Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zero Rupee Note

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 241 posts

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#71

Post by throwmex »

> One autorick-shaw driver was pulled over by a policeman in the middle of the night who said he could go if he was "taken care of". The driver gave him the note instead. The policeman was shocked but smiled and let him go.

Too good to be true.

On another note, what people usually do (when they are asked a bribe) is to notify the vigilance officer. The vigilance department provides marked original currency notes powdered with Phenolphthalein. Once the official accepts the bribe, the vigilance enters the office and arrests the official who took the bribe red handed (literally). But there are ways to circumvent this by depositing the bribe indirectly to the guy(proxy) who sells tea outside the govt. office from whom the govt official later collects it from.

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#72

Post by trazire »

mrep wrote: post #62
cardiffspaceman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA the bribe revenue would not be tax-exempt. Failing to pay tax on it would be another infraction.

And? INAL but I believe taking bribes is worse legally than not paying taxes so if you are willing to do the former, then why does the latter really matter? If you are going to take bribes, you are obviously not going to report it for fear of that second infraction because the first one would be worse and thus you wouldn't take the bribe in the first place if the latter infraction scared you.

It's kind of an "on paper" crime, a la Al Capone. You'll get caught quicker if you have a manual audit after paying bribes. The IRS keeps your returns private, for the most part, and if you don't pay you could have 10 years tacked on.

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#73

Post by smnrchrds »

aatharuv wrote: post #4
aaronharnly wrote: post #3

Zero-currency notes have been generated for most of the world: http://zerocurrency.org/

The website hasn't been updated for at least 2 years though. (Under America, it still lists Barack Obama as the President.

It still has the pre-1979 revolution bank notes for Iran. Not only has it not been in circulation or considered legal tender for decades, but also because of the inflation, the value of the note depicted is laughably low—like less than half a cent.

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#74

Post by tantalor »

CoryG89 wrote: post #37
Piskvorrr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This usually hinges on intent. The most common money-exchange scam is exactly this: the mark receives a stack of one-sided copies instead of actual currency, and the perp runs away before the mark notices. People have gone to prison for this.

Someone has gone to prison for trying to pass off one-sided copies of actual currency? Seems pretty unlikely to me. Would be interested in reading about an actual case of this happening.

> Seems pretty unlikely

Why? The example from Piskvorrr is textbook violation of 18 U.S.C. 473: (paraphrasing here) Handing out fake money with the intent that it believed to be real is a crime.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/473

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#75

Post by wongarsu »

geomark wrote: post #44
vbezhenar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Policemen are getting pretty low wages. But there are always a lot of people who want to work there, because they can get bribes. And they actually paying percentage of those bribes to their higher-ups and so on, so it's like a pyramid. And a lot of people want things to stay that way. Policemen are getting good income. Their masters are getting huge income. Ordinary people can pay much less to policeman, than t…

That's a very accurate description of how it is where I live. But at the end you call it a terrible win-win for everyone. If it's a win-win for everyone how can it also be terrible?

It makes some laws impossible to enforce. Why even make enviromental regulations when everyone will just bribe their way out of them?

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#76

Post by weberc2 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #65
Gibbon1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've no way of validating this but I've read that tipping in the US was originally a way for patrons to make sure that the server got paid. During the great depression people were often so desperate for work they would be willing to work for free in the hopes that employers would hire them. (This is still a thing in Journalism). Employers would exploit that. Patrons fought back by tipping workers directly. In the US…

Tipping originated a long time ago, but grew popular in the USA as a way to avoid paying newly freed slaves the same as non African Americans for work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dar... http://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants...

I'm pretty opposed to tipping as a practice, or at least the reduced minimum wage for tipped positions, but I was expecting more from those articles. If you strip away the appeals to identity politics they are much less interesting or compelling. The WP article basically goes away save for a handful of cherrypicked sources. The Time article retains some vague handwaving about how many restaurant workers were former slaves around the time tipping caught on--how do they fail to draw a clear connection to racism in a time when overt racism was a point of pride?

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#77

Post by aravindet »

sgustard wrote: post #41
oconnor663 wrote: post #32

I wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much l…

"Indian citizens pay approximately £3 billion (about $4.9 billion) in bribes each year." So with a million government/bribe-able officials in the country, that's $4900 a person, easily a doubling of salary.

There are FAR more than a million bribeable government workers in India. According to the ILO there were 55 million public sector employees in 2014. [1]

It isn't clear what percentage of them work in jobs that involve interaction with the public / businesses (and are therefore bribeable), but I would guess 50%, not 2%.

There are quite a few other factors to this calculation, though.

Quite often, bribe receivers pay a portion to their managers (who aren't directly bribeable but make hiring and promotion decisions). This happens in property registration offices for instance.

Also, not everyone bribeable actually takes bribes. There's a significant number that don't. For instance many postal workers and doctors don't take bribes.

Finally, bribes are very unequally distributed. A minister might get paid $100m, and bribes would basically form 100% of their income.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_...

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#78

Post by weberc2 »

nostromo wrote: post #69
stevenwoo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tipping originated a long time ago, but grew popular in the USA as a way to avoid paying newly freed slaves the same as non African Americans for work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dar... http://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants...

That might be true, but those articles are using a restaurant employees advocacy group as their only source. And beyond that one person's conjecture, there isn't much evidence that it's actually true.

I agree. If tipping really came to prominence during that time period, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had a racist history. But given that no one at the time hid their racism, I'm surprised that neither article could manage to make a clear connection.

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#79

Post by u801e »

amingilani wrote: post #31
aaronharnly wrote: post #3

Zero-currency notes have been generated for most of the world: http://zerocurrency.org/

The Pakistani ten rupee note's parody, while current, is half done. It reads ۱۰ which is 10 in Urdu, and literally says "ten rupees" in Urdu on the top. I'm assuming it was done by an English speaking individual that didn't know how to do it right. I'd love to contribute.

> and literally says "ten rupees" in Urdu on the top.

Are you saying that they literally spell the word ten in Urdu script rather than dus (Urdu for 10)?

Re: Zero Rupee Note

#80

Post by jdsully »

vbezhenar wrote: post #60
oconnor663 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy. It does make it sound like there's a bribery-free equilibrium really close by though. Like imagine all of these things happened as part of a single reform: - Policeman and management salaries go up. - Fines go down. - Taxes go up. - Anti-bribery enforcement goes way up. The idea would be to acknowledge that regardless of the br…

People don't respect police, so when government would want to massively increase their salaries, people would protest against it. Fines go down is a good thing for sure, but it'll reduce amount of money going to local budgets, so people in government will protest against it (because they'll need to find money to replace those from reduced fines). Taxes go up: nobody likes it. Anti-bribery goes way up: when everyone's…

> Fines go down is a good thing for sure, but it'll reduce amount of money going to local budgets

If it increases compliance then the effective revenue might actually go up.

Post reply on HN