
Grand Theft Cobalt: Rotterdam - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-27/thieves-pull-off-audacious-cobalt-heists-at-europe-s-largest-port
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mschuster91
> Around the same time, Weight said, armed men held up a freight train en
> route to South Africa, decoupled the carriages containing cobalt, and towed
> them away on a separate getaway train.

Just... how did the thieves get a _getaway train_? I can understand trucks,
that one is common, but an unauthorized train on the network, that should not
be possible? Or was the rail dispatcher bribed?

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gcb0
you just run your train on the rail like you would run your truck on a
highway. eventually you get into some factory or port with a connecting exit.

industrial rail is much more complex than your urban passenger rail.

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SmellyGeekBoy
> eventually you get into some factory or port with a connecting exit.

Or another train? Seems very risky!

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whatshisface
The train signals are big physical objects right there on the tracks, visible
to the engineers. A bandit on the railroad has as much information about the
positions of the other trains as a legitimate operator. (This is because of
the fail-safes in place for when the central control system gets something
wrong.)

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kurthr
The videotaped visit has all the elements of a con game... (barrels full of
gravel are a lot easier to load) as does the insurance payout. What happened
and the way the article is written make it fairly clear that the whole Cobalt
market from Africa to the LME is grey at best.

~~~
Scoundreller
Are any other mid-value metals any different?

With gold, you can charter a plane/helicopter to carry it under a watchful
eye.

With coal... too inexpensive to bother dealing with.

Cobalt sits nicely in the middle, creating a maximum of security issues.

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blunte
Good god I can't read bold white text on pure black backgrounds for more than
30 seconds before my brain/eyes have these horizontal lines burned into them.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Firefox has a reader mode I've gotten accustomed to. I also use 'Dark Reader'
which is a plugin for both Firefox and Google Chrome which customizes any
website's color scheme to whatever darkness setting you want, or light.

~~~
pm90
The reader mode is the best tool in FF by far for folks who like to read the
content. It filters out ads, lets you capture the content even if its behind a
paywall (well, most paywalls are pretty dumb).

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pierrebai
I'm still at a complete loss what benefits such speculators provide. They
hoard material, cause price increase, possibly con insurance by organizing
their own theft or at the very least benefiting from it by getting an early
return on cobalt via the insurance payout without affecting the market by
selling it.

It seems to happen to any commodity that is scarce enough to be controlled by
a few speculators.

~~~
F_r_k
If you're good, you'd buy low and sell high (otherwise you'll go bankrupt),
effectively smoothing the market.

An other way to look at it is arbitrage: instead of moving the commodities in
space, you move the in time.

