WoodScientist

I mean, what exactly do you want? OP specifically asked how people actually go about hiring a hitman. I assume OP is not a mobster. Unless you have those kind of connections, there is zero chance you're going to find some person you don't already know who will be willing to kill for you in exchange for money. OP specifically asked about hiring a hitman. And that fundamentally implies that there are people out there that offer this kind of service that you can just purchase if you have the cash. And the truth is that no, that business fundamentally just does not exist. Just because some people in certain very specific contexts have killed another person for money does not mean that there is a way for the average person to find a killer-for-hire. That simply isn't a service that you can go out and buy.

Worse still, their MO is incredibly transparent. They want to establish a "buffer zone" in southern Lebanon, but Israel's "buffer zones" are just a way of slowly expanding their borders. The problem is that a buffer zone like the DMZ only works as a buffer zone if you keep your own civilian population from moving in to that buffer zone! Israel lets it's 'settlers' move into what are supposed to be buffer zones like the DMZ. After awhile, the settlements are retroactively recognized and made legal. Now you have civilians in ordinary communities living in what was supposed to be a buffer zone. And since they're right on the border again, they're now in range of attack from the angry people whose former land they are now living on.

"Buffer zones" only work if you arrest and/or shoot any of your own people who try and move into them. Otherwise, they're just a slow-motion conquest via bureaucracy. The same thing has happened in the West Bank. Israel takes Palestinian land around Israeli settlements, declaring them to be security buffer zones. Then they let their settlers move in there. Suddenly they have vulnerable civilians within easy reach of angry Palestinians, so they need to establish a new buffer zone. Rinse and repeat.

It's slow-motion ethnic cleansing via zoning code and bureaucracy.

My understand is, yes. They just broadcast the message on all towers in an area. The pager may be a simple one-way passive device. Or, it might have just enough broadcast ability to periodically ping a cell tower.

Pagers still have some specialized use cases. One of these is hospitals. A lot of hospitals still use them. Hospitals, as structures, are designed to the most strictest structural codes of any kind of building. If an earthquake or hurricane happens, you want your hospital to be the LAST building that ever falls over. So hospitals tend to be big, heavy structures that are massively over reinforced, way beyond what commercial or residential buildings would be. If you look at hospitals, they just look different as buildings. They're hulking leviathans of structures.

While this makes them damn-near indestructible, it also can make it really difficult to get cell signals inside of them. Cell companies don't like wasting power broadcasting signals strong enough to penetrate bunkers. They size their towers so their signals can penetrate most common buildings.

But "penetrate" is a complex term. If you only need to transmit a simple message, a lower-quality signal is often fine. Think of the difference between talking and shouting. In a noisy environment with lots of interference, we automatically switch to a form of verbal communication, shouting, that can overcome a lot of noise, but has a low information density. You can shout to be heard over a din, but you're not going to be able to communicate subtle emotional context by minute tones in your voice.

Alternately, you can think of it that a simple message can easily be repeated many times. Want to make sure a simple text message gets through? Broadcast that thing 10,000 times in a row. That 10,000 times will still represent a fraction of a second of the data volume needed for a video call. But the pager can piece together the message from the few hundred fragments of messages that manage to get through.

I'm sure the actual network protocols are complicated, but I'm just talking about general communication here. The key is that for many reasons, you can often trade communications reliability for communications complexity. A video call will only work in perfect conditions. A simple page will penetrate thick concrete walls and work in the worst of weather events.

Oh, and often hospitals will actually install their own pager repeaters or independent pager systems right on site. In that case, the network doesn't need to worry at all about figuring out what tower to send the signal to.

Thankfully, the true morons are a very small portion of the electorate. I don't mean that anyone that is politically disengaged is a moron. If you just don't care about who leads you, figure each side is as good as the other, and just want to focus on your own life and troubles, fine. The struggle is real, and I don't blame someone who is working three jobs trying to keep a roof over their heads from simply deciding to avoid politics entirely. They don't have the mental cycles to spare, and they just can't. If you want to avoid all political news, put zero thought into the candidates, and just avoid avoid the electoral process entirely, fine. The right to vote is a right, not an obligation. I don't ascribe to that worldview, but I get it.

In contrast, the true electoral moron is someone who is completely politically disengaged, puts zero effort or critical thought into the state of contemporary politics, but still stubbornly insists on showing up to vote anyway. They don't have a damn idea who they should vote for, but damnit, they sure are as hell are going to vote anyway. It's the Dunning-Kruger voter.

