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

Sealing the edges of foil is hard. You need to get contact at least every ~1mm along a seam to stop microwave signals getting in or out reliably.

Yes and no. After all, there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. And at least a fraction of them has serious constraints on what they can do to get out of there (for example they have family, so they can't just pack up and go to a different state to start a new life).

Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process.

Many people have insufficient money for medication.

... and so on, so they dip their toes into crime, just selling weed at first, or laundering money, and then naturally they either get greedy, or get pressured into taking more risk, or simply get caught. (or maybe some successfully get out.)

and then there are people fleeing from very rough places (drug cartel warzones, etc.) and they usually don't have much more than their name, so they can try to do whatever makes some money.

Do circumstances make theft right? No. Of course not. But sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong, which quickly turns this into a hard pragmatic question with only grey answers.

> there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US.

Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, and riding public transit or a bike/motorbike with rudimentary knowledge on how to fix it.

These are hardships only when compared to extremely lofty standards of living - and if that makes you become a career criminal, it is hard to have sympathy.

The view you presented here is deeply, if unintentionally, flawed; it'd take a small essay to unpack and elaborate all the points in detail. But to sketch a tl;dr of a part of such essay:

- 'pas touched upon the amount of people in poverty; add to that mental problems, losing the IQ lottery, being born into a pathological family and a host of other concerns, and you'll see you're severely underestimating the amount of people who are forced into crime through circumstances.

- There's lots of people who for some reason don't care about such ideals as niceness, community and civilization. For those, committing a crime isn't meaningfully different than any legal activity - it just have a slightly different risk/payoff profile. If you look around carefully, get to know more people, you'll discover plenty of crime happening around you - not murder and robbery, but tax evasion, skirting environmental laws, health&safety laws, etc.

It may seem that in 2019, life of crime shouldn't be rewarded, and yet 2019 brought us a multi-billion-dollar IPO of a company whose primary business model is law-breaking at multinational scale.

> 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 having a real impact on preventing theft.

No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives.

In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.