In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour
crimereads.com
crimereads.com
I wonder how common it still is.
But today the bags are tagged with gps trackers and they're almost always caught.
> The vast majority of bank robberies are relatively unsuccessful affairs, having netted criminals just $7,500 in 2010 on average, according to the FBI.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-sho...
Maybe I should switch careers…
As if the lack of consequences for perpetrators doesn't have consequences of its own. Insurance is not free money.
Their point was that they aren't worried / don't lose trust in the bank if it gets robbed. Rather, the money is guaranteed, so they retain confidence in the bank even if it loses a lot of many due to a particularly successful robbery. Because they'll still get their deposit back.
This is 100% what the FDIC and NCUA are about: ensuring continued consumer confidence in their banks.
I think many would lose trust in their bank if they heard it was being robbed with abnormal regularity.
It's also your perogative to shop at shady websites, and hope your credit card will accept the fraud claim. It basically the same thing.
In no way do I condone robbery.
Now, if you don't care about that kind of creeping cost increase, I have a cloud architecture to sell you.
Why would you trust a bank, showing lax security in one aspect, to be stable overall?
My bank (outside of USA) offers interest lower than inflation.
It does, but absolutely not because of robberies
The Boston area was already particularly had hit during the 1990s, with multiple scores in the $120 - $500K range by just one gang, all laid out in the last paragraph: https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/state/1997/12/23/...
Just curious ;-)
(I did later find out that same branch had been robbed earlier that month)
and your relationship with that bank
you shouldn’t have to be limited to a payment/custody system where you think about it but that’s how it is
always fix your banking rails before you need them
I had no trouble last year walking in to my bank and getting $7,000 in cash to buy a car. They didn't have it in the drawer at the counter, but it took them just a few minutes to go the the back room/vault and get it.
If you’re a frequent flier for cash, you learn about them.
Is there evidence of this? Anytime someone mentions declining crime rates its always with "well, they clearly don't report it!"
Read your local newspaper or the police department crime blotter; bank robberies still happen. The take is diminishing and the risks increasing though.
ROI is better on ATM theft. Clever thieves can subvert them with USB malware through hidden access panels. They still run crap like Windows CE (or whatever the Embedded version was).
I hope he proves me wrong.
Other favorites include The Dark Knight’s opening, and as far as escaping a bank robbery goes, Baby Driver’s opening chase was 10/10 (even though a Subaru couldn’t do what he was doing but I’m willing to let that go).
The Town and the original Point Break have great ones as well.
90s were a crazy time, man.
(No HN pedantry about SPL please.)
It's been awhile since I saw it but I remember not hating it.
There are advantages, like increased employee & customer safety and lower costs. But I like to use uncirculated bills as gifts and now there is no one there to get them for me.
If you get a lot of checks, deposit one at a time methods can be a bit slow and tedious--but that's less and less common.
I remember depositing banknotes in ATMs in Britain in the early 2000s. It was only a single ATM at the bank branch. You had to put the notes in an envelope and feed that into the machine. They would check the amount later in the day.
At some point the machine would take the notes one at a time, and I've seen these in Britain and Denmark, but I deposit cash less than once a year in any case.
Here's a weird ebay auction of receipts from 1997 showing deposits: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334119399422 and a pretty good deal on long distance!
I once made a calculation of whether it is possible to track all banknotes by serial number. There are only 20bn EU banknotes! Fits snuggly in a Postgres DB.
With that, you could detect patterns: Does these guys always withdraws from this ATM and the money is cashed in that other neighborhood? Drug deal. A banknotes suddenly reappears after years? Black money stored in bulk, let’s see who withdrew it. Etc.
The challenge here would be keeping the transaction costs as low as possible and using a stable coin. It would cost everyone a couple bucks to send messages, which is a nuisance, and some people might be tempted to steal nickels for various reasons. The crypto would be there to prove there is no way the recipient can possibly receive your message without putting up cash. Perhaps some very popular people could set their threshold higher to reduce noise. But even $0.01 would be highly effective.
