CT Insider: This CT man was duped into putting his life savings in a Bitcoin ATM. Now there's no getting it back
Do you remember Jonah Hill’s scene in the 2005 Judd Apatow comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin? Catherine Keener’s character has a store where she keeps a bunch of stuff she then sells on eBay. (BRIEF ASIDE: It is impressive that eBay isn’t a completely dead reference nearly twenty years later. Of the ten most-visited websites the month this movie came out, only half are still in the top fifty. eBay fell from fifth to 48th.) Steve Carell, the titular virgin, comes in to ask Catherine Keener out, and Jonah Hill is already there browsing. As Steve successfully arranges a date, Jonah comes up to tell Catherine that he’d like to buy the pair of sparkly silver boots with goldfish tanks in the heels that he’s found. She tells him that she can’t sell them to him here, that instead he has to go to eBay and win them in an auction online. Understandably, this frustrates Jonah, to some comedic effect. You can just watch it, here:
I was reminded of this scene upon reading the above-linked story about the old fella who spent four days feeding his life savings into a Bitcoin ATM because a scammer had convinced him to do so.
At age 84, Samuels considers himself “completely illiterate” when it comes to computers*, so he called a repair business he found online and granted them remote access to the device. They fixed his problem and charged him a small fee.
Months later, he says, he received a strange phone call from someone claiming they'd accidentally deposited more than $20,000 in his bank account and needed him to send it back right away or risk legal action.
Naturally, Samuels was skeptical at first, until he peeked at his checking account and noticed a balance of nearly $22,000, far more than he typically kept there.
"I said to myself, God, they must be right because I don't have no 22 grand in my checking account," Samuels recalls.
[*No additional citation needed, actually.]
Somehow the scammers had transferred money out of this gentleman’s savings account and into his checking account, and he failed to realize his savings had been emptied before he followed the scammer’s request to get all the cash out of his checking account and “deposit it into a specific ATM in a specific store, using a particular code that would direct it to the right place.”
The right place, of course, being this scamming asshole’s Bitcoin wallet. Just a colossal piece of shit, this scammer, just like a truly dispiriting number of other pieces of shit trying to take advantage of old people of limited means.
Anyway, this is about Jonah Hill. Here’s the bit that made me think of the scene above:
When Hartford Police opened the ATM at the convenience store, they found every dollar of Samuels' deposit. In fact, Samuels recalls, it was the only money in the machine. Even still, officers informed Samuels there was nothing they could do — the money had already been converted to Bitcoin and sent off to who-knows-where. It was gone.
(…)
Hogan, the state police detective, says that within a few minutes of Samuels dropping his cash into the Bitcoin of America ATM, the money was gone.
"Once you put that cash in the ATM machine, it now is property of that ATM, it's no longer yours," Hogan said. "You've transmitted it, and it's now turned into Bitcoin."
The police aren’t wrong, of course. The cash goes in the machine, some numbers go flying around the world very quickly, and money “changes hands” as surely as any other of a billion electronic transactions that take place every minute. But also, in a very concrete way, they opened that machine and there was all that old guy’s money! They could very easily just hand it to him in a paper sack and lock the machine back up. Instead it’s just “sorry, nothing I can do, the money’s gone!” The money’s not gone! The money’s right there! Just give it to him! And write the Bitcoin ATM people a polite note that says something like “sorry, a nice old man got scammed and you'll have to recover your “Bitcoin” monies from whichever asshole you sent it to.” Is this fair? Of course not! Read this article and tell me what, precisely, fair has got to do with it!
I can easily imagine being Joe Samuels—who lost his life savings when he trusted an asshole on the telephone—and feeling just like Jonah Hill standing there just trying to buy a pair of boots. You could just sell them to me now, Jonah says, because it’s so easy, where I give you money and you give me the boots. If I were Joe Samuels standing there looking at that big pile of cash that I had only very recently put in a stupid box that turned it into imaginary internet bullshit, I’d be thinking: you could just give me that cash, because it’s so easy.
Catherine Keener should have sold Jonah Hill those funky ass go-go boots right there in the store, and the police should have just given Joe Samuels his twenty grand back. Justice!
