I just lost my wallet on the way home from work
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It's a couple summers ago, at the height of the summer tourist season and I'm cycling up 4th ave SW in DC. Somewhere between the NASA HQ and the National Mall my camera bag - packed full with a fairly new DSLR, a few lenses, and a secondary cell phone - came unbuckled from my messenger bag and tumbled to the sidewalk. Probably a few thousand dollars of gear, not counting the considerable hassle of resetting 2fa and credentials for every possible account that could be tied to my phone (it was password-locked but I have no idea how well that would survive a determined attack).
I was booking it pretty hard trying to catch a metro, so I didn't notice the loss for a couple more blocks. After the only genuinely involuntary (and painful!) facepalm I've ever given myself, I hurried back home (lived in town close by) and immediately started cancelling every account when my main cell phone rang. The bag was waiting for me, all contents undisturbed and intact, in a hotel lobby a couple blocks away. An anonymous samaritan had picked it up, brought it in and gave it to the concierge without a word, then walked away. Concierge called me using my contact info in a business card that was also in the bag.
In one instant, some unsung karmic superhero single-handedly erased the work of several hundred asshole double parking jobs.
Perfect balance. Yin and yang.
It's possible the person who recovered it saw it fall, but they didn't explain their actions or even identify themselves.
If the item is not hidden, not obviously suspicious, and is typical of the environment in which it was found, then it's unlikely to be a threat and can be inspected further.
Unattended bags are found all the time. There's no need for the military to be called in for all (or even most) of them. And even then, that's mostly the responsibility of the police than the armed forces.
How often do the bags turn out to be bombs? never?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
There may be a handful of other places with ‘unattended baggage’ policies, but there is definitely nothing illegal about dropping your bag.
Funny you should ask. A few years back my wife and I were stuck in Reagan (an airport in D. C.) for a super-long layover. As I'm watching my first ever episode of Archer, I notice the family a row over gets up and walks down the concourse, leaving their bags. Now, I've heard a bit of their conversations as I've sat there, and I gather they're American and probably self-centered and clueless. Or maybe that's what the terrorists that just walked away from their explosives want me to think. Regardless, we're sitting at the gate and there's a gate agent right there, so I put this in the "not my job anymore" bucket.
It's been a few years, but I'll bet it was at least ten minutes before the agent called security. It was long enough that I was about to get up and ask, "ya know, I'm not the super-paranoid type, but don't you think you ought to give the dog a little practice sniffing bags?" The dog and an agent or two show up, give the bags a sniff, and wait for the owners to return. I was disappointed that there wasn't at least a little ass-chewing. I mean, what U. S. resident doesn't know not to do that? And if they don't, how about driving that lesson home?
But anyway, we don't get too worked up about a random bag lying around. Because in the U. S., thus far it hasn't been shown that it stands much of a chance of blowing up. My sympathy to countries that have not been so lucky.
Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom? That's what is absolutely batshit insane.
Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.
You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.
This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.
All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?
No, because you left a container large enough to hold a fair amount of explosives, a container that has been used in other parts of the world at airports to detonate explosives, and you just walked away from it. Tell me what you believe to be the sane response. But if you just want to go take a shit, by all means, do so.
And I'm with sibling comment: I don't let my bags out of my sight.
I think fretting over a bag past that point is a little much. Frankly, the crowded snaking lines leading up to the TSA are where one should be concerned.
Those suitcases full of explosives you are hallucinating about? Has NEVER HAPPENED.
> United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629
> An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday, 23 June 1985 at 06:19 UTC, killed two baggage handlers, and injured four. The bomb was intended for Air India Flight 301, with 177 passengers and crew on board, bound for Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Narita_International_Ai...
Not recent, but not “NEVER”.
Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.
Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?
I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.
what i would have liked to have read is something like "while uber low probability, i figured it'd be best to deal with this immediately" or "i knew the probability that this is a bomb was so low as to be statistically impossible, so i just ignored it", not the weird hedged middle road
That's obviously not true. If it was the case, the Paris subway would forever be stopped.
What is true is that in France when someone reports an abandoned bag in a public place in the main cities, it will systematically be considered as suspect. It means that someone will first go visually inspect it. If it is deemed to present a risk, a detection dog will be brought. Then, if the detection dog smells something, it will be safely handled by the police bomb disposal unit. Thankfully - it turns a half an hour top operation into a significantly longer one - it is very rare to need to destroy a bag.
Also it is absolutely not illegal to check a lost wallet (or a lost bag actually) in France.
After the 2015 attacks one would guess. For a millenium at least, and well up into the early 21st century, a bag in public place in France it was just a bag -- and people could return it.
I'm pretty sure that's the case now too -- it's only "deemed to be a bomb" if it looks suspicious and somebody calls the cops. I'm sure people lose/forget bags with the same frequency in France as elsewhere, and the military/cops are not involved in the majority of cases...
That has nothing to do with the country. In my hometown in Germany nobody would steal anything, but in São Paolo I saw lots of pickpockets in the tourist destinations I visited.
That's highly depends on exactly _where_ in Brazil you are, time of day, your looks, general luck and many other factors. In may places you are likely to 'forcefully' lose your wallet, cellphone, car and if you are very lucky, that's all you'll lose. You can be encouraged to make a trip to the nearest ATM or even your house. Hopefully you will be alone and there won't be anyone else that can be used as leverage.
Source: have been robbed at gunpoint on several occasions. In one of them, they were discussing whether or not I should be shot. After smashing the driver's side window, while I was at a stop light. Thankfully I only had to clean up a small amount of blood from my car. On another, I was at a police station, was asked to go to a site of a police shooting to try to identify the crooks that had been shot (and were now deceased). Turns out that there was a separate event, not even 15 minutes apart a few blocks away, also two guys on a motorcycle. Those were not the crooks I was looking for, those got... caught.
That was all in a state capital, not in the middle of nowhere. Population equivalent to almost 3 San Franciscos added together.
You should be thankful of your luck.
I left Australia 🇦🇺
Guess where this will never happen? Hong Kong where I live now but where people are now afraid to visit because they think it's Syria.
I've been to HK, it's ok to visit, living there though is a different matter entirely, sure I may not get robbed at gunpoint but between China and air pollution I will find somewhere else thanks.
Australia is a really safe place by comparison to nearly anywhere else.
1) If someone on the street approaches you, they are probably up to something.
2) If you randomly select someone on the street you have probably picked a moral and upstanding person who would love to do you a good turn.
Because of (1) people tend to be a lot more defensive than they need to be when assessing what the average stranger is likely to do.
I am nervous with one other person in my subway car.
I feel completely safe with 5+ unrelated people in my subway car.
You can add a few more layers like seeking out someone in a uniform or who has a stroller, but generally speaking most people minding their own business are perfectly safe.
Honest grown-ups will be annoyed that a lost child refuses to come with them to the obvious "lost children" place, but they'll put up with it while somebody tries to figure out where the people responsible for that child are. Somebody with nefarious motives will probably need to take the child somewhere else though - by refusing to go they're protected.
tl;dr for the rest: it means: "Never go anywhere unless it was planned beforehand".
My son was always hyper social. (I have no idea where he got that from.) Would walk up to any one, everyone and start a convo.
While it's fantastic that my son was so open, trusting, there is still a risk. A little girl two grades ahead of him was abducted and then found dead on a beach. (Oak Harbor WA, should any one want to dox me.)
