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Increased Power Usage Leads to Mistaken Pot Busts for Bitcoin Miners
c0lo writes "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"
Dude's probably buying drugs with his bitcoins.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Better use of the electicity
"I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home. Seizing them has really put our department's IT unit on the fast track though. God Bless lax asset forfeiture laws."
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Seriously, this is getting annoying. Editors, you guys need to knock it off. The bitcoin fanatics are using you as an advertising push. It is getting annoying. Leave off it already.
They spent more on those machines, and on the electricity to run them, than they ever will 'mining' bitcoins.
Didn't even bother to read past the first sentence?
"Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation."
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
So if you want to grow pot mine a bunch of bitcoins and get the police to inspect your house. Once that's done setup your grow operation, because the suspicion has been relieved?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Second word of the summary is Canadian...
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:
Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation.
Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Oops. That was meant for the guy responding to you.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Canada does not have a bill of rights. They have a Queen.
"Rumors floating around IRC" strikes me as somewhere between Fox News and Homeless Guy on Street Corner in terms of credibility. This is exactly the sort of story that someone would make up as a joke, and people would repeat as though it's real.
So I watched the little video in the article but I don't understand why or how anyone would accept bitcoins as currency. Can anyone explain to me how running an application on your computer to 'make' currency produces anything of value?
Canada has a bill of rights too, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, both of which are focused on protecting personal property from unreasonable search and seizure.
But it looks like using "too much" power automatically means somebody is treated like a criminal and subject to being searched to prove otherwise.
Seems to me as these "probable cause based on power usage" continue and more and more intrusions of this nature should lead to law suits against the police and hopefully disallowing power use as a criteria for determining probable cause. That's a bullshit way of doing law enforcement. I run a server at my home. I'll be damned if I am going to sit idle if I were to have a search warrant against me based on stupid crap like that.
Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.
Just imagine the rhetoric: "Only pot-farmers use solar energy." "Support HB123 to place export controls on drug energy technology to Mexico!" "Off grid, on drugs!" "Tell the police if your neighbor has gone wireless!"
My question, as I have never done a grow room... what keeps a pot farm from actually getting their electricity from after the meter?
If they just cut a connection before the meter and manage to hide it, there are no power worries whatsoever. Cheaper utility bills to boot as well.
If Canada doesn't have a charter of rights, then what's this?
Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.
On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Probably because electricity is dangerous and if you know how to safely tap in, then you can find a better job than growing drugs. Or the ones that do it don't get caught and published in the news.
Why should the police be involved?
Though not surprising to see such comment ... many people have become conditioned to the police state and not fully aware of how omnipresent it is around them.
Seems to me the only people who should be asking questions, if anyone, regarding 3X average household usage would be the power utility to ensure the customer is aware of it and is able to pay.
And perhaps, especially in older developments / rural areas, sending out a utility tech to verify the drop and transformer are up to the task - likely there's going to be plenty of extra capacity available and hence no issues.
Ron
I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the Time story covering this 2 hours ago:
I hate to tell you, but it never happened. This is an AMD TV commercial (available on Youtube) saying, basically, run Nvidia and get raided for running a pot growing operation due to excessive power usage.
Oh, and a side note, in the US, the power companies DO regularly report users with sudden spikes of excessive power usage that are indicative of grow ops. This data is volunteered by the power companies, and the police do not need a warrant to collect it.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
If they just cut a connection before the meter and manage to hide it, there are no power worries whatsoever. Cheaper utility bills to boot as well.
It's harder to do than you might think. The utility owns and reserves the right to inspect any/all wiring before the meter, and they DO have meters upstream. If the upstream meter is reporting more consumption than normal compared to the sub-meter consumption, they know something is up - either they have a short or somebody is stealing electricity. Then they have various means of testing individual homes.to determine the culprit.
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
I don't read AC A human right
I can't remember exactly where, but someone suggested that this might be a possibility on one of the Bitcoin forums. A day later, someone said in an IRC channel that they had been raided. I'm pretty sure they made it up based on the previous day's speculation. And now a website has picked up the IRC claim, and now Slashdot picks up that website's claim. As far as I can tell there's no backing that this supposed drug bust ever happened, but it's pyramiding into bigger and bigger news based on nothing.
