Every so often my pessimistic tendencies get a healthy slap across the face by the actions of someone who took the high road when they easily could have chosen otherwise.
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.
I turned in more than one lost wallet or debit card to a librarian (or similar) while homeless.
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.
Long ago, I worked in a record store, and David Byrne came in to the store to shop. He was wearing a red plastic hard hat, yet gave a disparaging look to everyone who seemed to "notice" him. When he left, I discovered he had forgotten to take his credit card from the counter. I called him (we also had a video store with contact info) and he was incredibly rude and told me just to cut it up because he couldn't be bothered to stop back in. This story has no real point, but it did make me less of a Talking Heads fan, and perhaps relates to the idea that being a good Samaritan isn't always rewarding. That said, I once had my bag stolen at a nightclub, and a few months later someone found my wallet in some bushes and mailed it to me, which was a pleasant surprise. When I've had things stolen, I've always maintained a hope that there will end up being a happy ending, even if that hasn't been the case every time.
I flew back from Palermo to Zurich on Monday. Exceptionally in business class (essentially same price).
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.
Even prominent people can have a bad day or have other momentary hassles to deal with that might make them behave less than gracious on occasion. Trying to be generous here.
Whether you're talking about rich or poor, famous or not, educated or not - there are good and bad people.
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.
The problem with a forgotten credit card is that you can't be sure if it was stolen and can be cloned, so is better to dismiss it and get a new one. Maybe he had a bad morning talking with his bank about it yet so the card was useless at this time.
As per someone else's comment, everyone can have a bad day. I try not to judge people I don't know (unless there are repeat stories, then it's hard not to).
> 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.
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.
Back in '96 or '97 i found a pager dropped on the ground (they were pretty expensive back then), it was at night so i took it and called the lost and found number on the back. I was on the phone for about an hour and finally got to someone who gave me an address to mail it back to. I was in college and literally eating ramen noodles, i told them i was not getting a box and paying to mail it back. The person on the phone was rude and agreed to send a prepaid box to mail it back in.
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 found 2 and lost 1 in 49 years. But you'd need more than a couple data points to suggest anything. Let's at least require p<0.05 before suggesting something is "odd".
Ive both once lost and found a debit card in an ATM.
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.
Some do (that happened to mine when I forgot it once, bank called me). Others do not. The best ones require that you take your card before they do the thing you wanted it to do (as a measure to ensure you don't forget your card).
This drove me mad when moving to Canada. In Germany all the ATMs require you to take the card to get the cash, in Canada it was the opposite. I lost my card twice that way. Design is so important.
It’s like this in the US as well, and I didn’t know the possible difference in order of operations before you brought it up. I would think stuff like this would be written down in a best practice / licensing document somewhere in order to even sell ATMs.
Sadly no, there's very often tricks to correctly designing routine things in life that not everybody responsible has thought about and this can have dire consequences. Every "push" door with prominent "pull" handles is a miniature example.
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.
This is why I recommend all software engineers to read The Design of Everyday things. These basic design principles are helpful in designing UIs, APIs and architecture.
The thing with doors for me is that I feel “trapped” when I have a door with no place for my hands besides a panel that lies flat (does not extend outward) from the door. The first time I saw one I was very confused: it seemed to me that I was against a wall that was painted as a door, but had no handles. It was surprising to me that specific example it was brought up as an example of good user interface design in my university UI class.
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.
I can't remember which places do it which way, but I have walked off with my card and without the cash I withdrew when I used an ATM that gave the card back first (I was used to the other way round).
I live in Germany, where ATMs always require you to take out the card before giving you money. The reason I've heard for this is to avoid a particular scam that goes like this:
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.
Yes, ATMs nowadays wait for you to remove the card (start beeping if you don't) and won't produce the cash unless you've done so. But there could be ATMs on less-prone banks or just by other companies that just "sell cash" (and charge a fee) that are not so caring.
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 some Landmark course, many years ago, our homework included giving $1 to one random person every day, and recording what happened. As I recall, maybe 50% of people wouldn't take it, at least at first.
This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.
In major cities, I've been burned so many times with people trying to grab my attention for some agenda or other, usually to sell me something or peddle some wierd conspiracy, or both. I'm afraid I'd be one of the people who wouldn't take your dollar.
That's the problem with cities. Such high population density, so many people fighting for your attention. You have to ignore the people around you to some degree to get anything done. It's far too easy to just completely switch off after a while
This is why modern parenting guidance tends away from a blanket stranger danger policy toward something a bit more nuanced like "beware of a grownup who approaches you or initiates a conversations with you, but if you are in trouble, almost any grownup who looks safe to you is probably someone you can ask for help."
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.
Wow, that site is awfully bad. I had to go through 3 pages + one excruciatingly slow video all of which just told me how amazing their organization is, but I still didn't know what "Clever Never Goes" means.
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.)
In the Philippines, my companion and I went to an atm to withdraw our monthly support (something of a stipend as missionaries) and my companion was unfortunate enough to hold his in his hands just a little too long before putting it away and it was snatched by some kid who vanished into a sea of people.
In Hungary, I have been conditioned that if somebody approaches me on the street 95% of the time is a homeless person begging for money or somebody trying to sell me drugs or sex. The other people just not interacting with each other.
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.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if you say "Excuse me sir! You dropped your wallet" while holding up their wallet clear to see, people think "Oh no! A mugger! And they must have already robbed me, let's run for it" ?
While I was in college, there was a summer I couldn't find any tech work and ended up doing property claims for a tour company. It paid minimum wage, but it was pretty fun. What really surprised me was how many valuable items (camera bags full of lenses and an expensive-looking camera, CPAP machines, etc.) we would find with absolutely no identifying information whatsoever. We were able to track down some of the owners, but not all of them. If you're traveling, you should definitely have your name and contact information not just on, but inside your bags. It could come in handy someday.
I live in Sweden. Lost my wallet during my bike to work time in the morning. Not sure why it fell from my pocket, but it might because of the bumpy road due to some construction.
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.
When I lived in Germany, I would sometimes notice items placed up on fences, stone walls, the side of a fountain, etc. Things like keys, or a small child's toy, or a hat, for example.
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.
Another reason why people are doing this is to protect it from getting "even more lost". An item sitting on the road might be picked up by dogs, kicked away by mistake, or get dirty from people stepping on it. Putting it on the nearest fence puts it out of harm's way.
Similar thing happened to me. I lost my wallet biking in Amsterdam a few months ago. Replacing all cards would have cost a few hundred euros. Plus a guaranteed "please step aside" passing through the passport check at the airport (it's apparently a serious matter to lose your residence permit due to possible fraud).
Luckily for me, a kind stranger found the wallet and sent me an email and I had my wallet the next day.
my daughter lost her SL card (Stockholm public transport) that had a phone number written on, and on another occasion forget her debit card at the business.
