I was just tuning in to watch The Walking Dead … gotta see the zombies … and they keep annoying me with these commercials peddling “gold” coins: a $50 value, yours for only $9.95, and they are genuine 24K gold (plated), containing a whole 14 milligrams of gold. I checked gold prices, did a quick estimation, and figured out nearly instantly that that amounts to … about 75 cents worth.
Wow. That’s quite a racket. Shouldn’t there be something illegal about taking advantage of stupid people that excessively?
Wouldn’t the 1st amendment forbid such law? :/
the conflation of personal speech and commercial speech is new enough that not all laws making that distinction have been erased yet.
Not as big a rip-off as ID, nonetheless.
At least the coin is harmless, aside from the initial purchase.
Glen Davidson
I bet that they are pretty, though.
Anyway, the good thing so far is that Walking Dead is a hella major zombie apocalypse, finally.
That’s the $64 question – how far should we go to protect people from their own stupidity?
Now, now, PZ, the coins aren’t plated. The suckers would know, or at least have a vague idea, what that means. So the commercials say they’re “layered”.
I confess to having done that estimate myself.
And they’re not that much more of a fraud than the actual gold being peddled by Glen Beck’s buddies.
I told you so ! Greatest show on TV since Miami Vice.
I dunno, I’d rather tax lying than stupidity. Why’s there any practical difference between protecting people from their own stupidity and protecting people from other people ripping them off?
Wow. That’s quite a racket. Shouldn’t there be something illegal about taking advantage of stupid people that excessively?
No, it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money! {evilgrin}
Jeebus don’t tell me! I’m an episode behind.
There are commercial rules –if they say the coins _are_ genuine gold and not _contain_ gold it should be illegal. Or so I would have thought.
Of course, first someone has to complain. The term “face cord” for wood is illegal but you see it everywhere. A cord is 4′ x 4′ x 8′ and “face cord” 4′ x 8′ but no guarantee on how deep it is, often only 1′, is deemed misleading. That would be 1/4 cord.
Still not as good a profit margin as a cup of coffee, I’ll reckon.
I’m of two minds on this:
On one hand, yes. Consumer protection laws are hella important in a post-industrial society like ours. Hell, our entire economy is based on buying shit, so that shit should actually be worth something, you know?
But on the other hand, my gut feeling* is that the type of people to buy these gold-plated coins are the same jackasses that are stockpiling gold for a cataclysmic economic collapse/return to the gold standard. And, well, I really don’t like them very much, so there’s a bit of schadenfreude in thinking that they’re making fools of themselves.
*Not that my gut has ever been wrong before, mind you.
Markita Lynda
I’ve never heard the term “face cord”.
(I’m in Canada)
I’m pretty sure I could tell by looking if I was buying a cord or 1/3 cord.
gragra
18 March 2012 at 8:23 pm
Why should people who are capable of working through the lies be required to do so?
There is no such thing as unbounded intellect; you and I and everyone else has finite cognitive resources, has many large areas we know nothing about, and are therefore vulnerable to lies.
Every attempt at deceit, even if detected by 95% of its targets, requires energy to detect; that’s an inescapable fact of computation. And each attempt carries with it some level of risk; no one’s mental machinery is 100% reliable, and all of us are from time to time required to expend everything we have on the trials and travails of our lives, leaving us bereft of the mental energy necessary to sort through scams.
Each successful infection nets the scam artist more money and influence, with which they can develop greater expertise, and higher quality scams which will infect more people. You may comfort yourself by thinking “oh, haha, I didn’t fall for it”, but your neighbor did, and the money they took from your neighbor will enable a higher quality of scam, which may in turn take from you.
These theives rob people just as the kind that breaks into houses with a gun and threatens people with death. The moral “justification” for leaving those without the training, intellect and good fortune to separate scams from good deals is no better than a moral “justification” for refusing to prosecute thieves who steal from people who don’t have stone walls, iron bars on all windows and doors, and don’t have enough guns in the house.
Trust between buyer and seller, and widespread availability of correct information, unclouded by deceit, are essential to capitalism – and these liars harm everyone.
Who plays Rick Santorum?