When I moved to New Zealand it was the opposite. There is more interaction with "regular" people. They are helping me or asking for help.
TBH, whoever took it deserved it, it was the smoothest thing ever. I had friends with me all standing around and nobody saw it get taken.
I didn't want to call them myself or whatever because I was homeless and I knew I was automatically suspect as a thief because of it. So I wanted someone the world would trust/believe to deal with it.
Well before I was homeless, attempts to return wallets or found ID cards or whatever were consistently met with suspicion. One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
The one I found was left in a drive thru on a Saturday morning. The branch was open, so I walked in and dropped it off. I have no idea what the bank did after that.
I once left mine at an ATM, the bank cancelled the card and issued a new one before I even realized I'd left it behind.
Edited: Added “up” after “brought it”.
Modern railway trains use electronically controlled doors. Rather than needing a team of people to run along checking every door on the train is closed and locked, or just hoping nobody falls out of a moving train, the doors are powered and when instructed will close and lock. The doors can't close instantly of course and so the procedure will be that the guard or driver presses a button, there's a brief warning period and then doors try to close and lock, once all doors are successfully closed and locked you're clear to drive the train away.
In the UK it turns out that there were two ways to implement this functionality, some train manufacturers used one, some the other. One way goes like this, when the button is pressed:
1. "Door Open" buttons for passengers are disabled 2. All open doors sound an alarm (typically fast bleeping) 3. Wait a few seconds 4. All doors that are still open try to close
The other way goes like this:
1. All open doors sound an alarm 2. Wait a few seconds 3. "Door Open" disabled 4. Try to close any open doors
This second order feels pretty similar, it's likely only a few geeks even noticed it was different and nobody made a big fuss about it. Until there was an accident and then the accident investigators discovered it.
A passenger realised very late that they were at their destination, unknown to them when they pressed "Door Open" in fact the train's crew had just told the system to close all doors for departure and it was in that waiting period. On their train, the "Open" buttons were not disabled during that period. Now the passenger's door was open, but it had missed that "alarm" phase, so there was no warning anything was amiss. The passenger tried to step through the door, but at that moment the timer expired and the door closed on them, trapping IIRC an article of clothing and resulting in a dragging accident when the train departed.
All affected trains needed revised firmware to enforce the correct order of events now that it was apparent to everybody that there even _was_ a correct order of events.
Your account of the train incident is heart-breaking, but further solidifies my desire to have mandatory best practices that are evidence-based and have sufficient consensus for user interfaces that have harmful failure modes. On top of these best practices, there also needs to be a ramp plan from the any status quo interface that is nonconformant to the final version through as many intermediate designs as necessary to deal with ingrained user behaviour and ingrained user expectations.
1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM.
2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice.
3. Mallory uses the distraction to swipe Alice's card from the ATM without her noticing. Now Mallory and Eve have both the card and the PIN and can empty the account.
Dropped a credit card at TSA checkin a year ago, had it pointed out by the person behind me.
Found an out-of-state drivers' license a couple of years ago while running, got in touch through LinkedIn, handed it off at a Starbucks the next day.
Found a wallet at a Starbucks within the last year, called the guy at the business card number, left it at the front desk of my building.
But then I have the advantage of you by eight years...
A pretty well known German performer was also on the flight with his companion and - I assume - his favorite microphone.
The gentleman was meticulously polite, including the fact that he queued up at the gate instead of jumping the queue with about a dozen economy passengers in the queue.
Not every prominent person is an asshole.
Our instinct is to make assumptions like 'rich so asshole', and there may be correlations between some of those categories and rate of occurrence of good and bad, but the differences are small compared to the normal panoply of personality types.
Oh, and never read about your heroes!
Edit: just -> judge. Damn auto-correct!
When I was a little kid, I was on Crete with my mother, and at some point she asked me to watch her bag while she bought did something for a few minutes, probably buying food. So I was sitting there, with my knee on the bag, not actively watching it, I rather took in the surroundings. Some older Greek farmer type guy started to point at the bag, trying to get my attention, and I thought he wanted to remind me to really "watch" the bag, being a patronizing adult. No other explanation was possible in my mind. So without really looking at him or the bag, I was like "I know, it's fine, I got this, leave me alone". He did after a short while.
When my mother returned, she noticed the pomegranate the man had placed on the bag.. which is what he had pointed at. I was so ashamed.
This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.
Out in the country, I'd likely be more receptive.
That was over an hour of my life wasted and the company didn't seem to be grateful, hopefully the owner was...I will return things if found, just a bit more jaded about it.
I've tried to return stuff via my police precinct. Couldn't be bothered.
I once returned a wallet via a "I Saw You" style personal ad in our local arts paper. (One of his frat brothers saw the ad and posted it on his door. Result!)
I've returned a few phones. Because they've been locked, I had to wait until someone calls (answer) or texts it (quickly write down number, then use my own phone to call back).
Phones need a "I found this lost phone" feature on the lock screen.
In the end I didn't find him and left the toy on a counter, hoping he'd find it. The whole thing bummed me out. My own kid's lost a few toys and I know how devastating it can be. Granted I was sleep deprived and emotional, but it put a damper on my day nonetheless.
Everyone I know who's worked in restaurants or as a delivery driver tips very well. In my limited experience, teachers make some of the best parents when it comes to student interaction and parent participation.
I'd bet whoever found the wallet had lost their own at some point. Empathy is a powerful, powerful thing. I wish that more people would recognize that and work to instill it in their children.
As most of the things inside the wallet can be replaced in a couple of days (bank card, and some ID's), I did not worry that much. But, a nice guy from the neighboring office took the high road by calling the contact point of my office, which ended up in my boss hand.
faith in humanity restored. :-)
Someone called her with her SL card (worth around 100$), and the business kept her card and verified her identity when she called.
Clothing items are constantly being lost and left in-place mostly during winter, some might be relatively expensive
I asked a couple different friends about this, and they said that often when people see something that looks like it was lost, they will place it up somewhere more conspicuous right be where they found it, so that hopefully whomever lost it can more easily find it.
I always thought that was a little bit of a nice touch of humanity, even if it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to do.
Luckily for me, a kind stranger found the wallet and sent me an email and I had my wallet the next day.
In one of these stops, probably due to the stress and rush, we left her handbag behind. We noticed when we got to the courthouse (with around twenty minutes left until it closed). This not only implied losing her credit cards, house keys, healthcare card, some money and her phone, but also her ID card which was needed for the paperwork in court. The deadline for the procedure was the next day so we might still have a chance by going to the police and asking for a temporary ID or something, but I'm not even totally sure it would be possible, and in any case it would have been an absolute mess and we would have spent the next morning running here and there.
One or two minutes after we realized the handbag was missing and we were feeling like crap and powerless to do anything, my phone rings. Someone had used my partner's phone [1] to call her mother (because "Mama" is usually a reliable contact, I guess) and she told them to call me. I met the finders in a nearby square five minutes later. They returned everything, and refused any compensation. We completed the paperwork in time that day.
They will probably never know how big a favor they did to us (of course returning cards, phone, money, ID, etc. is always a big favor, but in this case it was even more important than normal due to the court issue, having very little time due to a newborn baby, etc.) and how grateful we are.