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
Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
In Germany you likely visited a tourist area and in Brazil you likely were in your local area where you live or work.
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.
> Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
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.
Or maybe they don't want to support Chinese oppression.
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.
I visited a sketchy part of Parramatta for work and it really wasn’t that bad. I walked around in the streets every night for a month to get dinner. But I can understand how it could easily be assumed (in my opinion) the most likely place in Australia to get robbed.
Australia is a really safe place by comparison to nearly anywhere else.
I go to Oktoberfest (Munich) every year, and for a beer festival with hundreds of thousands drunk people in crowded tents and all-cash transactions, it is an amazingly safe place.
I left a MacBook Pro behind in the bin at a security checkpoint at Miami International Airport a few years back. I realized it when I got home, looked up the airport's lost & found number, called them, and they had it. I was shocked. They held it for my dad to pick up.
I left an iPad in a men's room at Tokyo SkyTree. Went back 20 minutes later and some random guy (regular guy, no uniform or anything) came out of the men's room and handed it to me. I guess I had that "just lost my iPad" look on my face.
I was checking in at a hotel in Amsterdam with my suitcase 2ft behind me with a duffel bag on top and my backpack inside containing my laptop.
In the 30s it took me from the point where I took my wallet out to the point I was done paying somebody had opened up my duffel bag and stolen my backpack. I just bought that MBP 2 weeks earlier and just finished the hassle of setting it up.
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’ve grabbed the wrong Air out the airport scanner. It even had a dent in a similar place. I opened it to check on it as I walked off and the saw it was wrong. The other laptop was just leaving in someone else’s hands. Close call.
Not too long ago after a series of unfortunate events I spent the night on the floor of the international terminal of the Atlanta airport. The next morning I (exhausted) was riding the tram back to my departing flight's terminal and noticed a kid left a little dinosaur action figure on the tram. I didn't notice until the next stop. I grabbed the toy, hopped off the tram, sped-walked back to the last stop, and walked through a handful of gates looking for the kid.
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.
A few weeks ago, my partner and I, together with our 1-month-old baby, were rushing to a courthouse as she needed to do some paperwork for a case she's involved in. We were under high pressure as the courthouse would close in like half an hour, but our son was especially hungry that day and we had to stop several times to feed him, etc.
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.
On a current Android (presumably iPhones are similar) you can set information and a list of contacts, when somebody picks up a locked phone they can pick emergency and then either:
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.
Is it actually legal? In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it. Happens on a routine basis, not even worth the newspapers. You don’t have such laws in Washington DC?
> In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
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.
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.
I was in Shanghai Pudong airport waiting in line to check in. There was a small suitcase sitting there unattended for quite a while. What was funny is that all of us in lined seemed to be very studiously ignoring it, looking away. I think we all knew that if anybody said anything, the security theater would start and we'd never get on our flights.
dunno man: all i see here is that you failed to take proactive action to defeat the possible threat that you had imagined in your mind, and instead shed responsibility onto some other human.
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
In my BS mental model of how brains work, I imagine that we estimate the probability of a risk not through some analytical method, but instead with a sampling-based approach where we observe how much time our brain spends worrying about different outcomes. The mental narrative that accompanies inaction probably looks like an inconsistent mess, not a principled calculation that the probability is low.
Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom?
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 the GP comment had a point, before you get to a gate you are scanned/x-rayed, searched and pass by chemical sensors. This is not to mention other technologies that are baked into the surveillance system.
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.
> 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...
Those are both checked luggage. Not briefly unattended luggage by someone who is in the bathroom. Where's the articles about unattended luggage?
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 items? Drugs and bombs that someone managed to sneak past security already? In that case isn't the real problem improper inspection? What if the proposed mad bomber, after having successfully managed to sneak all these explosives past security, and hoping to transfer the explosives from his own suitcase to that of a stranger on a specific flight who went to the bathroom, in plain view in front of everybody sitting there waiting for that flight to board, finds that no one has gone to the bathroom without their luggage on that day? Wouldn't that ruin his plan? Not a great plan to be relying on someone on a specific flight going to the bathroom and a whole room full of people somehow not noticing a guy openly transferring an entire suitcase full of explosives from one suitcase to another. Wouldn't one of the other passengers waiting for the same plane at this point say hey wait a minute, this dude here is transferring a bunch of explosives from one suitcase to another! Maybe I should say something!
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?
What is illegal? To inspect a bag you find in public? To inspect a bag you see someone dropped? Would really be interested in a reference to a specific law.
Don't forget metros/subways.
You see a lot of luggage pass through without inspection (unlike airports or stadiums) but the potential for a terrorist attack is real and they've been used for exactly this.
So transit police in US respond very quickly to unattended packages or luggage and treat them as dangerous by default.
(https://wjla.com/news/crime/suspicious-packages-in-d-c-unpac...)
>In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
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...
France experienced a high amount of bomb attacks in the 70s and 80s, eventually tapering off in the 90s [1]. The aggressive reaction to unattended bags stems from these events.
It's certainly not illegal to inspect unattended items in the UK. An assessment is typically made of whether or not it should be deemed a threat.
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.
Someone registered and paid for a new Netflix account with my gmail address plus a point somewhere, which Gmail ignores. So I logged into the Netflix account, thinking it was actually mine and this was some misunderstanding. I realized that was not the case, so I to tried to get in touch with the person but no other info was available, everything was done from his phone apparently according to the account logs. I figured that reporting it to support would not do much since they too did not have his info and no phone number was on record, they would cancel the account and maybe the amount paid would be lost.
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.
I have this problem too - only, it happens a LOT. I've had people use my Gmail address but without the "." to sign up (or try to) for Playstation accounts, Apple accounts, Paypal, Skype, Bank accounts, plus it's pretty common that I receive wills and other sensitive legal documents, property deals, you name it. The legal docs etc are likely due to other people mishearing/mistyping someone's email which I can understand, but I'm constantly baffled by how often people must type in their OWN email address incorrectly for important situations too.
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.
I have this same issue with one of my junk email addresses. It's pretty short, it's a famous person's last name (I was a fan), but it's not a very common last name. I've received all kinds of stuff, from many people, but one lady in particular. I only recently noticed this and when checking, I found out that this had been going on since 2008. She's used my email for: car service appointments, plane tickets, Walmart orders, forwards from her work email, turbo tax, customer support, change.org, hotel reservations, etc. Pretty much every aspect of her life has ended up in that mailbox.
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.
It does make a case for not using common user names. I used to always try to use my first name in the early days of the Internet, but it was almost always taken.
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.
