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Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your comment. Yet tangentially those things can be taken away! At one point in several African countries they used finger prints for the ATM's. People suddenly started getting their fingers cut off by thieves. I would much rather give them a card then a part of my body.

Update: So I have been doing much Googling and can't find an accurate account of that happening. It appears there are some reports of it happening in Maylasia but that was for vehicles. Better yet is that in South Africa they are just blowing up the ATM's or ripping them outhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198626/South-Africa..., which honestly makes more sense.

I did see that Poland is pushing out some new ATM's, that are also used in Japan, that use the pattern of veins instead of finger prints. The state this means the finger has to be attached to the person

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Have you got some sources for this? If you've got criminal gangs willing to cut people's fingers off for their money, why do they bother instead of doing something easier and more reliable? The threat of having your fingers cut off would, I expect, be all that's needed to get people to hand over their cash. Sure, not everyone has got cash on them right now, but not everyone has got an ATM card on them and not everyone has got any money in their bank account. Additionally, they seem to be not fingerprint scanners, but vein pattern scanners, and the manufacturers seem to say that a finger no longer attached to a body won't be accepted.

If you're willing to cut people's fingers off and then walk to the ATM, you'd be willing to simply rob people in some other much easier and much more reliable way.

It seems that about a year ago someone was considering such ATMs [1]. Are you sure this isn't just the fears of people (as mentioned in the article) blown into urban legend?

[1] http://www.news24.com/Technology/News/Fingerprint-ATMs-Will-...

Rational thieves, that's a new concept. Are you sure you haven't been overexposed to macroeconomics material recently?

As a single example, some burglars, when deciding which house to burgle, chooses the house that appear to be easiest to get into (poor physical security, no dogs, no alarms) and that will be easy to escape from (many of them open doors and windows as escape routes before they actually start the stealing). They pick ones that aren't hosting a party. They pick the ones that have concealed (or at least not overlooked) access.

Shoplifters - get this - will often wait until there isn't someone standing next to them before taking something off the shelf. Sounds like a good go at rationality to me.

Of course rational thieves exist. Not hyper-rational fictional models, but rational. The degree of rationality is a spectrum, as always, and is affected by physical and mental health and various other factors, but if you think rational thieves are a new concept, then you're living in some kind of fantasy world.

Most theft is fueled by desperation.

Desperate people do desperate things for small, or often no gain.

People are injured or killed all the time over possessions they may or may not have on them.

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