Aw, c’mon. Compared to the Vampire Squid, this isn’t even pocket change, this is the penny on the sidewalk that gets walked over.
“Wow. That’s quite a racket. Shouldn’t there be something illegal about taking advantage of stupid people that excessively?”
I said the same about Harold Camping.
llewelly: Well said. You’ve made a solid case and I have to adjust my former position on the matter.
PZ – you need to read the graphic novel the show is loosely based on.
The show is great, but the graphic novel kicks the shit out of it.
AP
And it’s a graphic novel dammit…not a ‘kids comic’ like wifey says.
The salesperson could put on a funny hat and call the cost a tithe…
I always thought that poker machines (one armed bandits) were the tax on stupid people.
C’mon, they have enough to contend with, without having to analyse every get-rich-quick scheme to determine if there is some merit in it.
Joking aside, I’m with Llewelly on this one. Making people poor through scams is just not on. Allowing them to continue functioning by not having sufficient consumer protection is harmful to society at large.
Entertainment value: if you have free time, when someone calls to scam you, keep them on the phone for as long as possible, by doing that you are negatively affecting their bottom line & making their venture less profitable. My record is 45 minutes. I ended up having to tell them that I knew they were attempting to scam & that I was deliberately trying to keep them on the line to waste their time & that was 15 minutes before they gave up & hung up the phone. (I followed up with a report to the ACCC).
Whatever “should” or “shouldn’t” be the case seems fairly unimportant here. This scam likely does comply with at least national laws, and probably with most state laws as well.
But how many don’t? How many spam messages are actually illegal? It’s probably not legal to either spam or to advertise on TV that this or that “makes your penis larger,” but how long does it take, and how much money, to take them to court?
There have even been good financial scams which were clearly illegal, and didn’t put out the red flags, that caught out good-thinking investors, like Bayou Hedge Fund.
It’s caveat emptor, regardless of the law. A few things might be done via laws, like maybe the value of the gold should have to be stated or something. There’s really no hope for eliminating scams and frauds, though, because enforcement will never be able to keep up with the lies, even when it’s properly funded (like the SEC hasn’t been, or so it is said by many).
You can always sell junk for more than what it’s worth if you’re slick enough and have the funding to get your BS out there. Beanie Babies caught a lot of people out of money, never mind that it was basically foreseeable, and commemorative plates and Hummel figurines have proven to be pretty stupid investments. These coins are advertised by inferences that are somewhat more identifiable as being clearly misleading (and perhaps something could and should be done), yet we’re just about going to have to ban advertising, which almost always implies more than you’re going to get from the product, in order to prevent junk being sold using BS tactics.
Glen Davidson
PS, I also got the washing done & dinner made, so it’s not as though the time was wasted :)
Well, if the sucker who buys the coin manages to sell it to somebody else for more than he paid for it, how much of a sucker is he? The perceived value of the coin may not have anything to do with its actual gold content. But that is the base assumption, yes.
I’ve a little bottle about the circumference of a coin, that is nearly filled with gold foil floating in water. There is certainly enough foil to cover several coins in it. I got it for $5, and had no doubt the value of the gold was much less than that. It was purely a souvenir of Colorado, and worth every penny to me.
Goldschlager easily has a coin’s worth of gold foil in it, and sells for no more that any other liquor.
So yeah, the folks who buy those coins should know better. It just goes to show how gullible a lack of thought can make us.
If there was one rule I could teach a person who lives in this capitalistic society, it would be to always follow the money. Who profits, and how do they profit. Even simpler, who is paying for the TV ad and how can they afford it.
I think we’ve already answered this question, when we instituted rules on the sale of patent medicines early in the last century. You could argue that the rubes who bought that stuff were as stupid as today’s gold coin customer, and you’d be right. This didn’t stop the need for laws against the deceitful practices of patent medicine salesmen.
These days, of course, most of the same stupidity goes into the nutritional supplement market. That stuff ought to be shut down too.
Caveat emptor. The idiots who take Glenn Beck’s word as gospel deserve what they get.
It’s an interesting question in general, what exactly constitutes fraud. Why do people blame the homeowners for signing badly structured mortgages but we blame the hoodlums for confidence games?
