship" tests. The endogenous cannabinoid system has profound effects on mood, appetite, blood pressure and many more essential functions. Firms such as Stirling Winthrop and the labs of John William Huffman at Clemson University in the US produced hundreds of these drugs in their legitimate search for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. But they escaped into the grey markets in 2008 and a moral panic began – guaranteeing their increased use.

    The first batch of legislation banning new cannabinoid receptor agonists came in 2010, when the mephedrone (also known as M-cat or meow meow) craze was in full flow. About 170 were banned in technically complex legislation, outlawing entire chemical families and ring substitutions. Even the most recent legislation in February failed to prevent innovation. In fact, it fostered it. No sooner was one batch banned than dozens more were on sale – the very same day.

    Today, the number of new drugs available is accelerating at such a rate that police and toxicologists can't even identify what they are, because they have no reference samples available to compare them with. And all across the net, there are millions of drug deals taking place.

    As William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

    repost because this is awesome

    It's annoying because those drugs aren't better or safer or well understood anything particularly good.

    Like, now there are 300 things that cause a response similar to LSD. But, unlike LSD, most of them can kill you.

    There's 25 or so things that are basically heroin but worse.

    There are whole classes of drugs that are basically weed, but are much more addictive and dangerous.


    Just let people get fucked up. Christ.

    I was more

    talking about the first sale of something over the internet was weed.

    synthetic drugs are bullshit.

    I tried fake weed once

    Never again

    that shit was scary

  • Options
    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    Cinders wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Bogart wrote: »
    I dunno, maybe people will pay £14.99. Maybe the demographics skew heavily towards the young so the drop-off in old uggoes using the app isn't noticeable. How many dozens/hundreds of swipes does someone make in a day, anyway?

    The point is that it's super counterintuitive to price it like a free to play mobile game, where you offer free to grazers but squeeze every drop out of hardcore users, because part of the huge selling point of any matchmaking/hookup service is the huge user base. Why bother paying for premium service for unlimited swipes when there's a far more limited, market imposed cap on the total number of people in your area to swipe ON? I'm sure that they expected users to drop off as a result, but the high price to stay on board will probably result in the service itself having significantly less value. Basically I think Tindr is being very, very shortsighted.

    Just to be clear I don't think it's reasonable to say it should have remained free forever. These things have to monetize one way or another. Just that this way was probably the dumbest way to do it.

    Disagree. Conventional dating sites cost for than $15 a month and do fine. I think a pay wall is a good thing on a dating site. It weeds out the people that aren't serious. I think that ok cupids biggest problem is being free.

    But conventional dating sites offer more in terms of matchmaking, algorithms, quality control, etc. Tinders whole appeal is that it's NOT SERIOUS. it's about finding someone to mash your genitals against whose conveniently local enough to not make it a huge pain in the ass (unless that's on the table, of course).

    Oh it's a hook up tool? I hope it goes out of business then.

    Because it's a hook up tool, or because it's charging money?

    Consider the poster in question and you'll have your answer

  • Options
    DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    WaPo has a great article this morning about "the bourbons of Justified"

    Show does such a great treatment of that. I'm still learing to like them. My brown liquour experience so far is just Jim, Jack, and Crown though (all undrinkable except as shots or with Coke).

    If I want to learn to like Bourbon where should I start? Four Roses or Buffalo Trace both came up in the alcohol thread. ..

    Ask Casual Eddy. He is our resident Bourbon expert.

  • Options
    HakkekageHakkekage Space Whore Academy summa cum laudeRegistered User regular
    @variable they surely do. Just like people use OKC for hookups, even though ostensibly it's a dating platform. But there's a branding element of what the services are "actually about" that tinder is trying--and probably going to fail hard at--the rebranding attempt

    3DS: 2165 - 6538 - 3417
    NNID: Hakkekage
  • Options
    spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Mobile/PC 40k game


    PASS

    Spacewolves and warhammmer quest are really good. Way better than space marine which was console/pc. But of course, shadow of the horned rat remains the best warhsmmer game ever made.

