There's a bit of a Naked Emperor situation going on right now. Since Chinese manufacturers can make passable proxies (counterfeits), most people don't notice them from across the table and under two sleeves. Among people who do notice, most of them don't care. Among people who do notice and care, there's still a bit of nervousness about the whole thing because they know that if everyone using (knowingly or unknowingly, e.g. because they were sold one) proxies got called out, they'd be afraid of the number of people who'd be disqualified and it would undermine a lot of faith in the secondary market.
The truth of the matter is, a lot more people are playing counterfeits at tournaments than everyone'd be ready to admit. Hell, a pro player got disqualified recently for playing with one, despite pros getting their cards from sponsors.
Most of the decisions regarding reprints and the reserved list are influenced by a small clique of card hoarders, collectors and other stakeholders in bed with WotC execs and resellers, and they are known to whine a lot whenever a reprint takes place. Like, a lot. For instance, Fork is on the reserved list, but Reverberate was printed (although it does not exactly do the same thing, it is almost identical to Fork in practice, thereby not breaching the reserved list promise), and there was a huge outcry among these people. This is despite the fact that both cards see zero play in competitive formats. They just feel entitled to treat cards as stock options because of a non legally binding promise made by WotC in 1995, and because of them the older formats are simply dying out due to lack of new players. I have zero empathy for the hoarders.
All people I know who play MtG have an extensive collection of old cards worth tens of thousands of dollars. All of them wish the reserve list gone and the cards reprinted to hell. They care more about being able to actually play the game with human opponents who can afford it rather than masturbating over a triple sleeved A+ graded beta Lotus. Hell, even big card stores such as StarCityGames or ChannelFireball want it gone too, because holding such fragile assets worth that much ($300+ pieces of cardboard) is a liability that sees limited transfers.
Yeah, they've pretty much buffed creatures and nerfed noncreature spells. Savannah Lion and Kird Ape used to be huge, now even Nimble Mongoose (a 3/3 "can't be targeted" for G) is deemed underpowered by current Legacy standards, and downright unplayable in Vintage.
They've also much pushed the Planeswalker type, and you see plenty of them in Legacy/Modern/Standard; apparently it's a deliberate design decision to make sure that the characters featured in their lore see play at competitive tables.
On the other hand, older noncreature spells are still king among their kind. Lightning Bolt, Dark Ritual, Brainstorm, Swords to Plowshares and Glimpse of Nature aren't getting dislodged any time soon.
MtG is relatively inexpensive if you play Limited formats (Draft, Sealed, "you play what you open") or newer Constructed formats (Standard). For older formats, which I unfortunately find the most fun, your best bet is online. WotC has an official client (Magic Online) which is Windows-only, bug-ridden and requires you to rebuy your whole collection. There are free alternatives such as xmage or cockatrice.
What if I actually wanted the ability to get a thing going and quickly working within a few lines, while also being able to spell things out as needed when the use case arises? Crazy I know.
I'm always wondering - how can people that are determined enough to access the dark web and buy crypto, and willing to instigate a murder, fall for such obvious scams? Do they really think the mafia hosts front sites for anyone to browse and order through? What, do they think they give discounts and fidelity cards as well?
In the early 2000's, I knew a guy that responded to a spam message, which seemed like an obvious scam.
It was selling illegal software on DVD. After you pay through VISA, they would send you some DVD's with cracked software.
For me it was obvious that they would clear his VISA. But weeks later, he received the DVD's, and didn't have trouble with his VISA getting stolen. Seemed like a "legit" business.
I still can't believe it, but sometimes it seems to work out just fine (⊙＿⊙')
Hitmen are an actual thing that exists, it's not crazy to expect them to be available for hire via the dark web. In terms of legality and the consequences of being caught, ordering a hit on someone is not that different from ordering a kilo of heroin, and the dark web facilitates that pretty well. (Morality is, of course, another matter.)