Anarchy? Then don't tell me what to do!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Nothing, it happens all the time. But eventually, someone will notice the splice.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Article
It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.
The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.
The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."
If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.
Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:
Article
It's enough in the US to get a subpoena for the records, and that is enough to start an investigation. And, the average bitcoin miner will live a life similar to a grower (lots of usage with no light output) which, added together, is more PC than on most search warrants.
Learn to love Alaska
Why? So long as they pay their power bill what's the problem?
HID lamps (high pressure sodium or metal halide) yield more lumens per watt than fluorescents. Google tells me quickly that cannabis requires around 50 watts per square foot.
92kWh/day = 3800 W or 76 square feet of growing space, assuming all the power goes towards lighting. Again Google tells me that Cannabis yields about .5 oz/square foot estimated generously.
That figures to 38 oz per grow cycle. Let's say it's really primo buds sold at a festival for $50/eighth or $400 an oz. Ridiculous prices, but people do pay them for high quality stuff. Then you're looking at $7600
per flowering cycle.
At 8 weeks per flowering cycle, there's 6 flowering cycles per year. That nets you a maximum of $45,600 per year. That will have to cover everything from food to water to nutrients to power.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You should only have enough electricity for your Television to watch IDOL, FOX and CNN and that is all!!
Anything more and you are a terrorist!!!!
We will send the TSA immediately into your home to grab your balls, your breasts or open your kids diapers!!!!
That will show everyone that we just need to keep people safe to stop these terrorists!!!
Mr. Goldstein is _everywhere_ but with your sacrifices we _WILL_ _GET_ _HIM_!!!
Report anything you see to your local threat fusion center immediately!!!
Keep an eye on your neighbors so we can keep you safe!
-DHS
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
This topic came up several days ago in another thread on here ... another poster pointed out that often it's not the amount one steals that gets one caught, but rather unbalanced loads.
Regardless of whether one is paying or not, it's always important to balance the load between both 120v legs ... electricians when installing / upgrading a panel will stagger breakers so that both 120v legs are tapped roughly equally (not by the number of breakers, but rather in regards to expected loads).
On a related note, it's often greed that gets people caught - the utility is definitely going to notice, and will investigate, if one's average usage substantially drops to near zero - that's often a sure sign of wire problems and/or meter being bypassed.
Ron
Does the return on bitcoin mining equal or better the return on stock in the local utility? In the US, many utility stocks yield 5%. There's always some risk of the stock going down, but computer equipment is guaranteed to depreciate.
As with any money-making scheme, "show me the numbers".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Umm - actually England (which is ruled by the Queen) has a bill of rights too, which was written a full 100 years before the US got it's Bill of Rights.
Are you related?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Read the story, most of it is about Bitcoins and how amazing and dangerous they are and all that shit we've seen so much of lately. To me, it seems like the Bitcoin heads trying to generate more interest/advertising, and evidently succeeding since /. picked it up.
Would not surprise me at all to learn it is 100% bullshit.
I think it's high time we think about extending the 2nd amendment (Right to bear arms), to include technology.
I know they're not busting in to raid a Bitcoin factory, but that doesn't mean they wont in the future.
I'm a coder, and occasionally I write ciphers. Lately I wrote a block cipher system that takes any hash algo, data stream, and a pass-phrase, and produces encrypted output via a type of Cipher Block Chaining on hash-length sized blocks (MD5=160bit, SHA1=256bit, SHA512=512bit encryption, and beyond; Bonus, any new hash comes out, implement it and bingo, stronger encryption).
I came very close to being in violation of federal law when I posted my program on my blog. Fortunately a friend told me that my program was considered extremely dangerous to the government, and that if anyone outside of the US downloaded it, I could be heavily fined and/or jailed. I immediately removed the code, and checked the server logs; Fortunately only my friend had downloaded it.
