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A curious case here. Which country should he have been deported to?
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Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
271–280 of 331 posts
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh, every Toronto subway station is manned, you can imagine what that does to costs. Often multiple entrances = multiple booth staff. Going to unmanned and paying someone a premium to rapidly respond and fix machines 24/7 would be a massive cost reduction.
We don't even have drivers for our trains in Vancouver.
Newer system. But technically with the upgrades in Toronto, they should be able to run driverless.
Recently discontinued Scarborough Rapid Transit could have been driverless, but still wasn’t.
Toronto’s will have both a driver and and an on-train “guard” person to look out the window to make sure nobody is trapped in the door or something. Might get eliminated tho: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/toronto-says-no-to-ttc...
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 don't store money. They connect money to businesses in a structured way. No banks means businesses won't get created.
Fewer rather than zero businesses. Rich individuals could directly invest. Where banks shine is in making moderate risk investments which aren’t worth much individually but are a significant economic boost in aggregate. Housing may be unaffordable, but people aren’t living in sod houses with dirt floors and no running water either.
Going cap in hand to an angel investor for every £10k loan is not viable. And they don't have the levels of cash needed for this.
Why not use banks for this as well?
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought all coin mechanisms use magnets to differentiate coins, no? A coin drops at a known speed and the right coin will get pulled by the right amount by a magnet or get rejected.
Not in the US - I think they use diameter and weight.
Sounds like slug heaven. But I guess if they don’t take $1 coins, it’s not as worth it finding a washer that will go where a quarter goes.
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 don't store money. They connect money to businesses in a structured way. No banks means businesses won't get created.
I specified an (FDIC insured) bank's role "in transmitting and keeping an account of money". There would be nothing stopping a lender from lending if the US government gets rid of FDIC insurance and just provides the people of the US electronic money accounts directly.
Sure, but then what happens to the thing I said? How do businesses get loans? How much interest should be paid on that money, if any?
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed that too. $38k in 1981 in Edmonton was firmly middle class. Plenty of homes cost less than $100k. Rent was in the $100-300 per month range for a nice 2 bedroom. Dude just got greedy. If he had skimmed $600 per week instead of $3000, he would have doubled his take home pay and likely never would have been caught. It would have amounted to almost $100k every 3 years which is a tidy sum back then.
> Dude just got greedy. It seems to me that once a person builds an illegal habit, it demonstrates they: (a) probably have a higher risk tolerance than most people and/or an inaccurate understanding of the empirical risk level and/or (b) they have, perhaps only temporarily, found a self-interestedly-rational aspect of law/society to exploit. Once one's behavior crosses into that realm, "dude just got greedy" seems to…
He did make the "classic, amateur, movie thief" mistakes of spending lavishly and stealing a large fraction of coins that couldn't be covered simply by driving a crappy '77 Chevy Malibu. (That was a particularly ugly car with bad paint. [0] My parents had a '78.)
This is the idiocy of committing various forms of graft or embezzlement in the Western world: the rewards are small and short-term compared to the nonzero legal and financial consequences of getting caught. It's that most people are bad at quantifying the probabilities and qualitatively assessing their risk exposure before they're caught and rationalizing they're different and somehow smarter than everyone else at all times. His theft didn't go unnoticed and they eventually had to hire a private detective
Even if someone could steal much quickly the equivalent of, say, a billion dollars without raising any suspicion or leaving any trace evidence and launder it covertly, the problem becomes there is no country to disappear to where the proceeds could be utilized and where property rights are respected: countries including Iceland, Switzerland, Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Yemen, China, and DPRK will not help you. One could attempt to live openly, but they would find it difficult to launder their funds from nowhere into the legitimate banking world without inevitably raising suspicions or being caught through forensic accounting.
Therefore, a wise criminal™ is generally better off using legitimized means to facilitate large-scale wealth transfer from people and organizations that lack economic and political power using trickery, obfuscation, and complexity. Either that, or by creating genuine (or genuine-appearing) value and monetizing it well through work that doesn't involve criminality reduces the risk of ending up poor and/or in prison. Apart from specialized IP or knowledge work ability that can be productized as a startup, the areas of real estate, public markets, and fintech are the most obvious targets for non-lifestyle business models. Other non-/semi-lifestyle business models readily achievable by an individual is becoming a B2B supplier of high-value, high-margin specialized goods that present one or more barriers to entry, i.e., aircraft parts, nuclear energy parts, safety systems, or medical devices.
0. https://topclassiccarsforsale.com/chevrolet/288637-1977-chev...
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fewer rather than zero businesses. Rich individuals could directly invest. Where banks shine is in making moderate risk investments which aren’t worth much individually but are a significant economic boost in aggregate. Housing may be unaffordable, but people aren’t living in sod houses with dirt floors and no running water either.
Going cap in hand to an angel investor for every £10k loan is not viable. And they don't have the levels of cash needed for this. Why not use banks for this as well?
Get rid of Banks and many different things change.
Some wealthy investors would setup a lending operation using their own cash, based on historical examples of such. They would however need to charge higher interest rates than banks because they would be more capital constrained.
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I specified an (FDIC insured) bank's role "in transmitting and keeping an account of money". There would be nothing stopping a lender from lending if the US government gets rid of FDIC insurance and just provides the people of the US electronic money accounts directly.
Sure, but then what happens to the thing I said? How do businesses get loans? How much interest should be paid on that money, if any?
Supply and demand determine the price (or interest rate). Businesses get loans the same say any other business transaction happens. A buyer and seller hash out an agreement. This already happens all the time, even in the US (see investment banking).
If the lender, such as a bank, is any good at their job of underwriting, then they won’t need the federal government’s assurance to bail them out and they will still be able to attract funds from people seeking returns (and risk).
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#279As 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?
As an American, the part of the story where a single coin is valuable enough to bother with is very interesting to me. Our failure over years to introduce a working dollar coin (much less a toonie) is frustrating.
Re: Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
American coin mechanisms in vending machines and arcade games have magnets to filter out Canadian quarters.
I thought all coin mechanisms use magnets to differentiate coins, no? A coin drops at a known speed and the right coin will get pulled by the right amount by a magnet or get rejected.
It sounds like you're thinking of separating coins using eddy current braking [1]. This works even for non-magnetic coins because the effect is a function of the metal's electrical conductivity.
If you have a silver coin or a small piece of copper pipe and a large, strong neodymium magnet, then you can easily observe this effect at home by putting the metal sample on a table and quickly waving the magnet past it as close as you can without touching it. The metal will slide across the table following the magnet, despite the metal itself not being magnetic, because the moving magnet induces eddy currents which temporarily create a magnetic field like an electromagnet. Other metals besides silver and copper exhibit weaker responses due to higher electrical resistivity.