Thanks for the status update on Legal Pot As Reparations.
Besides the problems with black former pot dealers as the new legal cannabis entrepreneurs, there is also the problem that anything the New York State government involves itself in inevitably becomes bureaucratic, expensive, counterproductive, and downright nonsensical, so it might still be too early to declare your "old idea to only to give licenses for legal weed dealing to the less competent" to be a failure: New York State is notoriously bad at everything.
Ironically, the Legal Pot As Reparations plan might work in Southern states, where the government isn't so all-enveloping and everyone has more experience with the foibles of blacks (if any of those States were to legalize recreational cannabis).
Another comparison might be the firearms trade. Despite being clearly Constitutionally legitimate, somehow over two and half centuries it has never become an MBA-driven Big Box Store oligopoly (no Guns R Us or Bloodbath & Beyond) but has remained the province of ornery old small businessmen. Why? Whatever the answer is, maybe that can be applied to the emerging, but less clearly legitimate, cannabis trade.
Cabela’s and Bass Pro have a high margin clothing business. The guns are a low margin sideline to get hunters in the door. The founders of Cabela’s were sportsmen, but the current set of executives are all about value extraction. They’d rather sell beef jerky than pistols.
The fishing gear at Bass Pro is pretty extensive. Also, whether the clothing is high or low margin, their house brand cargo pants are very comfortable.
Absolutely. I didn’t mean to criticize their products, I have many of them. Clothing in general is high margin. I was just making the point that they’re more clothing stores with a side in guns than the opposite.
Mountaineering, camping, sporting goods; all operate in the same way.
In West Virginia, we have no cities with a population more than 50,000. It isn't worth it for Bass and Cabela's to open stores here. So gun selling is run by small businessmen here. I have a local gun shop and range one mile from my house.
But even more populated areas can have small businessmen running them. My college roommate own a gun range that sells guns in northern Maryland. I think people who enjoy guns like dealing with small businessmen. It helps to have a range attached.
To be a little pedantic: Cabela's / Bass actually have 3 locations in WV (Wheeling, Morgantown, Charleston), though the former two are only ~1 hour away from Downtown Pittsburgh and undoubtedly get many/most of their customers from southwestern PA.
Again, my point is that they’re make far more money selling 50.00 flannel shirts with 100% markup than they are selling 500.00 pistols with a 15% markup. Firearms are generally a low margin product.
> The founders of Cabela’s were sportsmen, but the current set of executives are all about value extraction
I remember an old episode of M*A*S*H where Charles was excited to receive a package from Abercrombie & Fitch and I was confused because A&F didn't seem like the kind of brand Charles would patronize, but I didn't realize that in the 50s A&F was a high-end merchant of hunting gear and clothing. In 1988 they were sold to The Limited who turned them into that store at the mall that only hired the young and the good-looking to sell their clothes.
FunFact: The gun Hemingway used to end his life was bought from A&F. We were talking about his granddaughter just the other day; the two never met as she was born 4 months after her grandfather's passing
From wiki "Cannabis in Louisiana is legal only for medicinal use; recreational possession of 14 grams or less is decriminalized punishable by a fine of no more than $100. "
For Mississippi:
Recreational marijuana is illegal, and only small amounts (up to 30 grams) of cannabis are decriminalized. Possessing more than this amount is a crime punishable by severe penalties, including jail time. It is illegal for anyone to smoke marijuana in public.
Belt-fed refers to a type of machine gun, like the Vickers used in the Great War. A Fed is a Federal Agent, usually FBI or ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms).
It’s a humorous t-shirt slogan sometimes seen on firearms owners in the USA.
My time working with the local Ottawa population has convinced me that welfare is very bad. They can't focus long enough to accomplish anything because whenever they hit the point where they lose the inspiration and it becomes work, they stop working. Even the ones who want to want to work haven't learned the fundamental skill of pushing through to the end when you don't feel like it. Ottawa means "trader" because they used to be high-functioning, as natives go.
Where was the New York State Dormitory Authority when those jerks stole my robe and towel from the hook while I was in the showers and made me run naked all the way down the hallway?
Somehow, nothing in the lengthy NYT extracts you posted here inform the reader what the real, actual problem is. These people got tons of state handouts and still failed?