[1] In case you are wondering, indeed she didn't have her phone locked with a PIN number, pattern or similar... I know, this goes against every security recommendation. It's just laziness. In this case, it probably helped by accelerating the return, though.
Make whatever the local emergency phone call is (112 or 911 whatever) which will work if the phone can figure out any way to make that call (e.g. it works if you have no credit on a PAYG phone or the "right" network isn't available)
OR
Display the information and list of contacts, then make calls to any of the contacts just as if the phone wasn't locked by its owner.
I wouldn't expect a random person to necessarily know this will work, but I expect police lost+found departments know it exists and maybe other types of emergency responder would know or at least won't be scared of pressing "emergency" on somebody's phone.
Mine gives my first name, and contacts for some close friends.
Finally the only way I found to notify the user was by creating/modifying Netflix users with usernames as short telegraphic messages such as "you registered", "using my email", "*@gmail.com is mine","contact me or change it". That message would be visible as the user opened up any of the Netflix apps or web app. It apparently worked as a couple days later my email stopped being primary on the account and never got any Netflix emails at that gmail inbox.
So if your email is bob@gmail.com you can also use:
b.ob@gmail.com, b.o.b@gmail.com, bob+alice@gmail.com,
You can use the second one to do filtering. I.e. use a different +{filter} for bills, entertainment etc.
bob+bills@gmail.com for bills. bob+spam@gmail.com for sites you know will spam you etc.
then setup mail rules to filter based on the +
"If someone accidentally adds dots to your address when emailing you, you'll still get that email. For example, if your email is johnsmith@gmail.com, you own all dotted versions of your address"
You can also add a plus sign with your own string after the username, useful for giving to websites you don't fully trust.
e.g. user.name+facebook@gmail.com
Gmail will still send it to user.name@ and you can track and filter the messages sent to that address.
Often I can just ignore the signup confirmation emails and it doesn't go any further, but it's surprising how often there is no confirmation link sent out and the account gets opened without verification of the email address. At that point, it can be incredibly difficult to get the problem rectified. Most companies don't seem to have any procedure in place to deal with this situation - Many online companies only have an easy way to contact them if you are one of their customers, so I often have to resort to resetting that user's password to get into their account and use the company's contact form to try and get things straightened out from there. Sometimes even that isn't possible, e.g. because 2FA prevents me from resetting the password, so about the best I can do is unsubscribe from their marketing emails and leave the account active.
The access I have to mess with other peoples' lives, if I so chose, is amazing.
I'm truly happy for her that I'm not a malicious person and when I figured it out I sent her a message. I hope she manages to stop using my email for stuff.
The one time I got it was with one of the Maxis online accounts and for the next couple of years I seemed to get a bunch of password reset requests from people who thought it was their account.
While there's something to be said for not using the same user name across different systems using a very common name is not a mistake I'm going to make again.
Everyone who picked her up warned her that what she was doing was very dangerous. She was lucky, they said, to get a ride from them, and not the criminals all around them. She got ride after ride like that. Family after family picked her up and took her along on their trip and all of them said, “You are in danger! You are lucky we are the ones who picked you up!”
In this manner, she traveled around Mexico for a month, and she never had a dangerous ride.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/2...
He ended up being not the worst and let me keep my keys and license when I asked.
It only takes once, and the consequences for her would probably have been much worse.
Are you assuming that the mugger you encountered would have raped her? (To be clear, I don't think that's a prima facie invalid assumption. It's a sincere object-level question.)
That includes the possibility of having a gun pulled on them like OP which only happened once.
If you pick a random person, they'll almost certainly be a normal, honest person.
If you advertise yourself with a giant sign "I WILL GET IN YOUR CAR IF YOU STOP", then a small percentage of random strangers, but a large percentage of opportunistic criminals, will stop.
I'd argue she got very lucky.
She may not know what she was "doing right," but I think it more likely she was doing something that helped foster positive outcomes.
I was never raped while on the street.
I also have lived without a car for more than a decade and accepted many rides from strangers. None of those rides ended tragically either.
I get told a lot I'm just lucky. It's a left-handed way of assuming a woman has no idea what she's talking about and can't possibly be competent.
Occam's Razor.
One factor in me not being raped while homeless was that I was usually not alone. There is safety in numbers.
Suppose a woman went 6 years in Anchorage. There's a 99.8% ^ 6 chance of her not getting raped. 98.8% chance in other words.
Would a woman who had not been raped after 6 years in Anchorage persuade you that Anchorage wasn't a more dangerous place than most?
Your comment here is hard to grasp given your previous comment. Mexico has a significantly higher crime rate than the US. As you acknowledge, being by yourself makes you more vulnerable. Being young makes you more vulnerable. A young girl hitchhiking by herself in Mexico is incredibly vulnerable. What are the odds that she will be raped or murdered over a few months of traveling? They may be 10 or 20%. They may be higher!
The fact that a girl had the most likely outcome happen doesn't prove or suggest anything. You can play Russian Roulette and you'll have a 5/6 chance of surviving. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to play. If someone plays three rounds, that doesn't make it safe.
I hope you'd agree that members of vulnerable populations should take extra precautions to mitigate their vulnerability. As per your own example, staying with other people in dangerous times and places.
Most rapes aren't cases of random strangers grabbing you randomly off the street. That's not how that works.
Most rape victims know their rapists. It's usually a social acquaintance of some sort.
Most college campus rapes or date rapes involve alcohol.
There is this narrative that we can't try to talk about what women can effectively do to protect themselves because that would be blaming the victim. But if you tell someone to lock your door to make it harder for someone to rob you, we don't have the same problem with such advice. We don't get all up in arms about how robbers just need to keep their hands to themselves and advice to protect your belongings is somehow victim blaming.
I agree that it's good and not victim blaming to offer advice to people, regardless of their gender, as to how they can live safer lives.
I agree that, in the US, most victims know their attacker. That doesn't mean it's safe for young women to hitchhiker in Mexico though. Similarly, you are vastly more likely to be killed by your own gun than any random gun out there. That doesn't mean you have nothing to worry about if some random stranger points a gun at you.
I never claimed what you are seemingly rebutting at all. I never said anything of the sort whatsoever.
I only suggested that this particular woman probably wasn't simply lucky. She was probably doing some things right that helped keep her safe.
It's an entirely different idea. It's the difference between saying "Lion tamers have lion taming skills and aren't merely lucky that they usually survive their shows." Versus "Because lion tamers exist, random people with zero lion taming skills are equally safe being locked in a cage with a lion."
Nowhere have I claimed any of this is "bullet proof." Just that consistent positive outcomes suggest an element of skill and knowledge that claims of pure luck erroneously dismiss as not existing at all.
edit: data tangent - if your Anchorage stats were about reported cases, the averages would need correcting for underreporting.
No. It's a straightforward way of assuming that you are not actually in complete control of the universe and it doesn't matter how competent you are, things could have worked out differently. If you'd like to assert that you actually have perfect methods of identifying and avoiding Ted Bundy and any other potential psychopath, then you are going to have to show a lot more evidence than "and I'm ok!" - because it is an extraordinary claim.
The leader board is 100 names long. I've been here over a decade and was not an early adopter, so the site is more than ten years old. There have been, no doubt, quite a lot more than a 100 people who have spent time on the leader board. So one openly female member out of more than a 100 names is less than one percent.