At Wellesley College, Students Vote to Admit Trans Men
Wellesley College is a liberal arts college less than half an hour west of Boston’s Fenway Park. Before our current cultural moment, you could safely call it a “women’s college” without anybody raising a stink. On their website, at the bottom of their About section, you can still see the following, emphasis in the original:
Commitment to Women
Everything about Wellesley College bespeaks its commitment to women, and to providing them with an unequaled educational experience that honors and cultivates not only what is best about each of them, and their own potential, but about what women offer our world.
Some other facts about Wellesley include that it is very expensive and very exclusive. Though most student qualify for financial aid that reduces the sticker price, get a load of this sticker price!
$90 grand a year! And according to this website that lets you see what sort of academic standards different schools tend to have, you really gotta earn the privilege to give them all that money.
Because this school is extremely selective, getting a high SAT score and GPA is vital to having a chance at getting in. If you don't pass their SAT and GPA requirements, they'll likely reject you without much consideration.
To be safe, you should aim for the 75th percentile, with a 1520 SAT and a 3.97 GPA or higher to be above average.
This is only part of the challenge - after this, you'll need to impress them beyond your academic scores, with your accomplishments and extracurriculars. But if you apply with a 1425 SAT or below, you unfortunately have a small chance of getting in.
All of which is to simply point out that this school seeks to educate a certain class of people. If that is not apparent to you already, probably no more sentences I could conceivably write will change your mind about that, so instead I’ll just note that Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Cokie Roberts, Diane Sawyer, Nora Ephron, and Katharine Lee Bates—the woman who wrote “America the Beautiful”—all went to Wellesley.
The student body voted in the affirmative for a non-binding referendum that called on the administration to open admission to “all nonbinary and transgender applicants, including trans men”—all of those nonbinary and transgender people who also have a lot of money and a spectacular academic resume, that is. Currently, the college’s language on who can be admitted is “anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman”—and who, of course, also have a lot of money and a spectacular academic resume.
What it means for what was previously a “women’s college” to admit nonbinary people (including presumably some who were born male) and trans men (presumably some who have surgically and fully socially transitioned) to its student body is an obnoxiously or deliciously complicated question, depending on one’s various appetites for such things. Presumably the mantra or moral absolute or truism “trans women are women” applies equally to “trans men are men,” which would seem to complicate admitting them to a space traditionally kept for women. The student body president, interviewed by the Times, suggests that Wellesley has always been a place that educates people of “marginalized genders,” and the student body wants the policy changed to reflect that long-standing reality.
“We’re just asking the administration to put on paper what’s already true of the student body,” she said. “Trans men go to Wellesley, nonbinary people go to Wellesley, and they kind of always have.”
A new policy, she said, “would not in any way change the culture of the school.”
“It’s still, and always will be, a school to educate people who are of marginalized genders,” she said.
So Wellesley is not a “women’s college,” but a “marginalized genders” college, in this formulation. One wonders at what point down the road in our timeline—presuming that we are progressing perpetually to the perfectible prospective post-patriarchal palpability to which we aspire—that such a thing would become unnecessary, or when, along the way, who counts as marginalized would change, god willing. But good luck with that, I guess!
Before the vote, the president of the college, Paula Johnson, wrote the following:
While Wellesley respects students’ right to express their views, I want to offer some context for why the College continues to believe in our mission as a women’s college and, at the same time, explain the steps we have taken to respond to students’ concerns about these issues.
For nearly 150 years, Wellesley’s mission has been to provide an excellent liberal arts education to women who will make a difference in the world.
(…)
Wellesley was founded on the then-radical idea that educating women of all socioeconomic backgrounds leads to progress for everyone. As a college and community, we continue to challenge the norms and power structures that too often leave women, and others of marginalized identities, behind. We are not a “historically women’s college,” a term that only applies to women’s colleges that have made the decision to enroll men. We have chosen a different path, one that aligns with peer institutions including Barnard, Smith, and Bryn Mawr colleges.
What does Wellesley mean by “a women’s college”? In accordance with our admission policy, Wellesley admits applicants who identify and live consistently as women, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth.
(…)
Wellesley is a women’s college that admits cis, trans, and nonbinary students—all who consistently identify as women. Wellesley is also an inclusive community that embraces students, alumnae, faculty, and staff of diverse gender identities.
