231–240 of 331 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US quarters cannot be picked up by magnets.
American coin mechanisms in vending machines and arcade games have magnets to filter out Canadian quarters.
A coin drops at a known speed and the right coin will get pulled by the right amount by a magnet or get rejected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You don't see too many banks collapsing, don't you? When it happens, its a big deal like with the SVB earlier last year. "Moderating risk" = depending on the US federal government bail you out? There really is no need for the charade of banks now that electronic databases are very solid technology. Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account of money is surely reproducible by the federal government at ve…
>There really is no need for the charade of banks now that electronic databases are very solid technology. Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account of money is surely reproducible by the federal government at very little cost (maybe even lower cost due to not needing FDIC and all that infrastructure) without having to pay a middleman. Banks' job isn't just keeping money safe and doing transactions. It…
I am not seeing the necessity of the federal government backstop to these businesses.
M: Yeah... they did it in Superman III.
P: Right.
M: What a good movie, actually. And then a bunch of hackers did it in the 70s as well and one of 'em got busted.
P: Well, so they check for this now.
M: No, here's the thing. Initech's so backed up with all the software we're updating for the year 2000, they'd never notice.
P: You're right. And even if they wanted to, they couldn't check all that code.
M: Thumbs up their asses. Thumbs up their asses.
P: So, Michael, what's to stop you from doing this?
M: It's not worth the risk, I got a good job.
P: What if you *didn't* have a good job?
Edit: All of the publicly available scripts and quotes were wrong. Checked the original source. ;@]
Skimming from public transit is an old trick. There was case like this in Boston about 15 years ago that came to light as they were switching away from tokens to Charlie Cards. It was an MBTA mechanic. IIRC he was caught because it looked strange that someone kept showing up with bags of tokens to exchange for cash at one of the stations. Even with the new card system, someone figured out a scheme to steal: https://w…
That’s nothing, in Canada we had a guy steal half point (200g) gold nuggets… internally… from the Mint. Only got caught when he deposited lots of big cheques from a gold coin shop at his bank and they learned he worked at the Mint. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/royal-canadian-mint-emp... In 2015, this fellow was making $55k/yr, contrast to the guy in the article making $31k in 1981.
As an American, the part of the story that is very interesting to me is that Canadian coins have enough ferrous content to be picked up by a magnet. Wouldn’t the ability for coins to become magnetized cause all sorts of issues for the internal workings of vending machines and other coin slot using mechanisms?
There are only several properties that can be easily distinguised from coins without complex digital processing: weight (and its distribution), sizes, conduction and ferromagnetism.
> He removed the face plate from the ticket machines, which as a repairman would raise no suspicion, then rigged a car antenna with a magnetic tip, like a make-shift fishing rod. Coin-by-coin, Kara hooked his catch out of the ticketing machine cash box into a shaving bag, which acted as his keep net. I can't picture how his rig worked, the article would have benefitted by anything visual help :/
I can't picture how you stand there long enough to steal thousands of dollars per week without anybody noticing for 13 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all practical purposes for a customer who doesn't do more than putting money in, it's just a storage and they know how much of it is protected if something happens to the bank. From their point of view their money is there, even if the implementation details are much more complicated.
But the money literally isn't there, and the FDIC insurance that secures up to a limit is itself poorly funded and incapable of covering the failure of a moderately sized bank. Saying the money appears to be there is very different from the reality of it, and in the context of whether customers consent to how the system works its also feels disingenuous IMO. Can people spend the money as though it were there? Sure. I…
Can you clarify what you mean by "covering the failure of a moderately sized bank"? Bank is almost never "all the money is missing". Instead, it's usually something like "we have assets > deposits, but they're long term assets that can't be liquidated immediately so we can't pay all the depositors right this second", or "we have assets < deposits, but the gap isn't big enough that FDIC can't handle it".
Stealing 2 million, one coin at a time, over 13 years, mostly at night, by waggling a magnetised car antenna through a small slot for hours and hours, is actually hard work. Its like the opposite of The Shawshank Redemption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There really is no need for the charade of banks now that electronic databases are very solid technology. Their whole role in transmitting and keeping an account of money is surely reproducible by the federal government at very little cost (maybe even lower cost due to not needing FDIC and all that infrastructure) without having to pay a middleman. Banks' job isn't just keeping money safe and doing transactions. It…
I should have written "There really is no need for the charade of FDIC insured banks now that electronic databases are very solid technology." I am not seeing the necessity of the federal government backstop to these businesses.
What does this have anything to do with maturity transformation? Are you simply trying to say that we don't need banks to do maturity transformation, and they should stick to handling transactions?