For comparison:
This is a list of Women CEOs of the Fortune 500, based on the magazine's 2019 list. As of the date of publication, women held 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEO roles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_...
According to historical surveys, HN is an overwhelmingly male space. For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309
Yet, I continue to be told by people on HN that I somehow need to prove to people that I know how to handle myself when interacting with men and my claims that I know how to deal effectively with men in social settings is bizarre, unfounded, ridiculous and so forth. I find this profoundly baffling.
Please skip the part where multiple men pile on to inform me that my ability to score "useless internet points" on a "stupid forum" is irrelevant to this discussion. To my mind, it is the single strongest piece of evidence that I can present that people here should be able to readily see as real evidence of ability and skill on my part and not just more anecdotal claims that cannot be verified. So that's why I'm bothering to post this, in spite of the very long history of awful, dismissive replies any time I talk about this stuff.
The handle that was briefly on the leader board is here and shows that I joined in July 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Mz
Nowhere have I claimed any ability to "identify Ted Bundy types." Suggesting this is my claim amounts to putting words in my mouth.
Thirty years ago, when I was a kid, my siblings and I wandered around in Mexico sometimes miles from home without an adult, talking to the locals. Everyone was super friendly, we were never threatened. People would sometimes offer us food or toys like little hand carved slingshots. It seemed pretty safe, and we didn’t get hurt during the year we stayed, other than once my little brother went to pet a donkey in a field and got kicked by it. It was a different time then, so I guess my point is you might likewise want to consider how the rates of homicide have changed over the years, where the rates are higher, who’s most likely to be affected, and how it actually compares to other countries, before assuming that everyone’s in equal danger, or that anyone’s in more danger there than here...
The parent comment mentioned traveling in rural Mexico, which presumably does not refer to Mexico City.
I agree that homicide rates have changed over the years. I would be surprised if it was ever wise for a young woman to go hitchhiking solo in rural Mexico though. From the story it seems rural Mexicans agree with me.
In Caracas the locals also constantly emphasized the dangers. Random airport workers would tell us to not even leave the airport unless we had a driver outside specifically waiting for us. Even on Isla Margarita locals would look at us in a panic if we were out on the streets after dark "you can't be here!!" and would go out of their way to help us get home safely.
I did once wonder if I was going to get hurt when I was pulled out of the audience during a circus show in Leon for the clown's knife-throwing act. I was mostly sure it'd be safe and faked and funny, but they blindfolded me and I certainly had a few thoughts run through my head about what I was thinking being in the middle of Mexico having knives thrown at me.
It's not particularly wise for a young woman to hitchhike in the US either. I certainly wouldn't recommend someone do it right now in Mexico, and I have no doubt that people here and there all have fears about it, but fears don't necessarily mean it's extraordinarily unsafe.
Nonetheless, I am consistently and insistently told that I am simply lucky as the entire explanation for those outcomes. It doesn't matter how reasonably I engage, I'm outright dismissed in a manner consistent with the idea that no woman is capable of having useful skills that substantially influence the odds that they will remain safe.
No matter how clearly I state that luck is always a factor in all situations and so forth, I get basically this la, la, la not listening! response.
This has been a consistent pattern across various forums for many years. Ergo, my conclusion that it boils down to an assumption that women can't actually be competent that I stated in some other comment here.
I'd guess that some social environments often behave like this, where information is difficult to objectively classify and measure, but someone with great people skills will be able to reliably get an indication of risk and intentions.
Maybe some extreme sports practicioners experience the same type of dismissal.
Funnily, come to think of it, investment/asset management falls into something that looks like a similar situation. In that case, it's very difficult to objectively assess whether great performance is luck or skill. I've always believed that some in the latter category are mistaken for being in the former. But it would be impossible to tell without having very specialized and specific skills, and almost impossible to do so in an objective and repeatable way.
Best practices don't actually require an assessment of intentions. Just like mountain climbers use safety gear whether the mountain seems like a suspicious character or not, erring on the side of caution socially doesn't actually require a determination of intent to reduce the odds of assault. (Inferring likely intent can be useful, but really shouldn't be a high priority per se when acting to protect yourself.)
You are at least the second person here to say something along these lines. Perhaps it casts light on a detail I need to somehow focus on more when such topics come up and which is a source of the profound disbelief and denial and assertions that a track record of success due to competence is simply not remotely humanly possible.
It's not even necessarily much luck: if the per-day probability of a violent attack while hitchhiking in Mexico were 1 in 50, which would still be extremely dangerous, it would only be slightly better than average results to go a month straight without an attack.
Because Zeman is controversial person, it turned out badly. People started spamming it with lowest amount possible (about 0.01 CZK) and wrote funny messages. There were people selling their bike or computer, sending messages to their mother from a trip. Two people even played boats there [1]. Even ASCII Pikachu picture appeared there apparently [2].
[1]: https://1gr.cz/fotky/bulvar/19/041/anime/KIT7a6caf_imgbauer_... [2]: https://1gr.cz/fotky/bulvar/19/041/anime/KIT7a6caf_imgbauer_...
EDIT: Transparent account was apparently mandatory for every candidate by law.
Of the four IDs I found three belonged to adults; the third was a state ID for a minor related to one of the adults. I was able to find a contact number for all three, via relatives, and had reached them all by afternoon.
I learned that the person who'd dumped the cards had committed a series of car break-ins in San Jose yesterday morning and had fled to Oakland. They stole purses, laptops, and an iPhone. I wish OPD had taken an interest in the theft or at least in returning the stolen property.
Sadly, in California most theft is merely a misdemeanor, and busy PDs do not have time to chase down criminals to give them a ticket.
But they sure do like camping out all the time to give people speeding and parking tickets. Priorities!
https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-average-30-million-...
I tell them: At least it's not Vallejo. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/12/willie-mccoy...
Fines are how many cities stay solvent. The job of police in America, therefore, is not to keep the peace and provide justice, it's to be tax collectors for the city.
Speed at which you drive has very little to do with your predictability. "Oh, no, Betty is driving 5 mph faster than me. I'll never know what she'll do next!"
Even if you try to give an example of someone coming up on your left at a 50+mph difference, it's not an issue if you signal and look in your rear view mirror to make sure it's clear. Most people just don't do either.
70 mph in a school zone? Not an issue if you just look both ways before crossing the street!
Seriously (not that you sound very serious) every morning, I make a left turn out of my development onto a nominally 30 mph road where people go 40-45, and it's impossible to see very far to the left before pulling out. Given normal speeds, it is possible to make the turn before the oncoming car if they are just out of sight.
So if anyone is ever going 80 there at the wrong moment, it will be impossible to avoid them and probably lethal to one or both of us.
If the visibility is good, there's nothing wrong with going faster. Aggressive speed limits make more sense to be followed when there's very limited visibility, high chance of stops, people crossing the road, intersections, etc.
But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
Seems like you've ignored what I just wrote in the previous comment. If I make a turn just as a car is barely out of sight, then at 40 mph there is just enough time to go before it hits me, assuming my car doesn't stall or something. If it is going much faster, say 80, then there would not be enough time. If I have no model of other drivers, and assume anything can happen outside my vision, which is what you seem to be expressing by the word "meteor" then there is no way I can make a turn in either direction safely at all, ever. The only way a person can deal with everyday situations is to assume roughly "normal" behavior (both in a social sense and in terms of physical law) and act accordingly.
