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After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

bloomberg.com

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Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#81

Post by Noumenon72 »

onion2k wrote: post #59
icxa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole concept of “bad neighborhoods” where people aren’t trustworthy is partly a racist trope The concept of a "bad neighborhood" comes from crime statistics, not racist tropes. Either crime (theft, robbery, fraud, et all) is high, or it is not high, race be damned. Subscribers to a particular political ideology need to calm down with the whole "your facts/science are racist" bit, because it hurts everyone over…

The level of crime in an area correlates far more closely to poverty than race, so suggesting a bad neighbourhood is bad because of the race of people who live there rather than other factors probably is racist.

Given the extremely high correlation of crime to race, that seems unlikely. https://www.quora.com/Are-crime-rates-correlated-with-ethnic...

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#82

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

jsemrau wrote: post #79
fencepost wrote: post #65

How is this "sharing?" This seems like app-based short term rentals little different from what I could get from Avis and the like. My initial thought was that this was allowing individuals to rent out their cars and my reaction was a hard 'oh hell no.' What's the term from the various "my expensive camera /lens was stolen" stories? Voluntary parting? Pretty sure that would apply to your nice car as well.

I still can't wrap my head around it why car rental companies like Hertz and Avis don't have this market completely cornered. They have the infrastructure, the assets, the know-how. Why is it still so inconvenient to get a car through them ?

Exactly! They are asleep at the wheel. German car rental company Sixt does this now.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

anonthrowaway2 wrote: post #37
orev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t have causation without correlation.

You definitely can. A control system causes a signal to be ~constant and thus ~uncorrelated to whatever you care to name.

If a control system's output is uncorrelated with what it is controlling, then it's not really controlling it.

Also, to see a clear linear correlation, you might need to know what you're looking for. A controller output may look uncorrelated with the target system state, until you realize it's a I controller, so you need to look for correlation between controller's output and the integral of the system's state.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#84

Post by rtpg »

caf wrote: post #49
jacurtis wrote: post #10

This is interesting because I always thought these "background checks" were just a formality. Like something needed for their insurance or to weed out a few extreme individuals (like those with multiple-DUIs or a heavy history of wrecks on their record). But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly havin…

The "background checks" were probably excluding a lot of low-hanging fruit, like attempts at creating accounts in fake names with stolen credit card details.

Hell, a background check will pull up people with earlier criminal convictions (which, given our prison systems generation of recidivism is probably an unfair filter but one that rules out a lot of people in organized crime)

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#85

Post by User23 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #32
mgramsey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for what seems like an extreme claim in your second paragraph?

The crime statistics in the neighborhoods should suffice. One thing I periodically see on HN is how companies are discriminating against (group here) because they aren't operating in high-crime neighborhoods. Obviously, a company maximizing revenues and minimizing liabilities will avoid such areas. So will most individuals delivering to them that don't want to get robbed (most likely), raped, or killed. They're more…

I'm still waiting for the startup that solves the burning problem of a lack of healthy food options in poor minority neighborhoods. A twice weekly food truck that offered fresh healthy produce and meats at reasonable prices would greatly improve health and well-being in those areas.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#86

Post by 8456523 »

User23 wrote: post #85
nickpsecurity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crime statistics in the neighborhoods should suffice. One thing I periodically see on HN is how companies are discriminating against (group here) because they aren't operating in high-crime neighborhoods. Obviously, a company maximizing revenues and minimizing liabilities will avoid such areas. So will most individuals delivering to them that don't want to get robbed (most likely), raped, or killed. They're more…

I'm still waiting for the startup that solves the burning problem of a lack of healthy food options in poor minority neighborhoods. A twice weekly food truck that offered fresh healthy produce and meats at reasonable prices would greatly improve health and well-being in those areas.

Aren't you worried that such a startup will run up against the same systemic biases that have been preventing poor minority neighborhoods from accessing healthy food at reasonable prices for decades?

In other words, food truck entrepreneurs have been around for decades, so why doesn't the service you imagine exist yet? Because so far no one with the right motivation, i.e., no one with their heart in the right place, has tried what you imagine?

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#87

Post by User23 »

8456523 wrote: post #86
User23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still waiting for the startup that solves the burning problem of a lack of healthy food options in poor minority neighborhoods. A twice weekly food truck that offered fresh healthy produce and meats at reasonable prices would greatly improve health and well-being in those areas.

Aren't you worried that such a startup will run up against the same systemic biases that have been preventing poor minority neighborhoods from accessing healthy food at reasonable prices for decades? In other words, food truck entrepreneurs have been around for decades, so why doesn't the service you imagine exist yet? Because so far no one with the right motivation, i.e., no one with their heart in the right place,…

I haven't noticed an overwhelming systemic bias in the startup community, have you? Why wouldn't it work? Are you saying VCs won't invest in such an obviously worthy cause because they are racially or class biased?

Are you saying that the demand just doesn't exist? That people in food deserts just want to be unhealthy because of some unspecified and perhaps unknowable reasons? I don't get it.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#88

Post by mohoromitch »

nneonneo wrote: post #41

Shame we can’t have nice things. Car2Go operates in my city, and it’s a remarkably convenient way to get around (even moreso given that Uber/Lyft are still banned by the city council - thanks to the taxi lobby...). They’re competing with a local car-share company for market share so their rates are very low. I do wonder what their rates of theft are here...

Vancouver?

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#89

Post by rjf72 »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #62
barbecue_sauce wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also don't necessarily correlate correctly with behavior. If you actively avoid debt, for instance, you are essentially penalized with regard to credit score.

That’s a feature, not a bug, the most profitable people are the ones that go into debt, never miss payments but also never pay it off.

I've read this as the explanation multiple times, but I think there's an even more obvious explanation: people that go into debt, never miss repayments, and never pay it off are more likely to continue paying their debt off on time than somebody who never takes on or retains debt.

As but one component to this a person who never takes on debt has, tautologically, managed to live a life without any need of debt. That implies he would have little difficulty continuing to live a life without access to credit. Because of this, he will generally have substantially less concern about his credit rating than a person who depends on credit for their basic livelihood.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#90

Post by lultimouomo »

hooande wrote: post #54
supernova87a wrote: post #12

Never underestimate how much cleverer than you people will be when it comes to money. They spend their full time on figuring out how to use the system in ways you didn't expect, whereas you don't even spend full time on getting the things to work the way you barely took the time to think they would. Secondly, take away the lesson that there's a reason that banks/stores/merchants don't lower their standards and go int…

Given the scale, I would suspect a ring of professional criminals more than people with low credit scores from "bad neighborhoods". This is Hacker News, after all. This is a system and someone hacked it. "In several cases, hackers with lists of email addresses and passwords have written scripts to locate car-sharing accounts using those credentials. Once they find the accounts, they sign out cars and disable their GP…

The article makes it quite clear that this was not a planned operations where 75 cars were stolen, GPS disabled, and shipped abroad or stripped for parts.

People were just refusing to give back cars, parking them inside private garages, using immobilizers, and stuff like that.

FTA:

> There was little indication that the people who took the cars had more than joyriding in mind. According to police reports, all the pilfered cars had functioning GPS trackers and license plates that started with the letters AX, and many still had visible Car2Go stickers on them, so officers patrolling the area had little trouble spotting them. On a single day they arrested almost two dozen joyriders.

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