  • Options
    CindersCinders Whose sails were black when it was windy Registered User regular
    simonwolf wrote: »
    Cinders wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Bogart wrote: »
    I dunno, maybe people will pay £14.99. Maybe the demographics skew heavily towards the young so the drop-off in old uggoes using the app isn't noticeable. How many dozens/hundreds of swipes does someone make in a day, anyway?

    The point is that it's super counterintuitive to price it like a free to play mobile game, where you offer free to grazers but squeeze every drop out of hardcore users, because part of the huge selling point of any matchmaking/hookup service is the huge user base. Why bother paying for premium service for unlimited swipes when there's a far more limited, market imposed cap on the total number of people in your area to swipe ON? I'm sure that they expected users to drop off as a result, but the high price to stay on board will probably result in the service itself having significantly less value. Basically I think Tindr is being very, very shortsighted.

    Just to be clear I don't think it's reasonable to say it should have remained free forever. These things have to monetize one way or another. Just that this way was probably the dumbest way to do it.

    Disagree. Conventional dating sites cost for than $15 a month and do fine. I think a pay wall is a good thing on a dating site. It weeds out the people that aren't serious. I think that ok cupids biggest problem is being free.

    But conventional dating sites offer more in terms of matchmaking, algorithms, quality control, etc. Tinders whole appeal is that it's NOT SERIOUS. it's about finding someone to mash your genitals against whose conveniently local enough to not make it a huge pain in the ass (unless that's on the table, of course).

    Oh it's a hook up tool? I hope it goes out of business then.

    Because it's a hook up tool, or because it's charging money?

    Consider the poster in question and you'll have your answer

    I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt!

  • Options
    DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    Variable wrote: »
    people do use tinder to date, I have seent it

    Gothamist has already run several shitty articles about people gawking at Tindr daters.

  • Options
    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    nostalgia for the 1990s

    what an age we live in

  • Options
    DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    SKFM,
    You want Tinder to go out of business because they are a hook up tool? Let me tell you about this little dubya dubya dubya named "Ashleymadison.com"

  • Options
    CindersCinders Whose sails were black when it was windy Registered User regular
  • Options
    spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    If to tinder pricing has you down, maybe try having a monogamous relationship for the rest of your life? Buy a house, have some kids, work until retirement age. Just see how it fits?

  • Options
    TavTav Irish Minister for DefenceRegistered User regular
    I think regional attitudes towards Tinder vary dramatically. It's definitely more of a dating app than a hook up app here.

  • Options
    ElendilElendil Registered User regular
    WaPo has a great article this morning about "the bourbons of Justified"

    Show does such a great treatment of that. I'm still learing to like them. My brown liquour experience so far is just Jim, Jack, and Crown though (all undrinkable except as shots or with Coke).

    If I want to learn to like Bourbon where should I start? Four Roses or Buffalo Trace both came up in the alcohol thread. ..
    i would suggest waiting until they're not "undrinkable" before trying to get into it

    try making manhattans or something as training wheels

  • Options
    BogartBogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod
    If to tinder pricing has you down, maybe try having a monogamous relationship for the rest of your life? Buy a house, have some kids, work until retirement age. Just see how it fits?

    Monthly membership fees for this are high.

  • Options
    bloodyroarxxbloodyroarxx Casa GrandeRegistered User regular
    Mobile/PC 40k game


    PASS

    Spacewolves and warhammmer quest are really good. Way better than space marine which was console/pc. But of course, shadow of the horned rat remains the best warhammer game ever made.

    Yeah no.

  • Options
    bloodyroarxxbloodyroarxx Casa GrandeRegistered User regular
    This article makes me like Notch less and I cant put my finger on why

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/03/03/minecraft-markus-persson-life-after-microsoft-sale/

  • Options
    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    Bogart wrote: »
    If to tinder pricing has you down, maybe try having a monogamous relationship for the rest of your life? Buy a house, have some kids, work until retirement age. Just see how it fits?