Either way - sounds like a bad intersection and they should design it differently. (Turn on left with left arrow only, etc.)
Ah, but I'm not. There's a lot of people who live in the same place I do, and they all have to come out of that road in the morning. It's very predictable, not like being hit by a meteor which billions of people have no experience with.
People can and should plan for people turning out of side streets.
A "meteor" would be a car making a turn and stalling right at that moment. Wanting to eliminate that sort of risk is probably related to the problems people are having developing software for self-driving cars.
Problem is, the speed limit is usually set with local factors in mind. I.e. if the speed limit doesn't make sense to you then the people who set the limit likely knew something you didn't.
Try driving in Finland, Sweden or Norway at dusk in the fall. That kind of attitude will often result in a white-tail or a moose through the front window. :D
See:
> But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
After OPD refused the IDs/cards I contacted a handful of local news outlets and explained the situation. One of them, ABC 7, began reaching out, possibly incessantly, to the media relations office at OPD.
By 4:30 PM today I had a text from one of the ABC 7 producers telling me the OPD media relations officer wanted to get in touch and including her desk phone number. When I spoke with her she apologized, acknowledged that procedure had not been followed, and told me they were in touch with SJPD regarding the break-ins. She also told me she would follow up with OPD leadership.
Not sure how applicable this strategy would be in other communities/countries but it appears to have worked for me. I'll also note that I reached out to the mayor's office before contacting news orgs and got no response.
However, FB should have filters for those instead of grouping everyone in there.
It makes no sense that the person living in the same town as me with a genuine profile is in the same interface as accounts written in foreign languages with 1 friend and a creation date of two days ago.
I hate having to cancel cards. I'm still dealing with the echos of losing mine back in February[1] (right before moving!) and so I'm calling everyone in the group trying to get her contact info.
Turned out she hadn't even noticed it was gone yet.
[1] AT&T keeps silently cancelling my auto-pay on the new card and nobody can figure out why.
You think you would do something different here? And you have considered all the possible ramifications of doing so? No doubt you've considered the impact on the number of spammy/scammy interactions that everyone experiences, the number of harassing messages that people around the world receive and you've made an informed trade-off between that and meaningful social interactions people have with the folks who find their wallet.
Seems like a pretty strong statement to call it a dark pattern, implying malice, when it could just be a good thing.
FB probably already has data to know how much of a pervert someone is... if they linger on those beach pictures for too long, for example.
It _is_ a dark pattern. It prevents you from _knowing_ someone has messaged you. In 99,9% of cases you want to know someone sent you a message.
Facebook is a friend platform, not a stranger platform. Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.
Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?
>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.
Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.
I don't want unsolicited messages from people. It's bad enough for me on LinkedIn, where that's the whole point.
Not everyone uses the tool the same way you do.
If I don't want them to be Facebook friends, then I'll give them my email.
Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.
> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.
Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.
Booting off the spammers seems like a much better idea to me.
I have, though, found a half dozen credit/debit cards in the past two years outside of any good place to leave them (parking lots/garages, streets, sidewalks...). I guess I'm a good-samaritan with a healthy dose of paranoia/skepticism/cynicism. When there's no obvious place that I think the owner will know to look, I tell someone I know that I found it, and promptly cut the card up into fine pieces, mix them, split the pieces into a few groups, and dispose of them in a 4+ trashcans in different locations (this is probably excessive, but my goal is to dispose of the card with as much caution as I would get rid of my own card if I knew it could still be charged to.)
I have weighed trying to return them, but I ended up triangulating against the chances I'll: waste time tracking down someone who has already canceled the card anyways, send the card to the wrong person, completely creep someone out by tracking them down, or get caught with a card that has been reported stolen and have a hard time proving I didn't steal it.
All the replies are people contrasting shitty experiences they've had with their own wallets and money transfer services.
His top pinned tweet is:
> Reasons to work at @TransferWise:
> 1. Irreversibly change the world of finance to be fairer
> 2. Excellent office dogs [video of cute dogs running around]
I mean, I'd love this to be true, but the coincidences are uncanny.
Some percentage of those people who deal with this stuff on a weekly or monthly basis will say "yeah, this is f'd, there must be a better way..."
But this may be more commonly known 'hack' in the UK with their banking system than it appears.
Marketing for what?
Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.
A viral tweet like this could land him 5 minute segments on any number of local-news stations that need a feel-good piece. He'll then have the opportunity to talk about his company.
And followers. As this tweet makes it's rounds through the media, he'll get more. He can then use that following to promote his business.
It opened the door for people to openly bash their existing bank or financial provider, and he (and his company) didn't have to say ANYTHING - their followers did it for them.
AND... a bank card without a name on it of any kind? A wallet without any identifiable information? No license, no other credit cards, no shopper cards, not a business card???? Nothing?
Who would think, I'm going to start a chain of 1 penny transaction to contact this person at this bank account, and hope they get them before they cancel their bank account because they lost their wallet.
And is this a wallet with cash and a single card with no identifiable information on it? NOTHING else?
EDIT: Because I can't reply below: because they have access to that bank account now. Pretty simple. The card in question is said to have their banking info right on the card, so you close that account and start a new one.
reply to your edit: (btw, you can click on the timestamp of a comment and reply directly, always) … That's not how it works. If you loose a card, you let the bank deactivate the specific card. The account itself is not permanently compromised by a card. Someone else knowing your "banking info" (= account number) doesn't mean much and is not a reason to close an account.
Option 2: Work out where my nearest police station is, and what time it's open, go to it, wait, fill out whatever crap they make me fill out.
Option 3: Work out where the nearest branch is to me, what time its open, go along, queue up, explain the situation, hope they can do something.
Have you ever considered that most countries don't have banking systems as ass-backwards as the US does?
EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)
I'm not saying I think it's fake, but I think it might be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and posting a defense isn't evidence.
Edit: I wondered if I got this slogan right, and it turns out to have a name - The Sagan Standard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
Speaking of cynicism, this argument is known as an Ad Hominem Circumstantial:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Anyone can conveniently lose a wallet, but one with a bank card with no identifying info in it anywhere? A finder who went to bizarre lengths to make Faster transactions to your bank account to send you a message? Absolutely no other identifying information in the wallet? A plan to ride a jump bike around to prove you looked for it with receipts?
Before sending someone pennies with context in the transactions, hoping that person would get them before they canceled all their bank accounts because they lost their wallet, I would just take the card to the bank and have them call the owner, or take it to the police and they'd do the same.
Uhg, sorry, "I ensure you" and "jump bike receipts" is not enough to convince me.
EDIT: Removed the quotes from Faster, my point seemed to get lost because of that.
1. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2014/11/customers-bei...
All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.
If you're like "Oops, that's gone" and it fell into a waterfall or something then, sure, you cancel it and have a replacement sent, but say you just got back from the store and it isn't in your wallet. You call a modern bank. "Hi, I think I lost my card maybe?" Good chance they say - "OK, we'll freeze the card, call us if you find it or if you give up and we'll send a new one".
I'd suggest calling or sending it to the bank instead. I'm sure they can find its owner with a lot less hassle than this.
That would also mean someone can send you money if your card is blocked or cancelled. Account number and sort code don't change when you get a new card.