Something has always bothered me about those gold ads.
If gold was such a hugely important investment, why the hell would they be selling all their gold at such rock bottom prices? This just doesn’t make sense, it would be severely against their own interests if true. There’s a ripoff somewhere in this business, though I haven’t researched it enough to say exactly where it is.
Already stoked for season 3 and the continuation of Andrea’s bad-assness.
#17
Not even Kirk Cameron would stoop that low, although he’s nearly there already.
The ads like this that I’ve seen cross the line into fraud, at least as I see it, and I, of course, ANAL. The thing is, they spend half of the ad talking about actual gold coins that were pressed in the past, and discuss the value only of those coins. The “facts” about the “reissued” coins are glossed over. The value cited for the coins is for the originals, and although that is mentioned, it is at the same speed as the “plus tax, tag, title, dealer’s fees and magic bean charge” that one (barely) hears in car commercials.
I’ve always told my kids that the safe thing is to always assume that anyone trying to sell something is a liar. You may not spot it, but they are lying about very important aspects of the product.
No. Fuck em.
Fun fact: when “regular” novels [you know, sooner or later, we’re going to have to stop calling them that] were introduced, they were basically regarded the way comic books are now.
Making them state the gold content makes sense to me; anyone who did want whatever object it is for the art/souvenir/collector value wouldn’t care. Calling something a “reissue” of something that does have collector value, I’d think that would be fraud, too. (Something that might have collector value of its own someday, I’d leave that to the buyers.)
Wouldn’t the coin sellers only be held to it if a bunch of customers got together to file a class-action suit? Any individual’s damage would just be the price of however many coins they bought less the gold value. There’s no government agency ensuring fair transactions of precious metals as far as I know, or there wouldn’t be a gazillion We-Buy-Gold shops on every street corner down here.
I don’t think you can advertise that on prime time either :P
If only stupidity lowered reproductive fitness somehow.
If only lying lowered reproductive fitness somehow. *rolleyes*
I’m reminded of a sitcom where the not very smart main character wanted to buy baseball cards as an investment. At a card store, he asked the store owner if a specific card would go up in value. The owner replied, “it’s doubled in value since I bought it.”
The “reissued gold coin” scam is so obvious, it’s difficult to imagine that enough people fall for it for the companies behind it to make any money. I’ve often wondered if the scam isn’t a front for a more serious criminal activity like identity theft or money laundering. And, of course, any one who does contact them immediately goes onto their contact list which they then sell.
They already have a consumer protection in place, they limit each customer to 5 coins per sale, and I’m sure everyone would be content with just 5 and not get greedy and attempt to purchase more than their fair share.
Also, The Walking Dead is the bomb and may become a handy guide for surviving a post-Santorum presidency. Aim for the head, double tap for safety.
…I wonder if they limit customers to no more than 5 coins because that keeps the fraud damage below some dollar limit that would make it count as investigable?
Aaaaaand they now have access to those individuals’ addresses and credit-card information.
I guess that’s why I don’t watch any TV show “live” … gotta love the PVR… I just skip the stupid ads… just like adblock does for me in firefox.
With Uncle Sam selling rag paper for one to one hundred dollars a gram, depending on the president printed on the bill, 1.4 miligrams of gold for a buck seems positively fiduciary
My ex-boyfriend’s stepfather had an entire basement, two room with shelves floor to ceiling, full of unopened Star Trek dolls. And a few Star Wars ones too.
He said it was an investment.
He also had hair exactly like Data’s.
Zombie Apocalypse was interesting, but I wasn’t sold on [spoiler] ,[spoiler] or [spoiler].
As for the gold-clad coins. Unfortunately, as “collector’s items” their price is set by the seller, and can be whatever they wish.
that the thing’s intrinsic value is less than 1 USD is left to the buyer to deal with. “Caveat Emptor”, claims the scammer. Yes, it should be illegal to sell coins based on the deceptive appearance of being “gold clad”.
As an aside, I particularly despise the ones that abuse patriotic sentiment to sell coins that aren’t worth the price of the postage to mail them.