I didn't know that all strong encryption ciphers have to be registered with the US government (like firearms!? -- Strength at or above 64bit symmetric or 768 asymmetric, or 128 for elliptic curve), and that export of software that can perform encryption must be approved by the government before you put it online, or else it could be considered trafficking illegal controlled software.
I was told by some that if your code was open source, you could just fill out a form, and you were pre-approved, but I don't think that's the case anymore.
I've been tinkering with ciphers since I was 10 -- I don't think anyone outside the US got a hold of my tinker-code, but who knows? We swapped code at HAL-PC SIG's all the time...
With today's government's lack of respect for our freedoms and esp. digital privacy, I think it's time we added the right to bear technology & math, esp. cryptography to the Bill of Rights.
Hey, If I can be prosecuted for distributing my ciphers under the "munitions export restrictions" laws, then does that mean I already can assert my 2nd amendment privileges to USE MY PC TO TWIDDLE BITS? Does freedom of speech (1st amendment) not give me the right to post some byte-code hex to my blog? (Looks like it's illegal to sell your Beowulf Cluster on Ebay too.)
There was even the case of a man who tapped into high voltage power lines without a physical connection. And they tracked him down and prosecuted him. But my understanding was that he was doing that for quite a while.
Learn to love Alaska
The first four paragraphs are nothing but gushing about bitcoins, no mention of the bust at all. The 5ths finally makes a mention of the power thing and then there's a bit of talk about the alleged bust from the wonderfully reliable source of "IRC". Then more shit about how bitcoin is a cool "P2P" currency then a video about bitcoins.
The fucking thing is a bitcoin promotion and just more of the "Oh look at how awesome and scary it is!" crap. I have serious doubts the event in question ever happened. This is astroturfing.
Any journalist will tell you that you lead with the most important stuff. Each subsequent paragraph is less likely to be read. So if this was about rights and a real event the first paragraph would go more along the lines of:
"What was supposed to be a bust for a pot growing operation went wrong for police when the discovered a house with nothing but a large number of computers working overtime. Police obtained a warrant for the house of $some_guy due to energy company records showing an unusually high amount of usage, often a sign of a marijuana growing location. However no drugs were found, instead just mean computers which were engaged in a process called 'bitcoin mining."
Then maybe a paragraph about bitcoins, then one about drug ops and power usage and so on. That it starts with bitcoins and goes for 5 paragraphs tells you that the article is all about that, not the supposed rights issue.
The average price of electricity in the US for residential customers is 11 cents/kWHr".
So 93 kWHr/day works out to an average electric bill of $312 -- which is likely on the high side for a house in the south using A/C (or perhaps a house in the north with electric heat) but far from excessively high.
I imagine that this bylaw gives them the right to inspect a significant percentage their customer's houses at least once a year ... at least the larger houses, anyways.
Charging their plug-ins? AC on 24/7 in hot states? I have friends in TX that leave their AC on pretty much throughout the summer. Or the obvious answer, lots of pot growing operations.
An Ad? For what?
I would politely ask him to go away, would that be a reason to search my home?
By the way, polite would be staying the hell off my property. Never talk to the police, they will try to pin something on you. If they want to speak to all you know are your name, address and that you need a lawyer.
Now people will be growing pot inside computer cases. lol
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pc+stealth+grow+box
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Canada has a Queen of Rights?
Plus, it's dangerous to be choppng into live 200-400 amp 240V wires.
It is if you don't know what you are doing but afaict the electricity companies round here chop into live 240/415 three phase mains cables all the time to tap off new properties.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Look, I'm not going to argue on whether or not marijuana should or should not be legal. Let's just accept (for this argument) that it is, and continue on the presumption that stopping a crime is, in and of itself, a worthy goal.
/. on issues like this. But sometimes, /. gets too caught up in it's own hatred of the establishment, and starts taking irrational positions. Blindly hating anything involving the police is just as bad as blindly defending anything involving the police.
Let's also assume that "exceptionally high electric usage" has a correlation (but not causation) with said illegal activity.
