Colombia seizes first unmanned narco-submarine with Starlink antenna
This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.
However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
At the very least you'd need a few dozen. Iridium manages to get coverage from 66.
Then there are the power/cooling/antenna size issues.
If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery?
You put in a cheap SIM card and it will pick up signal when you get close to the coast and send a message saying it reached its destination.
Sounds like a nightmare honestly.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
Yeah, but that only works if you get feedback back. The problem is not that the submersible sometimes breaks down. The problem is if you only have a gsm modem on it which only sends data back at the end of the run you won’t be able to tell what went wrong, therefore you can’t improve on it.
“Boss, a big wave broke the snorkel and the craft stalled 36% of the way there. Richardo is welding a stronger snorkle on the next one as we speak.” Is what you want to tell your boss. This is the reason why they have telemetry.
The problem with launching the craft into the dark with just a gps sifnal is that it is too binary of a signal. You get one bit of information out of it: made it / didn’t made it. With that your ship can be 99% perfect and still only see the “did not make it” signal because of the last 1% of things not working.
You also have to remember its not like they are building tons of identical subs and moved an entire fleet over to starlink. They could have a dozen very different setups running with just a few guys tinkering around with whatever devices are easy to obtain under the radar, and it prevents single design vulnerabilities from collapsing your entire sub delivery supply line at once. Even if it only evades enforcement a single time by being novel, the cocaine it delivers out values whatever hardware and work it took to setup in the first place.
However the bigger draw is probably high bandwidth two way communication globally. No need for an obvious route as you can use GPS to get near US waters before turning it on, while still being in control of location of delivery or even meet up with it on the open ocean.
Sending the position only requires a few bits, let's say 48. A position update requires even less, depending on how far it could have travelled since the last known position. At such low data rates you could hide the transmission quite effectively.
Starlink needs to be detectable by satellites, but you can almost completely block the signal going in other directions.
SpaceX might already be sharing it’s data with coastguards though.
Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.
Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
"or just because they're hard to obtain "
Are they?
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.
I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.
And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
And if you get rid of the drug war you get rid of the insanity around prescribing controlled substances.
Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason
I agree that most (not all) people have the common sense to avoid the stuff most of the time. I think things would get dangerous if these substances were to be available at all times to just about anyone; that would mean them being available to people who are at their lowest or least-rational, as well as the intersection of people with an innate lack of self-preservation and those who previously lacked ready-access to drugs. If someone just lost a loved one or had a few too many drinks I think they're a lot more likely to make reckless decisions - I think policy should protect our most vulnerable.
And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
If I were to believe these claims I'd need to see some evidence, it doesn't align with my intuition. My sense is that drug users would be more likely to test their drugs if they didn't have to fear the law and I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise - of course the government ought want to ensure that drug-testing solutions were more readily available before decriminalization policy went into effect.
I think decriminalizing the sale of all drugs, without a great deal of research supporting the conclusion that it wouldn't catastrophically increase the rate of drug abuse, would be highly reckless from a policy perspective. Decriminalizing possession seems like a good first step to precede more research, I think we agree about the harms and immoral motives behind the war on drugs - I don't yet have reason to believe that the war on drugs is a loose Jenga piece that we can freely remove.
Now that I can get weed at a legit store, I have no clue where to get the harder stuff. My dozens of hookups have all left the field.
It never worked. Not even a little bit.
I would like to see evidence that jurisdictions in the developed world that stop prosecuting dealers for freely selling what I'd call "hard drugs", e.g. opiates and amphetamines, see their population's well-being improve, on the whole - if there has ever been such a jurisdiction.
So, I think you are over estimating the effects of decriminalizing drug usage. And you are underestimating the effects of getting it out in the open where it can be monitored and be made subject to legislation. And of course there have been plenty of countries that have experimented with this and have gotten good results. And there have of course been plenty of countries that have gotten decent results with decriminalizing drug usage.
The legalization of weed in the US is a good recent example. Before legalization lots of people would get in trouble for smoking or selling weed. And these days the same activity is fine. Do lots more people smoke weed now? Probably to some extent. But it's mostly the same people that were interested in doing that sort of thing anyway. I come from a country where weed smoking and sales were decriminalized decades ago. The system kind of works. Dutch drug usage stats aren't very different from surrounding countries.