Perhaps they're just bad at running businesses, and/or legal weed is a sh*tty business, or both?
Exactly my thought. You see this in article all the time now. It raises obvious questions and never answers them. My heuristic is to assume answering them would violate some piety of the author.
If all the nation's governors were given an IQ test, NY governor Kathy Hochul would surely be at or near the bottom. As lieutenant governor, she took Andrew Cuomo's place after he was me-tooed out. Cuomo picked her for the same reason Biden picked Kamala Harris--she's female and not capable of outshining him. Come election time, New York being a one-party state, she managed to hold onto the job, but her idiotic "congestion pricing" may have voided any future political success.
The legal cannabis business has (supposedly) turned out pretty shite in California. I have a neighbor whose job was designing hydroponic weed farms (to let you know what a square I am, I heard it as 'wheat' farms and wondered how that could make economic sense). He lost his job a couple years back. I've read that the legal stores can't compete with the illegal stuff which remains the majority of sales. I guess people are loyal to their dealers or don't like paying taxes or something.
I was just going to post something similar -- small business failure in this case has nothing to do with race, reliability, "competence", big gummint revenooers or any of that.
The profitability of legal weed was massively, massively, massively overhyped. Legalization in Canada has bankrupted many an unsubsidized lily white private sector entrepreneur who believed the nonsense:
The real aim of this legislation was not to make the little guy rich but to to keep sliding the general ethos and ambience of modern Western life further and further toward Pottersville. People going bankrupt along the way is not a bug, it's a feature:
It makes sense. The profitability of illegal drugs was based on the government driving down competition. For it to be profitable for the private sector would require the government limiting the licenses and doubling down on enforcement against illegal operations.
I don't do drugs and the few times I tried cannabis I didn't care for it. I have always been suspicious of the enthusiasts from prohibition days. You know the kind-they think smoking reefer is the cure for all and that being a little stoned all the time is the most wonderful gift.
I can't endorse prohibition as it was. It was futile and amounted to price supports for often violent people. That said, it looks like just letting it go and not bothering at all is no good either. Here in California I continue to be astounded by how little people care about the hordes of meth campers on our sidewalks and parks.
My current idea is we enforce the law against the street level dealers and users only. No price supports for the larger organizations. If you smoke meth and can hold down a job and a place to live, fine. Once you hit street level, your ass is ours- pick jail or locked up rehab.
I'd keep the reefer legal but try to convince people it's a bad idea to use it often.
Rather than trying to help them finance and maintain a storefront, just give the guys
1) exclusive license to sell cannabis within a fixed geographical area
2) an easy way to report anyone else for encroaching on their territory.
The primary challenge would be delineating the license blocks in a way that they're big enough to support one lazy licensee, but small enough to make them worth jealously guarding.
Steve your last point about reparations is a good one. The reason so many “progressives” push for them is that there are so many scummy characters just salivating at how much money will be thrown at people who have no experience investing and saving. Lawyers, agents, financial advisors, banks, car dealers, jewelers, studio producers just CANNOT WAIT to get their paws on that pot of money and steal Blacks blind.
I remember seeing some pro-reparations column in 2020 and at the bottom noticing “Funded by JP Morgan.” Somewhere in the bank there is a guy thinking “Well, obviously these poor oppressed souls will need some banking services when they get their checks. We can be right there with credit cards, loans with Byzantine terms, high fee investment opportunities, etc.”
These people view Blacks w reparations as fresh meat. It would be the greatest transfer of wealth from hard working taxpayers to skeezy hustlers, bankrupting middlemen Blacks in the process.
hi steve I've long enjoyed your work but I see less of it these days since you blocked me on twitter about a year ago :( I think this may have been a mistake when you were blocking a lot of people? please if you've got time can you unblock me? My handle is @redmanM5, I don't think my xosts are of any quality but I'd just like to be able to see yours on my tl again
"I’ve long advocated the idea that if we are going to legalize drugs, at minimum we need to make sure that MBAs don’t take over, like they are taking over the sports gambling bookie business and making it far easier to lose your house betting on the Knicks online than when you had to go meet in person with a bookie called Tony Cannoli."