"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"
That would be a great feature if you could tell gmail what +something suffixes you've used and it blocked all mail to other suffixes and the address without the suffix. As it is, spammers can just strip off the +something part, or change it to +somethingelse, to cover their tracks. I know this is gmail specific - for other providers they'd have to keep +something suffix in case it really goes to a different inbox - but gmail is so big that spammers can afford to make a special case for them.
Doesn't Gmail support rules that apply when no other did? That could be used to filter out all emails to addresses that are in use we while deleting all others.
no, Gmail does check for that during registration. But you could use those two different email addresses to create two separate accounts somewhere else.
In terms of the kindness of strangers, I’m reminded of a friend who decided she wanted to hitch hike around Mexico when she was 18. She was poor but she wanted adventures. She wanted to get away from the beaten path, away from tourist traps, and go out into the rural areas so she could discover what Mexico was really like.
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.
I frequently walked home from work in Oakland at 1am when I worked a night shift. I always wore headphones too and people would tell me I was being stupid. After about a year and a half of this I was coming up a hill to a four way intersection when someone popped out from behind a fence just before I passed it, grabbed my shirt and stuck a gun in my stomach.
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.
> 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.)
They are implying that the outcome for the girl hitchhiking around Mexico could have been worse had one of the criminals or other bad actors been the one to pick her up. I believe the purpose of the story here is to warn against survivorship bias. Just because something bad doesn't happen to you when you do something risky, it does not mean that the bad thing does not or cannot happen. Someone hitchhiking solo around Mexico (or anywhere) is taking a risk of being picked up by nefarious persons and having bad things happen, such as sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, or murder. The fact that one girl did it for a month with no issue does not necessarily mean that there is no risk in doing it.
The purpose of the Oakland story is to warn that just because something bad doesn't happen, even for a long time, it does not mean that the bad thing does not happen.
>In this manner, she traveled around Mexico for a month, and she never had a dangerous ride.
>the consequences for her would probably have been much worse
These are the two linked statements — if she had had a dangerous ride, the consequences could have been worse (abduction in a foreign country etc.) than the consequences of a mugging in your own city.
The problem with hitchhiking is that you don't pick someone at random, someone decides to pick you up.
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.
You may want to consider the rates of homicide and rape in Mexico before determining that one person's experience of not being hurt is that compelling.
I just looked it up and Mexico city’s homicide rate in 2009 was half that of Atlanta, Georgia. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Mexico#Mexico_City) Mexico has changed considerably in the last 30 years, and the story above sounds like it wasn’t recent. Most murders today are drug related, and crime is heavy in US border towns, but not that bad everywhere else.
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...
Mexico City is one of the safer cities in Mexico and Atlanta one of the more dangerous cities in the US. Tijuana and Acapulco, on the other hand, have a murder ten times higher than Atlanta's. Victoria, Juarez, and Irapuato have five times Atlanta's murder rate.
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.
When I was in Mexico City (10+ years ago) every single person advised "don't get in random taxis", make sure you know one / have a driver's number.
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.
It's a bummer it's gone that far downhill, I'd love to go back and visit someday when it gets better. We used to take random taxis all over the place, back when all the taxis in DF were VW bugs with the front passenger seat ripped out. Never had an issue with any drivers, but I remember distinctly how the driving in the city was total madness, traffic rules and conventions we take for granted mostly ignored. I had fears about being in a crash, but no fears about being randomly mugged or killed.
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.
The people being killed in Mexico, by and large, are not foreign travelers, they are Mexicans who are involved in drugs. Looking at the average murder rate is misleading in this context.
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.
I'm a woman who was homeless for nearly six years. Homeless women also are at high risk of being raped, which is one of the reasons you see relatively few women on the street compared to men.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'll give you another extraordinary claim: I appear to be the only openly female member of HN to have ever spent time on the leader board.
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.
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.
I'm a woman, but I also have absolutely no idea why this would be relevant. If it helps to explain, I would disbelieve any person on that leaderboard who said they would definitely be able to identify any Ted Bundy types. I don't think that skill exists.
The vast majority of rapes are not committed by Ted Bundy types. This is a detail I already addressed elsewhere. Most victims know their assailant socially.
Nowhere have I claimed any ability to "identify Ted Bundy types." Suggesting this is my claim amounts to putting words in my mouth.
The city in the US with the highest rape rate is Anchorage Alaska with 200 rapes per hundred thousand people. Without taking into account any of many relevant complications, that's a 0.2% chance to get raped annually, or a 99.8% chance of not getting raped.
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.
Your statistical gymnastics is a case of how to lie with statistics.
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 don't really know what we're arguing about at this point so I'm tapping out.
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.
That doesn't mean it's safe for young women to hitchhiker in Mexico though.
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."
The word usually in that sentence admits to that outcome.
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.
Given a long enough time in risky circumstances (vs a few months of single-mode behaviour, hitchhiking, in your example) the experience would start to get pretty compelling. I think the cited six years is probably good enough to get a good feel for the risk level, especially since you presumably hear about other incidents from peers and develop an intuition for risky situations.
edit: data tangent - if your Anchorage stats were about reported cases, the averages would need correcting for underreporting.
I would guess that GP's reasoning is flawed; in this part of the world, the likelihood of a "normal, honest person" picking up a young woman is much higher, due to the knowledge of a high crime rate.
I don't doubt that's a factor. But I also know that I have a very long track record of successfully negotiating circumstances that others deem untenable and I've actually taken college classes in subjects such as Negotiation and Conflict Management.
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.
It makes sense that competence can look like blind luck to people who are unfamiliar with the environment, if it's an environment that behaves in a subtle way and is rarely experienced by an average person.
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.
reliably get an indication of risk and intentions.
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.
> I have reservations about the explanation that a consistent positive outcome can be chalked up to pure luck.
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.
It seems like hitchhiking works then! In safe areas, and in super dangerous areas when you look vulnerable... All those families stopped because they were afraid for her well-being. But still, super lucky, if a criminal had got on that road ahead of the family, the story might have been different.
I agree. I was forced to hitch-hike in Guatemala after missing the last bus . I also was picked up by a family
and sat in the back of their truck for about 100km. When I got off at 9pm they advised to only continue to hitch on mining trucks or oil tankers during the night. I still remember sitting under a huge banana leaf during torrential rain waiting for hours for a truck to stop. The driver later dropped me off in the middle of no where and said a bus would stop there by 5.30am and indeed it did stop, but it was full so I was sitting on the roof of the bus for the next three hours together with 10 other souls.