There is a huge fucking difference between "getting a search warrant" and "asking some questions". Get this straight. Not every cop is a power-obsessed Nazi just waiting for the chance to oppress everyone. Most of them, surprisingly enough, are human beings, not monsters. There's laws. They enforce them. Most laws, in fact, are just laws - murdering people is wrong, robbing people is wrong, raping people is wrong, all the way down to "playing music way too loud at four in the morning and causing a disturbance" being wrong.
Knocking on someone's door and asking a few questions ("We noticed your power bill was kinda high, we were just checking to make sure you knew. You happen to be doing anything really electricity-heavy? Arc welding? Homemade tesla coils?") is pretty much justified when you have something generally suspicious. It would be like "that driver just veered rather erratically, there's a decent chance he's drunk, might want to go check".
This is, of course, predicated on police, too, following the principles of the law. Refusing to talk to police in this case should not be evidence of anything other than not liking to talk to police. If that gets used as justification to later come back with a warrant, that's not good. Don't like that. But a polite status check is arguably a good thing - it lets any misunderstandings get cleared up before anything remotely serious happens, and it would probably be enough to get some exceptionally wasteful people to start using less electricity.
Now, understand this: I do not like how the police have become in the US. Or elsewhere, actually. There's many, many cases where police are clearly and flagrantly violating laws. There are far too many judges issuing free search warrants, far too many laws being misused, and more unjust laws than should be tolerated. Normally, I side with
If this ever does become a full-on police state, I'll be one of the first to grab my rifle, fill up some molotovs, and start taking back our rights. But until then, let's be reasonable - on both sides.
That's why when you get pulled over by a cop the first thing is not to reach for you license and registration but to shut off your engine, roll up your windows and prepare to get out of your car with your license and registration. once out you lock your car. The police can't break and enter your car but if you have the windows open they are are allowed to make shit up to stick their head in the car or search. leagaly speaking if your stopped by the cops and have your window open you have forfeited your right to demand a search warrant can be more easily seen or searched. same with being asked to open the trunk of your car, you need to ask them if they have a warrant first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMjMPlXzdA&feature=related
i think that marijuana should be legal, but if marijuana is interfering with his ability to work, then that's an argument people will make against marijuana legalization. either a drug is harmless, or it isn't. not being able to hold a job while using a drug means its harmful, it means society has to pay for the guy's food and housing. society doesn't want to pay for some asshole to get high all day, why are we underwriting that lifestyle? he needs to get a job. and i'm not saying potheads can't work, you are: " lack of valuable employment."
employed, productive potheads: an argument for legalization. potheads sitting around all day unemployed supported by society: an argument for continued criminalization
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
EconTalk (a great podcast) has an interview by a real economist and a BitCoin founder: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html. Interesting listen.
You do realise the penny isn't the only currency, right?
A $100 bill does not cost more than $100 to make.
I would love to see the amortized cost, on a per-penny basis, of R&D. If it's more than a millionth of a cent per penny-year, I'd be amazed.
If a cop pulls you over and you get out of the car without being asked, prepare for a world of hurt.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
That would not be reason to search. If you suspect (or are just paranoid), let the police know that you will have a lawyer on file to argue as such should they return with a warrant that has no actual evidence.
And I'm concerned about this growing culture of "never talk to cops, they hate freedom and will pin anything they can think of or even imagine on you". Mainly because of the implication that "the organizations dedicated to protecting the people are in fact the greatest threat to such". That is not (yet) the case. There are signs we're headed there, yes, and I am concerned about that as well, but this is the county police we're talking about, not the Gestapo or the Spanish Inquisition.
Pollution of the planet we live all live on?
That alone is a reason to politely ask why the neighbor uses so much power.
No sig for the moment.
I am not sure what size an average US house is (in sq ft) but the power usage would be very dependent on the number of people living there, and the weather/climate. In summer a house in the southern US will use a lot more power to run the A/C and in the winter a house heated only by electricity here in the northern midwest will use more just to remain comfortable.
