Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally I’ve had the inverse, pulled over in a lower-income black neighborhood because a patrolling officer thought I must’ve been there to buy drugs. I do wonder how often that type of thing happens, but we simply don’t hear much of it because it isn’t widely considered as bad.
I had that happen to me when I was a student living in west philly, also once in Kensington and once in Camden. The later two are/were particularly notorious, though my neighborhood in west philly wasn't very nice either. I've heard mixed reports of cops in Camden, but the cops I've encountered in Philly all seemed genuinely concerned with protecting the law abiding residents from crime and are pretty good at getting…
After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
131–140 of 241 posts
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#132This 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…
I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?
On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform.
Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars.
As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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, a…
I think this is inaccurate and you need citations to justify the idea that those in deep poverty are better off then they were 25, 50, 100 years ago.
Health outcomes, (obesity, nutrition, drug addiction ) could easily be worse.
Security outcomes, (violent crime, domestic violence, police violence) could easily be worse.
Economic outcomes (job security, lifetime earning expectations, minimum wage) could easily be worse.
Social outcomes ( close friends, community ties, connection to close family memebers) could easily be worse.
Remember that looking at averages is misleading if the distribution is changing around a constant mean.
Further, the idea that crime is an economic choice, and not a socially determined choice is highly suspect. For instance, street level drug dealers make very little money [1], the average US bank robber steals ~$4,000 [2]. Crime is rarely a "rational decision" it's made in a socially constructed context.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf [2] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-sho...
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?
On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform. Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars. As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to…
There was a story a few years ago about someone renting an AirBnB to run a meth lab
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#135lol chicago... anyone wanna have a guess at the thieves' skin color?
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#136How 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 ?
Car2go started out as a joint venture of Daimler and the car rental company Europcar. Nowadays it is a joint venture only of car makers Daimler and BMW.
I actually wonder how profitable these very short term rentals are on their own. Maybe part of their profitability is long term brand development? Certainly city dwellers like me, who gets by with bicycles and public transport mainly, are exposed much more easily to the experience of driving a nice, modern BMW or Mercedes than they would without these "car sharing" offers.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Isn't recidivism the kind of filter that causes people to become recidivist, though?
Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that the school-to-prison pipeline is so profitable for private business. The younger you put the “Mark of Cain” on a citizen, the sooner they become a revenue opportunity.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
In the UK, those companies all require a driving license, passport, credit card, many thousand pound deposit, credit check, 2 bank statements, and a code from the government showing driving offenses... They then proceed to print off paper forms which they staple other forms to, scan them in, print them off again, fax them to the headquarters before emailing them as well, and print them out a third time just for luck,…
Then they only do these things when they're open (although you can return cars at all times), so too early, too late or Sundays are out.
They also only have one location in the city where you can get cars, and it's usually much further away than the closest car sharing option.
For longer trips (and one-way rentals which are great for moving city) they are still a good option, but if you need a car for an hour to get some heavy tools from the hardware store they're out.
(The other option would be to borrow a cargo bike which is free from the city, but again only when they're open and requires more travel to and from the place.)
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#139Reminds me of Ofo venture to Almaty. Some thief spent weeks methodically picking up every Ofo bike in the town, until the only ones left were broken or thrown into unreachable places.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#140> Car2Go sent several workers to retrieve the vehicles, only to find that a group of thieves had claimed them as their own. Some blocked the vehicles in to prevent repossession; others threatened the company’s employees, according to someone with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity. How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that? Also, they mentioned that people sublet th…
>> How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that?
This happened in Chicago. Police response times are... more than a little slow.