Grand Theft Cobalt: Rotterdam | Hacker News Reader

Grand Theft Cobalt: Rotterdam

bloomberg.com

37 pointspetethomas16 comments

> Around the same time, Weight said, armed men held up a freight train en route to South Africa, decoupled the carriages containing cobalt, and towed them away on a separate getaway train.

Just... how did the thieves get a getaway train? I can understand trucks, that one is common, but an unauthorized train on the network, that should not be possible? Or was the rail dispatcher bribed?

you just run your train on the rail like you would run your truck on a highway. eventually you get into some factory or port with a connecting exit.

industrial rail is much more complex than your urban passenger rail.

> eventually you get into some factory or port with a connecting exit.

Or another train? Seems very risky!

The train signals are big physical objects right there on the tracks, visible to the engineers. A bandit on the railroad has as much information about the positions of the other trains as a legitimate operator. (This is because of the fail-safes in place for when the central control system gets something wrong.)

> industrial rail is much more complex than your urban passenger rail.

Yeah of course, but shouldn't a train on the rails that should not be there, or is suddenly stopped, raise a couple of red flags in dispatch?

At least in Germany, a train would not even be able to get onto the main rails if you steal one in a yard - it must be specifically cleared and the appropriate switches set, as their default position is, for safety reasons, that an unauthorized/stolen/out-of-control train is always diverted to a "safe derailing" place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_points).

The most likely explanation is that it didn't happen quite like that. The next most likely explanation is that relevant railway employees were in on the scam.

The videotaped visit has all the elements of a con game... (barrels full of gravel are a lot easier to load) as does the insurance payout. What happened and the way the article is written make it fairly clear that the whole Cobalt market from Africa to the LME is grey at best.

Are any other mid-value metals any different?

With gold, you can charter a plane/helicopter to carry it under a watchful eye.

With coal... too inexpensive to bother dealing with.

Cobalt sits nicely in the middle, creating a maximum of security issues.

Good god I can't read bold white text on pure black backgrounds for more than 30 seconds before my brain/eyes have these horizontal lines burned into them.

I have the same issue. Looking at literally anything else afterwards is slightly painful

If the content is interesting enough, I will go into the developer's tools and either change the CSS itself (if it's easy enough) or just read it right in there

Firefox's "Reader View" handles this article just fine with the added bonus of removing 90% of the other unnecessary crap on the page, too.

Firefox has a reader mode I've gotten accustomed to. I also use 'Dark Reader' which is a plugin for both Firefox and Google Chrome which customizes any website's color scheme to whatever darkness setting you want, or light.

The reader mode is the best tool in FF by far for folks who like to read the content. It filters out ads, lets you capture the content even if its behind a paywall (well, most paywalls are pretty dumb).

I'm still at a complete loss what benefits such speculators provide. They hoard material, cause price increase, possibly con insurance by organizing their own theft or at the very least benefiting from it by getting an early return on cobalt via the insurance payout without affecting the market by selling it.

It seems to happen to any commodity that is scarce enough to be controlled by a few speculators.

If you're good, you'd buy low and sell high (otherwise you'll go bankrupt), effectively smoothing the market.

An other way to look at it is arbitrage: instead of moving the commodities in space, you move the in time.

Monopolists can always destroy value. That's pretty independent of the (overwhelming recognized) value of commodity speculation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com