In a bus traveling south of Mazatlan I met a family and they invited me to stay at their home in Mexico City. This place, as it turned out, was right in the middle of the largest slum and consisted of a metal frame with roofing and side walls made of tarpauline and a mud floor . The first few days there was a queue of people outside just to oogle the foreigner, but it was all good with lots of smiles. The morning teeth brushing and face washing ritual by young and old was fascinating to watch, with everyone awaiting their turn at the single faucet for hundreds of people.Food was simple, mostly made on small kerosene stoves. I stayed for 8 days and at no time did I feel unsafe , despite my host explaining about many pickpockets , expert thieves and robbers living in this area who went to work the tourist spots during the day , like other people would go to an office , but this was home.
My host had a real job in the forestry department of the city government , but he said he could not afford to live
else where.
Professional thieves are professional enough to not waste time on the foreigner that was probably broke since you were staying in their neighborhood. And professional thieves need a level of anonymity to work, which goes out the door when they rob someone in front of their aunt.
They were picking her up to protect her. I’ve been in Central America and had these types of things happen, never foolish enough to hitchhike. Many times people on buses have explained these types of things to me. Where I need it watch out for my stuff, how to not get ripped off, and which places I should avoid. One example I can remember[1].
Another woman did that recently(ish) in Europe, not just for adventures but to prove the world was a safe place or something - she was murdered though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Bacca
This reminds me of a story about how a tribe in the amazon jungle picks their camp site. They check the surrounding trees to make sure they are in good health. I imagine you would have to spend 1000 nights next to a tree they would regard as unsafe, before there was even a chance for something to happen to you. When it happens though, your family will remember it.
That's not how it works. People travel around like that the whole time I'm sure. If every one would end up dead after a month, there would not be anyone left. But that one time it happens, be it after 10 years or 20, you are still dead. Sucks to be that tiny percent that it happens to.
In Czech Republic, during presidential elections, one of the participants (winner, Milos Zeman) opened a transparent as part of their marketing. That meant that every transaction was visible along with donor, amount and a short message.
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].
Coincidentally, I was able to return four peoples' IDs and other cards just this afternoon. Yesterday I was walking in East Oakland and found a pile of credit cards, debit cards, and IDs. Oakland Police Department wouldn't take them so I brought them home and started googling names and addresses.
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.
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.
Speeding tickets make sense. They're putting people's lives in danger by speeding. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do regularly. Having a set of predictable behaviors saves a lot of lives. People who think that think they're "great drivers" or "everyone else is doing it" violate those norms and create risk.
> Speeding tickets make sense. They're putting people's lives in danger by speeding. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do regularly. Having a set of predictable behaviors saves a lot of lives. People who think that think they're "great drivers" or "everyone else is doing it" violate those norms and create risk.
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.
"Even if you try to give an example of someone coming up on your left at a 50+mph difference"
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.
My example was mainly on a straight road because it's easy to understand. It applies to curvy roads where you won't see ahead too though. As someone driving, you should never drive faster than what you can see ahead and be able to stop in time. I kind of imagine what I'd like to call a "meteor" incident. Would I be able to stop in time if a meteor randomly crashed just outside of my vision ahead in a turn? If not - probably going too fast. (It's not uncommon to meet a "meteor" in the form of a car) One could call that "speeding" but that's not what it is colloquially. (Speeding to most is going 1+mph over the posted limit)
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.
"As someone driving, you should never drive faster than what you can see ahead and be able to stop in time. I kind of imagine what I'd like to call a "meteor" incident. Would I be able to stop in time if a meteor randomly crashed just outside of my vision ahead in a turn? If not - probably going too fast."
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.
In this case, you're the meteor and the other person is at fault. They turned a corner (I don't see how else they couldn't see the intersection - if it's a straight then they can see the intersection - thus my cornering talk) and went into an intersection where another car was already. It's no different than someone romping over a very steep hill (very prevalent in SF) and assuming the intersection they're running into is "clear". (It usually isn't!) It's not a thing they can do and they shouldn't do it.
Either way - sounds like a bad intersection and they should design it differently. (Turn on left with left arrow only, etc.)
"In this case, you're the meteor and the other person is at fault."
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.
> But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
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
Speeders, generally, don't care about their absolute speed. They only care about their speed relative to the people around them. They form packs which bunch up and then rotate positions and lanes while they overtake each other and occasionally people driving legally. All this massively increases the risk of crashes at deadly speeds. If they'd just go the posted limit there'd be far fewer bunches and far fewer lane changes.
I signalled and looked over my shoulder before changing lanes today, only to see an unexpected car right behind me when I looked back into my rear-view mirror. I'm still not sure whether they changed lanes into my lane, or if they were going so fast that they weren't in my field of vision until I turned back around. They braked in time, though.
Why should the OPD bother chasing down purse thieves? How are they going to make money for the city by doing that, when they can go after people for speeding and parking violations instead and make lots of money?
I don't know why the guy is getting downvoted. It's a known city for having rather unpleasant police. Most of my friends who live in Oakland have really unpleasant experiences with their officers.
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.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
This is neat! I once found someone’s debit card on the street (in the US). It had a small face shot on it, so I found them on Facebook and sent them a message. Of course, Facebook had already started doing the “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern, so like two years later the woman responds thanking me, but also saying she just canceled the card. Which is what I would’ve done, but I at least wanted to provide some peace of mind or closure that it wasn’t stolen or anything.
A few years ago, I found a wallet at a New York subway station. The wallet had some documents (including driver's license), weed and a note saying "You are fool". I found the guy on Facebook. He didn't know anything about the note, but we figured it was written by someone who found the wallet before me. He or she took all the cash and left a note, lol. I threw out weed and mailed the owner all of his documents. He was the happiest man in the world on that day.
"Giving" the weed to the owner of the wallet seems like it would be fraught with legal peril, even if the kind wallet returner were to try and do it as a "dead drop".
We had a woman visit a group I belong to from out of town, and I gave her and someone else a ride to a meeting. A couple hours later I found her debit card in my back seat.
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.
Nine hundred miles from home I spotted a driver's license in the snow from a chairlift on Snowmass Mountain. It was still there when I skiied back down. Imagine my surprise when it was for a neighbor who lived two blocks from me! It was only surpassed by my neighbor's surprise when I knocked on her door and handed her her son's driver's license.
I've found quite a few things over the years. Phones. Car keys. Cards. Wallets. I've run after people who left purses, bags, chargers, and even a guy who straight-up forgot his laptop on a table. The vast majority of the time, these things happen in some establishment with a lost-and-found I can turn items over to.
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.
Yup. It’s admittedly a bit unsettling, but people make their info public and I was trying to be helpful. Might as well try to use social media for some good, ya know?
This is a legitimate concern, but the way to combat isn't to silently hide messages behind unfamiliar UI. For a contrast, consider email junk filters, which generally serve a similar purpose but are accessible enough to easily scan through in case of legitimate messages being lost.