I think the five per customer limit is just another trick to make them seem more valuable. “If they’re only letting me buy five they must not have made very many!” Of course when you see the same ad 6 months after you first saw it it’s pretty obvious how “few” they made.
I suspect they’re also counting on the ignorance of many buyers of the Metric system. If you don’t know how small a milligram is 15 of them sounds very impressive.
National Collector’s Mint, the company that sells these things, has been accused more than once of questionable claims in its advertising.
I have often thought about collectables and antiques and their value, how much of their value could be calculated to storage costs in keeping something long enough to be worth something. the commemorative coins like the replica double eagles are a rip off but if kept for 159 years might be worth 50 bucks which given inflation might get you a small coffee maybe if we still have a civilization by then. If not punch a hole in it to would make an OK washer. They are still better than lottery tickets or scratchers .
uncle frogy
And if you collect the dumps from the washers, (if they’re big enough) you can put them into poker machines, and you might be able to convert them into the equivalent of their scrap metal value
It’s called price gouging, and it’s illegal. But who is going to enforce it? How many government employees would be needed to make enforcement work?
Look at how much trouble they already have in keeping the alternologists and quacks from harming naive customers.
Uh PZ, don’t you post about religion all the time?
I don’t see the problem; in the event of a zombie outbreak/rapture/Mayan doomsday/whatever people hoard gold coins for, these are certain to be precisely as useful as those actually made of gold, and for a fraction of the cost.
Scams tend to be a scam by scamming the gullible, who cannot see the reality no matter what obvious alarm bells ring, the lust of further…tax free… wealth is all that matters, and if that comes with no apparent cost to themselves then all is for the better.
Reminds me of Harold Camping and his rapture fandango, he got so convinced and sure of the date that thousands donated …some even their life savings to his scam and he…well gave not a sovereign to a beggar, makes perfect sense if you recognize the old fraud had no intentions of giving any cash back to any of his scamees for his failed prediction.
oh well not everyone is lucky enough to have an IQ in double digits!
The under achievers tend to forget the part about camouflaging the strings that move the puppet!
Should I stick with The Walking Dead? I just watched the first series and enjoyed parts of it, but overall it had too much in the way of utter stupidity, emotional miscues, inconsistent characterisation, clunky dialogue, and incredibly derivative plot points. I wouldn’t say I hated it, but the first series did not convince me to watch more even though I love a good zombie story. Anyone have any persuasive advice to change my mind?
I’ve just done some calculations and the layer of gold on those coins is actaully a lot thicker than the layer of democracy we have covering plutocracy in the west.
@Greg Davidson:
Waaaaay up thread you mentioned spam.
In the US and several European countries, spam is indeed illegal. However, there are other European countries (like Russia, the Ukraine) where spam is a legitimate method of business advertising.
So if the spammer is American, they’re breaking the law. If they’re Russian, they’re not. We can’t (easily) charge foreign citizens with breaking our laws.
It’s the small tax on the really stupid.
The big scammers are on Wall Street.
1. The obvious ones, Madoff (10-20 billion USD), Stanford ($7 billion), and hundreds of outright Ponzi or Ponzioid scams.
2. I had to laugh when I saw the latest, about ex-employees calling Goldman Sachs toxic sheep shearers of their customers. I’ve seen them in action close up once long ago. Whatever they are saying now, it is an understatement.
3. A lot of accountancy seems to be finding legal ways to lie a lot. We see it with the quarterly and annual reports that public companies file with the SEC. It was amazing how the large banks could file bland positive reports for years while having time bomb derivatives that blew up and would have destroyed them if we didn’t bail them out for trillions.
An ex-Wall Streeter once called it, “One vast white collar criminal enterprise”. IMO, this way overstates the case but not entirely. And whatever one says, it is still one of the few games in town for finance driven economics.
Just wait until they come out with the new version: 14000 micrograms of pure 24 kt gold. Sales would increase, I guarantee you.
Please let this be a rant on ‘fiat money’, I could use a good laugh XD
It’s really only like the “confused dot com” car insurance adverts. They offer “A thousand Nectar points, free!!!” if you buy car insurance through them. That just sounds so much more impressive than “£5 off at Sainsburys” …..
The real answer is education. Teach people to think for themselves, and they won’t be so vulnerable to these sort of scams.