But again, thankfully this is a very small portion of the people that show up on election day. There's maybe 30-40% of the whole population that's just decided to write off politics entirely. I don't personally understand that worldview. I can't imagine not caring about what leaders we elect and how it affects our lives. But, oh well, if someone chooses to opt out of the political system and accept whatever the rest of us decide, so be it. But while I don't understand it, I am at least thankful that most of these people have enough self-awareness to realize that if they don't give a damn about the outcome of elections, that they really shouldn't bother voting in the first place. The vast majority of people who are completely disengaged with candidates and the issues are simply not going to vote at all. It takes a rather rare breed of moron to completely divorce yourself from political thought and reality, while also deciding to still bother to register, drive to the polls, and fill out a ballot.

And also, I take solace in the fact that if their vote really is a random number generator, then they will have little actual effect on the election. Both candidates should get about an equal share of the true moron vote, so their overall effect is a wash.

I'm overall not that concerned about the true undecided morons. I'm far more concerned about those who have taken a look at both candidates and actually fully embrace and love the policies proposed by Trump and Vance. The type who are not just unaware, but fully onboard with their most abominable policies. I'm far more concerned that there's a sizable portion of the population that is entirely in favor of the idea of creating a Christofascist white ethnostate. Trump and Vance have the support they do because there is a sizable portion of the electorate that is fully aware of everything they have done and want to do, and to them? It sounds like a fantastic idea. THAT is what really keeps me up at night. The true morons are mostly harmless idiots. The truly evil ones are those I'm really concerned about.

It costs me 4$ a week in fuel to drive to work. A monthly transit pass is more than 100$. Even with an honored citizen pass which is just under 30$, it’s still cheaper for me to drive to work.

You are committing a mortal sin of personal finance - equating vehicle cost with gas cost. It is this precise mistake that results in countless American families literally driving themselves into poverty. The cost of gas is only a small fraction of the per-mile cost to operate a vehicle. This is one of the single biggest mistakes people mistake when assessing their personal finances, deciding on how far to live from work, deciding whether to drive or fly for a trip, etc.

All of the costs of vehicle ownership scale with mileage. Cars depreciate faster the more you drive them. The more you drive, the greater the chance of an accident and a resultingly higher insurance premium. Every mile you drive means more maintenance and burns through ever-more of your car's finite lifespan. Gas is the only one of these you feel so directly, but ALL of the costs of operating a vehicle scale with mileage.

It is difficult to calculate the true total cost of vehicle ownership, but a good approximation is the IRS mileage rate, which is 67 cents per mile. This is the IRS's best figuring of the average cost to operate a vehicle, averaged across the US vehicle fleet. Obviously it will be higher or lower depending on the precise vehicle you drive, how reckless a driver you are, etc.

But let's be generous and assume an average mpg efficiency of 35 mpg. If gas costs $3.50/gallon, then gas costs you about 10 cents per mile. Averaged across the US vehicle fleet, gas costs less 20% of the actual cost of operating a vehicle. A car is a big expensive asset that you burn through just like you burn through gas. Every mile you drive a vehicle gets it one mile closer to the junkyard.

This is what creates the illusion of driving being cheaper than it actually is. I mean, just think about it from first principles. A bigger vehicle like a train or bus is obviously going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to move a person the same distance. It's simple economies of scale. When you buy a transit pass, you are paying for your share of the full cost of operating a bus or train, not just the fuel cost.

If you want to calculate the true cost of operating a vehicle, a rough method is to take what you spend on gas and multiply by 5. That's a lot closer to your true cost per mile of owning and operating a vehicle.

Let's look at these undecided voters:

Brady, 30, Wisconsin, leaning Trump - I don’t want to go through another four years of a Trump presidency.” "But his vote is largely contingent on his personal financial situation, and he noted, “Things have gotten more expensive.” He cites inflation, but he is completely unaware of the relation between the pandemic and the supply chain disruptions that caused that inflation. He doesn't understand that this inflation was caused by the pandemic, and what Trump did to exacerbate that pandemic. He just blindly maps economy to president in office and puts zero thought into whose policies actually do what.

Lee, 59, Wisconsin, leaning Trump - "Lee did not like how ABC handled the debate, specifically the fact-checking. He felt the moderators “teamed up on Trump.”"

"He felt Harris did almost too well, saying it was “almost like rehearsed.” But he said he “never got any message from Harris” and said she “skirted issues,” including the Biden administration’s “inability to stop the flow of migrants” and the economy.