I've come across a type of scam where someone on a dating app like tinder will pose as an attractive person with the intention of trying to convince the victim to engage in sexually explicit texts or snapchats. Once they do, the scammer then looks up the friends of friends of the facebook profile associated with the number and then tries to blackmail the victim with threats of sending embarrassing texts to their closest friends. There are now TV commercials warning about it too. The best thing you can do is beg the scammer to post the texts, it really confuses the hell out of them and thanks to this facebook feature, the threat is greatly minimized.
Actually, the best thing you could do would be to not send someone pictures of yourself you wouldn't like shared. Also, the scammer could just add them as friends first.
Yes that would be the best thing but sometimes kids aren’t wise enough. Yes they could add all your friends, but the idea is to kill their incentive. After all they’re banking on you being ashamed for their blackmail to get money from you. Those that matter don't mind and those that do don’t matter.
They would still probably send nudes to your mother out of sadistic pleasure. Sometimes people get themselves into a situation where they have no good choices to make.
So what if they do? You can't let other people dictate your emotions or they will take advantage of you any way possible. That feeling of shame and embarrassment comes from within, not from the scammer, and therefore you have power over it, not them. There's no sadistic pleasure to be had if the victim doesn't care. If the victim doesn't care, why should the scammer waste their time? But just in case they do, good thing there's that facebook feature that hides messages from obscure users. By the time someone ever finds the message, you can just say it was a deepfake.
Just because it comes from within doesn't mean it's realistic to control it. People feel shame for complicated reasons, and to stop feeling shame about something would likely change parts of someone's personality. Maybe he or she thinks that only special people should see them nude? You can't just will that away. Plus, the perpetrator might be satisfied in knowing something like "now all her friends will know what a slut she is" or whatever those people tell themselves.
Not everyone is as "tough" as you. Learn to have empathy. Having your naked body sent to people you love is a grossly embarrassing proposition for most people.
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 do, and most of them are gross (I’ve read a lot about what women deal with, and my women friends have told me as much). But I don’t know if the current solution is the best one. If I were a cynic I would say that Facebook does this intentionally because they want you to befriend someone to chat with them.
> “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern
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's solution to unsolicited messages and spam was basically to make messages from non-friends totally invisible. I wouldn't really call it a dark pattern, but they have broken the ability to send messages to anyone who is not your friend. It's pretty much a spam filter with with one binary parameter. It's just lazy.
Interesting point, I wonder if they can apply some logic into it, like if the sender is male and he's written to many female non-friends, give him a higher "probably junk" score. But if he's gotten good response rates his message is probably worth delivering.
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.
If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people. How would contacting a business work if their email system auto-rejected all messages from people not already known?
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.
Tools don't exist in a vacuum. When a tool is a closed platform driven by a business, that business is going to heavy-handidly steer how the tool is used.
It isn’t always socially appropriate to friend request people, which is why I rarely do it (because I have no idea what the other person’s expectations are). If I’ve been introduced to a total stranger via Messenger, I don’t necessarily want to (nor should I have to) be their “friend” just to have them see my messages.
> If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people.
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.
I hate it when my cynicism alarm goes off, but this feel-good tweet about hacking payment transfers for good is written by a guy who's twitter bio says he's a PM at Transferwise ("We’re building the best way to move money around the world.")
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
Hi, I’m the guy who lost his wallet! I agree it’s a convenient overlap and understand your cynicism but I assure you that it’s genuine. I can even provide you with the receipt from me riding a jump bike around for an hour looking for my wallet! :)
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 :)
Thanks for dropping in. Sorry if that actually happened to you. The sad thing is when much of tech is dedicated to churning attention capital into financial capital in an ever-more-clever cat-and-mouse game, one stops being able to trust anything that grabs one's attention. Or, at least every social interaction starts to feel purely transactional. It's a shitty social dystopia we're building for ourselves.
Whichever way your story went, thanks for the neat tale of what can be done with bank transfers! Glad it worked out.
I'm not all that cynical about it. I don't think that people (micro-)blogging made up stories (which this may or may not be) means there's something terribly wrong with them. It's a white lie told repeatedly with a straight face. It's worse than a white lie told once, but not as bad as a more directly harmful lie like faking an illness and collecting money from strangers on GoFundMe.
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.
Um, this is how banking works in the UK. Nobody cancels their bank account if they lose their card, they just cancel their card. And given someone else's card I could send them 1p within a minute (even if it's cancelled). Now I've seen this approach, it's what I'll do next time. And it doesn't involve the poster's company in any way, transferring thousands of pounds instantly within the EU is trivial.
Also in a lot of cases these days you don't even have to cancel the card.
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".
In the UK the details needed to transfer money into an account are on most bank cards (Account Number and Sort Code), so that's enough identifying info.
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?).
The old system (BACS) has been electronic since 1983, or possibly even 1968 when it was introduced. (Wikipedia is unclear, it seems transactions were recorded on magnetic tape for the first 15 years, before using phone lines.) It slowly replaces the paper based system: cheques.
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.
I'm curious about this. I've always banked with NatWest so I'm only really familiar with their cards, but my bank account number is definitely not printed on the card (the sort code is).
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?
I'm with Starling Bank, and along with the usual Mastercard numbers (card number, expiry, CVV etc.) it has the account number... though not the sort code, strangely. I guess you could look it up if you wanted to, but you'd need to know this 8-digit number with no label was the account number. Weird.
I think Natwest is the outlier in this case. I've always had my account number and sort code on all my cards with other banks (Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax).
Edit: Maybe also Monzo, no account number on that one.
Faster Payments is the standard, free way of making payments to bank accounts in the UK. Everyone with online banking here has easy access to it regardless of what bank they use. Also, our debit cards generally have enough information to send someone a payment that way for some reason.
IIRC the limit according to the standard is £100,000/day but most banks impose their own arbitrary limit. Assuming things haven't changed in 5 years, this[1] lists the limits for a lot of banks. I can also add to the list that Monzo's is £10,000/day.
BACS is generally cheaper at volume. In addition, BACS Bureau allows a payroll company to transfer money directly from your employer's account to yours without the money ever reaching their account.
All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.
Anyone can say anything they want on the internet! The variables here are conveniently precisely aligned where real world chances of this happening are null. I also call BS. But a noteworthy mention to the marketing idea. With all due respect.
For what it is worth, I saw this story and thought "Oh, I love this; creative use of metadata in the payments system", principally because I am professionally involved with payments. All the "coincidences" here are explainable by "people who geek out on X will tend to see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians and will become focal points for other people who geek out on X, who see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians." You can trivially reproduce "OMG banks!" on any social media feed you control; just kvetch in public about a banking story.
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.
Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one.
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.
>Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one.
Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive.
floatrock is pointing out the fact that there is a motive for this to be a PR stunt.
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)
> He never put blanket statements and didn’t even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.
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.
> 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”.
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.