I've lived in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Finland that have a complicated relationship with alcohol. And of course technically, alcohol should be considered a drug. I've seen more alcohol abuse there than in countries where it's perfectly normal to have a drink. You have alcoholics everywhere. But it seems people not getting exposed to a normal set of behaviors around alcohol have a lot of people that overcompensate when it's suddenly made available cheaply. You see this when you meet Scandinavians on vacation elsewhere in Europe.
I currently live in a city (Berlin) where it is considered normal to have a beer on the street, in parks, or public transport. Not just normal. But completely socially acceptable. Nobody frowns at you. Nobody tells you off. And mostly people just stick to a sensible amount. Beer consumption is actually dropping in Germany. People are switching to non alcoholic beverages. That's happening in a lot of places.
1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.
2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.
3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.
4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.
If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.
Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
There's always a balance between focusing on the task and dealing with the world. Adderall always turns up the focus. It's just that's a beneficial effect for those who didn't have enough focus, often an undesirable effect for those who already had enough.
Saying it works differently on ADHD brains is like saying the furnace works differently on winter weather than on summer weather.
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
If your goal it to have zero bad effects from people using drugs, and you think you can achieve atleast close to that, then prohibition does seem like an ideal policy. But if you believe a decent number of people will find or produce and consume drugs regardless of the law or enforcement capabilities, as evident by the last 60+ years of failed strong illegal drug policies, prohibition drug policies for any drug is silly and leaves you almost no room to educate people about drug usage or how to minimize harm and addiction and limites their choices in being able to pick the safest versions of a drug.
When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
And now you got an entire online community dedicated to 3d printing firearms and sharing models and designs, and it is REALLY easy to go from 3d printer design into sintered or casted metal parts that require little to no actual machining to operate.
In my opinion, 99% of the barrier to obtaining firearms in this era is purely a lack of desire and them already being so cheap to get. It doesn't require a craftsman of 20 years to produce working fierarms nor even specialized or unusual equipment or materials. But even if someone did order more specialized machinery from China to produce say cold hammered barrels at a factory scale, a chinese tool making company isn't going to think twice about shipping it and taking the money, and if the producers can run it for just a few months it would have paid for itself.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.
No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.
You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
What will Starbucks / Nestle do?
Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
But with the street you get varying purity. And the drug war has caused the manufacturers to move to more concentrated products to make smuggling easier. And fentanyl has a very nasty property: the tendency to clump. This is no problem for the pharmaceutical industry, but when you have a dealer mixing stuff it's easy for a lethal clump to remain in the product. You get that, you better hope somebody nearby has Narcan.
You don't see it killing the pain patients like it kill the people on the street--this is a dose problem, not something inherent to the drugs.
And why is that a reason, anyway? There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal. Protecting the user is clearly not the motivation. (The data isn't so clear on the second because the data is so contaminated, but it looks like it is alcohol.)
Also, the majority of crime traces back to drugs. Remove the drug market, you cut the crime rate in half overnight. And there's no question the drug war causes a lot more harm than the drugs.
I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal. The highly addictive stuff you can make an argument for it being legal with a prescription, addiction is a valid reason for a prescription. It has been handled that way in the past in England and worked well. In in ideal world I would favor this approach, but I have a sufficient distrust of the politicians to trust this wouldn't become full of obstacles.
Amsterdam's experience with legalization says that it doesn't increase use, but advertising does.
Thus, what I would like to see: General promotional stuff is limited to simple item-price listings. Nothing more can be presented unless the customer has already demonstrated interest, either by entering a website (and the insides of the website can't be bookmarked, you must enter the gate each visit), or by entering a portion of a store devoted to that drug. Externally there must be a minimum of information needed to identify what the business is.
The selecting your stuff part can never be mixed, you want two different types and you must visit both places even if they have a common checkout.
The same rules apply to all recreational drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.
No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible.
I never once advocated for the war on drugs approach, and I made that crystal clear in my comment. Proper policy != war on drugs. It means making sure that drugs get properly certified and its distribution controlled. It means focusing on treatment rather than aggressively punishing those who get addicted. It means addressing the underlying social issues that pushes people towards drugs rather than pouring all money into militarizing the police.
