Comment by topmonk

7 years ago

You're asking him to prove a negative. The onus should be on you.

Not at all - one can very reasonably assume that 'very frequently' means after it has been discovered during a traffic stop, in which case it is valid to ask how often djrogers has been in that situation.

  • A mostly unrelated and offtopic comment: It's been a misconception that the $20 and $100 U.S. Dollar bills contain some RFID-like passive tracking capability embedded within the "ribbon" security feature. If you want to have an expensive and uneventful couple minutes, put a $20 in a microwave for a few seconds to "disable" the chip, but be sure to have a cup of water around. The foil-beanie wearing crowd claims that the result of the microwaving, which burns Jackson's face, is proof. Nevermind the actual fact that a majority of the ink on the front of the bill is on Jackson's face, and that the ink contains metal used for pigmenting and other proprietary security measures which is likely the reason it smolders or catches fire first.

    Anyways, the reason I bring this up is to highlight the paranoia of some that think that long-range RFID scanners can actually locate large stacks of highly valuable "untraceable" currency, which might be used by the highway patrol to identify potential targets to pull over for civil asset forfeiture reasons.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cache-point/

    • The stacks of cash with the ribbon and magnetic ink can be scanned for. Think of those plastic and metal ribbon security stickers stores use.

  • His main point was we don't have enough data for the 'very typically' label. To prove this, you need some sort of data.

    Instead lostcolony was asking for evidence that this is not the case, implying that we should accept 'very typically' with no evidence, and expect proof of absence to change our minds.

    • Actually, no, I wasn't asking for evidence that this was not the case. I was asking for why we should treat djrogers' personal experience as evidence for why it isn't 'very typical'. Does his personal experience even match the criteria smrtinsert implied? And even if it does, why should we consider it, giving how few data points it is, of such poor sampling quality (given a single subject).

      I was asserting nothing about how typical seizure is or isn't, just how poor djrogers' supplied anecdotal data was.

@lostcolony didn’t ask anyone to prove anything. I just read his comment; he merely asked for clarification.

Without a conclusive study, the only proven conclusion is that "large amounts of cash are sometimes seized, sometimes not". However, a study could reveal that this happens very typically, or not very typically (for some definition of typical). In either case, that is not proving a negative.

  • That's exactly my point. Stating that seizure is 'very typical' as fact, and if someone says you have no evidence, the retort shouldn't be "Prove it isn't."

    • No one said I had no evidence (the original statement for this subthread wasn't mine), and my retort wasn't "prove it isn't", but "your supplied anecdotal data is not actually helpful".

      I totally agree the original post to this subthread supplied no data. That's obvious. But to counter it with badly qualified anecdotal evidence does nothing to actually counter it.

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