Isn't this a success story of a regular bank account though? I would find this super far-fetched as some sort of weird promotion, especially where OP's company is never mentioned and not actually posed as better than a regular bank account (or a regular bank account as bad).
Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.
Marketing is not a banner ad or billboard anymore.
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?
Most cards have a business name or person's name. Taking the card to the police or the bank would get a call directly to them.
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.
Why would you cancel a bank account over a lost wallet?
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.
A bank card has the sort code and account number of the account on. Those let you transfer money into the account. They don't let you take over the account. They're like an area code and phone number, which don't let you take over someone's house.
A lot of HN regulars come from America, where knowing the equivalent information does often make it possible to steal money from someone's bank account and where you can only make payments like this using third-party companies or paper checks. I think a lot of the misunderstandings in the comments might stem from people not realising that UK banking is different.
There's a softer version of this intuition: a guy who works for Transferwise would be more likely to write a blog post about something like this when it happened to him.
I understand the cynicism, but at this point, Transferwise isn't a scrappy startup and I can't see any reason why they'd want to pull off such a PR stunt. They're valued at $3.5B. $3.5B companies don't "fake lose" their wallets to get to the top of HN
Where is there a "deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is" at the link? I see a tweet with a fun story that's about no negative part of banking and bunch of replies about how this is cool or how the commenter also has a story about lost property. If it's deeper I didn't scroll far enough down, and I doubt very many of those interacting with the tweet did either.
Be all that as it may, in a world where people use their Wi-Fi SSIDs to say nasty things to their neighbours, I totally buy that this story is plausible.
To be a bit more cynical, every time I see those generic "change the world" and cheeky "office dogs" things listed as a reason to work there, I can't help think; "you really couldn't come up with any meaningful reasons to work there?"
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.
Just want to chime in to tell any prospective new Transferwise customer that my experience with the company has been dreadful. They can for no reason deactivate your account with funds still remaining. That’s not the problem though, it is that their appeals teams takes over 2 weeks to respond per message. Yep, waited 3 weeks to get an answer for deactivation. Another 3 weeks to convince them it was an error. Now it has been a month since I sent in my supporting documents and no reply yet. Think I might have to file a formal complaint at this point.
It's not noteworthy all of itself, things get unproportional amounts of attention all the time on the internet, but I find it interesting that this story then ended up on the very top of HN
Since we're sharing, I lost my wallet in the park on the day before I had to hand in my thesis. When I realized it was gone, I just blocked my bank card, but otherwise I put it out of my mind because I was focused on last-minute changes. An hour later or so, the police called and told me that someone had handed it in and that I could pick it up at the station. I told them that I would do that the next day because my thesis deadline was more important. So they sent two officers to my address and and brought me my wallet. Talk about service!
Two weeks ago in Maui at the visitor center at Mt. Haleakala a distraught young woman came in saying she had dropped her wallet somewhere between the visitor center and the peak. When she went to the women's bathroom in the visitor center to check if she might have dropped it there, she found someone else had forgotten their iPhone by the sink.
Within a few minutes an older couple walked into the visitor center and said they had found a wallet on a hike but had lost their iPhone :-)
Two individuals each finding the others lost item was pretty karmic!
I found a wallet once. It has a bankcard in it, so I called the bank, telling them I had found the wallet of one of their customers and asking them if they could help me return in to the owner.
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.
Same find, in Australia. But they (Commonwealth) wouldn’t entertain any swapping of details. I was just on the phone to the service centre and I thought all was lost ... but of course they said “just take it to any of our branches and we’ll sort it out”.
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.
I stick my email-address on all valuables I could conceivably lose. Just last month the police sent me a message about a camera found in the road with my address on it. I'd been wondering for weeks where I misplaced it. It must have fallen off when I passed there with my bicycle.
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!
I imagine the bigger concern is that it's pretty easy to social engineer your way into most online accounts with an email and the info from a drivers license.
Even better - put a photo or even a drawing of your face on the note as well, to try and evoke some empathy from the finder, increasing the chances it'll be returned to you.
I was riding my mountain bike in the woods about 5 years ago. I found someone's wallet in there. Looked them up on Facebook and LinkedIn and sent them some messages. Never heard back from them for a few years.
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.
I once lost my wallet the night of a work Christmas party. Went through the trauma of cancelling cards etc, getting some cash from the bank branch to tide me over, using my passport as ID. A real pain.
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!
I've found bank cards a few times and have called the bank in question, they've just thanked me, made a note of it, and asked me to destroy the card myself.
Seems like the practice came to an end last year in England and Wales: "From 1 October, anyone who contacts the police about something they have lost will be redirected to private websites"[0].
Mine allows about an original tweet in length, but forces a line break in the middle, and it disallows dangerous characters. Just the usual suspects that always break everything and cause database tables to be dropped or commands to be injected. Exclamation marks are super dangerous.
Honestly, I can understand stripping characters at a large organization like a bank. It shouldn't ever be necessary, but it protects against that brainfart/junior dev/marketing analytics software, with little cost.
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]"
"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."
The system has existed for over a decade, and the slower predecessor for over 50 years. It's a normal thing in Britain, and doesn't need to be advertised.
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.
This... In India we have UPI Unified Payment Interface, in which with a bank account & phone number, you can signup to any of the tens of participating banks UPI address, in format of user@bank Mine is dav@hdfcbank. Totally safe & one way only, incoming. You just need to plug this into your bank app, in micro seconds the money will be out of your account & in to my account. Works 24x7x365
"the technology the "good Samaritan" used" is just what anyone in the UK uses to send money to someone else. It's been standardised for like... forever, and is nothing special or worth astroturfing for.
It is coincidental that the person who lost their wallet is working in that industry, but it probably helped the story go viral instead of just disappearing.
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).
Twitter wouldn't load for me (well done 2019 JS-heavy interface!), so that's the story...
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.
The bank account number is written on the card. European bank accounts make a lot more sense than in the US, your account number is a public number that can be used to receive money only and there is a transfer number for making payments.
> European bank accounts make a lot more sense than in the US, your account number is a public number that can be used to receive money only and there is a transfer number for making payments.
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?
That makes sense, the debit card will be EMV compatible so it'll need a number that's about 16 digits long, because that number needs to be unique compared to all the world's payment cards.
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.
Follow-up stupid American question - what's "bank cards"? Is it like a business cards with your banking information on it that you give to someone so they can send you money?
...it's a card that you use to pay for things in store, taking money from your bank and giving it to the store, and to get money from ATMs, taking money from your bank and giving it to you in cash.
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.
Yes it's like a debit card, and ATM card, and helpful reminder of your bank account details, all in one. And it's supported by Mastercard and Visa, so you can use it anywhere you can use a creditcard, even though it's not a creditcard.
