I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.

What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.

All your contacts are ‘in’, you have a reputation and people trust you to do what they expect, etc. etc. If you get arrested, even more so, as now people ‘outside’ have a clear signal which side of the line you’re in.

People looking down on you is as much a defense mechanism for them as anything else too, of course, as it provides not only a us vs them mechanism, but also makes it easier to segregate themselves and avoid crossing the line.

It’s genius really.

The director helps reveal what's inside the killer's mind by suggesting to him to make a movie of his experiences. In one scene [2], we're at a lush waterfall, we see angels dancing and the victims of the killers thank him for freeing them from communistic godlessness and sending them to heaven, with the song "Born Free" playing in the background...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CfG-VmDyjE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ta9To14yw

Emotional and social consequences from killing are not so easy though, usually, but the actual act itself is pretty straightforward, especially with a little training and some forethought/prep.

It tends to change one’s view of society and other people quite a bit. Which makes re-integrating with society and/or integrating childhood conditioning hard. Hence the flight to delusions or drugs for many.

But often the hardest part for many people to understand is how easy it can be for many to just shrug their shoulders and go ‘ok’ and continue on with their lives with not only no guilt, but feeling good about it. Because sometimes people needed killin’.

Organised crime can make it profitable because they already have manpower and equipment, but it isn't necessary.

The smuggling operations between Guatemala and Mexico go both ways, depending on market prices in both countries for some very unglamorous products like eggs and gasoline.

There definitely does seem to be a breed of people like this, and Latin America or Africa can present some interesting opportunities (see alo cowboy capitalists by vice).

>A few years ago, an entire beach in a remote area of Jamaica vanished. Thieves dug up hundreds of tons of sand and hauled it away in dump trucks in the middle of the night. The sand--white, powdery, Caribbean sand--was worth about a million dollars.

To my knowledge, but not necessarily fact, they aren't even working with the country's national government, but small poor regional governments directly.

If they would engage in sand stealing, the prisoner slaves might help keep the labour cost down.

From there, you've got 40-100 truck runs from wherever the barge unloads to wherever the sand's in use, assuming you can't run the barge straight to the customer. Again, that's not a huge amount +to the CFR above.

Above using barge capacity of 20-50k tons, and truck capacity 50 ton.

Ever since that I’ve assumed it’s about 2.5 tons per cubic metre. This works much better.

It’s a silly way to buy a lot of concrete, but does help someone without a tow bar.

> “The police will do the right thing: Aim at their little heads and fire! So there is no mistake”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/world/americas/brazil-rio...

The easy thing about sand is that it takes whatever shape you want it to. The hard thing about sand is that it has to be firm (strong internal chemical bonds) and in small granules (somehow, lots of energy had to go into breaking those bonds, in the beach case this is wave energy).

But if you had a large enough library of rocks with known shapes or which will break along predictable lines, and a precise enough idea of the ultimate desired shape for your project, you could skip the energy intensive middle part and just use large rocks that mostly fit instead of tiny rocks in the form of sand-based concrete. Then you'd glue those rocks together with concrete--which would still require sand, but now much less of it.

I'm not sure how the monetary economics would shake out, but from an energy budget perspective it seems like a win to not require things to be broken up so tiny just to have them glued back together into something so large. "cheaper" to just mostly solve the puzzle out of already large pieces.

Perhaps we don’t need to use actual rocks, even! Dried clay can work just as well. If we put it in fire, it should become firm enough for most purposes.

How do you imagine competing in price with pebbles?

You can’t replace it with fist sized rocks and expect it to behave appropriately, regardless of ‘compensation’

If anyone invents a cheap process, it may have revolutionary consequences, probably.