Also, "Faster Payments" is the name of the normal system to transfer money between accounts in the UK. It doesn't cost the sender anything other than the money they send. It's called "faster" because the old system was a lot slower (because it was based on paper I think?).
Do some other UK banks really print the account numbers on their cards? Or is there some way to send a Faster payment to a debit card number?
Edit: Maybe also Monzo, no account number on that one.
The 2-3 days got the old system will have been a limitation of batch based computer processing from that time, and maybe moving the magnetic tapes around.
The cost of getting this wrong is much higher than the benefit of getting it right, and in our experience the probability is higher too.
Whichever way your story went, thanks for the neat tale of what can be done with bank transfers! Glad it worked out.
Also, there are people on HN who do marketing for a living (checks business cards including me?), and to the extent that you model someone as going into their planning meeting with "OK guys I have this great idea for how to hit our Q4 numbers: lets do stealthmarketing on our personal Twitter accounts", you should know that that would not receive the reply "Genius Bob, why do we employ teams of expensive professionals to do this when you come up with such pearls of wisdom for free."
Mentioning this half because excessive cynicism is a failure mode for geeks and half because many people on HN will, at some point in their life, actually have to get good at causing people to adopt a product or service, and HNers should correct the mental model that would suggest that this is in any way aimed at or effective at causing adoption of a product or service.
It's vastly less complicated to just assume and assert that everything is bullshit everywhere, all the time, than to actually try to discern where cynicism and optimism are each warranted.
Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive.
Edit: a word
I think you mean ulterior motive :)
I'm not sure that's reflexive cynicism.
I've seen that type of cynicism and it is ugly. It's also ugly to assume there are never ulterior motives, or to disparage someone for questioning something.
I've found that just as there is reflexive cynicism designed to feel superior, there's also reflexive anger to people who go against the current.
floatrock provided evidence and reasoning as to why he questions the validity of this event. He never put blanked statements and didn't even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.
Your comment is something I'd think of as reflexive anger toward cynicism. There wasn't any real weighing of evidence or deep consideration. Just a general dislike toward cynicism.
BTW: I understand the word reflexive to mean: without thought and consideration, automatic and many times pre-programmed (i.e. prejudicial either toward cynicism or against it)
I feel like this is a debate-team style nuance that doesn’t really have merit in actual conversations.
If somebody tells me a story about their day, and I respond “well, it’s possible that you made all that up, and this is all a ruse to trick me”, I’ve not accused them of making it up, I’ve just pointed out it’s possible. But I’ve implied an accusation, otherwise I’d not have gone out of my way to announce this “possibility”.
And, as noted in your comment, you then do directly accuse the reply of being “reflexive anger towards cynicism”, with the implication that the audience is required to provide “deep consideration” when responding to the possibility. If the original comment is just pointing out something that could potentially be true, without any accusation, why are the rest of us required to give it deep consideration?
Can’t I just respond “well it’s possible you’re fake!”? To which the original commenter could retort “no, you’re fake!” And then we go back and forth forever, secure in the knowledge that it’s impossible to totally prove the voracity of any story. That would lead to a lot of comments back and forth, but it seems unlikely any of them would lead to meaningful/productive discussion.
Except your example is not very compatible.
First, by making it a direct accusation, instead of 2 third parties discussing someone else. If I said it directly to you, you'd be correct in the accusation bit. Situations will make the same words have very different interpretations.
Second, and most importantly, your example has no reason. It's just doubt for doubts sake. That's the definition of reflexive. floatrock isn't just saying 'it's possible you made it up'. But, 'hey look, climate deniers are funded by big oil, maybe they are biased/not honest'. Conflict of interest is a REASON for doubting.
floatrock did provide reason for his doubt in the form of the exposure of a conflict of interest. Which is why I felt his comment was good. He even showed the doubt in a conscientious, non aggressive way. I actually don't agree that it was a PR stunt. But putting out relevant information, like conflicts of interest, should be relevant to all thinking people.
Next, you are welcome to provide a REASON for why it isn't a PR stunt. Personally, I think such a PR stunt would have marginal benefits toward the KPIs for transfer wise. Their small team would probably be better served on other things than this PR thing, if it was that. So I personally don't think it was a PR stunt. But that's beside the point. The point I was making: Reflexive statements suck, whether reflexively cynical, or reflexively sheepish, and I felt the person making the 'reflexive' accusation was unintentionally ironic.
The fact that you are ignoring the 'reasoning' element, makes the word 'reflexive' not seem relevant, when it is.
You can't prove anything definitively, but you can provide evidence to further an idea or not.
Evidence, reasoning... that's where the in-depth comes from. I would hope that's required on both sides.
Maybe I've already gone through enough shitty startups to not fall for it anymore, or maybe I'm just a cynical guy in general.
They weren't allowed to give contact details of the owner to me, but they were allowed to forward my contact details to the owner of the wallet.
Through this route we eventually got the wallet back to its owner. Took half a day to get everything in order, but man were they happy to get the wallet back.
So I lose the satisfaction of closure — who knows what happened to that thing after I handed it over — but this does feel like the most-safe option.
"You have a collect call from 'GAME IS OVER PICK ME UP MOM THANKS'. Would you accept the call?"
Keep a note with your email address in your wallet - clearly marked "wallet owner's email".
Paranoid version of the life lesson:
Keep a note with an anonymized email address, with forwarding set up for the message to go to your actual mailbox, in your wallet.
This! You never know.
The poor thing must have seen at least one bout of rain and a lot of sun judging by the ablated jacket. And it still works perfectly!
Then one day, they responded to my Facebook messenger message that they didn't notice my original message. I never looked deep in the wallet, but evidently there was some sentimental stuff in there they were happy to have back. I can't believe I held onto that wallet for so many years.
Found it a few months later in the back pocket of my smartest suit trousers, which I’d drunkenly hung up in the wardrobe. Never thought to look!
FML.
At least I found £50 that I assumed had gone forever.
The "official" way of dealing with lost property in the UK is to take it to your local police station. If no-one claims it within 6 weeks, you might be able to keep the item. I certainly remember doing this a few times when younger. Not so sure many people know this nowadays.
Anyway, my mother lost her purse a few months back in the small town in Scotland where she lives. Someone suggested she try her local police station (actually not so local any more thanks to the current government having closed over 600 police stations[0]) and lo and behold someone had handed it in there!
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/600-police-stations-shut-...
I think my father managed to find the owner from the wallet's contents in the end.
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/43-police-forces-in-england-and-w...
Why is that? What am I even supposed to do with 12 characters?
I never understood this.
The twitter user just so happens to works for a company that uses the technology the "good Samaritan" used. I just glanced at who the guy was, and found it funny that he works in the industry. Who knows, maybe that's why he found it so awesome.
"In April 2018, TransferWise joined Faster Payments as the first non-bank payment service provider to be a directly connected settling participant,[23] after being the first of its kind to gain access to Bank of England's Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system.[24]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service
"Money transfer firm TransferWise has become the first non-bank company with direct access to Britain’s Faster Payments Scheme, which the start-up said on Wednesday would help it compete with banks on sending money overseas."
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-transferwise-britain/start...
I don't think his work has affected his reaction here.
Pretty much any domestic bank transfer initiated electronically via mobile/online banking will be cleared through Faster Payments up to a limit of about £25,000 ($32,000) for most banks (the theoretical limit is an order of magnitude higher), making it the de facto way of transferring money in the UK. When I was a student, bank transfers by Faster Payments were more common than cash payments for settling small debts between friends.