The Wellesley News editorial page responded to that letter with the restraint and good faith one might expect of a terminally online college student in 2023, writing the following:
We disapprove of and entirely disagree with President Johnson’s email.
(…)
We also want to remind the Wellesley community that President Johnson is the spokesperson for the Board of Trustees, which must be held equally responsible for the College’s transphobic rhetoric.
I would say that it is fucking insane to call what President Paula Johnson wrote “transphobic rhetoric,” but that’d get me in a whole other pile of trouble, so I’ll just leave this sentence as constructed to convey that I think that that’s all very dumb, too, while pretending that I’m not doing the thing I’m doing, because I think it’s funny. Instead, I’ll simply say that what President Johnson wrote was not, in fact, in any way transphobic by any reasonable understanding of the word, and calling it that only diminishes the impact of pointing to real harms when they do happen. To say nothing of the fact that calling Johnson’s very careful and explicit inclusivity “transphobic” just makes you look like an absolute fool to just about everyone else on the planet. I guess it’s worth it, though! It helps to have the absolute certainty that you won’t have meaningfully beclowned yourself in the eyes of anyone who matters in terms of your future social and employment prospects despite this absurd self-humiliation—some might even call that a pretty substantial sorta privilege.
To say nothing of the privileges pointed out above, the kind that get a person into an institution that advertises its $90,000 a year price tag and has undeniably elite academic expectations for its applicants. Or, as someone at Wellesley who is perhaps a bit exhausted by this discourse is quoted to have said in the Times piece:
Kaleb Goldschmitt is a music professor who transitioned while at Wellesley. The college culture is becoming more welcoming to gender diversity, but not as quickly as many students would like, said Professor Goldschmitt, who identifies as transmasculine.
Still, Professor Goldschmitt questioned the outsize attention that students were paying to the debate.
“I definitely want the trans and nonbinary and questioning students to feel welcome and loved and supported and encouraged to explore,” the professor said, “but my goodness, do I wish they would rally like this for disabled students or for other things.”
Follow-up question for Prof Goldschmitt: please do expand on your definition of disabled.
It is not always useful to try to imagine a future where you have been proven entirely wrong in your current positions, and the people who you consider to hold absurd views have been proven entirely correct, but sometimes it’s fun. I admit that I lack the imagination to know what a future wherein the gender ideologists are right actually looks like. This is in keeping with my inability to imagine any future wherein a religiously fanatic fundamentalism has been proven out. They are all imagining impossible worlds that exist beyond the bounds of our physical reality, perhaps because they do not deign to live with the rest of us rabble, where people will always be people, for better and for worse.
Submarine with 2 bodies, 3 tons of cocaine seized in the Pacific Ocean off Colombia
The roughly 50-foot-long submarine was carrying almost 5,800 pounds of cocaine, worth more than $87 million, officials said. The navy said the vessel had been bound for countries in Central America, and that the seizure had kept more than 6 million doses of cocaine off the illegal market.
Setting aside the curious assumption about just what constitutes a dose—does anyone really believe that 6 million fewer doses of cocaine will be ingested because of this seizure? This is not really a zero-sum equation, is it? It’s like when my kids are mad that someone else finished off a carton of ice cream—in no way has the totality of their future ice cream intake been impacted by this event! There will be another half-gallon of ice cream in the freezer before you know it, because you are alive in a time of impossible decadence and obscene plenty, you little shit!
The above quote should further be amended to include something like this: “But really, this has just very slightly driven up the price of retail cocaine for users in the US, who will continue to purchase and consume all the cocaine they like, seizures and illegalities be damned.”
I tried to verify that a supply crunch of the sort induced by such a seizure will necessarily lead to a price bump at the retail level, but I couldn’t find anything reliable on the internet. It seems like the sort of thing that Freakonomics would have covered at some point, but I don’t think they have. But this is just basic supply and demand, right? Supply constricts, demand maintains, price increases. The fact that this is all happening in an illegal black market should only make it easier to see this sort of effect—there shouldn’t be too many confounding variables.
Anyway, if you know of any research of this sort, let me know, I guess! And don’t take drugs.