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A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

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Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#141

Post by mirimir »

cf498 wrote: post #91
lewis500 wrote: post #55

Only as I get older do I realize how incredibly bad elements of law enforcement in the US can be, and legally so. Few cops and agents are bad, but it is a system with little filtering, personally or institutionally, of the bad elements. Civil asset forfeiture is overwhelmingly unpopular, but when states try to reform it the law enforcement groups rally around it mightily. Essentially they want the right to steal mone…

As an outside perspective, how do you quantify, that only "Few cops and agents are bad". If your job contains robbing people, I would rationally word it the other way around. Hopefully there are quite a few cops who dont follow the rules and subvert the system of organized theft. But if you take policies like civil forfeiture or for example police union cards for family members this sounds like organized crime to qui…

Well, it's criminal, and it's organized.

Classic quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#142

Post by megous »

the_dave_santos wrote: post #120
jbob2000 wrote: post #89

Why would you risk carrying around that kind of money? What’s wrong with doing a wire transfer? Or just writing yourself a cheque? Failing to see an honest use case for moving that much cash by hand.

Read the news, it's explained there fully. According to them in Albania; wiring has high fee, bad rate, and possibility to be intercepted due to corrupt system.

Well I totaly understand why he would do this. I once made an international wire transfer, because there was no other option, and the banks stripped me of 7% of the funds on fees, and completely retarded currency exhange rate.

For this guy, that would be a year of savings, which is not insignificant.

Also banks will not commit to any specific total fee amount. If you read their terms and conditions, they say that money could go via unspecified number of intermediaries, where any one of them can take a part of the money up to 5% each or some such.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#144

Post by ra1n85 »

orf wrote: post #119
ra1n85 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite happy my government takes measures to assure a certain level of personal safety, both physical and psychological. All except for terrorist attacks, which are considered part and parcel of living in a big city[1] like London (but strangely not Tokyo which has 4-5m more citizens!). [1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-york-explosion-sad...

Shame on you for spreading that fake news. People on HN should know better and be held to a higher standard. > Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job. We must never accept terrorists being successful, we must never accept that terrorists can destroy our life or destroy the…

>Shame on you for spreading that fake news.

That's quite the argument!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I03IKr2TWDM

"It's part and parcel of living in a great global city..."

>Seems sensible to me.

You keep using that word...

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#145

Post by retox »

orf wrote: post #119
ra1n85 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite happy my government takes measures to assure a certain level of personal safety, both physical and psychological. All except for terrorist attacks, which are considered part and parcel of living in a big city[1] like London (but strangely not Tokyo which has 4-5m more citizens!). [1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-york-explosion-sad...

Shame on you for spreading that fake news. People on HN should know better and be held to a higher standard. > Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job. We must never accept terrorists being successful, we must never accept that terrorists can destroy our life or destroy the…

>Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things,

Living in a city, you must be prepared for terror.

This is not how things should be.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#146

Post by ra1n85 »

orf wrote: post #109
ra1n85 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "media" was gagged - completely unable to speak about the arrest, sentencing, and secret imprisoning of one of your fellow citizens.

Until that was immediately challenged and sensibly lifted 3 days later. It was only introduced as an extension to the already existing reporting restrictions on the trial that he broke. The judge quite sensibly didn't want that case, sure to get lots of attention, to rub off on his ongoing court case which has existing reporting restrictions . I'm also sure America could teach us a lot about gag orders though. Stick…

>Until that was immediately challenged and sensibly lifted 3 days later.

After he was sentenced and in jail.

Love the coarse metric of British "sensibility"! Sounds like we need a "sensibility spectrum" to measure this all against. Would really love to stack my freedom and property against that sturdy and immutable post of justice!

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#147

Post by stordoff »

jbob2000 wrote: post #89

Why would you risk carrying around that kind of money? What’s wrong with doing a wire transfer? Or just writing yourself a cheque? Failing to see an honest use case for moving that much cash by hand.

Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean you can assume it is dishonest. Moving money IS an honest use case.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#148

Post by DenisM »

Justice Thomas indicated [1] his severe disapproval of civil forfeiture and interest in invalidating it should a good case present itself, and so it seems that such case just turned up. I'm waiting for the supreme court case with eager anticipation.

Last time there was a potentially suitable case the victim's lawyer made a mistake of not raising the constitutional grounds (4th amendment) during the initial trial, and this formality made it impossible to mount a good appeal.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#149

Post by Turing_Machine »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #127
woolvalley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go live in the USA, and you'll see the multiple ways it's more broken than Canada. Many other friends who have moved over from other developed countries collaborate the experience. I'm in the bay area, maybe it's just a special kind of broken that you don't see in other places in the USA, but things like flint, michigan also exist in the USA.

Canadians as a whole apparently disagree. There are about ~700,000 Americans living in Canada, and also about ~700,000 Canadians living in the U.S. (see links below) However, the U.S. population is more than 8x that of Canada. That means that on a proportional basis, Canadians are about 8x more likely to move to the U.S. than Americans are to move to Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_St…

Those links offer some other interesting comparisons.

There are about 700,000 U.K. citizens living in the U.S., and only about 160,000 U.S. citizens living in the U.K. The populations are about 63 million and 320 million, respectively. On a proportional basis, one would expect to see 5x more Americans living in the U.K., but in fact, there are 4x more U.K. citizens living in the U.S.

Similar ratios apply for other countries. Germany has 1/4 the population of the U.S., but there are 5 times as many Germans living in the U.S. as there are Americans living in Germany.

Voting with your feet never lies.

Re: A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it

#150

Post by dssu »

lewis500 wrote: post #55

Only as I get older do I realize how incredibly bad elements of law enforcement in the US can be, and legally so. Few cops and agents are bad, but it is a system with little filtering, personally or institutionally, of the bad elements. Civil asset forfeiture is overwhelmingly unpopular, but when states try to reform it the law enforcement groups rally around it mightily. Essentially they want the right to steal mone…

I found this interesting article from Pew Research on how the perspective of the public sharply differs from how the police perceive the current state of affairs.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-views-publi...

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