Hitmen don't actually make their service readily available* like a pizza restaurant's website, and the ones who do quickly get caught - natural selection if you will. I haven't ever heard of a case of someone getting targeted by an online hit ordered through one of those websites, which you'd expect to if even a single one of them were actually legit. Which makes sense from an economic point of view - there's much more incentive running a (relatively inoffensive) scam and making boatloads of money, rather than risking lifetime jail and committing atrocities to make the same amount of money.
As for ordering drugs, the legal consequences vary a lot depending on the country's jurisdiction. There's also such a thing as a priority list in law enforcement, and they presumably care a lot more about murders than drug use, so one will draw much more attention than the other.
*Yes, readily available. There's nothing "dark" about a website that can only being accessible through special software, it's been a thing since the days of Usenet and BBS.
> I haven't ever heard of a case of someone getting targeted by an online hit ordered through one of those websites, which you'd expect to if even a single one of them were actually legit.
Centralizing murder-for-hire is a good way to get caught, scam or not. I believe Kuklinski did it for a while but it's not a savvy way to go about your business these days.
There have been more than a few cases of people putting ads for wetwork on Craigslist that were successfully responded to. There was even one bizarre case in which a teenaged girl put a successful hit out on herself.
> Which makes sense from an economic point of view - there's much more incentive running a (relatively inoffensive) scam and making boatloads of money
Not everybody is intelligent/skilled/capable enough for organized crime. To a lot of people, a mere $5000 is enough money to get caught up on their late rent, car payments and child support. Pull-trigger-get-5k is a simple procedure, moreso than running elaborate darkweb portals and fucking around with Bitcoin.
Contract killing hasn't changed much over the ages. You don't need to retain a celebrity hitman, you just need to get in contact with some desperate nobody willing to do anything to make ends meet. Morality and ethics are luxuries for those who can afford it.
Online drug dealers are similarly incentivized to sell oregano and baking soda, yet apparently there are plenty of real drugs being transacted as well, including quantities well beyond personal use. And it does depend on the jurisdiction: I'd wager that in (say) the Philippines and some parts of Central America a kilo of heroin would draw more police attention than a murder, unless the victim is well connected.
And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
Reviews and escrows are a thing in the drug world. Generally speaking everything with drugs is easier:
-It's easier to manufacture your own drugs than commit murder
-It's easier to go unnoticed by law enforcement manufacturing, selling or buying drugs than going unnoticed with murder
-Enforcement authorities around the world are much more willing to cooperate with each other when it comes to solving murder rather than busting someone's MDMA lab
-The market for drug consumption is much larger than the market for hitmen (fortunately!) and it's easier to reach out for the former audience rather than the latter
-There are much more third parties willing to act as escrow for drug trade rather than hitmen services
-There's a moral case to be had about leaving drug use alone (victimless crime and all that), as opposed to murderers or murder instigators which are universally reviled; there are much fewer people willing to engage in a hypothetical hitman market than there are with a drug market
-A review system can actually work with drugs because of the large demand and relatively risk-free aspect for buyers; a good seller can quickly build a reputation, while a bad seller will get buried by bad reviews. Can you imagine a hitman customer writing an Amazon-style review over the person he had murdered?
>And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.
There just isn't enough demand for it to be worth the risk and hassle. As I said, any hitman stupid enough to set up a front store is begging to be busted by undercover cops posing as "customers".
> -It's easier to manufacture your own drugs than commit murder
Well that seems false. You literally need no equipment to commit murder. If you have no connection with the victim, it's even easy to get away with it with a few precautions.
Drug synthesis is much, much harder.
The rest of your points seem mostly sound. The low demand for murder services is probably the most pertinent reason for the difference.
I was taking into account the human factor; most people are simply not willing to kill another human being in cold blood, whether it's sheer empathy or the risk of getting caught.
I think simple human empathy would be a problem for anybody considering a career in contract killing.
A bigger problem might be that it's not as easy to for sure kill someone as most people think, especially if you want to avoid leaving any evidence at all. It only takes one error to kill your career. It also doesn't help that the public's image of assassins (super professional bald guys with enormous resources) is pretty much completely wrong. Actual assassins are much more likely to be drug addicted flat broke bums.
