Quote from: malacath on October 23, 2012, 04:58 amQuote from: whirledpeas on October 18, 2012, 09:49 amWow, if there were 1,327 arrests, and the USPS processes 300 million peices of mail per DAY, then your odds of getting arrested are .000000012% or 12 in 100,000,000. Damn! Those are some pretty good odds ;)Well, not really. Yes they process 300 million pieces a day but packages containing contraband are much more likely to be found because of drug dogs and x ray machines, you would need to know how mnay illegal parcels are processed a day and compare that to how many are intercepted.The number you got represents the proportion of parcels that are intercepted and found to contain drugs, not the odds of getting arrested for having drugs sent to you, although that number is also probably very very low, just not that low!Sorry to be "that guy" but I took several statistics courses in college so I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to incorrect stats.+karma to the stat geek :DGetting the true number of people who post product is essentially impossible as far as I can see. I have heard of (3) busts to SR/OVDB vendors, but every one of them was related to something they were screwing up in RL. The problem is that this is a biased sample since somebody intercepted for sending contraband through the post might have been thrown into prison and wouldn't be able to tell us they were caught for something they screwed up on SR for x months/years even if they wanted to. Vendors appear and disappear all the time due to restocking waves, pressure for timeout, long cons, identity obfuscation and so forth so there's no way to distinguish all that noise from people who were intercepted. I mean, there is no benchmark that I can think of.Quote from: damaged on October 23, 2012, 05:38 amQuote from: whirledpeas on October 18, 2012, 09:49 amWow, if there were 1,327 arrests, and the USPS processes 300 million peices of mail per DAY, then your odds of getting arrested are .000000012% or 12 in 100,000,000. Damn! Those are some pretty good odds ;)Most of those arrests are for large shipments of drugs, too. Your chances of being arrested for something like 5 ecstasy pills or a gram of coke are basically zero. They'll confiscate the package but it would make no sense to spend resources on a controlled delivery and arrest for what would amount to a sentence of probation.That might be true... in some circumstances... but as kmfkewm points out, you shouldn't really say it is. I mean, where do you mean it is true? The United States? Which state, which county? There are too many variables jurisdiction-wise to make any remarks like this. For example, you can get a short couple of weeks/months in prison for possessing 1 gram of heroin in the USA, hell maybe even hours of community service, but in other parts of the USA under certain circumstances this would be 20-30 years in prison./mini-rant/That the law is so incredibly variable is largely due to local politics, and that the written law bears little or no similarity to sentences passed down in practice, makes the concept of the law being a deterrent a complete nonsense of the highest order. This is not a phenomena unique to the USA either. In many cases you'd have to be a legal scholar to know whether the payoff for being a product vendor is appropriate or not. For example; let's say you receive 20 grams of weed. You are a consumer who tokes occasionally, this is your winter stash because SR vendor had a good deal going and you took advantage of it. But you happen to be within 500-1000 meters of a high school, and the weed was not sent within your state but over state lines. Now you could be looking at serious time.Not to piss people off who imagine they've done their research, but in practice knowing the "possession quantity" in your jurisdiction doesn't even scratch the surface of how horrendously convoluted and inconsistent the justice system really is. Could you build a online calculator that gave you an exact number of months/years n for your product quantity and state? It doesn't exist. The truth is that the biggest factor in your trial could be what side of the bed the judge woke up on that morning, there's a study showing that trials in the morning deliver considerably harsher sentencing than those after lunch.Laws should be simple, clear, prescriptive and universal under all circumstances, and they sure ain't. It'd benefit LE and market participants alike to have clarity, but politics fucks it all up and the result is a higher rate of violent crime "cos better safe than sorry", it's a sorry truth that witnesses to crimes get popped all the time because the shooter doesn't know what the alternative might be, even though they'd be good for a couple of months or even years if it meant they didn't have to knock somebody off. You can't be equivocating when you have a decision like that on your hands, it's a grisly mathematical or economic decision. You'd be thinking "Two or Twenty", and if you don't know the answer you'll probably pull the trigger and rationalize it later. This is where 3 strikes evolved from in reality, a colossal failure of the American justice system to be remotely lucid and logical. People don't actually like killing people, the army searches for people who do and even they have a tough time finding genuine ones, all that 'gangsta bravado' is just fear and machismo stupidity, but that's part of how it happens sometimes. When I see statues of lady Justitia with the blindfold on, I don't think that is *quite* what was intended for 'blind justice' to mean, but yeah, it sure is fucking blind as a bat. The American justice system is one of the most corrupt in the world despite its incredibly pretentious assumptions about being better than other jurisdictions, but I mean 'legal corruption', it being structurally defunct, not people handing back envelopes with cash although that happens too. The law exists for lawyers. If you don't believe that, you're naive. In my eyes both the prosecution and defendant are victims of the 'justice system'. Most people will never believe this until the 'justice system' happens to them. Then they realize their ideas of American exceptionalism Re: American Justice are a steaming heap of shit of the most pungent order.You'll have to talk to Stoned Emo, but I think a single tab of LSD means the rest of your natural life in prison in Russia. Those people are mental, as in they have to have some weird mental illness. Reminds me of the Tim Leary quote about LSD causing psychosis, just not in the people taking it./end mini-rant/