In addition, BACS/CHAPS transfers (the other two main electronic clearing systems in the UK) typically incur fees, and would normally only be used if the value exceeds the limit for Faster Payments. In addition, Faster Payments normally clears "instantly" (i.e. in seconds); it's literally the most convenient way I know of to transfer money domestically in the UK, and is accordingly ubiquitous: cash requires you to have exact change and have cash to hand, which is increasingly rare in Europe; BTC addresses are too long compared to a UK account number/sort code.
Having recently moved to the US for a year, I've noticed that the financial institutions tend to be years/decades behind Europe in terms of electronic payment processing and clearing.
I happen to be friends with the guy who found the wallet - we met at the CouchSurfing meetup in Kaohsiung, when he visited Taiwan.
This was his personal reaction:
"I found a wallet in the middle of the road while cycling home from work today. I couldn't find the guy on Facebook, but one of his bank cards had his sort code and account number printed on it, so I got in touch by transferring him 4p and including my phone number in the payment references. It worked, and he tweeted about it, and it's gone viral! Unfortunately so have I (with a cold) but this is making me feel much better"
"A fitting end to perhaps the strangest day of my life. More reflection tomorrow once I've wrapped my head round it all x" (with a link to a video from 7News Australia about it).
If he had the bank card he could've looked up the person's name on social media (if it's unique enough), or even call the bank, a friend forgot his wallet in a store once and got a call from his bank telling him so, and to contact this number of the finder. Cleverly, the bank didn't give out my friend's number to the finder. This was not in the US though, reading about US banks, I'd imagine they're less helpful.
I know for a fact you have them in the US. A 'debit card' maybe?
It uses the Visa or Mastercard payment networks, supports chip, contactless, swipe, or you can enter the numbers online, and also has useful information like your bank account number and routing number on. If you give other people that information they can pay you money even though you're not a store. Which is what happened here.
I didn't know that bank account number was writen on it in Europe, thanks for the info.
However most such (debit) cards in the UK have the associated account number and "sort code" in smaller type on them too. Certainly all the ones I've ever had are like this.
For the benefit of the non-US folk (including myself): it wouldn't be a good idea to reveal one's bank account number in the US because people can just pull money out from it with an account number?
Two years ago, I was in a mountain ski resort in Big Sur with some friends and found an iPhone (with no emergency contact) with a wallet case containing an ID card on the floor. They were afraid of taking it from the floor. Still, I had just been past the security office, took it without thinking at all, and went straight to it while trying to find the girl who lost if on Facebook to send her a message.
When I arrived there, I was holding the ID to copy the person's name in the Facebook search. There was a queue with some people talking with the security officer there. Once it was my time, I was putting back the ID.
The officer was such an asshole, I thought he might call the cops to question me about it.
I said I found the phone on the floor. The officer kept me asking why I went through someone's else things. Multiple times like I was doing something evil.
I got upset really quick and told something like 'look, I found this on the ground full of snow and am trying to find the owner' and left the office immediately.
I told my friends (all Brazilians, like myself), and they told me the culture there was different, and probably I should have asked someone to come over to retrieve the object instead of taking it there on my own, as I didn't want to be accused of anything. I never bought this explanation.
Despite what happened, I'd have done the same again.
> 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
Me and some friends knew each other's bank account numbers due to shared orders and stuff, so we would send each some joke amounts typically smaller than 20 cents just for the cool messaging medium.
https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/scien...
I seem to keep finding cash. The first time when I was 9, a couple hundred between racks in a department store. I showed my mom and we brought it to Lost&Found. A year later after nobody had claimed the money, they called us up and gave it to me as the finder. I promptly invested it in a shiny new skateboard.
The last time I was walking behind two guys on the street and one of them dropped a bundle of bills. He didn't notice. I picked them up and yelled "hey, stop!" after them. It was dark. I'm sure they heard me, because they stopped talking to each other, but they quickened pace without looking around. I kept yelling at them - in hindsight it must have come across as aggressive, because they just kept hurrying away. At last one of them turned around, saw that I wasn't trying to jump them, and gladly accepted his money back. He wouldn't let me go until I reluctantly accepted $20 as a thank you.
Ah, this reminds me from the days when Dutch postbank transfers were instantaneous if not send to another bank. A friend and I did a chat with the short messages you could send. We even got a printout of all the 1 ct messages as that was still a thing back then.
I'm pretty sure I could have been fired for that.
When I was on my way home, it fell somewhere. I didn`t even notice.
I got home, showered, I was getting ready to go to bed when I got a call from some guy.
Turns out he was walking with his dog, and saw the duffle bag fall of the roof. He took a look inside, and there was my Id and a business card, but not my contact information.
He recognized the business card because it was someone who got to med school with him. I was my step mother busIness card.
She gave he my cel number. I was incredible luck that day.
About a decade ago, I discovered a featurephone-based BASIC programming environment (as in, you write code directly using the phone itself) where you can upload programs you've written and download programs by others. There had sprung up a cottage industry of programming kids whose sole access to technology were their phones; that was pretty amazing & amusing in itself, but I laughed out loud when one of the uploaded programs consisted entirely of comment lines, essentially using uploaded source code as a message to one of the users of the service.
Then drop the wallet at the bank's closest office.
Last time was a year ago. I lost my wallet out of my back pocket at a tunnel, on the road. I did not even know I was missing it, when someone was on the door. His son found it. I gave him a bottle of wine as a gesture (couldn't come up with something different, it all went fast).
In retrospect, I don't think I could have done anything even if the language was English apart from wait for the owner to call their phone. That said, I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions about how I could have been a better Samaritan.
Then what?
(It's the Chinese greeting when picking up the phone)
Long time ago, I came out from Denny's during lunch and just after walking on the right edge of the parking lot, found a bundle of 100 dollar bills. There were several restaurants in the same location. I walked into the same Dennys and gave it to the cashier saying I found it in the parking lot and probably belongs to someone who might have visited here and then left. Next day I get a call from Dennys saying the owner of the cash wants to thank you and reward you. I said thanks but not needed.
The times I’ve found a wallet, I’ve called one of those support lines. The support person was able to contact their customer to give them my phone number. The customer called/texted me, and we arranged for them to pickup the wallet. This has worked every time to get the wallet back to its owner within a couple hours of my finding it with minimal inconvenience to me.
Instead, one could present the financial institution with the hypothetical question, and then only give the specifics if the institution's policies are non-destructive.
If the finder is a decent sort, and has the time to try alternatives, I'd rather get the cards back intact than to have to do the cancellation dance.
It worked. About a half hour later, I was sitting in their car, getting a ride home in exchange for the phone they lost, which I happened to find out in the middle of nowhere.
I remember vaguely having given a wallet with some ID and a business card of a medical doctor to the office of the doctor. They will never disclose private information but will call the owner himself.
At some countries they drop a wallet on the road, wait for you to find it and then appear and claim that few hundred bucks (or a local equivalent) are missing. First they try to threat you, and then resort to the police. Your fingerprints are on the wallet.
If you want to help, make sure you have a stranger witness at least, who is willing to help, or better look for a policeman nearby.
How could they pull this off? It's 100% he said, she said. What court is going to see such a case through and find in favor of the fraudster?