Of course, as far as the authorities are concerned, teaching people to think for themselves is actually a bad thing, since as often as not what the authorities are doing is tantamount to pulling a scam.
My rule of thumb is that anything with a 90% profit margin should probably be illegal.
I have to disagree with this bit right here.
I believe that an understanding that any advertiser will lie to me in his own interests to the greatest extent allowed by (enforced) law is essential to capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t about trusting anyone on the other side of the equation, it’s about deciding, as a society, what level of lying we’re comfortable with.
It’s like the story about the gambler (I forget who, exactly) who was warned by a friend that the poker game he was playing was rigged. He replied, “I know, but it’s the only game in town.”
That’s advertising.
As for this type of ad in particular?
I dunno, it’s certainly slimy… but on the other hand, every dollar spent on this is one fewer dollar contributed to Ron Paul’s campaign, so it might be a net positive.
Just for illustration, over here we have the “Fernabsatzgesetz” (distance selling law) which applies to sales over the net and presumably also over tv.
One of the provisions is that for most stuff sold this way, a consumer can return it, no questions asked, inside two weeks. (Exceptions are stuff like food or CDs that have been unpacked.) And the seller has to inform the consumer of this; until he does, the time limit doesn’t start to run.
(This is of course simplified; the law has now been integrated into another, and of course – it being law – there are a lot more rules. But the above is, I believe, the essential point.)
Seems to me that’s a law that protects both stupid people and intelligent people who, for some reason, just didn’t spot the problem before buying.
Not really a tax on the stupid as much as a scam. For a proper tax on the stupid, look no further than state-run lotteries. People who wouldn’t set foot in a casino because they can’t afford to gamble are overrepresented among players of lotteries, yet these lotteries pay in the region of 50%, as opposed to 92 – 96% on a roulette depending on how many zeros are on the wheel).
I always thought that those sort of coins were meant for “collectors” who just wanted something pretty for the knick-knack shelf. Just like the creepy porcelain dolls or Elvis memorabilia you see in the newspaper inserts. I figured the “real gold plating” was just supposed to be a selling point to that end (because real gold is prettier than fake gold I guess?) and not supposed to imply that the coin has actual value.
I’m still trying to understand how stockpiling gold is supposed to be useful in a postapocalyptic society. I mean, if the world has gone to shit, I don’t want shiny rocks. I want food, weapons and ammo, and everything I can cart out of the local drugstore, from antibiotics to tampons.
Tylenol will be worth more than gold if circumstances arise that no more will ever be made.
#63 saalweachter
Thats the music ‘industry’ your talking about there!
You find me a musician who gets 10% of what the industry takes for his or her work sold over the internet (at almost zero cost) and they can buy you a drink.
This is one of the reasons behind the new copyright laws (Acta etc): you cant have people freely selling their own work – there be alot of parasites out of work.
In an apocalypse gold would act a a pyramid scheme. Take those gold coins, give them to someone for their stuff. The guy you gave them to does the same. And on and on, until it gets to the guy who can’t find anyone who’ll take the gold, since gold by itself isn’t much use when basics are a problem to find.
Nah, I’ve got a friend like that. He tends to know quite a bit about metal values. He was into silver first, and collected old nickles and quarters before such and such a date because they had more of one kind of metal than new ones. He would laugh at this scam too.
@timgueguen
#70
Hm… that would make Metro 2033’s post-apocalypse economic system more… realistic.
You use bullets as money. Because frankly, when there are mutant animals out to kill you, you need those bullets.
Profit margin isn’t the question. It’s product versus coast and advertizement of product.
When you get a cup of coffee you know what you are buying. There’s some risk it’ll suck but it will be squarely within the perimeters of coffee. And if your coffee is horrible most stores will attempt to fix a new one for you. You are paying for the enjoyment of flavor.
With the gold coin it is advertised AS an investment when it is in fact a novelty item. You do not get what you paid for…the genius of the scam is that you only figure that out years down the line when the value does not increase.
