How I Became One of the Most Successful Art Smugglers in the World | Hacker News Reader

How I Became One of the Most Successful Art Smugglers in the World

vice.com

101 pointsrobg14 comments

Cool story I guess but at the end I'm left wondering how much of it is true and how much is exaggerated just to sound 'cool'. I can't help but pick up quite a bit of arrogance in his answers.

I was thinking the same. How do you know these stories aren't BS? "Oh, I did some shady things in the 60s..."

I love reading Vice. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Agreed. I just got sucked into the site for an hour and had no idea.

Hah! Me too!

I highly recommend the Vice Guide to Liberia, if you want to hear about some of the lesser-known failures of colonialism.

Did colonialism ever produce anything but failure for the native inhabitants?

Hong Kong (and maybe Singapore) might be examples where colonialism was better enclave against some brutal forces or economically advantageous because of a more multi-cultural society.

Overall, though, it's a pretty dismal record.

Malaysia is probably the best success story, but you can easily make a case that India was better off under colonial rule than before or immediately after.

India was the producer of the most sough-after goods in the world - so much that when robbery threatened land commerce, some people thought it was a good idea to try a workaround and commission seaships to try to reach it from around the globle - where america stood in the way.

The damage inflicted to India have been huge. It is only starting to recover. My bets for the next world superpower are not on China (due to upcoming demographics problems), but on India.

I thought India also had demographic issues?

My money is on Brazil and Argentina.

B & A are going to be good, but IMHO not as good as India. I see India at the #1 spot around 2050. More people - as a billion. More education, and people moving back from the US to share their experience. Democracy (improving), and a wariness of how leftist reforms seriously damaged their country in the past. If they can fix the bureaucracy, it's going to be quite hot. (and BTW I'm not indian, this is not some personal bias - I just see a lot of potential)

Fair enough. The future is bright, surely.

Vice is awesome

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