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And the Four Loko black market begins. Police do a sting operation and women face up to three years in jail.

Black-market cigarettes are costing many states hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost tax revenue. And the lucrative, illicit trade is attracting violent criminal gangs that can be lethally ruthless.

China has a almost total lack of copyright or patent enforcement, and now it is allowing the software market to grow and advance faster than in the western world. It is interesting how the freedom of ideas will always surpass any controls.

With cigarette prices up and the number of smoke-friendly places down, the black market for loosies is now thriving on the streets. Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. “The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much,” Mr. Warner said.

Judge: Landlords must allow pot dispensaries, and FEDs can then confiscate property. Is this a backdoor way to get eminent domain? Is this "legal"? County courts offer various results, City of Oakland to go against FEDs saying to close it "would create a public safety problem by encouraging a black market for marijuana." Confusion abounds.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Judge-Landlords-can-t-stop-pot-sal...

For as long as there have been laws, there have been black markets to sell whatever those laws prohibit -- drugs, guns, whatever Han Solo was shipping on behalf of Jabba during his smuggler days. But not every law is as clear-cut as "machine guns and heroin are bad," and not every black market item is as menacing as those. In fact, you'd be utterly baffled to see what's getting traded in the shadows these days, considering it includes things like ...

Say goodbye to China's "export economy" paradigm. Perhaps this finally explains where all the excess liquidity has gone: with China now not exporting to the US consumer, it has instead refocused on its own "middle" class.

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