I'm not sure how much that is a function of MBAs as much as an artifact of legalization. Back in the day Tony Cannoli had no recourse on gambling debts besides Vinnie the Bat. After the collusion of predatory government interests and predatory Big Gambling interests the legal apparatus can be used for collection. Take the bail bond business as an example. It is now, as ever, in the hands of the equivalent, if not necessarily co-ethnics, of Tony Cannoli. Yet, Tony has not been pushed aside by the MBAs. Tony when given a level playing field can hold his own and better with MBAs.
Thanks for the status update on Legal Pot As Reparations.
Besides the problems with black former pot dealers as the new legal cannabis entrepreneurs, there is also the problem that anything the New York State government involves itself in inevitably becomes bureaucratic, expensive, counterproductive, and downright nonsensical, so it might still be too early to declare your "old idea to only to give licenses for legal weed dealing to the less competent" to be a failure: New York State is notoriously bad at everything.
Ironically, the Legal Pot As Reparations plan might work in Southern states, where the government isn't so all-enveloping and everyone has more experience with the foibles of blacks (if any of those States were to legalize recreational cannabis).
Another comparison might be the firearms trade. Despite being clearly Constitutionally legitimate, somehow over two and half centuries it has never become an MBA-driven Big Box Store oligopoly (no Guns R Us or Bloodbath & Beyond) but has remained the province of ornery old small businessmen. Why? Whatever the answer is, maybe that can be applied to the emerging, but less clearly legitimate, cannabis trade.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/f/fa/Bloodbath_%26_beyond_gun_shop.png
Mississippi and Louisiana have already legalized Cannabis. https://disa.com/marijuana-legality-by-state.
And one needs to visit a Cabela's or Pro Bass store.
Cabela’s and Bass Pro have a high margin clothing business. The guns are a low margin sideline to get hunters in the door. The founders of Cabela’s were sportsmen, but the current set of executives are all about value extraction. They’d rather sell beef jerky than pistols.
The fishing gear at Bass Pro is pretty extensive. Also, whether the clothing is high or low margin, their house brand cargo pants are very comfortable.
Absolutely. I didn’t mean to criticize their products, I have many of them. Clothing in general is high margin. I was just making the point that they’re more clothing stores with a side in guns than the opposite.
Mountaineering, camping, sporting goods; all operate in the same way.
In terms of floor space, I’d estimate fishing. I mean, huge amount of fishing gear. Plus boats. My local Bass Pro is like a car dealership for boats.
In West Virginia, we have no cities with a population more than 50,000. It isn't worth it for Bass and Cabela's to open stores here. So gun selling is run by small businessmen here. I have a local gun shop and range one mile from my house.
But even more populated areas can have small businessmen running them. My college roommate own a gun range that sells guns in northern Maryland. I think people who enjoy guns like dealing with small businessmen. It helps to have a range attached.
To be a little pedantic: Cabela's / Bass actually have 3 locations in WV (Wheeling, Morgantown, Charleston), though the former two are only ~1 hour away from Downtown Pittsburgh and undoubtedly get many/most of their customers from southwestern PA.
Thanks for letting me know.
Try reading
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/02/15/shops-selling-most-crime-guns-revealed-atf/72581120007/
Again, my point is that they’re make far more money selling 50.00 flannel shirts with 100% markup than they are selling 500.00 pistols with a 15% markup. Firearms are generally a low margin product.
That some of the biggest selling gun stores in the U.S. are Pro Bass and Cabela's shows that they also sell pants does not matter.
> The founders of Cabela’s were sportsmen, but the current set of executives are all about value extraction
I remember an old episode of M*A*S*H where Charles was excited to receive a package from Abercrombie & Fitch and I was confused because A&F didn't seem like the kind of brand Charles would patronize, but I didn't realize that in the 50s A&F was a high-end merchant of hunting gear and clothing. In 1988 they were sold to The Limited who turned them into that store at the mall that only hired the young and the good-looking to sell their clothes.
FunFact: The gun Hemingway used to end his life was bought from A&F. We were talking about his granddaughter just the other day; the two never met as she was born 4 months after her grandfather's passing
They legalized for "medical" purposes. I wrote "recreational".
