Does anyone else have difficulties reading articles written this way - structured as Hollywood movies, with artificially built-up suspense and all? I feel patronized all the time, trying to get to the "meat" of the article, just finding "next page" link instead.
No. Long-form journalism is about keeping the reader engaged in a story they didn't know they wanted to hear. You wouldn't write fiction with a strict focus on the sequence of events, why should this be any different? While you're feeling patronized I find that I enjoy the engagement. Frankly, your way sounds boring.
I think a great part of that frustration is down to long-form magazine features being ported to wired.com, where brevity is better suited to the web-page form.
Personally, I think almost all of the writing in Wired is excellent - well crafted and edited and laid out within interesting designs. Yes, while there are pretty common 'paint a picture' set-ups and more detail about the actual people involved than you'd get in news (for sure) and non-US feature writing (my view), that's part of the reason I keep buying the US print copy of Wired (even in the UK), and enjoy settling down to read it.
I feel the same. I don't care about the biography of the person being investigated, I just want to know the stuff related to the meat of the article. For instance, I don't want to know about this man's passion for Andy Warhol. Or that previous article about a woman who stood up against Citibank: I really didn't care about her love for horses and that she's a cowgirl or whatever.
But that's just a pointless rant, and I only share it because you raised the question. The appropriate way to deal with this would be to identify authors who tend to write in this style, and avoid reading them. I don't pretend they're bad, it's just their style doesn't fit my tastes.
Good at making counterfeits, bad at making counterfeiting work.
Saw a trashy Discovery channel doc on counterfeiters. They printed using laser printers, and had a good process for aging the money. That was all that was needed... people just don't look that closely at money most of the time. They got away with it for years, even though they were pretty foolish (spent their own fakes, used the same spot every time to print money, etc.)
I can't tell if all that means there are probably smart people getting away with it constantly because they don't slip up in these dumb ways?
Totally. A friend in I tried this (not in the US) using bills approximately $20 in value. We had a mediocre Epson printer and just did the approach of scan+print. We'd then handle the bills and throw them with dirt. Nothing fancy; just two kids playing around to get some extra beer money and also just to see if we could pull it off.
Out of the 10 times we tried using the fakes, we only were noticed once. It's very, very easy to do if you aren't trying to make a living at it.
I would imagine these days, it's even easier to pull off, _because_ of the high-tech protections. If you can replicate a single high-profile piece (like a hologram or something), then folks will probably just assume it's good. Most people don't know the tens of different protections, and anything flashy and difficult looking would work. They don't know the details - hell, I'd bet a bill with a holographic mark could be counterfeited using one of the holograms Microsoft uses on their products.
I used to work at my dad's currency exchange. You know why they get away with it? Telling fakes from real requires WEEKS of training. We would get information from the US Mint, Treasury and the Secret Service. The capital investment required probably will outrun the training cost for most retailers.
Never ever do this, esp in the US, even as a joke. I know of cases in my college where students counterfeited $20 bills as a drunk joke: what they found out is that irrespective of the amount federal agents and the goddam CIA got involved and they got persecuted to the maximum degree. My prof was called as an expert witness in the case.
I read an article about it a long time ago. The minimum penalties are draconian. An example from the 80s was a kid who had been making photocopies of $1 bills and feeding them into a change machine for free candy. The minimum penalty at the time was something like $100,000. Today they are higher. You don't want to mess with them.
Governments take money seriously. For example everyone knows that Isaac Newton was a great scientist. Few know that he became Master of the Mint, and was responsible for enforcing the traditional penalty for undermining the currency - execution by drawing and quartering. (By all accounts he was very zealous in this task.)
I heard stories from an American student who went to my Canadian university...
Apparently he was back home partying it up with some of his home town friends... when the Secret Service kicked down the door in the middle of a party, immediately subdued his friend (the counterfeiter), and left abruptly.
TL;DR version: an after-the-fact account of how a man counterfeited millions all in the pursuit of "art". It makes for a romantic story, if nothing else -- although it certainly is not as sexy as the Leonardo DiCaprio/Tom Hanks Catch Me If You Can version.
The book by Frank Abagnale is a pageturner too. I've always liked reading those "social hacking" books, like Catch Me If You Can, or Kevin Mitnick's story The Art of Deception.
Nobody is printing money out of thin air. When they print more money, they value of the $20 that is in your pocket decreases slightly, but the value of your house increases substantially.
Everybody knows it's not wise to store 100% of your worth in cash.
All money is "conjured" to some extent. Cash has no intrinsic value (you can't eat it or use it to build a house); it only has value because we as a society accept that it does, and accept that governments have the power to print it. Counterfeiting as described in the article is a violation of that social contract. Perhaps you think that all money is counterfeit because banks print it, or something, and that we should instead operate on an economy built around trading shells or bison, but even if that's the case, societal expectations clearly differentiate between what banks do and what this guy did, so if "counterfeiting" is the wrong word to describe the latter and not the former, feel free to suggest a more precise term.
