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So thieves broke into your storage unit again

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211–220 of 317 posts

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're going to sell your surfboard and buy new ski equipment every winter, and sell your skis and buy a new surfboard every summer? As well as the rest of your bulky seasonal gear? Sounds expensive.

Surfboards mounted on the wall are a common decoration, so there is off season storage. You can rent skis for a season for $400, I suspect most rental places are than $100/month. But skis especially can usually fit in the back of a closet or under a bed. Kayak? Get a season pass for the rental place.

I think you're ignoring the point that if you want high-quality gear, it's cheaper to buy it outright and store it off-season.

And the kinds of people who live in places where they don't have room to store a surfboard year-round, are the kinds of people who don't have a bunch of wall space for one either.

I think you might not be totally understanding the concept of small urban apartments. Putting skis in the closet or under the bed year-round doesn't work, because your closet and underneath the bed are already full. (And it's not just skis, obviously -- it's boots and poles and helmet and bulky jacket and snowpants and gloves and everything.)

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I canceled my insurance after going carless, I was told that there would be a lapse in my coverage causing my rates to increase. So naturally I asked why would I cover a car I no longer own. Apparently, there is a type of insurance that covers you as a driver of other cars. Of course there is. Going on 4.5 years now with no insurance payments. It's been glorious

If you do regularly drive other cars, it can make a lot of sense to make sure you have a liability policy that will cover an incident (vs assuming that the coverage on the vehicles is appropriate for you). Not sure why you'd be bothered/dismissive that you can access a sensible financial product.

It was less about me driving (I don't drive since going carless), but more about here's a way for us to keep you on a monthly payment for a service you no longer need to avoid "lapse in coverage". That's like telling someone they will have a lapse in their homeowner's coverage while they are renting.

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a periodic public service announcement that there is not, and never has been "a tragedy of the commons situation". Even the author of the concept, Garret Hardin, has acknowledged that he made mistakes in his understanding and research. Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the co…

Can you elaborate? My understanding is that overfishing and climate change are prime and valid examples of the tragedy of the commons. You seem to be claiming that the problem is with systems of management, but the entire point of the tragedy of the commons is that it happens when there isn't management. Which is abundantly the case at the global level of international waters and a shared atmosphere, because there is…

If you go and study the actual history of fishing territories, it invariably turns out that they all came/come with complex systems for managing yields. There wasn't ever "a big sea full of fish and anyone could just do whatever they want". For example, if you catch fish with impunity because there is nobody at sea to stop you, you still need to sell them which means interacting the people (in some way) close to where you caught them, and markets have traditionally been one of the points of control.

When so-called tragedies of the commons occur, it is invariably because someone has first attacked those systems of control to further their own ends. In the case of fishing, most traditional fishing communities and systems have objected to the arrival of industrial scale fishing, but they have been ignored and sidelined because of the interests of the owners of those new systems. So the problem is not that people/communities cannot manage resources held in common, it is that they cannot effectively resist power, wealth and greed if and when it arrives. But that very inability is also contingent on broader political and economic conditions, and is not inherent to the fact that the resources are held in common.

Climate change may well be the first true example of Hardin's original concept of "tragedy of the commons". It has a number of properties that traditional resource "extraction" behaviors do not share (including the invisibility of the problem until it is too late). But when people talk about "tragedy of the commons", they are typically referring to much smaller scale situations than the one(s) that have led us to where we are with climate change.

There's also a case to be made, given the remarkably early understanding of the consequences of fossil fuel utilization and the documented behavior of the companies involved, that climate change is precisely the type of failure I'm describing rather than the one Hardin did. We have systems of control for the things fossil fuel has negatively impacted, but people who became very, very, very, very rich from their use actively subverted and captured them for their own purposes.

I acknowledge that the shift is subtle: from the problem being "humans cannot manage resources held in common" to "human systems for managing resources held in common are frequently not robust enough to withstand selfishness and greed". Nevertheless, I think it is an important one.

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#214
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planet's air and international waters are truly public resources, at least currently. I'm not sure if I would call them a commons. Speaking of which, Elinor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons, outlines the conditions for the successful management of a commons. Notably neither private ownership nor governmental control is ideal, the best outcomes are by cooperative organizations where those with a direct stake i…

> I'm not sure if I would call them a commons. I don't understand why not. That's the literal definition of a commons in the political economy sense -- a public resource everyone can take from freely. (As opposed to a public resource that is managed via licenses, auctions, limits, etc.) On what basis would you not call them a commons, in political economy? The entire point of the "tragedy of the commons" is the trage…

> That's the literal definition of a commons in the political economy sense -- a public resource everyone can take from freely.

Part of Ostrom's point is that this sort of commons has rarely, if ever, existed. It's a misunderstanding that Hardin's work created or amplified. Resources held in common are in fact always managed and not "free for the taking".