I think this overstates the case. Up to 40% of murders go unsolved in any given year. Most murders are committed by people the victims know, that's why they're "easy" to solve. If you don't know your victims, there's virtually no way for the police to link you to the crime unless you make a colossal mistake, like divulging our identity or your contact info to the person who hired you, as the police will be looking at them closely.
DNA and fingerprints, unless you're already a criminal where those are registered, would only establish you as serial murderer whose identity is unknown.
Or someone's camera-doorbell catches you walking down the street at the time of the shooting and they match your face up at the airport...
Or a cop happens to be sitting one street over and hears a gunshot and gets to the scene just as you're stepping out of the building.
Or the victim is paranoid and has an itchy trigger finger.
Or the cops are investigating the victim's family and associates and notice a weird pattern in their bank account.
There's a lot of ways a killing can go wrong. Even if the odds of any one killing going bad are small, the cumulative chance of an error creeps up with each job. Worse, it's hard to jack up your prices really high to reduce the number of jobs you have to do because the more money moves around the more scrutiny it receives.
Every circumstance you described is clearly exceptional and not representative of the norm, which don't seem to change the points I've made. Simple precautions would handle most of them too.
Interesting that you assume an assassin's preferred method of execution is a gun or other violent means of execution. That seems like the last resort of anyone competent to me.
I'm sure there is a crazy world of high-end assassins given the incidents involving Jamal Khashoggi, Viktor Yushchenko, Alexander Litvinenko, etc. But from a business standpoint and morality aside, the "every person" assassin almost seems as bad of a business model as the one high school kid who sells fake ids. You have a bunch of one time customers, extremely high legal risks versus the financial payoff, and a high likelihood of eventually getting caught. With drugs, you have addicted, and therefore, repeat customers.
Indeed, I would suspect that real hitmen usually aren’t full time hitmen as an occupation. In the case of the highend examples you mention, they’re probably ex special forces or spies for that country that usually don’t get asked to do that, but do some other jobs for their paymasters. And most “hitmen” are probably actually from extremely poor countries and live and work in gangs doing all the usual gang illegal stuff in addition to doing hits (for relatively low sums).
I think dark web hitmen are entirely scams, but I suppose if we can literally buy heroin or crystal meth online from the dark web, it’s not entirely naive to think aprori that hits could also be purchased. The reason they’re not is probably that it’s actuslly extremely difficult to regularly perform hits in the West, and probably not a great business model to scale on the dark web for the average Joe who wants to pay only a few grand for a hit.
Richard Kuklinski was a fulltime hitman. He had some other scams on the side, but killing was his business. I suspect that when you're running a large criminal enterprise you need people like Kuklinski on a kind of retainer basis.
> Throughout his criminal life, Kuklinski was involved in narcotics, pornography, arms dealing, money laundering, collecting debts for loan sharking, hijacking and contract killing.
As a data point for low-end assassinations -- some cities don't have the police resources to investigate fully every time a faceless teen or young twenty-something rolls up on a moto, shoots someone, and rolls on. I remember this being something that the local radio and papers would talk about in some of the south american cities closest to the fishing village I spent 7 or 8 years in.
It was convenient to pretend that all kinds of legitimate low-level assassinations are gangland "ajuste de cuentas," back-and-forth murders amongst gangs, to the point where the phrase 'ajuste de cuentas' became kind of a shorthand to refer to the police's lack of zeal.
So that the entry level product could be surprisingly reasonable for settling business disputes in extra-legal ways.
In all the cases you mentioned, these assassins were not in a business or contracting service, they were government agents, military, and otherwise trained and in the sole use of their own government. In most cases of “mafia” hitmen, they were not contractors either, but essentially a specialist within a family. There are freelance hitmen, especially in places like Mexico where cartels hire from pools of desperate young men, who get paid mediocre money for killing. I doubt that a world of truly skilled, high-end assassins exists as a free market, too many legitimate and illegal interests would benefit from their dissolution.
