Almon Brown Strowger was an undertaker and suspected that a rival buisness used their wife’s position as a switchboard operator to steal customers.
So he invented the automatic switchboard and put his competitors wife out of a job.
Came here to comment this. Are you a fellow Lateral Podcast listener?
Lamborghini was a tractor company before they made cars. Ferruccio Lamborghini was successful and bought 2 Ferraris, one for him and one for his wife. He would drive his business partners to lunch in hhem, but he tended to burn up the clutches. He eventually discovered that they used a same inexpensive part as his tractors, but Ferrari charged 100 times the money for the same part. He spoke to Enzo Ferrari about it and the conversation did not go well. Lamborghini was so insulted by the reply that he started his own car company.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a25169632/lamborghini-supercars-exist-because-of-a-tractor/
Tricking people to pay 100x its normal cost is pure unadulterated capitalism.
I hate scammers. People who call you pretending to be the “IRS” and claiming that you’re about to be arrested for unpaid taxes. Sick bastards who make money ripping off (mostly elderly) people.
One time I started getting those phone calls. I went down to the customer service department where I worked, which still had a fax machine, stuck a blank piece of paper in, dialed the scammers number, set retry x100, and hit send.
I called them back an hour later to see if they were getting the message and the guy gave me an earful. I politely explained that every second of his time that I wasted was one less second he got to spend ripping someone else off. He hung up on me but I kept calling back until they finally disconnected that number.
Totally worth it. Fuck scammers.
You would enjoy 419eater.com
And Kitboga. I think I’ve seen nearly every video on “More Kitboga”.
Man I remember the fax bomb. Either huge numbers of black pages to burn through the recipients’ ink toner, or two bits of A4 taped together neatly to form an infinite loop.
The latter was stopped when sending machines got a buffer that images were stored in before they were sent (as opposed to the OG fax machines that dialled the recipient and “live streamed” the pages by scanning and sending at 9600 baud or whatever the handshake was at), and most buffers threw an error when they were full (usually because the sender was taking the piss) and never sent. Shame.
King Harald of Norway, when asked by Trump about getting invited to talk about a Nobel Peace prize, decided to host Obama instead.
Fidel Castro offering to send election observers to the US in 2004.
I know there’s been a few cases of people paying fines with wheelbarrows full of loose pennies.
Obligatory caution that that can backfire if the recipient insists that the debtor counts the pennies. Or if the creditor refuses the pennies entirely, which is legal in some jurisdictions. (e.g. in the UK, pennies and 2p coins are legal tender up to amounts of only 20 pence. Anything beyond that is left to the discretion of the recipient.)
In the US, pennies are legal tender and have to be accepted as payment for debts owed. This tactic usually ended up in the fine being dismissed.
There is no federal statute requiring private lendors to accept payment in the form of coins. The coins are legal tender but they dont have to be accepted.
The discussion is about fines. I’m not sure why you’re talking about lenders.
Also, Title 31 (Money and Finance), Subtitle IV (Money), Chapter 51 (Coins and Currency), Subchapter I (Monetary System), Section 5103 (Legal Tender) of the United States Code states:
United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts.
So yes, there is a federal statue requiring private lenders accept coins as payment.
I don’t think that says what you think it does. Just because they are legal tender does not inherently mean (nor does that snippet say) that they cannot be denied as a form of payment.
Yes it does. It’s a legal form of payment, and if a lender denies it, you can sue to have the entire debt discharged because the lender is refusing legal tender.
If you’re a debt holder, you’re required by federal law to accept any form of legal tender as payment, which includes coins.
You really should read down to the bottom of that article, where it says that businesses are allowed to set the terms of what forms of payment they’ll accept as long as they do so before the deal is made or the sale is done. Your own source contradicts what you said.
Don’t quit your day job to start giving people legal advice.