“Trump stuck his foot in his mouth multiple times,” Lee said, though." "He voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent from Vermont, in the 2016 primary and is now leaning toward Trump, independent Cornel West or the Green Party’s Jill Stein (not from an environmental standpoint, however, because he thinks the Green New Deal “went too far”)."

This man has no idea what he wants in a leader and is just voting on vibes.

Woman, declined to give name, 68, Oregon, undecided "Trump, on the other hand, she said, it was like “something was in his water,” and he wasn’t his usual self."

">She said this of her ideal ticket: “If RFK [Jr.] was on the ticket with [former Rep.] Tulsi Gabbard [of Hawaii], it would have been a slam dunk for me.”"

This woman has not been paying attention. Trump was his usual self. This is simply how he always is when the media isn't sane-washing him.

These are not serious people. They are low-information voters who do not have any consistent policy positions and vote based entirely on vibes. They don't take serious looks at the capabilities, policies, and worldviews of the candidates. Their political compass is a random number generator.

This election will not be decided by "undecided voters." Anyone who is still undecided at this point is simply unreachable. You had four years to actually live in a country governed by Trump, and four where Harris was the VP. You saw what kind of policies each would enact. You don't need to take their word for it, you can assess each candidate's actual record.

I'm sorry, but in short, the only people undecided at this point are complete morons. You could try to convince them to vote for your candidate, but they're just as likely to change their mind completely on the way to the voting booth because of the shape of a cloud they saw in the sky on the way there. They're random number generators. They don't have any capability to actually assess issues or candidate capacity. They're the kind of people who are only allowed to vote because trying to screen out the true morons from the voter rolls would cause more problems than it's worth.

No. This election will not be decided by the 1-2% of people who are actually undecided at this point. First, most of the 5-6% who claim to be undecided actually aren't. They've already made up their minds deep down, but they just want to pretend to themselves that they're enlightened centrists who are withholding judgment until the very last minute. Those who are truly undecided at this point are simply morons. They cannot be reached in any meaningful way, as their vote is effectively a coin flip. The real world doesn't affect their judgment process, and they will just flip a coin on the way to the voting booth.

This election will instead be driven by turnout. Everyone except the true morons already knows how they are going to vote. The real battle for candidates isn't to persuade people to support them. Instead, the real battle is to persuade people who support them, but maybe don't support them enough to bother getting off their ass and going to the polls to vote. The real battle is for the lazy voter, not the stupid voter.

Sure. But when I say, "professional hit man" I don't mean a gangster, a mobster, or a spy. I'm referring to more of the professional hitman as seen in popular culture: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProfessionalKiller

Think the trope in fiction. Someone wants someone killed. They find the shadiest person they can, like their tweaker cousin's dealer. They then ask this shady person if they can put them in touch with a contract killer. Through the grapevine, they meet with someone who is literally a professional killer-for-hire. The usual trope is some extremely well-put together gentleman; he probably wears a 3-piece suit and black leather gloves. He probably views killing as an art form. He takes professional pride in it. He's probably obsessed with expensive firearms and their various accessories, and he personally owns an arsenal big enough to take down the government of a modestly-sized city. Killing is his passion; he only charges at all because he has bills to pay like anyone else. The usual trope is to imagine someone as professional and presentable as the most formal lawyer or doctor you can imagine, except their business is killing.

While the real world version of a professional killer wouldn't be so extreme, the core should remain if they are to be a professional killer. They don't need to dress in a suit, have a private arsenal of rare expensive weapons, and speak in a British accent. But they should still meet the minimum definition of professional to count as a professional hitman. A "professional" is generally someone who offers a specific service to the public as their primary occupation. Lots of people know first aid. But only a doctor or a nurse makes medical care their actual profession. Most people can replace a light switch, but that doesn't make them a professional electrician. A professional usually sees some higher purpose or artfulness in their services and seeks to provide them to all that can afford them.

Sammy Gravano was a mobster, a terrible human being, and a ruthless killer. But he was a mobster first, and a killer second. He committed numerous other crimes on behalf of the mob, not just murder. And he didn't commit murders that weren't at the behest of the mob. You, as a random stranger, couldn't just knock on his door, hand him a bag full of cash, and get him to off someone for you. In fact, he would probably kill YOU just for trying.

Per OP's original question, Sammy Gravano does not count. There was no way for some random person back during his day to find him, hire him, and have him take someone out for them. He was a mobster, not a professional hitman-for-hire. And that is a crucial distinction.

