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“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

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Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#271

Post by lqet »

yard2010 wrote: post #269
maeln wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there). On the other h…

This is such a dystopian phenomenon, I'm far from an expert but I guess it's a matter of city planning?

It's very hard to avoid this. It's mostly a combination of railway noise, throughput of a large number of people who are only travelling through, opportunities for pickpockets and beggars, and historically of soot and air pollution by steam engines, which makes these areas unattractive to live in.

And it is not for lack of trying. City planners since at least the 1850ies have been trying to improve the areas surrounding large train stations.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#272

Post by mindok »

shizzor wrote: post #263
skrebbel wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, but I always wonder how these money laundering kebab places work. We have some in my city too and they always leave me puzzled. If nobody eats there, how do they launder money? I'm probably daft/naieve but can't figure out the mechanics of money laundering when the business doesn't actually move any product.

They already have the money, they just need a business as a facade to claim the money was earned by running the business. But you are right, eventually it would be suspicious if they only sold food but never bought the matching raw ingredients. That's probably why they now moved to barber shops - nobody knows or can prove you didn't cut the hair of the hundreds of people that were never there.

Hmmm. Maybe that’s why hairdressers are on the skilled worker list for immigration to Australia.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#273

Post by JmsPae »

lqet wrote: post #243
JmsPae wrote: post #86

Hi there, "OP" here. First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things; This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post ove…

Why did you include metro stations in your study? The original quote only included train stations. The metro originally largely replaced a tram network, so the metro station density in Paris is higher than for other underground systems. I think it is very hard to find kebap shops in Paris that are not within 500 m of a metro station. This kind of dilutes the significance of your study, because I never really noticed…

I thought to include metro stations mostly because of the nature of the original French subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MetroFrance/comments/1hcifh1/pas_vu...). It perhaps doesn't make much sense in hindsight, but I also filtered out metro stations later on in the post and it didn't change much.

I'm starting work on a follow-up which will sample more cities, though I still plan to use walking distances w network analysis for now.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#274

Post by randomcarbloke »

JmsPae wrote: post #86

Hi there, "OP" here. First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things; This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post ove…

please do berlin, london, and stockholm.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#275

Post by JmsPae »

wjholden wrote: post #228
JmsPae wrote: post #86

Hi there, "OP" here. First off, it's been fun to see this post spread across the interwebs since I first wrote it one caffeine-fueled day just over a week ago (first Menéame, now here) and for the heck of it, I thought I would clarify a few things; This post was (sortof) a meme. Sure, I "understood the assignment" and performed the quick "study" ("analysis" might be more fitting) for the sake of the original post ove…

Which R-Tree Rust library were you referring to?

https://github.com/georust/rstar

Banger library. Not sure how it compares to, say, kd-tree in terms of performance but it allows for plenty of primitives.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#276

Post by jajko »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #265
jclulow wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay…

> If you gamble tens of thousands in those machines, and you don't care about the losses, you get a reasonable expectation value back out as laundered winnings. Where does the laundering come into it? If the machine pays out in cash and you just walk away with it, you've gone from having a big pile of dirty money to having a slightly smaller pile of dirty money. You could declare that the smaller pile is all gambling…

You are overthinking all this. This is not Al Capone investigation, tax offices are understaffed and petty negligence or even crime happens with tax returns very frequently. You think taxmen are going to investigate endless hours of video feed from some casino via court order for some 10k win claimed in taxes? Not sure if casinos even keep all video feeds for say 3 years since it takes time to actually file and process those tax returns.

If you are not big enough fish or have some bad luck, you can slip through quite easily. The key is to keep it down money wise, spread it across many places and random dates. You can't do big sums alone, hence the grandpas in parent comment.

Basically, small crime these days, at least in Europe, is not punished unless you literally steal from police personnel. And if you do it well you can hide bigger crime in sea of small crime.

Maybe AI could help with some of that, but I see often lack of any interest by police to even care that ie your 700 euro phone was stolen, even if you still know its exact location in specific house. No AI is ever fixing that.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#277

Post by Symbiote »

maeln wrote: post #256
lqet wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you include metro stations in your study? The original quote only included train stations. The metro originally largely replaced a tram network, so the metro station density in Paris is higher than for other underground systems. I think it is very hard to find kebap shops in Paris that are not within 500 m of a metro station. This kind of dilutes the significance of your study, because I never really noticed…

I would second this. In Paris, but I find it to be true in most European city, the area surrounding train station is usually not very nice. It is usually surrounded by cheap hotel for 1-night traveler, overpriced fast food (hence the initial theory) and social housing / cheap building (a lot of people don't want to live next to a train station due to the nuisance, so poor people often get stuck there). On the other h…

You would need to further filter for the largest railway stations, perhaps by number of platforms ≥ 6 or 8, otherwise you will include many urban and suburban stations that serve essentially the same purpose as metro stations.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#279

Post by Symbiote »

lqet wrote: post #271
yard2010 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a dystopian phenomenon, I'm far from an expert but I guess it's a matter of city planning?

It's very hard to avoid this. It's mostly a combination of railway noise, throughput of a large number of people who are only travelling through, opportunities for pickpockets and beggars, and historically of soot and air pollution by steam engines, which makes these areas unattractive to live in. And it is not for lack of trying. City planners since at least the 1850ies have been trying to improve the areas surround…

It's also a very large building or roofed space, where it's more difficult than elsewhere to accuse homeless etc of loitering.

Re: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”

#280

Post by einpoklum »

jclulow wrote: post #262
skrebbel wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, but I always wonder how these money laundering kebab places work. We have some in my city too and they always leave me puzzled. If nobody eats there, how do they launder money? I'm probably daft/naieve but can't figure out the mechanics of money laundering when the business doesn't actually move any product.

The point is generally to recover cents on the dollar from money you can't otherwise use. Imagine you have a network of people moving illegal drugs. They collect money from their customers, and they need to pay it to you, the supplier. Arrange for them to eat a lot of food at your restaurant. Maybe they shout their friends. The money goes into the restaurant, and is mingled with other money. That money is used to pay…

Requiring your henchmen to eat a lot of Kebab all the time is not at all a scalable money laundering scheme. It's also self-defeating since they will become fat and sickly from too much Kebab :-(
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