Elements of Fraud under US Federal Law (my paraphrasing):
“An intentional misrepresentation of material fact with knowledge of its falsity for the purpose of inducing another to act. Reliance on the misrepresentation by another causing him to act. The action causes injury or damages”
I still don’t understand how homoeopathy is legally sold in the US.
There’s already a tax on the stupid. It’s called the state lottery.
This annoys me. My mother plays the lottery and she is not stupid. it isn’t a stupidity tax, it’s a desperation/hope tax.
It depends on how far back you end up after the meltdown. Gold was the standard for a fair while, so going back to it after fiat is seen as likely. Also some are using it as a physical investment that they will be able to sell back should a gold bubble start forming.
Theres a certain sense behind it, but seemingly balanced on a selection of slightly unlikely what-ifs. It wouldn’t form a first priority, but that being said, once you’ve bought all the guns and supplies you can fit in your house then you may as well spend your magic paper on something solid.
They are doing nothing more than the national lottery does in the UK. It’s widely known here as the ‘Stupid Tax’.
I think it’s quite likely, but I wonder at what value level. If very few people survive, while most of the gold supply does (after all, you can’t destroy it using ordinary weapons, only disperse it into uselessness–not all that easy, actually), it might be used as money but not be all that valuable.
Lead might be good to stockpile (or would a lot of scrap survive?), for bullets especially, and maybe guns and the like. Then you have valuable stuff, not the gold that may become all too plentiful post-apocalypse, and then you can acquire a good deal at lower levels of value.
Glen Davidson
Wellllll…..
Since the only times you see these adverts, is on conservative shows….
But, is this not the same as religion. Glitter which when examined is worthless. And no, I do not think we should abolish religion, we need to educate people to think.
After all, the only way people will not fall for future scams is to actually use their brains. No amount of legislation can stop stupidity. But legislation can encourage intelligence.***
*** nature vs nurture argument.
Oh please. That’s not even close to being a “scam”.
My ex-sister-in-law (thank Zeus for THAT happy outcome) is still hoarding her Beanie Babies.
depending on the “apocalypse”, gold coins might be of use, but most likely they would simply be lumps of heavy metal. The good points about gold are, it doesn’t tarnish, has a low melting point, and is roughly as dense as tungsten yet much softer. Theoretically, gold should make excellent bullets.
Which, if the complete collapse of modern technological society happened, is probably about all it would be useful for.
Better to spend you money on enjoying life now, and worry about “after the fall” later.
Yeah, come the end of civilization, gold is only worth what someone else will give you for it … without just shooting you through the head and taking it. Hoarding gold assumes a certain level of society to give it value.
Me, I’m spending what little I have on increasing my own skills, buying tools, and doing my best to keep civilization from collapsing.
With Uncle Sam selling rag paper for one to one hundred dollars a gram, depending on the president printed on the bill, 1.4 miligrams of gold for a buck seems positively fiduciary
The difference is that, within US boundaries, people are required to exchange $100 worth of goods for that piece of paper. That piece of paper is One Hundred Dollars; there is no platonic dollar that somehow exists outside the currency issued by Uncle Sam.
For a proper tax on the stupid, look no further than state-run lotteries.
Nope. A ticket in a lottery is a license to daydream for a week, and cheaper than a movie.
The obsession with gold at the “collapse of modern technological society” is nothing compared to the freaky obsession with guns.
Exploiting stupidity is an environmentally responsible thing to do, being as it’s a renewable resource – after all, there’s one born much more often than every minute. And if it’s not a renewable resourced, then exploiting it would lead to a decline until we have no stupidity left, and although I don’t think that will happen any time this side of the first month of blizzards in hell, it’s a pleasant thought.
Your comment just made my day. So now i must spoil it ;p
Unfortunately under the general rules of economics and unintended consequences, exploiting it will actually lead to more stupid being created as demand increases and damage to the environment.
First turning people stupid will be made more efficient (daytime tv?). When that does not satisfy demand (and when has it ever?) we will draw in other resources (turning smart people stupid perhaps). Consolidation of smaller stupor-farms into massive conglomerates followed by the inevitable relaxing of protection laws after money and false campaigns by said conglomerates.
Since creating stupidity (rather than taking the small amount available naturally) takes energy and resources, it then becomes environmentally unsound.