Car-sharing service HiGear shuts down due to theft of 4 cars worth $400,000

I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the "HiGear girls". It's not quite as bad as I thought because they don't seem to "rent out" these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification.

FOLLOWUP (responding to comments): I'm not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them.

But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women's value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the majority of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.)

I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.

The problem with running criminal business is that as soon as he tries to scale, he would inevitably and very seriously piss off lots of people.

That would put extra pressure on law enforcement to catch the thieves and they would eventually be caught.

Next step is several years in jail and close monitoring of the future crime activities.

End result - the only expertise that he would gain over the years (in stealing) would be not marketable.

no, the one problem with a criminal business is that once you make a mistake, it's typically a long time (many years in prison) before you get another shot. Non criminals get many do-overs for their mistakes without a waiting period.

No, I'm dead serious.

Colin (the aforementioned kid I grew up with) figured it was easier to attract good talent and keep them happy if he treated his operation like a professional job.

So, he employs his team through an auto-repair shop, where they're full-time employees with full benefits and he sets them up with a 401k (that he matches up to some percentage of, I don't know the number). That's pretty much unheard of among actual mechanics, never mind car thieves.

And he gets to cherry-pick his team, and they like the stability and "legitimate"-ness of the operation.

He's been doing it for a while, so his numbers must make it a good decision financially (he has elaborate spreadsheets of every facet of his business).

The most "boss" I ever got to look to impress a girl was in college when a friend of mine went out to Boston on a Friday and ended up at the end of the night having her car stolen. She calls me all upset, and I think, "Maybe I can see if Colin can get her car back."

So I call her an hour later and let her know that if she goes to a specific T-station parking lot, her car will be there. She calls me later and lets me know that, it is, indeed there, and there's a case of beer in the passenger seat with a note saying "Sorry".

Nerdy, adolescent me felt like a puffer fish that had puffed itself up.

Tech reporting itself is pretty bad. TechCrunch, Business Insider, etc are essentially tabloids.