So the Japanese are facing a hostage crisis, which blows. Two of their citizens have been captured by ISIS, which is demanding a $200 million ransom for their release. Traditional thinking holds that there’s only two options for dealing with this — pay up and get your people back or don’t and suffer a tragedy.
But there’s a third option no one talks about–offer to pay half up front, followed by the second half once your citizens are released. Tell the captors something like “You can understand why we don’t fully trust people who live in a desert but dress in all-black.”
So you wire the first hundred million to their bank account. Once the captives are released, you proceed with the second payment. But this one is done in cash. Specifically in pennies. But you don’t drive the pennies to an ISIS camp like you’re some Soverign Citizen protesting a traffic ticket by driving a van-load of pennies to the courthouse.
Nope, these are pennies from heaven.
You load the ten billion pennies onto planes. The planes fly as high as possible, getting up to like 70,000 feet. And then they drop their load onto ISIS training camps.
And you thought the penny was useless.