I am amazed that paper banknotes have remained even vaguely counterfeit-resistant for so long. It seems like a very difficult problem, given modern technology; the capital costs of an intaglio press and great plates are high, but some kind of CNC milling should be able to produce equivalents at some point.
The NK superbills are still as far as I know the best quality.
In Australia, we've had polymer notes for 20 years, and counterfeiting is a thing of the past, to the point where I was puzzled as to why someone in the US was marking my $50 note during a purchase while visiting. Paper notes feel nice, but polymer lasts longer and are effectively counterfeit-proof.
Prior to this, we had a woeful $100 note, which was black and white with a bit of subtle colour. Pretty, but a dumb idea for currency. It was not unknown for folks to photocopy one, scrunch it up, and wander into a convenience store in the early hours when the staffer was tired...
If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real, talented artist low on his money becoming a counterfeiter: i.e. they made him do it, and he wouldn't have done it without them, and a judge released him early on probation for this reason (from the article).
But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.
The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.
It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.
[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:
"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."
I disagree. In the article Kuhl had a legitimate buyer who backed out. The bills where printed and Kuhl needed a buyer. The police decided to become the buyer but the counterfeit bills had already been created and the artist would have found a buyer eventually.
[+] [-] jablan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevejalim|13 years ago|reply
Personally, I think almost all of the writing in Wired is excellent - well crafted and edited and laid out within interesting designs. Yes, while there are pretty common 'paint a picture' set-ups and more detail about the actual people involved than you'd get in news (for sure) and non-US feature writing (my view), that's part of the reason I keep buying the US print copy of Wired (even in the UK), and enjoy settling down to read it.
[+] [-] AYBABTME|13 years ago|reply
But that's just a pointless rant, and I only share it because you raised the question. The appropriate way to deal with this would be to identify authors who tend to write in this style, and avoid reading them. I don't pretend they're bad, it's just their style doesn't fit my tastes.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SilasX|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennywinker|13 years ago|reply
Saw a trashy Discovery channel doc on counterfeiters. They printed using laser printers, and had a good process for aging the money. That was all that was needed... people just don't look that closely at money most of the time. They got away with it for years, even though they were pretty foolish (spent their own fakes, used the same spot every time to print money, etc.)
I can't tell if all that means there are probably smart people getting away with it constantly because they don't slip up in these dumb ways?
[+] [-] throwaway_lop2|13 years ago|reply
Out of the 10 times we tried using the fakes, we only were noticed once. It's very, very easy to do if you aren't trying to make a living at it.
I would imagine these days, it's even easier to pull off, _because_ of the high-tech protections. If you can replicate a single high-profile piece (like a hologram or something), then folks will probably just assume it's good. Most people don't know the tens of different protections, and anything flashy and difficult looking would work. They don't know the details - hell, I'd bet a bill with a holographic mark could be counterfeited using one of the holograms Microsoft uses on their products.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
Governments take money seriously. For example everyone knows that Isaac Newton was a great scientist. Few know that he became Master of the Mint, and was responsible for enforcing the traditional penalty for undermining the currency - execution by drawing and quartering. (By all accounts he was very zealous in this task.)
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|13 years ago|reply
Apparently he was back home partying it up with some of his home town friends... when the Secret Service kicked down the door in the middle of a party, immediately subdued his friend (the counterfeiter), and left abruptly.
Apparently he never saw that kid again.
[+] [-] fiatpandas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackNapoleon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StevenRayOrr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GFischer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbarham|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennywinker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|13 years ago|reply
Nobody is printing money out of thin air. When they print more money, they value of the $20 that is in your pocket decreases slightly, but the value of your house increases substantially.
Everybody knows it's not wise to store 100% of your worth in cash.
[+] [-] apendleton|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
The NK superbills are still as far as I know the best quality.
[+] [-] samstave|13 years ago|reply
I would think that EVERY tech innovation/resource/capability is really a proxy service of China, Russia, Iran, etc...
There is no way they would have the tools to do what hey do on a range of fronts if they were not used as a proxy by these other nations.
[+] [-] GFischer|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar
[+] [-] kqr2|13 years ago|reply
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052267...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Making-Money-Counterfeiter/dp/...
[+] [-] johnohara|13 years ago|reply
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104909/
Here is a short YouTube clip from the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q
Searching images for "jsg boggs art" returns some of his work.
[+] [-] btipling|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
Prior to this, we had a woeful $100 note, which was black and white with a bit of subtle colour. Pretty, but a dumb idea for currency. It was not unknown for folks to photocopy one, scrunch it up, and wander into a convenience store in the early hours when the staffer was tired...
[+] [-] jstclair|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BlackNapoleon|13 years ago|reply
We need to be employing these sorts of lifehackers.
[+] [-] its_so_on|13 years ago|reply
But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.
The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.
It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.
[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:
"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."
[+] [-] mmcconnell1618|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losethos|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]