The way it typically works with mid level street gangs is somebody or a group of criminals (crowd sourced murder) floats a bounty on some other criminal, and other freelancer mid level guys try and collect it. They pass around 'paperwork' to each other which is usually evidence of said target collaborating with police or breaking some other gangster code. There is always more than enough violent and foolish street criminals willing to claim the bounty. Somebody tried running a crowd sourced tor hidden service scheme for murder a few years ago IIRC.
What happens if you buy something from the dark web and you receive nothing or some garbage, there is always a large risk of being scammed, some people have too much bitcoins and could afford losing some.
How can I trust the reviews and the escrows, explain it to me as you would explain someone that is not technical (so no crypto terms if possible). I mean we have fake reviews on Amazon and other sites.
I assume you would buy something small, see if all is fine, then buy something more expensive wait and see how things work out, but for something very expensive how will it work, how is the mediation happening if I don't like what I receive or I am evil and report that I do not receive what I asked for?
Surprisingly enough, dark market sellers have excellent customer service. Since the market is completely transparent for a seller. On a number of dark markets both a seller and a buyer have a reputation that is tracked by the market. If a seller sees that you've bought before and this is the first time you ask for a refund they'll send you your order again.
Same with the reviews, a seller that has been around for a few years on a market, has good reviews, is most likely not a scammer. If they were they would be banned from the (reputable) dark market(s).
The fact that users' reputations are visible apparently lead to a widespread swindle called "selective scamming": sellers would ship as normal to buyers with an established reputation, but just outright rip off new users knowing that the buyer would be assumed to be the scammer.
But as a buyer to build a reputation I need to buy multiple things , this means I need to buy drugs from X, a gun from Y, some forbidden magazines from Z, my anonymity drops with each purchase. If I would do heavy illegal things I would not reuse same identity. I doubt that the mafia on the dark web have real reviews and fair escrows.
There is also the risk that all is a trap and you incriminate yourself, even if you try to be anonymous there is a risk to make a mistake and leave a trace.
This is what's so mind boggling to me. Even if the criminal never provides their name or any identifying information they have to provide the name of their target. I'd imagine if the police told a victim someone tried to put a hit on them the victim would probably have a pretty good idea of the criminal's identity for the police to then investigate.
The way you describe such a person makes that person sound like a person who is desperate and irrational. I think that's part of your answer right there.
Pretty much all large cities are dirty. People like to stereotypically dunk on Paris but to be frank it's got nothing on London or New York. There's just something inherently filthy that comes with large concentrations of human beings. The only exception I've seen first hand is Tokyo. I guess if you're not used to large cities it must be shocking.
"There was a certain something about the air in [Ankh-Morpork]. You got the feeling that it was air that had seen life. You couldn't help noting with every breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits." -Terry Pratchett, Mort
Examples of fields with hundreds of years of 'peer-reviewed research':
-Alchemy
-Phrenology
-Humor theory
-Spontaneous generation theory
-Astronomical geocentrism
-Ether theory
-Graphology
-Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis
-Astrology
all of them were once respected fields, complete with papers, journals, professorships, exams, etc.
By the way, speaking as someone in academia, you'd be surprised at how little 'peer-reviewed' means in terms of scientific validity. There's plenty of crap in
Nature and Science and everyone knows about it.
I agree that "peer-reviewed" is a pretty low bar, although a better example would be more modern fields like those recently dubbed "Grievance Studies" -- formal peer review was not common even in hard sciences until maybe 50 years ago, quite a bit later than geocentrism.
But GP is correct that this is not junk science. The basic ideas of psychometrics were pretty clear 100 years ago. They've been widely attacked since then, both casual mud-slinging (Alchemy, Astrology...) and also people who drilled into the details and tried to prove things wrong. Arguably the former strategy has had more effect than the latter.
Is it true though? There's plenty of evidence that IQ test performance can be learned (i.e. you score higher) with prior training. That's why it's often insisted that tests be taken "out of the blue" without any preparation whatsoever.
The truth of the matter is, a lot more people are playing counterfeits at tournaments than everyone'd be ready to admit. Hell, a pro player got disqualified recently for playing with one, despite pros getting their cards from sponsors.