Opioids are actually not all that dangerous
Victims of the epidemic would beg to differ. The epidemic highlighted the need for proper control of drugs through certification and prescription. It showed how far the pharmaceutical industry will go if left unregulated.
But with the street you get varying purity.
I never advocated for this either. It should be illegal to sell drugs without a license.
There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal.
Which is why regulation has increased for tobacco all around the world. We could do more to limit the exploitation of people by tobacco companies.
I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal.
Yes, the specifics of regulation should vary depending on the dangers of each drug. I'm against all drugs being unilaterally legalized.
Opioids are only dangerous due to variance in purity (overdoses) and availability (withdrawal-motivated crime).
Of course addiction and dependence can be exploited for profit, but how is opioid dependence different in that respect from alcohol dependence, gambling addiction, sex addiction or even TikTok?
We already know what causes compulsive behaviors linked to addictions and also how to undo them. Amphetamines, cocaine, opioids, gambling and sex have a common denominator, namely overexpression of Delta-FosB protein in the orbitofrontal cortex. Those changes can be eradicated overnight with histone deacetylase inhibitors, but this treatment is not generally available.
But if you have access to accurately known doses that can be stepped down in small amounts you avoid all the bad things.
Remember, there's a big problem with inadequate pain control. Drug doesn't work exactly as the doctor expects, they assume drug seeking--and now you have people driven to the street to make life bearable. You're not going to "cure" an "addict" that actually needs the pain control.
Cut out all the nonsense, with addiction a valid reason there would be no drug seeking and doctors would be able to work with the patients much better.
Of course, that only works if you have access to a standardized, regulated supply of opioids. You can’t do it with street drugs of unknown purity.
Going cold turkey off potent opioids is a recipe for relapse, or at worst, death.
Still, the likelihood of dying from withdrawal is much, much lower than with benzos or alcohol: both of those can cause seizures in withdrawal.
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
The opioid epidemic is not a great example
You think the issue of regulating heroin and fentanyl is comparable to alcohol prohibition, but not the opioid epidemic?
The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions
The problem blew up when pharmaceutical companies deceitfully advertised addictive pain killers as safe and aggressively prescribed them to even those who didn't need it. It would've been prevented if the government adequately stepped in before it happened. It was already too late when authorities started cracking down, and to frame that time as the starting point of the problem is blatantly disingenuous.
It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
It's you who's framing the deregulation of OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl as "humane and sensible," not me.
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
No, you haven't presented a single supporting argument that stands the test of logic and common sense.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
What kind of logic is that? The only way to regulate something is to not regulate? What kind of mind games are you playing here?
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
Just because the US tries to solve every social issue with over-policing, police militarization, and mass incarceration doesn't mean that it's the only solution.
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Yes, and you think having more would-be Sacklers selling highly addictive drugs without anyone to stop them is a solution to that? Give us a break. Libertarianism doesn't stop billionaires and their exploitation of everyone else.
Do you really think ”legal” means unregulated? That, if something, is a libertarian viewpoint.
Think about how many regulations you need to fulfill to be able to legally build a house, or employ a person. Are those things completely unregulated? How about the fuel you purchase at a gas station? Ever get only water or nitromethane instead of unleaded gas? Of course you haven’t, because you are buying a legal, regulated product.
Making drugs legal would make it possible to enforce standards of quality, labeling, age limits, et cetera before the products ever got to market.
By making drugs illegal, the society has abandoned all those controls and replaced them with the threat of violence: enforcement of behavior instead of enforcement of regulations.
That does not sound like freedom to me.
(Please don’t start arguing that murder also needs to be legalized, we both know that is not what I’m arguing for.)
The drug at the center of this was listed as working for 12 hours. In many patients it did not. And the docs do not listen--it's supposed to be every X hours, it's every X hours. Fortunately I've had very little need of pain stuff because I know every single drug that I have ever been able to discern wearing off does so in less than the specified time. Blood pressure by the book of 1/day swings both too high and too low. Same total dose split into morning/evening provides very good control.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
If an opiate addict could get their daily heroin legally for $10/day, there would be no black market filled with poorly dosed fentanyl pills that kill people.
