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Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

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Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#201

Post by ajhurliman »

consumer451 wrote: post #92
jeffbee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.

Violence for property crime is a bit 18th century, no? I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.

How would you handle it? Give them a stern talking-to?

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#202

Post by mschuster91 »

rdtsc wrote: post #11

> He called police, who got a search warrant Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance. I remember people saying "so what if you have tags, police won't do anything and you shouldn't be confronting thieves anyway". Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as a…

> Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device.

Because if people would rely on that then I'm pretty certain some would go and sue Apple if they fail to retrieve their property - e.g. because a thief noticed the "you're being tracked" notification on their iPhone or Android.

OTOH I'd really really REALLY love it if all the modern cordless power tools and their batteries would come with smart tags integrated that work with Apple's, Google's and Samsung's Find My networks.

And I'd love it if I could somehow tell my iPhone, my Android and my wife's Android which tags belong to the respective other... right now when we're travelling for longer than 2h, she gets notifications from my AirPods and keychain tracker, and I get a notification on each of my devices for her stuff. Makes the anti-stalker thing pretty useless if you routinely have to ignore it.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#203

Post by jonathankoren »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #181
jonathankoren wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure your anecdotal experience is true for you, but funding is not linked to clearance rates. Counter to copaganda, police are worse at solving cases compared to 30 years ago, even as crime rates have fallen dramatically and funding has increased. If you think preventing and solving crimes, then American police are objectively bad at their jobs. If you think of police as revenue generators, then they're good at i…

It’s sorta hard to trust that your data is unbiased fact when you use the term “copaganda.”

I mean, if you weren't smugly comfortable in your biases, you could always just do a search, say for "FBI crime rate by year", or "police clearance rates by year", or "police funding per year", but I guess not.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#204

Post by teitoklien »

consumer451 wrote: post #92
jeffbee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.

Violence for property crime is a bit 18th century, no? I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.

Crime should not be tolerated, criminals thrive on society’s indulgence in being ‘understanding’.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#205

Post by cynusx »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #185

I don't get it - how could you be this well organized about your criminal business and yet not have process to find and remove tags before leaving at your storage for all your other crimes. Sloppy.

Criminals don't tend to be the highest IQ segment of society

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#206

Post by consumer451 »

teitoklien wrote: post #204
consumer451 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence for property crime is a bit 18th century, no? I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.

Crime should not be tolerated, criminals thrive on society’s indulgence in being ‘understanding’.

Man, it sounds to me like a few users in this thread wouldn’t mind some good ole Sharia Law.

Can’t steal if you don’t have a hand!

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#207

Post by Tempest1981 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #107
hangonhn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My buddy got his bike stolen in Mountain View. Not only did the police find his bike they also arrested the thief. Another buddy was woken up one night by a drunken stranger pounding on his door. He called the MVPD and within 5 minutes 3 squad cars showed up. I used to live in Dallas. One night an entire floor of cars parked in my apartment garage was broken into. I called the police and reported it. Then I asked whe…

> Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating. Having Google headquartered there probably helped their finances.

Mountain View implemented a business tax of $150 per employee per year in 2020, bringing in $3.3 million per year from Google.

It's a struggle for cities to pass/raise business taxes... the businesses threaten to leave, and the cities back down.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#208

Post by saagarjha »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #173
cwmma wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand, the optimal amount of "loss" both internal and external, from Apple's perspective, is greater then zero. They know they could do straight forward things to reduce it, like put everything in the back room so you have to ask for it, or hire security guards to physically prevent theft. But they decided that would be worse for business to prevent all theft then to simply have a few people steal stuff.…

That's the relative optimal loss given the alternatives presented. The absolute optimum is zero. >It being easy for people to grab thousands of dollars worth of stuff and run out of the store is a choice they made intentionally. Risking rape or death when I leave my house is a choice I make intentionally. That doesn't mean that murder is optimal or should be tolerated. There are straight forward ways crime could be r…

The optimum is never zero. Not because we like murder and rape as a society, but because we don't know how to make it zero and broad attempts to bring it closer to zero significantly limit our freedoms and worsen our society. Of course it sounds horrible if you're the victim of a rape (and I guess it would be terrible as a murder victim if you weren't, well, dead) that we accept a baseline level of crime as optimal but the fact is that the best way to get rid of rape is to prevent people from having sex. This is an extremely unpopular proposition and it is actually unlikely to be effective anyways, because wanting to have sex is far more desirable than wanting to rape people, and making crimes illegal doesn't actually prevent them from happening.

There are a number of less extreme suggestions that you actually probably hold (more policing, stronger sentencing, etc.) that people actually do support and are not obviously dead in the water but they have the same tradeoffs on a smaller scale. Do we accept, as a society, less crime that also makes it more likely that you will be mistakenly identified as a criminal? Should we funnel more money towards crime prevention instead of, say, healthcare? Going "we cannot tolerate any crime" sounds great but the optimal amount of crime will always be nonzero.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#209

Post by saagarjha »

scrollop wrote: post #194
chongli wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on … As well they should. The last thing Apple wants is some parent tracking down their kid’s stolen bicycle using an AirTag and wind up getting killed by the thief. They want people using these things the way my dad uses them: to find his car keys (or whatever else he might lose)!

Which is perhaps why they have the anti stalking sound.

This is of course to prevent stalking.

Re: Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

#210

Post by saagarjha »

ajhurliman wrote: post #201
consumer451 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence for property crime is a bit 18th century, no? I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.

How would you handle it? Give them a stern talking-to?

The comment you replied to provides an alternative.
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