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a periodic public service announcement that there is not, and never has been "a tragedy of the commons situation". Even the author of the concept, Garret Hardin, has acknowledged that he made mistakes in his understanding and research. Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the co…

> This matters because the "tragedy of the commons" concept has been used to suggest (successfully) that communities cannot manage commonly held resources, which is false. This is not my impression. I’ve always heard “tragedy of the commons” invoked precisely to advocate that commonly held resources must be regulated.

The concept of "toc" is used to claim that you must have regulation otherwise you get a tragedy. The historical reality is that we have almost always had regulation, and tragedies happen anyway because the regulatory process is not robust enough in the face of greed and selfishness.

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#216

My ex-wife demanded that we store some awful, terrible wicker furniture after a house move, so I put these cheap monstrosities into a $40/month storage unit in a semi-desolate area of town. The unit was broken into three or four times but the thieves didn't do me the favor of actually stealing anything. On the last break in I contemplated just leaving them a note with $20 inside pleading with them to just take the da…

Your post reminded me of Mark Twain’s very funny short story “The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm”:

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#217
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US already incarcerates vastly more people than most comparable nations because it has vastly more crime than comparable nations. you have to look at what happens to crime in the US over time, when you are more or less stringent about jailing criminals; predictably as you fill the jails, crime goes down, and when you empty them, crimes goes up. >It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to th…

we incarcerate at a higher rate per capita, not just in absolute numbers. based on your apparent view of things, that ought to result in less crime per capita, but it does not. > more or less stringent about jailing criminals is quite different than "fill the jails, empty the jails" Quite a bit of research on the effect of deterrence on crime seems to strongly suggest that it is the level of certainty of being caught…

Independent of any discussion on deterrence or incarceration's purpose, I think you misinterpret parent point as being about absolute numbers, but I read their point as per capita crime rates being higher, and thus per capita incarceration rates are as well being downstream of a population committing higher per capita offenses.

America has measurably larger underclass than, say, EU measurable in absolute and per capita terms across metrics like offense rates, incarcerations, income equality, education...

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

first result from google come for "effect of deterrence on property crime" https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/deterrence.pdf second result, summarizes and links to several review papers: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

Then I'm not sure what you mean by "deterrence". Both of the linked articles argue against increasing the severity of punishment, but they also say that the certainty of getting caught is a strong deterrent. This doesn't seem to be in conflict with what the GP said ("supporting laws and politicians that catch and punish criminals effectively"). It seems to me that many people have a problem with thieves not being pun…

Most of the people I have read or heard advocate for "more effective handling of crime" are much bigger on the severity of the sentence, though I don't deny that many will mention both. The "N strikes and you're out" angle, for example, is all about the severity of the sentence once you reach N.

New HN commenter "smeeger" whose subthread we are in seems close to favoring violence as punishment for relatively minor crimes, for example.

Still, yes, things that significantly increased the likelihood of being caught and punished do seem like a good idea, and do not require sentencing being changed.

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#219
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we incarcerate at a higher rate per capita, not just in absolute numbers. based on your apparent view of things, that ought to result in less crime per capita, but it does not. > more or less stringent about jailing criminals is quite different than "fill the jails, empty the jails" Quite a bit of research on the effect of deterrence on crime seems to strongly suggest that it is the level of certainty of being caught…

Independent of any discussion on deterrence or incarceration's purpose, I think you misinterpret parent point as being about absolute numbers, but I read their point as per capita crime rates being higher, and thus per capita incarceration rates are as well being downstream of a population committing higher per capita offenses. America has measurably larger underclass than, say, EU measurable in absolute and per capi…

If incarceration is always "downstream" of per-capita crime rates, then it presumably has little effect on the upstream causes of crime.

And yes, the US has a larger underclass than the EU, which just might have something to do with why we have more crime, no? And if so, increasing incarceration rates is not likely to help much, is it?

Re: So thieves broke into your storage unit again

#220

The key takeaway I think people are overlooking is that there’s a level of intelligence and persistence in thieves that make physical security an intractable problem with exponential cost scaling as you patch “holes.” So from a systems approach, the better solution likely is something like: Employ and provide safety for the people stealing from the units so they do not feel compelled to steal. Imagine if the money sp…

Physical security isn't an intractable problem, but effective security requires expensive expertise and maintenance. The cost of good security is why you keep your spare couch in a self storage center but your jewelry in a safe deposit box.

In theory, a well designed security system at a self storage center could be good enough to deter thieves relative to the value of what's stored there. In practice, the fact that owners pay for the security, insurance pays for break ins, and customers are supposed to evaluate the whole mess leads to a lot of naivete and show and not a lot of effective solutions. Show me a self storage place that guarantees you against the loss of your stuff and I'll show you a storage place with effective security. I'll also show you one that's more expensive that the competition and doesn't have much to show a consumer to justify the surcharge.

Looking at self storage places locally, they all seem to compete on price. When I eventually found one that seemed to be competing on security, it was 50% more expensive.

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