There's this run by volunteers, but there's not mich going on.
With electronic databases keeping track of funds and movement of funds, the banks’ purpose is reduced to being a lender, which requires much, much less infrastructure.
If we had a constitutional right to an electronic funds account with an inalienable right to receive and send money, there would be zero need for banks. Their remaining purpose would be to be an underwriter or lender, at which point you would just describe them as an underwriter or lender instead of a bank.
Technically, there is no reason why the Fed has to give the banks 5.25% interest, and then the bank gives the general public 20 basis points less. They could just give it directly to the public.
It's also a policy that has buy-in from private banks, given that they are literally bought in to the Federal Reserve.
Although, I would argue the federal government and the federal reserve have the same mandate, which is maintaining a steady increase in asset prices. They might say they have other priorities, but their first will always be maintaining the social order, and politically, that requires sacrificing the currency’s purchasing power to maintain a minimum ROI.
And the federal government is explicitly the one guaranteeing that the numbers in your account at a private bank mean something, so how could the federal government be undermined? Surely my money being at Chase account # x or US government account # y is the same thing for me, except with Chase, there's a middleman in play who is taking a cut of interest from the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the things that sets the policy in question, is an executive branch agency, situated similarly to ones like the FCC.
Fed policy is not "very different from government policy", it is government policy.
See the recent bank failures of SVB and the couple others. How did having the money at a bank help, rather than say an electronic money account in a ledger operated by the federal government?
If you can deposit your money directly with the FED then that IS safer than government debt.
During a financial crisis such as 2008 money would go straight to the FED for safety forgoing everything else. This causes interest rates to spike everywhere including gov debt at precisely the time the government needs to borrow heavily to fix whatever went wrong.
That is why there will never ever be direct deposit with the FED because it circumvents one of the most important safety features in the modern economy, which is in the event of a crisis the government can borrow cheaply to fix things.
If people want to invest their money in US federal government debt, then the government has to pay interest. I do not see where thesafety” factor comes from, surely that is ensured by a functioning court system that ensures the numbers in the database cannot be altered.
The government can default on its debt, that's why the debt has a credit rating. As unlikely as it is to ever happen it could happen with enough political dysfunction because political opponents are playing chicken with each other.
A direct deposit with the FED can't, the FED does nothing with that money and can literally just print it back into existence, which the government cannot do.
Also, why does money in an account have to be debt? For a physical bank dealing with lots of staff and physical cash, they have expenses they need to recoup. But with instant communications and electronic database, why can the government simply not operate a database where the money (a number that someone had the legal power to spend) simple exists?
‘Every day a pedestrian is hit by a car on Main street. He is getting really annoyed.’
https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2023-10-20/killi...
It's interesting to see the debate going on in Seattle regarding crime right now. What I can say is that, while crime rates may not be scary compared to, say, the early 90s, what is different is that in the 90s you had to go to bad areas to experience it. Now the crime comes to you. It is much more widespread in areas 'normal' people frequent. Part of that has to do with the revitalization of downtowns that occurred then(when millennials and gays began cleaning them up?), I think. Back in the 80s and early 90s, you didn't go to downtowns unless you worked there.
Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ is kind of a throw back to that era’s preoccupations.
Due to local laws, it's a fairly safe bet in Los Angeles that few if anyone has a weapon more dangerous than a pocket knife. In small town Texas or Alabama, there will be a much higher percentage of armed customers, and a non-zero number will have a hero complex.
Founded by vets: - Bandidos - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Eugene_Chambers - Hells Angles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hells_Angels#History
Russia is just starting to relive the joys of young men returning from an ugly war with ugly new skills. Their last round was Afghanistan, and that was a kids' party in comparison.
This entire article is anti-freeway anti-freedom-of-movement propaganda. In the future the only thing that will have freedom of movement is capital, not humans.