Is it safe?

A write-up on safes (ostensibly a discussion of the fact that many Americans prefer to store their wealth at home as opposed to banks) reminded me of the tension between secrecy and security. Safes — even high quality safes — are not necessarily good hiding places. If a safe is found, it would become the logical subject of a thief’s attention, and if he cannot crack it open, he might very well decide to haul it away and work on it later.

But if something is hidden well enough that a burglar cannot find it, that not only saves the cost and hassle of a safe, but can keep the goods safer than a safe would. The most mundane places can offer a perfect stash for a vacation. Valuables can be thrown into the kitchen trash can or into a washer or dryer full of clothes. A piece of large diameter ABS sewer pipe can hold a lot of stuff, and can either be made to “run” from floor to ceiling or from wall to wall into holes cut for the purpose (allowing the owner to simply slide it out whenever access is needed) or else accessed through a removable cleanout. Few burglars are going to disassemble what appear to be a house’s waste lines in search of valuables.

To add to the confusion, why not add a real safe? A cheap safe — the type that cannot withstand ordinary attack by a crowbar — could be put anywhere and bolted to the floor.  This could cause a burglar to waste valuable time tearing into it. And better yet, fill the thing with cheap crap that looks valuable. Fake gold coins, fake but real-looking jewelry, so that when he finally gets in, he’ll think he scored, and get his ass out of there ASAP. I think it’s safe to assume that many burglars are drug addicts or at least know the value of illegal substances, so to complete the appearance of a real score, why not throw in some herbs that could pass for high potency fake sensimilla, dried up store mushrooms in ziplock bags, and if you have an empty controlled substance prescription bottle lying around, by all means throw in some worthless old pills to make it look real. (And if you really hate burglars,  I guess you could substitute strychnine or something evil. But that would be wrong; burglars of unoccupied property really do not deserve to die, and his next of kin might turn around and sue you for setting a lethal burglar trap. So scratch that idea entirely.)

Ideally, though, you would want security as well as stealth. Throwing your gold in the kitchen trash or the dryer is not something most people would want to do on their way to a vacation.  So maybe a real safe that is very secure and very hidden, and an easier to find safe to waste the burglar’s time.

Title shamelessly borrowed from a favorite older flick, as is this picture:

After all, as Sarah said, “what is yours, you keep“!

MORE: Whoops, almost forgot. If you are one of those cluttered souls who cannot bear to toss or shred old paper and have accumulated boxes of it, just empty a box, throw in your goodies, and put the old files on top.

UPDATE: Nice comments! Commenter Neil opines that somebody might catch on to fake coins, which is true, although some of them are convincing. As to fake gold bars, they are certainly good enough to fool thieves. Why not only can they fool experts, they even fool governments.

On Wednesday, the BBC reported that millions of dollars in gold at the central bank of Ethiopia has turned out to be fake: What were supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem.

This is an amazing story for two reasons. First, that an institution like a central bank could get ripped off this way, and second that the people responsible used such a lousy excuse for fake gold.

Governments defrauding governments? That should not surprise anyone, and I’d say that there might be some poetic justice involved, except the government swindlers aren’t even that good at it. The real con artists don’t use gold-plated steel; they use gold-plated tungsten:

Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.)

A top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don’t know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16″ layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out it’s fake. (Unless, of course, central bank gold inspectors are wise to this trick and have developed a test for it: Something involving speed of sound say, or more powerful x-rays, or perhaps neutron activation analysis. If bars like this are actually a common problem, you certainly could devise a quick, non-destructive test for them, and for all I know, they have. Except, apparently, in Ethiopia.)

Well, we can’t expect too much from government bureaucrats. Either in Ethiopia or here.

What’s a taxpayer to do?