The anonymity that these car sharing services provide is already an issue. In my neighbourhood car2go are the most likely to be recklessly driving and harassing people in the streets. They should be tightening their policy not loosening it. I really believe there needs to be a standard for this (if one doesn't already exist).
It probably varies from city to city, but I always assumed that the reason car-sharing drivers are worse than others on average is just because they get less practice, are more likely to have learned to drive in a different country (with different traffic rules, layout of bike lanes, etc.) and perhaps don't know their way around as well (so they're experiencing a heavier cognitive load).
After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
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Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#142Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm generally with you until the end sentence. But, insurance in Florida is like insurance anywhere else, so not sure what you're alluding to...
I’m referring to the fact that Florida has much more expensive home insurance (and fewer home insurance companies) due to the risks associated with said region. A “neighborhood”, if you will (from the grand parent post). The insurance companies didn’t lower their standards, they offset their risks by charging more or being unavailable entirely.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit scores measure behavior, not your attributes. The issue here was fraud. My credit score doesn’t help you assess risk if someone else is impersonating me.
Credit scores measures behaviour in the same way that financial standing measures character or skin colour tells you something useful about a person. It try's to proxy one with another and fails, because really they're two independent variables and life is complex. Someone's ability to pay down debt at any given time is not behaviour, at least it's a tenuous argument.
The use of data from credit reporting agencies is not to predict the outcome of lending to a specific person, but to predict the outcome of many, many loans to many, many people. For which I would say it succeeds, as the entities utilizing it seem to be economically successful due to making a smaller proportion of bad bets than entities who would not, for example in the linked article.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#145If there’s one thing enterprising thieves know how to do, it’s ruining things for honest people and why we can’t have good things. You really have to think like a thief when you want to serve the public because the public provides a cover to the crook and if you let your guard down it’ll bite you in this day and age.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably varies from city to city, but I always assumed that the reason car-sharing drivers are worse than others on average is just because they get less practice, are more likely to have learned to drive in a different country (with different traffic rules, layout of bike lanes, etc.) and perhaps don't know their way around as well (so they're experiencing a heavier cognitive load).
There is no reason to assume that people driving cars they don't own are as careful as driving their own cars. This makes a huge difference.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can have nice things. The whole thing looks to me like an localized, one-time incident. In my (European) city, there are multiple car sharing companies active, and it has caused me to sell my (gasoline) car and use the (electric) car sharing system.
What city is this, if I may ask? Or at least what country?
We even got bike sharing now which I'm still skeptical of, seeing how it failed in many European cities so far either due to reckless vandalism or by people parking them in the most idiotic ways. The ones here at least have fixed spots where you have to pick up or return them so that should at least solve the second problem, but it also makes things a lot less flexible.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#148If there’s one thing enterprising thieves know how to do, it’s ruining things for honest people and why we can’t have good things. You really have to think like a thief when you want to serve the public because the public provides a cover to the crook and if you let your guard down it’ll bite you in this day and age.
Well, the title of the submission seems to imply that if car2go simply reversed the decision on background checks then we could indeed have good things...
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#149This 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…
That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up. Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables. (It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability tri…
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#150Earlier 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…
In another Hacker News article, these would all be things we should be striving for