I feel pleased reading the stories on the comments here.
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.
Nah I think the tweet is gone, I can't see it from a browser.
(edit, weirdly I tried again and it worked. Definitely errored with a strange error the first time)
Around 2007-2009, Germany had fairly expensive SMS on mobile plans, but bank transfers within Germany were usually free, and Swift transfers allowed like 200+ characters of text.
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.
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.
This is very nice use of the (now) mandatory message space for SEPA transfers!
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.
It's (UK standard) 'Faster Payments' l, not SEPA. I don't know if it's mandatory, but all the (five that I recall) banks I've used since its introduction have supported the reference/message field. It's usually pretty instant, especially if intrabank.
I worked at a university a while back. Found a student's wallet in a park one day while running, but I couldn't find any contact info. I looked them up in the university database to find their phone number and was able to meet up to return the wallet.
I once was comming back from academy, and was late, so I didn`t want to stay and shower there, and decided to go home in may exercise clothes.
When I was going inside the car, I put the duffle bag containing wallet, clothes and watch, OPN the car roof to open the door, and forget there.
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.
Anything that can hold arbitrary text and can be seen by more than one user eventually becomes used as email.
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.
I've lost my wallet multiple times in my life. Always got it back, intact (ie. nothing missing). Why? Because most people (99%) are good, and people are empathic to such circumstances. They'll help you out. I've done the same (in The Netherlands, the police will forward it to the city council).
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).
On the flip side, I knew a woman who started being stalked by her ex after they broke up. Even though he was blocked on everything he was sending her e-transfer requests with abusive stuff in the comments field.
A few weeks ago I found a working iPhone X on the side on the sidewalk. I thought about using siri to call a recent contact and try to get it back to the owner, but I found the language was set to Chinese (which I cannot read or speak) and I gave up and put it back on the sidewalk in case the owner came back.
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.
You could have given it to some near by store saying someone dropped it and maybe he or she may come looking for it..
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.
Hmm. That’s neat. But usually someone has a bank card or other membership card with a support line on it. Is there some reason to not just call one to report the found wallet?
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.
It depends on the organization. Some larger financial institutions are sometimes more likely - or even bound by internal policy - to simply trigger their standard card-cancellation procedures.
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.
When I was in grad school, I was 10 miles from home without a phone. I had been walking for miles, and eventually found a beat up old Galaxy-S3 on the road. I picked it up, turned it on, and it happened to still be logged into Facebook. So, I posted a new status on their Facebook account: "Hey, I found your phone -- give me a ride home if you want it back".
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.
The ticket machines of the German railway system print the ticket before releasing the bank card (to prevent a charge if the printer is broken), which makes it very easy to forget the card in the machine. Happened to me twice, both times someone found the card, brought it to a branch of my bank, which sent the card to the branch in my home town, which then contacted me, saving me the 10 EUR for a new card. Thanks, strangers!
Interesting approach. I would have the wallet given to the bank. The bank can't disclose the phone number of the customer but will be happy to give him a call and tell him he can pick it up in the branch.
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.
Similar fraud: a guy who looks like a bad guy “finds” the wallet near you, makes sure you seen it and then inclines to split it. “Don’t even try to call cops!”, take your cut, etc. If you take it, even out of confusion, bad guy vanishes and their friends come and claim they seen all in reverse and that you took most of the money. Banknotes with known serials / pen marks are in your pocket, threats, police.
Here's a variation I've seen: bad guy finds jewelry (necklace/ring) near you, making sure you've spotted it too. Then you get in an argument for ownership. He suggests splitting the cost - he would leave if you pay him, in cash, half the estimated price of the expensive-looking but fake jewelry. And then, of course, he vanishes.
It never goes to a court, obviously. Your choice is to spend hours at crappy room with other unsocial dudes waiting for more important cases to be documented before yours, -or- take a shortcut by just giving them what they claim. You’ll also be confused if it is a fraud or you just found a recently stolen wallet. That’s how fraud works.
Wouldn't it be much easier for the finder to just get in touch with the bank and ask them to notify the owner?
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.
No it wouldn't. Sending three or four transfers from mobile banking app is for sure faster than finding bank number, calling them, listening to the info that the conversation will be recorded, listening to the menu, then listening to music interrupted with "we will be with you shortly" etc. I guess I could send 20 transfers at least during this time.
Interesting that there's an 18 character limit. In Australia, with the NPP (equivalent to UK's Faster Payments), your description can be up to 280 characters including, of course, emoji.
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?
> does Faster Payments allow you to pay to any other identifier (email address, phone number)
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).
"Reference", "memo", "note" - some referrer or reminder about the transaction in question. Invoice number, PO number, 'movie tickets' ... it's just a free-form text field.
In the Netherlands, for at least the last 35 years, transaction forms have a field "Description" where you can enter arbitrary text. Originally on paper, now electronically.
American banking infrastructure is weirdly antiquated.
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.
$16 to pay someone? How do you do something like transfer your friend some money? Or pay someone who did some work for you?
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?
in practice, no one uses the banks directly to send money like that: we use apps like Venmo / CashApp that take your debit card/bank info and act as an intermediary for sending/receiving money.
> Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.
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.
That's true you can give out different account numbers. You can't change that once you give it out though a cheque allows you to decide at the very last moment.
Is it really that hard to receive the money then transfer it to the right account?
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.
NZ expat here :) Venmo doesn't charge for sending or receiving money like this to or from people. They make money through other means; from the top of my head one is paying by credit card - they take 3% if you use credit card. Another way they make money (1% per transfer) is by doing an "instant transfer" directly from your Venmo account to your bank (the other option is ACH transfer which is usually next-day delivery.) I tried this on a Sunday night which was also part of a long weekend and the money instantly appeared in my US bank account and I got a push notification from my bank that a deposit was just made. It was awesome and makes NZ look out of date.
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.
>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire. So, wires are not as common as in Europe.
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.
Wire transfers also take 2-3 days to clear because the Fed likes to sit on the float. They totally suck in the US.
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.
They are not prohibited (I pay for them on my business account). They just need to price domestic transactions the same as EU-internal ones – which often results in free transfers.
>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire.
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.
I don't think any (major, credible) bank charges to receive a wire because like text messages, you have no control on getting wire transfers, and it would likely cost more to set up such a system than to just accept wires from anyone to any account.
With SEPA, they now have both the free-style "description" box, as well as a (shorter) "Reference" field that has a standardised format including parity bits to prevent typos and the trouble they can cause.
At the very least with european SEPA transfers and their predecessors, but I would have assumed pretty much all bank transfers where you send money support some way to put a message - how else would you map incoming transactions from previously unknown senders to what they're for?
In the US, AFAIK the only metadata you get with a direct / ACH deposit is the sender's "name", usually the company name. I assume that you can't easily change this per transaction.