The amount of overdose deaths is caused by enforcement forcing the market to select an inferior product, fentanyl
I’m not advocating for making opiates legal, for what it’s worth. I’ve been addicted to heroin, suboxone got me clean.
There is the issue of side-effects which is why many drugs are prescription only, for example, when using anti-clotting drugs (warfarin), usually requires bloodwork. A blackbox warning ("you're risking death, requires bloodwork") would suffice here.
I would consider an exception for antibiotics and antivirals since physician stewartship is to be trusted more than the general public. Failing that would mean the rise of pan-drug resistant strains. Me abusing those drugs may in fact impact my neighbor. Most other drugs, it doesn't harm my neighbor at all, it's my choice.
I don't expect this would ever happen, but it's nice to imagine such a world.
Despite the strong effects cocaine has on users, it isn't really especially dangerous or damaging except to people with heart problems who would have similar issues with other stimulants like caffeine. The most dangerous thing about cocaine might just be how obtaining it involves interacting with such serious and expensive criminal markets and the legal problems of getting caught with it. The War on Drugs has propagandized it seem to like some super-drug of the most dangerous order that drives people mad and turn into cannibals or some outlandish shit, but it is a huge mischaracterization; basically the same kind of thing they tried to do to marijuana in making people think it turns you into a rapist or makes you a drooling idiot.
The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business.
This has now been seen in both Colorado and California.
Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized.
The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago.
Update: you know I'm right
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...
Steer with GPS, that way you are only listening.
I wouldn't rely on Starlink, it seems like something that could be discovered easily. Any authority that had a map of where legit ships are could filter down to the mysterious Starlinks that are in the middle of the water, but near a remote coast, having traveled from Colombia, not on a known vessel.
Maybe if you need the comms, you rely on radio. Whatever the ham radio people use could perhaps be made into something. You don't need a lot of bandwidth anyway.
I guess the question is economics, then. How many trips could you get on a little boat that has a solar panel, electric engine, a battery, GPS, and a radio? And what would that cost?
It's the same reason it makes no sense to put solar panels on a car: the solar panels would add minutes of driving daily.
You would need massive area of solar panels to power a sub which is obviously not workable if you want to be stealthy.
72hrs On My Unlimited Range Solar Boat > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc2PFExZXas
Quoting an AI summary (because I'm looking for a quick answer here):
Mexico has become the primary financial beneficiary of cocaine money today. Mexican cartels now control the most lucrative parts of the supply chain - smuggling into the US market and wholesale distribution. They've essentially become the "middlemen" who buy cocaine from Colombian producers at relatively low prices and then sell it in the US at much higher prices, capturing most of the profit margin.
Colombia remains important as a producer of coca and cocaine, but the economics have changed dramatically. Colombian groups now often function more as suppliers to Mexican cartels rather than controlling the entire supply chain themselves. The raw materials and initial processing generate far less revenue than the final distribution stages.
Why wouldn't they track it and wait until it rendezvoused with people they could arrest?
Also, today I learned it's illegal to operate a semi-submersible in Colombia.
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
Unless there’s a type of killing that doesn’t involve death, looks like the AUC was a far right wing death squad.
Miguel Uribe is in the minority conservative party and was shot three times at campaign event by an underage youth who was hired for this purpose. A number of arrests have taken place.
The leftist president Gustavo Petro has not strongly reacted against this event, and the U.S. recently recalled their ambassador for somewhat confusing reasons (Columbia did the same).
Narco drone subs are delivery vehicles, just not for the “last mile” to the end user. They are more like self-driving long haul trucks that don’t care about international borders.
Speaking of which does Ukraine use weaponized RC vehicles and roaming unmanned anti-ship subs? I would think you would get a larger payload and better damage from the undercarriage.
I think both conjectures are likely true.
Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
Drone submarine doesn’t require life support systems so it can be smaller, simpler, and stay submerged longer.
But you could theoretically build a drone that would guide itself to a destination with just GPS right? It would potentially be even easier with water?
Do you even need the two way command and control?
These aren't autonomous true submarines, they're semi-submersibles. Weather and surface conditions will vary (potentially greatly) along the route.
No drugs were found
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.
He does videos on youtube too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO-VQllYIZo
Its very likely the mainstream media pick up this stuff because they follow him :D