From wiki "Cannabis in Louisiana is legal only for medicinal use; recreational possession of 14 grams or less is decriminalized punishable by a fine of no more than $100. "
For Mississippi:
Recreational marijuana is illegal, and only small amounts (up to 30 grams) of cannabis are decriminalized. Possessing more than this amount is a crime punishable by severe penalties, including jail time. It is illegal for anyone to smoke marijuana in public.
It’s been legal in Canada (the whole country) since 2018. I haven’t been following the subject though.
Rural King has a huge firearms section. Think typical farm guns.... and FN belt-feds!
The only good Fed is Belt-Fed!
Thanks, I wasn't familiar with them before.
Still, it is a family business—if a large one—rather than an MBA-driven corporation, and their main line of business is farm supply.
Also, am I out of date, or are their prices pretty average?
Belt fed? As in feed-and-bleed?
My British mind can barely comprehend this.
Belt-fed refers to a type of machine gun, like the Vickers used in the Great War. A Fed is a Federal Agent, usually FBI or ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms).
It’s a humorous t-shirt slogan sometimes seen on firearms owners in the USA.
The best example is in Reno 911, where they try out Frisbee's machine gun...as a LEO, I can confirm it's veracity.
https://youtu.be/0VqSel1m28Y?si=8_SrwwixNntRP8GY
Oh, gotcha. I’d never seen that before.
Most realistic show out there.
"Bloodbath & Beyond"
That's great!
It would have been funnier in the cozy Bed Bath & Beyond typeface.
> when you had to go meet in person with a bookie called Tony Cannoli
Oh, you know him too? 🤣
He's really a good guy if you don't Dean Martin him!
My time working with the local Ottawa population has convinced me that welfare is very bad. They can't focus long enough to accomplish anything because whenever they hit the point where they lose the inspiration and it becomes work, they stop working. Even the ones who want to want to work haven't learned the fundamental skill of pushing through to the end when you don't feel like it. Ottawa means "trader" because they used to be high-functioning, as natives go.
NB: I'm generalizing from casino payouts to reparations/welfare.
Here's Lipton Matthews saying this in a more sciency way: https://substack.com/home/post/p-157448045
Where was the New York State Dormitory Authority when those jerks stole my robe and towel from the hook while I was in the showers and made me run naked all the way down the hallway?
You see what I mean about New York State government?
Never there when you need 'em; always there when you don't!
P.S. Next time that happens, don't run, walk with pride!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/a500ay/walk_with_pride_laddie/
What, don’t you know that issuing large amounts of debt to low time horizon individuals is compassionate?
Sounds like it is working out.
I bet the construction companies they could use had to be state approved DEI businesses who were very expensive and not very competent.
Somehow, nothing in the lengthy NYT extracts you posted here inform the reader what the real, actual problem is. These people got tons of state handouts and still failed?
Perhaps they're just bad at running businesses, and/or legal weed is a sh*tty business, or both?
Exactly my thought. You see this in article all the time now. It raises obvious questions and never answers them. My heuristic is to assume answering them would violate some piety of the author.
Absolutely. Sometimes the reader can see the logic gap where the editor excised the question.
They were people with criminal records. Maybe not prime candidates.
Is it not working out because the MBAs structured the loans?
"After a string of convictions for selling marijuana in the 1990s, he was skeptical of the government."
Clearly not skeptical enough.
I think Conner is part of some sort of organized crime org and isn't merely a bad legal pot dealer. See my comment below.
If all the nation's governors were given an IQ test, NY governor Kathy Hochul would surely be at or near the bottom. As lieutenant governor, she took Andrew Cuomo's place after he was me-tooed out. Cuomo picked her for the same reason Biden picked Kamala Harris--she's female and not capable of outshining him. Come election time, New York being a one-party state, she managed to hold onto the job, but her idiotic "congestion pricing" may have voided any future political success.
The legal cannabis business has (supposedly) turned out pretty shite in California. I have a neighbor whose job was designing hydroponic weed farms (to let you know what a square I am, I heard it as 'wheat' farms and wondered how that could make economic sense). He lost his job a couple years back. I've read that the legal stores can't compete with the illegal stuff which remains the majority of sales. I guess people are loyal to their dealers or don't like paying taxes or something.
I was just going to post something similar -- small business failure in this case has nothing to do with race, reliability, "competence", big gummint revenooers or any of that.