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
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.
For regular bills, when adding a bill pay account online, the bank will ask for your account number... so there must be some way to specify that with an ACH transaction. I've noticed that the custom input memo field visible to the end user goes away on ACH transactions though, at least at my bank. Perhaps it's just used by the account number automatically?
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.
Yep. While Faster Payments is brilliant, BACS' overnight processing and the direct debit system is total sufficient for the vast majority of cases, certainly things like bill payments.
I wonder if you could write a personal check and deposit it to the person's bank account -- write something in the "memo" line and hope that the person checks the scanned images of the cancelled checks. Of course, then that person would also have your bank account number.
Same with Venmo in the US. There is literally a whole website that polls the front-page API for Venmo, scans for some keywords that could indicate a "spicy" transaction description, and displays them.[0]
P.S. I have zero affiliation with the website or the owners/developers, I just thought it was entertaining.
You have to be careful with "naughty" words, like if your description includes the name of a company on the Dept of Treasury's shitlist[1]
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
A few years ago I found an iPhone on the floor in central London. I was on my way to dinner with friends that were in town for a couple of hours, so I put it on the table and waited for something to pop up.
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.
I left my laptop (£2,000+ MBP) on a train in the UK (South eastern rail). Some amazing human handed it in, yay!
The rail company charged me £30 to collect it as an admin fee.
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.
A little over 2 years ago I found an iPhone while I was passing by Subways in downtown Palo Alto at around midnight. Before I had time to figure out how to get the phone back to his owner the owner called and I told him in the first sentence that I just found his phone, where I am and that I‘ll wait for him to pick it up.
It's a shame Apple makes it so hard to return their devices. I've tried with a locked phone and AirPods but thought they have serial numbers and probably Apple's databases have owner info they totally refuse to forward any "it's been found" type messages.
About 4 years ago, I found this credit card on the street in Pittsburgh when I was walking home. When I got home, I just emailed the persons firstname.lastname@gmail.com. They actually responded and I walked back to near where I found the card and gave the guy his credit card back.
What a strange coincidence: just a couple of days ago our local Nextdoor had someone who found a wallet in the street.
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.
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.
this might actually be a decent idea for an instagram competitor. Sounds dystopian, but I'm sure a good marketing department could make it seem normal.
If I had deep pockets I'd actually work on this idea. One issue I find is the processing cost of such nanopayments. Cryptocoins didn't live up to the promise of enabling this use case :(
Was easier just to call the bank, and leave a message to the manager.
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.
My license dropped out of my pocket when I was visiting a friend in a town 2 hours drive away. Didn't even notice until I got home. 3 weeks later it shows up in the mail. A stranger went through all that trouble to mail it back to me.
It's not a contactless payment, it's a bank transfer. The person who found the wallet sent payments of £0.01 to the owner. When you make bank transfers you can include a short payment reference which can be any text you want, and it appears on the other person's statement.
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.
It's not so strange. Many debit cards in the UK have the sort code and account number printed on them, which is all the information you need to send money to that account.
When I send a payment I can either include a structured message (a code in the format xx-xxx-xxxx) or a "free text" message in which I could easily write "found your wallet contact me on abc@email.com"
I once found someone's iPhone in a shopping basket at my local supermarket and spent the whole day getting it back to them. I decided to buy a lottery ticket - after all, my cosmic karma must be running at an all time high.
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! :)
The first thing I do with a new wallet is to put a piece of paper in it containing my name and phone number. It stays there forever useless, until it gets lost. I stole the idea from a reddit thread.
Within the past couple of years, I dropped my wallet while downtown and when I got home my wallet was waiting for me there. Was impressed that they went to the trouble of delivering it.
Lots of comments talking about a possible fraud behind the story, if that's the case why anyone use the expression growth hacking, it wouldn't be the appropiate term ?
While this is neat and kind, wouldn't it have been easier to see which debit / credit cards are in the wallet, and simply take the thing to the nearest branch?
Dang... super unique. We might need to add this approach to our Lost and Found software when the digital outreach and postcards don’t quite get through. Love it.
I lost my wallet in the gas station and got back from the state police dept after check whether I am the owner for 20 mins. Of course, all cashes were gone.
Yeah yeah, they coincided with a good one. I have lost 2 passports, 4 laptops and 6 cellphones on the subway in NYC. Half of those were literally stripped off of me. The other half I was drunk and negligent.
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.
I've seen some studies[1] that suggest wallets are returned more often if they contain money.
Suggested reason: we tend to surestimate the value of money vs the other contents when we find a wallet.
it was clever but he just didn't want to get caught by the surveillance state /s
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.
The bank might be suspicious that it's part of some kind of scam. Like they might trust the info more because it's coming from their bank's official number.
No. People come in to banks with lost wallets and cards they found all the time. But you should do it at an office. You can't just call and have them send messages to users.
Can you tell me how this constitutes as flame-bait? From my anecdotal experience I feel my comment is true. The comments in response to mine offer enlightening information to the contrary. I didn't post it to flame anything only to generate interesting responses.
I'll try to stop doing what I think you want but note that from my perspective, I just have a different perspective on certain things and I find it only worth saying things that are different or controversial rather than saying things everybody already agrees with. It's not necessarily purposely flame-baiting though differing opinions do tend to look that way as a side effect. I will admit I use sarcasm to illustrate some points, but I can stop that. Just note, that I'm not purposely flame-baiting anyone. I am literally just saying an opinion that I have that many people disagree with.
Not that my view holds any moderation weight, but for me (and as far as my up/down vote goes) that might've been fine if you'd expanded on it more, exactly what is 'only in rich countries' and how something's specifically different in not-rich countries, i.e. sharing some insight and adding something less low effort to the discussion.
'only in rich countries' on its own just reads like a Reddit-esque meme/jokey dismissal.
That's legitimate. I can agree with that and the downvote. But you realize that I was accused of flame baiting meaning I was accused of making up a statement purely for the purposes of inducing anger.
I would argue that clearly from the evidence in the responses, such a statement (while it did attract downvotes) did not attract flame and therefore was not "flame bait."
Did not know this. Good to know. Given relative wealth and my own anecdotal experience in poorer countries I would think the opposite. Clearly, I am wrong.
A while ago, there was a fashion of making lost wallet studies around the world. It looks like every factor is more relevant than country (time of day, wallet stile, place, phone number being available, anything), except for those countries where people absolutely do not let things out of place and those where people think everything is a bomb.
feel like a large part of where we are in the world now is because in 2015 or so, YouTube mindlessly and singlehandedly funneled millions of apolitical young male gamers into gamergate extremism. It took forever for YouTube to stop giving me personal recommendations for various alt-right content no how many times I told it I wasn't interested.
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.