The other main usage of power for people not involved in pot farming or running a server farm would be hot water used for showers and laundry. Especially if there are more people living there and their ages. (babies can cause a lot of laundry especially for people that don't use disposable diapers.
Of course the average slashdotter living in mom's basement wouldn't use much power for washing and laundry...
If this ever does become a full-on police state, I'll be one of the first to grab my rifle, fill up some molotovs, and start taking back our rights. But until then, let's be reasonable - on both sides.
At what point do you cross that line? Suspension of habeas corpus for non-citizens? Detaining American citizens without charge? Detaining Muslim Americans as they try to legally enter America after going abroad? Spying on Americans without warrants? Using National Security Letters to avoid what little oversight still exists?
In regards to this specific case, how is en masse monitoring of everyone's electricity consumption not an abuse of power? We're not talking about a cop seeing something suspicious from the road and using that as probable cause for a search. We're talking about monitoring the records of everyone with no probable cause or warrant and then using that as the basis for a search. Granted, Canada is not subject to the same laws as the United States, but this seems pretty damn abusive no matter where you are.
They are growing the pot plants -inside- the tower machines! What, you think all that bling lighting is for show?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Just an FYI: the average house in the US uses about 930 kwh of energy per month. So, 93 kwh works out to about 3x the national average. Energy use in the US is highest in the US' South (because AC uses a lot of electricity), and we're talking about Canada here, so 93 kwh/day is probably more than 3x than average consumption for Canada.
All those abuses are federal level - many not even federal police. Guantanamo is military. NSA is intelligence (in the political sense, not the mental sense).
Yes, the federal police-like agencies (FBI, DoHS, Customs) are at the level where something needs to be done. Not quite a casus revolutionis, but definitely at the level that major, actual change needs to happen.
However, this case was local police. The worst they usually do is unfairly ticket people for speeding. (Note that I said usually - given that there's over a quarter billion people in this country, I'm sure you can cite a dozen other cases of cops being assholes, but that's statistically insignificant).
Also, even the summary states that the DEA needed a subpoena just to get the energy use records. So they were not, in any way, spying on absolutely everyone's power use. Getting a subpoena for this (since there was no active case involved) requires evidence. So they already had at least one other thing suspicious about the bitminer.
Anyone owed a debt in the US (for instance), must accept US dollars as payment. That's what the notice "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" means on dollars. The same is not true for bitcoins--I can freely refuse payment in bitcoins, and the government can do nothing about it. That's a large component of the reason why people like dollars.
Pollution? I suppose that depends on how your electricity is generated. If using a lot of power is a problem for the power companies, then they should charge more for higher usage.
Which can lead to some pretty scary situations for tourists (or immigrants) from countries where you're _expected_ to get out of the car after being pulled over.
Looks like it isnt just the USSA thats becoming a police state, but Canada as well.... With Australia getting the same way, we're gonna run out of places to emigrate to....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.
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Slashdot, seriously stop it. You just look like tools repeating garbage like this.
Go back to pretending Second Life is popular or something.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Canada has the equivalent of the 4th amendment which, at least in some ways is stronger then the American one or at least in the way our Supreme court has interpreted it is.
In this case they are not showing up with a search warrant. There is a municipal by-law that allows them to do a home inspection if you have high power consumption and if they find anything, like one neighbor who had a loose stair railing, they charge you about $5000 ispection fee. The RCMP do show up as well but stay off the property.
The by-law is currently not being enforced as so much shit has been raised about this and the town is being sued.
And yes, I live in Mission BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Ok, I must be missing something... but is the summary implying that Ohio Police and the DEA are acting on Canadian bylaws?
Not searched, a home inspection for you know, bad wiring, loose banisters (neighbor got caught with that as they used too much power running a heat lamp 24 hrs for their chickens) and signs of a grow op without a license. Just to make it interesting, the federal government does not share with the municipality who can legally grow medical marijuana. .
They do give you notice and if you refuse the inspection then they get the warrant. I live in Mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You're mixing up two different cases. The DEA is in the United States, the "we noticed you're using too much electricity, mind letting us have a look?" case is in Canada.