    Monthly membership fees for this are high.

    and cancellation is a nightmare

  • Options
    BethrynBethryn Unhappiness is Mandatory Registered User regular
    If to tinder pricing has you down, maybe try having a monogamous relationship for the rest of your life? Buy a house, have some kids, work until retirement age. Just see how it fits?
    And if that isn't your style, have you considered a dog?

    Search for adoptable dogs in your neighbour with our flagship product, barkr.

    ...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
  • Options
    _J__J_ Pedant Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Tav wrote: »
    are we talking about how fucking stupid Tinder's monetization was because I'm salty

    "People use our service."

    "Maybe we can make money off them."

    That is "fucking stupid" in the way Capitalism / The Wage System is fucking stupid.

  • Options
    AthenorAthenor Battle Hardened Optimist The Skies of HiigaraRegistered User regular
    edited March 2015
    It's so annoying knowing a delivery was in town yesterday and hasn't been delivered yet.. storm be damned.

    Athenor on
    He/Him | "A boat is always safest in the harbor, but that’s not why we build boats." | "If you run, you gain one. If you move forward, you gain two." - Suletta Mercury, G-Witch
  • Options
    TavTav Irish Minister for DefenceRegistered User regular
    I'm surprised they didn't go the Whatsapp route

    free for a year, a dollar per year after that

    whataspp are gonna make so much money

  • Options
    TraceTrace GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam We Registered User regular
    Cinders wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    redx wrote: »
    Trace wrote: »
    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal
    News in this year's Global Drugs Survey that internet drug dealing was on the rise will have alarmed, surprised or intrigued many people. But the very first thing bought and sold on the net was a bag of marijuana – over 40 years ago.

    In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

    In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

    Since then it has been, as the Grateful Dead might put it, a long strange trip, and drug users have, with the help of chemistry and neuropharmacology and telecommunications, stayed several steps ahead of the law.

    Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal have been sold online. In 2013, some people are asking: why even break the law when you could just commission a Chinese lab to synthesise a synthetic marijuana substance (technically, a cannabinoid receptor agonist) that's shown in laboratory conditions to have some of the same effects as marijuana? The law has struggled to keep up.

    That question is also being asked by unscrupulous dealers, who are happy to import and sell these untested, rare compounds of unknown purity, dissolve them in acetone and spray them on an inert herbal carrier material which they sell online to anyone with a credit card. They have little regard for the consumers of these untested drugs, which were never even designed to be drugs in the first place. They can lead to sickness, high blood pressure, and even kidney damage.

    Last year researchers found 73 new drugs on the market, sold by almost 700 websites in Europe. But what are they? Most people over the age of 30 will remember when the drug menu was limited to marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Today, the pharmacopeia is bafflingly novel and in many cases legal.

    By simply examining drug laws, it is child's play, one clandestine chemist told me, to work around those strictures and create a legal drug: one that is chemically similar to a banned substance but is not itself proscribed. Even easier is to examine published medical research papers for anything showing increased locomotor activity, or activity at the serotonin or dopamine receptors, since they will be likely to work, in some way or other, as drugs.

    And if they've only been tested on rats, who cares? Young people are queuing up to be guinea pigs.

    Of the 73 new chemicals that were discovered last year 50 were cannabinoid receptor agonists, often developed for use in legitimate pharmaceutical research known as "structure-activity relationship" tests. The endogenous cannabinoid system has profound effects on mood, appetite, blood pressure and many more essential functions. Firms such as Stirling Winthrop and the labs of John William Huffman at Clemson University in the US produced hundreds of these drugs in their legitimate search for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. But they escaped into the grey markets in 2008 and a moral panic began – guaranteeing their increased use.

    The first batch of legislation banning new cannabinoid receptor agonists came in 2010, when the mephedrone (also known as M-cat or meow meow) craze was in full flow. About 170 were banned in technically complex legislation, outlawing entire chemical families and ring substitutions. Even the most recent legislation in February failed to prevent innovation. In fact, it fostered it. No sooner was one batch banned than dozens more were on sale – the very same day.

