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Man Swallows USB Flash Drive Evidence
SlideRuleGuy writes "In a bold and bizarre attempt to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid, a New York City man grabbed a flash drive and swallowed the data storage device while in the custody of Secret Service agents. Records show Florin Necula ingested the Kingston flash drive shortly after his January 21 arrest outside a bank in Queens. A Kingston executive said it was unclear if stomach acid could damage one of their drives. 'As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB.' I imagine that would be rather painful. But did he follow his mother's advice and chew thoroughly, first? Apparently not, as the drive was surgically recovered."
Sure it does. Printing money steals from everyone else with the currency. If you have some amount of value or wealth in your country in terms of goods and land, and suddenly there's twice as much money in circulation, everything would suddenly have to cost twice as much for the same amount of value to be exchanged. In essence, by introducing twice as much money into circulation, the money printer has just stolen half the wealth from all users of the currency. The same thing happens for trivial amounts of money, the effect just isn't as pronounced. The first time it's used the money has the same value as it used to. So the effect is especially nasty because it takes a while to materialize.
I actually knew someone whose job was to negotiate with dictators in African countries to trade $1M for some large quantity of newly printed money in the local currency. He'd then take that money and spend it on as much stuff as he could, take it to America and sell it at a profit. The dictator is happy to have a big pile of almost universally accepted US currency and doesn't understand (or care about) economics well enough to understand that he's just helped someone steal both goods and the intangible value of his country's currency.
Isn't this man considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
No, not at all. He is in America, and we don't do that sort of thing anymore.