281–290 of 307 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is taking your own property back being a bad citizen?
In some countries it might be illegal to disturb someone's possession of something, as a general rule, regardless of legitimate ownership. For example, in Sweden, if it's been more than 24 hours, it's illegal to do it on your own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in Austria that's not how it works. The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought it in good faith. The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike. The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money. It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive b…
I can't believe the law works like that. Are you telling me that if I buy a yacht in Austria "in good faith" from someone who doesn't own it, I can just sail away on the yacht, original owner be damned?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably illegal, but a GPS tracking and remote braking could be a “fun” (actually really dangerous) combo for a stolen bike. Of course it is just as likely that some unfortunate person would have unknowingly bought your stolen bike, so that’d be bad.
It’s probably legal. Modern cars do this, with the caveat that the owner can’t control the remote disabler. Interesting legal gymnastics would required to make it legal for a Detroit automaker to do this, but not an individual. However, such gymnastics are sadly common these days and wouldn’t surprise me.
It'd be nice to see e-bikes that just go into full generator mode when they're reported stolen; a bike that you can't petal is useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is taking your own property back being a bad citizen?
If you go to someones backyard and start taking things and they call the police then you are a bad citizen. Calling cops and doing it with their help covers your ass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in Austria that's not how it works. The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought it in good faith. The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike. The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money. It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive b…
I can't believe the law works like that. Are you telling me that if I buy a yacht in Austria "in good faith" from someone who doesn't own it, I can just sail away on the yacht, original owner be damned?
However as soon as you as the buyer feel something is off, you aren't protected anymore because only good faith buyers are protected. For example if you go to the black market or something seems to be extremely cheap you definitively aren't protected anymore.
It's a conflict of interests. This law is trying to do a tradeoff. Imagine you went to Walmart and bought a bike and everything seemed fine but it turned out that an employee stole the bike and sold it to you in the name of Walmart. In this case you can keep the bike.
So my stolen bike went via Poland to the Ukraine's Lviv, where it was probably disassembled because the traces of the tracker are disappearing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, every homeless person I have ever talked to has had some bullshit story. Its almost as if the impulse to spew bullshit is the primary cause of homelessness. Or some inevitable consequence of most mental health problems. Its so reliable that it makes me question the idea that housing costs are the primary cause of homelessness, but perhaps that just pushes more people on the mental margins over the edge.
This is a pretty mean-spirited comment, I don't even know where to start. Homeless people are just people like you and me. If you'd been born in their shoes, with their inherited genetic make-up, raised by their parents, surrounded by their friends, living their life experiences etc you'd very possibly be homeless too and 'spewing bullshit' as you put it
(This includes mental illness and addiction--even if we mentally those people as being in the grip of something beyond themselves, if a peaceful, non-grifting society is desired someone needs to make choices about how to restrict their freedom.)
There's a Dutch bike company (VanMoof) that offers a Theft Recovery service for their bikes: they have teams of people that track down the bike (using GPS primarily) and basically steal it back. They used to produce monthly videos of bike recovery operations, though it looks like they've stopped the videos so you'll have to scroll past a few years of promo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof Often they recover t…
I did not hear about VanMoof earlier but my buddy called police (Amsterdam area of course) once when he found his bike and he wanted to be good citizen so he did not want to just steal it back from some backyard. Well police helped him recover the bike without arresting anyone and told him next time he should just steal it back and don't bother them.
During COVID there were plenty of officers available to fine normal people who were sitting too close on a bench. But to deal with real criminals who talk back is too much of a hassle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is taking your own property back being a bad citizen?
It becomes complicated if the new owner has legitimately bought the bike in a second hand store.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The videos are interesting. Will VanMoof go anywhere in Europe for you then to recover these then? I see Strasbourg and Stockholm in addition to the Netherlands. Any insight into how the pricing works for recovery?
From [1] it looks like * You pay $400 for 3 years of coverage. * Must have the bike locked and file a police report. * They can choose whether or not to attempt recovery. * If they choose not to, or fail to recover the bike, they'll replace it. * Up to 3 replacements are covered in the 3 years. So it's really just theft insurance but they can attempt to recover low-hanging fruit. In wonder what their attempted recove…