    Today, the number of new drugs available is accelerating at such a rate that police and toxicologists can't even identify what they are, because they have no reference samples available to compare them with. And all across the net, there are millions of drug deals taking place.

    As William Gibson said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

    repost because this is awesome

    It's annoying because those drugs aren't better or safer or well understood anything particularly good.

    Like, now there are 300 things that cause a response similar to LSD. But, unlike LSD, most of them can kill you.

    There's 25 or so things that are basically heroin but worse.

    There are whole classes of drugs that are basically weed, but are much more addictive and dangerous.


    Just let people get fucked up. Christ.

    I was more

    talking about the first sale of something over the internet was weed.

    synthetic drugs are bullshit.

    I tried fake weed once

    Never again

    that shit was scary

    Yeah that fake weed shit is absolutely fucking dangerous. That stuff -can- kill you. Pretty easily too, the ld-50 of one of the brands around here was about 5-6 grams.

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    TavTav Irish Minister for DefenceRegistered User regular
    _J_ wrote: »
    Tav wrote: »
    are we talking about how fucking stupid Tinder's monetization was because I'm salty

    "People use our service."

    "Maybe we can make money off them."

    That is "fucking stupid" in the way Capitalism / The Wage System is fucking stupid.

    I'm not saying their desire to make money was stupid

    the way they did it was amazingly awful though

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    BogartBogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod
    _J_ the criticism centres around the actual pricing structure rather than the existence of a pricing structure.

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    MazzyxMazzyx Comedy Gold Registered User regular
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Hakkekage wrote: »
    Bogart wrote: »
    I dunno, maybe people will pay £14.99. Maybe the demographics skew heavily towards the young so the drop-off in old uggoes using the app isn't noticeable. How many dozens/hundreds of swipes does someone make in a day, anyway?

    The point is that it's super counterintuitive to price it like a free to play mobile game, where you offer free to grazers but squeeze every drop out of hardcore users, because part of the huge selling point of any matchmaking/hookup service is the huge user base. Why bother paying for premium service for unlimited swipes when there's a far more limited, market imposed cap on the total number of people in your area to swipe ON? I'm sure that they expected users to drop off as a result, but the high price to stay on board will probably result in the service itself having significantly less value. Basically I think Tindr is being very, very shortsighted.

    Just to be clear I don't think it's reasonable to say it should have remained free forever. These things have to monetize one way or another. Just that this way was probably the dumbest way to do it.

    Disagree. Conventional dating sites cost for than $15 a month and do fine. I think a pay wall is a good thing on a dating site. It weeds out the people that aren't serious. I think that ok cupids biggest problem is being free.

    But conventional dating sites offer more in terms of matchmaking, algorithms, quality control, etc. Tinders whole appeal is that it's NOT SERIOUS. it's about finding someone to mash your genitals against whose conveniently local enough to not make it a huge pain in the ass (unless that's on the table, of course).

    Oh it's a hook up tool? I hope it goes out of business then.

    Dude stop projecting your personal morality mate.

    u7stthr17eud.png
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    ElendilElendil Registered User regular
    now that tinder is too expensive, my only option is to go around wearing a sandwich board with "DTF" written on it

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    simonwolfsimonwolf i can feel a difference today, a differenceRegistered User regular
    Bogart wrote: »
    _J_ the criticism centres around the actual pricing structure rather than the existence of a pricing structure.

    let's not be hasty

    I've heard good things about abolishing the wage system

  • Options
    BethrynBethryn Unhappiness is Mandatory Registered User regular
    simonwolf wrote: »
    let's not be hasty

    I've heard good things about abolishing the wage system
    Abolish the abolishment system.

    ...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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    TavTav Irish Minister for DefenceRegistered User regular
    "Hey guys, I think our customers value our app more than the monthly cost of Netflix"

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    spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Their whole business model is "let's enable people to make poor life decisions that may result in them getting STDs or worse from a total stranger they have sex with. Yeah. Not a fan.

This discussion has been closed.