WRT the federal agencies, my point was that saying that there's no point questioning the actions of the police until they cross the line into blatant tyranny is a dangerous position to take. As to federal agencies not counting for abuses of police power, there we disagree. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and arrests people like a duck, I'm going to call it a duck. Pointing out systemic abuses in local agencies is more difficult because each state (and even each municipality) have different laws. But if you want to go down that road, the new Arizona-style immigration laws springing up across the nation are certainly worrisome, especially if the don't get slapped down by the federal courts.
What this tells me is that high electricity usage is no longer probable cause.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They started caring when every inspection began to net them 5000 dollars. If I could get $5000 for knocking on doors and harrassing people, no one from here to Pacoima would be safe...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
How does the electricity to bitcoin ration pay off? Anyone knows?
Depends. If your mom is paying for the electricity, while you're collecting the bitcoin, then the ratio for you is pretty good. For your mom, it's not so good, but she's presumably inured to suffering with a geek/nerd/dweeb cluttering up the basement.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Homer Simpson: Okay, boy. This is where all the hard work, sacrifice, and painful scaldings pay off.
Employee: Four pounds of grease... that comes to... sixty-three cents.
Homer Simpson: Woo-hoo!
Bart Simpson: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer Simpson: Yeah, but your mom paid for that!
Bart Simpson: But doesn't she get her money from you?
Homer Simpson: And I get my money from grease! What's the problem?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Do you realize that the "real" currencies in your pocket and in your bank are all equally a "scam"? They are all abstract fictions that we use as tokens to avoid the unwieldiness of direct barter.
Ostensibly bitcoin is less of a scam than the currency that you seem to think is "real". Bitcoin is tied to a scarce computational resource which prevents its supply being manipulated, unlike the money that governments can print arbitrarily. Ever since "real" currency left the gold standard, its actual value has been evaporating steadily, and Fractional Reserve Banking has turned over 90% of its original value into pure debt. If you're looking for unsound currency practices, look there.
There is nothing "real" about the dollar as a currency except the fact that people are willing to give you goods in exchange for them. And that reality happens to be exactly the same with bitcoin.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And I'm concerned about this growing culture of "never talk to cops, they hate freedom and will pin anything they can think of or even imagine on you". Mainly because of the implication that "the organizations dedicated to protecting the people are in fact the greatest threat to such"
Bullshit. When they pull people over the first thing they do is ask "Do you know why I pulled you over?". That question is asked just to get you to admit to another thing they can ticket you for or use to arrest you. If you are unlucky enough to be interacting with them in another way it gets worse. For anther fun example in NYC police will encourage suspects to hand over marijuana in public with promises that they will ignore this minor fine-able offence. The reality is they are inducing these suspects to commit the crime of displaying these drugs in public, moving a non-crime fine only offence into misdemeanor territory. They are actively encouraging the commission of actual crimes so they can make more arrests.
The sooner this notion of "using too much power, must be doing something wrong, send in cop thugs" is eradicated, the better.
FC Closer
If I remember right, part of his being caught was that he boasted about it.
But yeah, he set up a sort of air-gap transfer coil in his barn.
I don't read AC A human right
Do you expect the pot growers to know what they're doing that well? Or have the proper tools?
I don't read AC A human right
Thanks Anonymous dad!
Side note: from wikipedia --
If you're going to go out of your way to call somebody an idiot for being wrong, the least you could do is make sure they're actually wrong, and ideally make sure they're wrong about something that actually matters (if your beef is Hr vs hr).
Do you correct people for going "6 sec" rather than "6 s" too? I'll bet you're great fun at parties!
Yes, but if you're singling out the outliers for police involvement, you should probably look for people several standard deviations away from the average. I don't know what the standard deviation would be in this case, but I'll bet a significant percentage of the households in Canada use over 930 kWhr per month. Especially the wealthy with larger houses.
> Fair enough, but what is it backed by?
Mathematics.
Because that's a lot of ongoing expense to get a bunch of bitcoins.