I once got a call/mail from my bank giving me the contact details of someone who had found my lost keys that had an RSA SecureID token generator thing on them and the finder called the hotline imprinted on it.
I don't remember much details around it since it happend in the mid 2000s.
Out of curiosity, does Faster Payments allow you to pay to any other identifier (email address, phone number), or only bank account number? More importantly... does it support emoji?
There is a system called Paym which lets you send money to (the bank account associated with) a phone number, but you have to sign up for it explicitly to associate your phone number with your account, and I personally have never used it nor heard of anyone I know using it.
> does it support emoji?
I believe it's limited to some subset of uppercase ASCII only. However, some banks allow emoji for transfers to other accounts within the same bank (e.g. Monzo).
Genuinely curious. Is this a UK thing or available everywhere?
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
You can include a memo on a paper check though.
For bills that don't accept ACH bill pay (i.e. most smaller companies and utilities), banks will often print and mail payments via check for free (it just says "signature on file" on the printed check). Like I said, decades behind.
I pay our childminder by bank transfer. Its almost instant to do from my phone, free, and I just put the invoice number in the reference field. The idea that banks would print and post cheques is like something from the era of telegrams. So weirdly anachronistic.
The predecessor to this UK system was introduced in 1968.
(Usage by individuals to send money didn't really happen until online banking was introduced around 2000.)
https://www.usbank.com/online-mobile-banking/transfer-money....
This says I have to pay a fee, and then wait 2-3 days to send somebody money. That's not caused by "infrastructure" that's caused by greed in the absence of effective government to tell them to get their shit together.
Even better it tells me the size of that fee is included in a "Fee Guide" the link for which is a 404. Excellent work.
Is that in any way remarkable?!
On the other hand, ordering your bank to print a paper check, and send it through postal mail is free of charge.
If we're talking about SWIFT transfers, it's probably the same in Europe. The only difference is that in Europe there's SEPA, which is readily accessible by consumers, fast and cheap.
I don't do many though, other payment options are easier (e.g. authorize companies to just take recurring payments from my account).
Here in New Zealand you'd tend to get their bank account number and send them a (free) direct deposit through your bank's Internet banking service. Until very recently that was also the main payment method for our eBay auction site equivalent TradeMe (they've now started a sort of PayPal clone called Ping so that they can skim a little extra from each auction).
But I've heard people can potentially withdraw money from your account if they have your account number in the US?
Venmo mostly.
Venmo is amazing. It's so fast and practically everyone has it. It's the Google of payments. I wish New Zealand had something like that. Sending money to friends in NZ is slow and painful - not terribly so, but compared to Venmo they really are.
Banking still uses cheques, so you have Paypal, Venmo, CashApp and so on.
Public transport is bad or even non existent which is why Uber and Lift exist.
The programm of over-the-air TV sucks and you get Netflix, HBO, Hulu and so on.
Uber exists because taxis suck.
Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.
Paypal is for websites no stores accept it and doesn't replace a cheque
Maybe it's different in the US, but I have a different account number for each of my bank accounts. So I can still choose where I want to deposit someone's money when I give them my account number, by choosing which account number I give to them. And no-one has to go to a bank.
Yes, it's an extra step, but you're already doing way more steps to cash a cheque than use a transfer service where you only give an account number and suddenly the money is there.
IMO, this sounds like a solution looking for a problem to me.
This is one of the reasons Paypay got so big so fast. There was a huge pent up demand for a wire transfer service that didn't suck. But then Paypal started to suck and people had to find something new.
This isn't true, each bank sets their own fees. It's true it's usually stupid expensive to send one, but none of my main banks charge to receive a wire.
For a long time I was confused by Americans raving about things like venmo or bitcoin talking about it making it cheap and easy to transfer money. Then I learnt more about the US banking system and it all made a lot more sense.
Planet Money did an episode all about it, featuring someone from the UK talking about our Faster Payments system, who is basically instant.
P.S. I have zero affiliation with the website or the owners/developers, I just thought it was entertaining.
Some of them are fairly generic terms. I remember when this was posted[2] on HN (payment troubles caused by writing "Blue Sky" on the memo field in a check, because a company called "Blue Sky Industries" was caught doing business with Iran).
Supposedly Venmo will also flag your payment if you put "ISIS" or something like that in the description
[1]: https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt
[2]: http://anildash.com/2014/02/21/here_is_a_thing_that_happened...
Eventually a message popped up with a full First Name and Surname, so I got my phone out, looked up the name and found the guy on twitter, I asked him about who he'd messaged saying I'd found this phone, I'd like to get it back to its owner.
Before he replies, the device starts ringing because FindMyiPhone had been activated.
A couple of minutes later this girl barges into the restaurant, grabs the phone from the table and starts shouting abuse at me and accusing me of stealing it.
I apologised and explained that I had been trying to get the phone back to her, but I'm also out at dinner with friends, and I'd found it practically in front of the restaurant, so I hadn't wondered off with it somewhere.
The last thing she shouted at me before leaving was "why didn't you just call one of the numbers in the phone then, or message someone?" at this point, my patience had ended with this idiot. "Because it's locked you dumb bitch" as she stormed out.
Anyway, this guy replied, turns out it's her cousin, he apologised for her attitude, and thanked me for my effort. I asked him to give her a promise, that if I come across lost property in London again, I'll just step over it and carry on, thanks to her.
I don't go out of my way anymore to return things I see on the floor.
Now, when I find things, and this happens relatively often (I've no idea why) I find the individual using social channels like LinkedIn or waiting them to call the phone.
She found his debit or credit card in the wallet and went to the local branch of his bank. They called him and he got in touch with her, and wallet was reunited with its owner.
Edit: actually the sibling comment’s suggestion (bill monthly) is probably better
I would not think twice about a cent, but people would definitely think twice about spamming a mailing list or sending newsletters to people that you know don't want them.
I once found credit card on the floor. I searched the agency on the internet, talked to the account manager, and left my contact info. The manager talked to the owner, and the guy give me a call.
I'm thankful that a drivers license mentions addresa, would have been annoying to replace all those cards.
If not mistaken this was done via contactless payment, right? how is that possible to add a message? (maybe you can in some country)
The UK has the Faster Payments Service which enables most bank transfers to be completed in a few seconds, so they would have seen the messages immediately as soon as they logged into their bank account to freeze the lost card.
But first, I'll make myself a nice cucumber salad and I'll use that new mandoline slicer we got - protective dongle thing be damned (The very same mandoline slicer my wife told me to be every so careful with before she left on her trip). Wow.. this is cool - every slice of the cucumber is identical down to the en.. OW!
Sliced my finger opened and spent the evening in the ER getting half a dozen stitches and the top of my finger sewn back on.. So much for karma...
The lesson I learned from this is never, ever return a phone you found - it will only lead to pain! :)
I asked my Android phone and it replied that technically I am a Homo Sapiens...
I don't believe in good samaritans. People only return wallets when they have no value or gains to be realized from them. The good folk leave it there, the ones with varied motives take it away.
Again, congrats for recovering your wallet. I'd never dream of it.
[1] could be https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734141432
I lost my phone one day and a stranger returned it by guessing my 1111 pin. People are generally good. He threatened me with a $20 fee but I agreed to pay and he refused it.
Yeah, whatever. But I apparently also need a cookie or something to see what this is about, so no thank you.