Posts by Jim Cathcart
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Mike,
I was pretty sure there was a big difference between "pure" crystal meth and the backyard variety commonly found in NZ. Sorry I can't put my finger on what the difference is, but I did thing I had something to do with the ingredients. Perhaps it has something to do with the coedine. Obviously, if you can get hold of it in its undiluted, unprocessed state, it's going to be "more pure" than deriving it from OTC tablets.
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Based on all the labs that the police keep finding, I think it's the missing raw ingredient that is snuck into the country, a fair bit of manufacture takes place here.
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I very much doubt most (if not all) of the labs are "pure" crystal meth. There's no point in smuggling the active ingredient into NZ for manufacture. You might as well smuggle the real thing. Also, I understand that to make "real" meth cannot be done with the chemistry sets you find in suburban NZ. It's a bit more sophisticated than that. I imagine the stuff you found cooked out in Glenfield must be heinously toxic.
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From my understanding, one of the active ingredients in "pure" crystal meth is not available to the general public. In the case of Japan, most of the "shabu" or pure meth comes from North Korea. Doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo were a large supplier for the Yakuza before they got taken down.
One would think that the pure meth is imported into NZ, so $1000 a gram is not out of the question. On the streets of Osaka, it used to be readily available for as little as 10,000 yen ($120) per gram.
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I think Japan is a good case in point here.
Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, said that "the Japanese think long-term. If they think they will benefit in 100 years, they will invest for their grandkids. There's a bit of national pride we don't see in the West." I'm pretty sure there's more to it than just national pride and wanting to be first, but there's certainly something to be said for setting up a network now that we'll need in a few years. Chances are, eventually we'll have a nice, fast, cheap, nationwide fiber network that will allow us to download porn faster than we could ever have imagined before, but at the rate we're going, it's going to be a while."
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Thanks for the international podcast Russell! I'm happy.
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I agree with Paul Robeson in that we can't watch Media 7 from overseas. I'm very interested to see what Bernard Hickey has to say.
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The skin discrimination is one I've encountered in every Asian country I've been to. In Japan, however, there's a trend among some teenagers to torch themselves under sunbeds to an extreme effect. These kids don't usually play by "the rules," but they're not that punk rock in my opinion.
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The icons are very interesting depending on how you look at them. Your hardcore ethnocentrist particularly loves these stark contrasts, but being a honky domiciled in Asia, I've come to realize that the lines are often blurred or entirely missing. Often to the dismay of the orientalist (occidentalist), that's just the way it is in this post-modern mash-up of a world.
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Or the Japanese tycoon in the mid-90s who went to Akihabara to buy himself an internet.
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Writing about HDMI and hi-def media from the manufacturing side is part of my bread and butter. I'm often surprised how much confusion exists within the industry. It's hardly surprising that those on the retail end people are far behind the eight ball.
Perhaps there's an opportunity in NZ for an operation similar to Circuit City's Geek Squad in the U.S.