uberconcept.com

Every now and again I see comments from people saying that it is only the dumb criminals who get caught. The implication of this is that there is this vast group of “super” criminals who are too smart to get caught, people who make their living from a life of crime.

There are several problems with this view. One of the major problems is that it is just not provable. A criminal who is smart enough not to get caught is someone who is smart enough not to get detected. If they can’t be detected, there is no way to prove that they exist.

The other major problem with this is that it assumes that people can commit crimes that either go unnoticed or that people do care about the crime that was committed. What is more the impact of the crimes we associated with “super” criminals would tend to be higher (massive heists etc).

Suppose you are a “super” criminal whose sole means of income is their life of crime. You will want enough money to live on comfortably. You will also need money to run your crime business, funding research and equipment for future crimes, bribes for police, paying helpers. At this point we are talking in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The impact of your crimes could be a multiple of that hundreds of thousands of dollars each year if you were stealing anything other than cash (e.g. paintings, jewels). The amount you can get from the stolen items would be less than the true value or the owner’s value. Stealing a jewel ‘worth’ $1 million means an impact of $1 million for the owner, even if the fence will only give you $200K for it. Equally, even when stealing cash, it may need to be laundered.

There are two ways to try to get that kind of income:
1. Infrequent big crimes
2. Frequent small crimes

Both methods have problems. The bigger crimes attract more attention and higher penalties. On the other hand the smaller crimes have to be frequent, which means that you are more likely to get caught though the penalties are smaller.

Either way, the reality is that there are no ’super’ criminals. Anyone who is a professional criminal will have enough of an impact on society, leaving enough traces of their activity to get caught.

I finally took a look at Myspace for the first time. Yes I now, its been around for ages, I just couldn’t be bothered to look.

That site is such a cess pool. It seems to be basically a tool for teenagers to whinge about the life, the universe and everything and to post lame photos and videos. Of course that fact that everyone links to each other as friends, just exacerbates the issue. It feels like the worst of the blogosphere (yes I feel the irony).

I feel dirty just visiting the site.

I’ve written a brief article on what I consider are the major shortcomings of perl as a language.

Like many things I think this may come to personal preference and what your training/background is.