Nah, I know how to really piss 'em off. The definition of 'white' has always been cultural, not genetic. Look at how the Irish or Italians weren't considered 'white' for many generations. So I propose we modify the definition of 'white' to deliberately exclude people with strong Southern heritage. Maybe we can justify it with racist psuedoscience. "No one whose ancestors who have lived in such a hot and humid area for so long can really be white." If you have ancestors who have lived in the American South for more than three generations, you are now a person of color by default, regardless of your skin color. You no longer get to live in the 'white' club. If the Irish can be excluded from being white, so can the Southerners. Only people whose ancestors fought on the right side of the Civil War will get to call themselves white from here on out. We'll even add a question to the Census that asks how long long your ancestors have lived below the Mason-Dixon line. Anyone who says three or more generations will automatically be classified as non-white, regardless of what they list their stated race as. We'll take the thing from them that they value above everything else, their very whiteness.

Burn the witch!

Professional hitmen don't actually exist. It's a 'business' that you can't possibly advertise for and has no way for the customer to assess the quality of the provider in advance. Sometimes killings do happen in exchange for money, but they don't involve someone that is a professional killer that works with the public as their primary source of income. It just doesn't exist. But there are some cases where killing does happen for money.

Sometimes two people will conspire to kill another for profit. Maybe one spouse hates another spouse. They ask a close friend or relative to kill their spouse, and they offer a portion of proceeds from life insurance as a payment for their risk and trouble. Or they're cheating on their spouse with someone else, stand to inherit all their spouses assets upon their demise, and promise to marry the person they're cheating with, thus sharing all the assets with them. In this case, it's not a stranger being hired; the killer has known the person 'hiring' them for decades.

Some killings-for-hire are gang related. A gang wants someone killed. They don't hire a random person to do it. They get one of their own members, who they've already known for many years and is a full member of the gang. In compensation for the huge risk the person is taking on to perform the deed, they offer a large sum of cash. Again, an unvetted stranger is not being hired. This person has likely already committed numerous crimes on the gang's behalf in the past. When you've already committed enough crimes on a gang's behalf to get you years in prison, a murder isn't such a stretch.

Some killings-for-hire are done at the behest of nation-states. Spycraft. The KGB or CIA hire someone in a foreign country who is already sympathetic to them to kill someone the intelligence agency wants taken out. The intelligence agency doesn't just select anyone, they go through a long vetting process just like they would any other intelligence asset. In fact, the potential assassin has likely already provided good intelligence and assistance to them for years, already risked extensive jail time or worse. If you're a US military member that's been providing intelligence to the KGB for a decade and have already participated in sabotage efforts, you're already looking at treason charges if you're caught. Offing someone for the KGB isn't such an escalation. And when a nation-state hires someone to perform a killing, they also offer the person a plausible way out. The CIA can hire someone to kill someone for them in a foreign country and hand that person a US passport along with a few million safely in a US bank account in their name. Hell, they can make sure the assassin's family has been given US citizenship and is already in the US before the deed is done. The CIA assassin can perform the killing, and as long as they can get to US or friendly territory before the foreign cops catch up with them, they'll be completely free and clear. And regardless, their family will already be set for life in the US.

These are the kinds of scenarios where killings actually do occur in exchange for money. No one hires someone to kill another that they haven't heavily vetted. If a random civilian is going to hire someone else to kill someone, they won't hire a professional assassin. They'll hire their brother or their lover. Otherwise contract killings only are done by organizations like gangs or national intelligence agencies, and they only hire people to do so that they've worked with for years and who has already committed numerous less severe crimes for them in the past.

In short, there really is no such thing as a professional assassin that serves the general public. Maybe if you are the spouse of a high-level violent gang member, you might be able to convince them to use the gang's resources to pay one of their trusted members to kill someone in exchange for cash. But if you're just a random average person? Forget it. There simply are not professional contract killers hiding in the shadows that a random civilian can hire if they have the cash. Anyone claiming to be that is simply a cop. Any person who DID try to start a career like this would be caught very quickly and have a very, very short career.

Are you high?

Wouldn't that make sense from an evolutionary perspective? Through human history and prehistory, think of all the common tasks people did on a day-to-day basis. I would say the vast majority of them would involve looking at things below eye level. With the exception of picking fruit from trees or hunting birds in flight, most of the tasks we evolved to do involved looking at things below eye level. Most work with crops involves looking at things below the height of your eyes. Tracking prey involves looking at things below the line of the horizon or tracks on the ground. Crafting objects involves working with your hands and looking down at your work. Raising children involves looking down at their shorter stature.

Why wouldn't our back and neck structure be evolutionarily optimized to look at things a bit below eye level?