The profitability of legal weed was massively, massively, massively overhyped. Legalization in Canada has bankrupted many an unsubsidized lily white private sector entrepreneur who believed the nonsense:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/the-razzle-dazzle-days-of-canada-s-cannabis-industry-are-over-as-pot-industry-faces-downturn-1.6995207
The real aim of this legislation was not to make the little guy rich but to to keep sliding the general ethos and ambience of modern Western life further and further toward Pottersville. People going bankrupt along the way is not a bug, it's a feature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXQhTmNDTGo
It makes sense. The profitability of illegal drugs was based on the government driving down competition. For it to be profitable for the private sector would require the government limiting the licenses and doubling down on enforcement against illegal operations.
I don't do drugs and the few times I tried cannabis I didn't care for it. I have always been suspicious of the enthusiasts from prohibition days. You know the kind-they think smoking reefer is the cure for all and that being a little stoned all the time is the most wonderful gift.
I can't endorse prohibition as it was. It was futile and amounted to price supports for often violent people. That said, it looks like just letting it go and not bothering at all is no good either. Here in California I continue to be astounded by how little people care about the hordes of meth campers on our sidewalks and parks.
My current idea is we enforce the law against the street level dealers and users only. No price supports for the larger organizations. If you smoke meth and can hold down a job and a place to live, fine. Once you hit street level, your ass is ours- pick jail or locked up rehab.
I'd keep the reefer legal but try to convince people it's a bad idea to use it often.
Private citizens are also allowed to grow their own (I think you can have two plants. I’m not a user but my friend’s husband is and he grows his own.)
Hydroponic wheat farm is pretty funny!
Upside down rice.
In my defense, on of my best friends grew up a wheat farmer and it comes up in conversation frequently
Maybe they're going about it all wrong?
Rather than trying to help them finance and maintain a storefront, just give the guys
1) exclusive license to sell cannabis within a fixed geographical area
2) an easy way to report anyone else for encroaching on their territory.
The primary challenge would be delineating the license blocks in a way that they're big enough to support one lazy licensee, but small enough to make them worth jealously guarding.
That's all we need: a bunch of blacks with even more rationale to get angry about certain folks coming onto their territory.
Angry and snitching beats angry and shooting.
They're not going to do the former. These are ghetto blacks selling weed; they will do the latter.
Steve your last point about reparations is a good one. The reason so many “progressives” push for them is that there are so many scummy characters just salivating at how much money will be thrown at people who have no experience investing and saving. Lawyers, agents, financial advisors, banks, car dealers, jewelers, studio producers just CANNOT WAIT to get their paws on that pot of money and steal Blacks blind.
I remember seeing some pro-reparations column in 2020 and at the bottom noticing “Funded by JP Morgan.” Somewhere in the bank there is a guy thinking “Well, obviously these poor oppressed souls will need some banking services when they get their checks. We can be right there with credit cards, loans with Byzantine terms, high fee investment opportunities, etc.”
These people view Blacks w reparations as fresh meat. It would be the greatest transfer of wealth from hard working taxpayers to skeezy hustlers, bankrupting middlemen Blacks in the process.
hi steve I've long enjoyed your work but I see less of it these days since you blocked me on twitter about a year ago :( I think this may have been a mistake when you were blocking a lot of people? please if you've got time can you unblock me? My handle is @redmanM5, I don't think my xosts are of any quality but I'd just like to be able to see yours on my tl again
"I’ve long advocated the idea that if we are going to legalize drugs, at minimum we need to make sure that MBAs don’t take over, like they are taking over the sports gambling bookie business and making it far easier to lose your house betting on the Knicks online than when you had to go meet in person with a bookie called Tony Cannoli."
I'm not sure how much that is a function of MBAs as much as an artifact of legalization. Back in the day Tony Cannoli had no recourse on gambling debts besides Vinnie the Bat. After the collusion of predatory government interests and predatory Big Gambling interests the legal apparatus can be used for collection. Take the bail bond business as an example. It is now, as ever, in the hands of the equivalent, if not necessarily co-ethnics, of Tony Cannoli. Yet, Tony has not been pushed aside by the MBAs. Tony when given a level playing field can hold his own and better with MBAs.