581–590 of 652 posts
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Lacks autonomous armed drones swarming around the train, "disencouraging" anyone who doesn't belong there to stay off the tracks.
I'm fairly certain the FAA is the only things preventing their use. They're already being deployed in India: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/western-railways-to-use-surv...
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Lacks autonomous armed drones swarming around the train, "disencouraging" anyone who doesn't belong there to stay off the tracks.
Why do I feel like this would be the simplest solution to this problem, and in fact so simple it's likely to occur in the next few years... ...okay, reality check, even if the autopilots get good enough, it'll still be incredibly easy to whack a drone into the train's overhead wires if you have a big enough stick, and now they potentially have to fix the cable, or maybe a blown transformer. Right.
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>Before, if you broke into a container, you'd often find weird homogenous B2B stuff. Like a bunch of dog food. but presumably the volume of b2c stuff being shipped over rail hasn't changed? after all, the b2c stuff has to get to customers somehow. Maybe a random assortment makes it a more attractive target due to the skinner box effect (ie. lootboxes).
If you open up a container going to a Walmart warehouse, it might be filled with massive blocks of bulky items of dubious fence value and can be difficult to dig to anything good. Even if you get something "good", having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash. And it's probably in a massive box that isn't easy to move and isn't easy to determine the contents of compared to…
Why would that be hard? eBay, craigslist, Facebook groups, and other platforms exist which can be used to facilitate the quick and easy offloading of stolen goods.
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If you open up a container going to a Walmart warehouse, it might be filled with massive blocks of bulky items of dubious fence value and can be difficult to dig to anything good. Even if you get something "good", having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash. And it's probably in a massive box that isn't easy to move and isn't easy to determine the contents of compared to…
> having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash Why would that be hard? eBay, craigslist, Facebook groups, and other platforms exist which can be used to facilitate the quick and easy offloading of stolen goods.
And then if anyone is poking around at secondary markets, you have a massive number of item X showing up new-in-box grey market in a zip code where a bunch of that item was stolen.
Compare to having 20 random consumer items, all stolen from different end-recipients. It's hard for any authority to know these items were stolen. It's hard to establish you stole them or were knowingly receiving stolen property. Even if they surmise that they're probably stolen, as far as they know you could have committed petty theft several times at unknown places.
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Arresting dealers / busting drug rings is one of the few policing activities that directly leads to MORE crime. What happens when you bust a drug ring and arrest some big players? You immediately create a power vacuum, which leads to a turf war where other players (in the gang or between gangs) start jockeying for power, spreading their mayhem across the area. The only solution here is legalization, treatment, and ge…
Only if you keep the market alive. Arrest the dealers and administer the drug to addicts for free at clinics? I think that would be an interesting approach. I'm not a policy expert. I used to agree with you, but I think part of the issue is trivial access to drugs (see the tenderloin). It's harder for addicts to quit when it's very easy to get the drug (whether that's via dealers or legalization) and the city helps t…
I mean, it's a national crisis. It's easy to point the zits on my face but the problem is in what I eat.
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> having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash Why would that be hard? eBay, craigslist, Facebook groups, and other platforms exist which can be used to facilitate the quick and easy offloading of stolen goods.
Instead of some number of Amazon packages with unknown contents going missing, cops and the recipient immediately know that $8k of headphones were stolen. It's obviously over the threshold of grand theft. Etc. And then if anyone is poking around at secondary markets, you have a massive number of item X showing up new-in-box grey market in a zip code where a bunch of that item was stolen. Compare to having 20 random c…
OTOH, I think your argument assumes criminals are lacking creativity... and that the police care and/or have the resources to track $8K worth of headphones. If $8K of headphones are stolen, how many % of total headphones sold on eBay/CL/FB/etc. per month is that? Also, who says they have to offload all the headphones immediately? What's to prevent a "criminal network" or a single person from creating 20 different eBay accounts, each selling one pair - location: obviously not near where they were stolen from. Repeat process once per x months or just wait a few months until the heat is lower. Or perhaps pass the headphones on to a larger "criminal network" who can resell them all over the US. Also on eBay one could just say "shipping from northern California" when in fact they are located in Southern California - who will verify that? Also you could take a few pair to pawn shops... some might even take multiple pairs at once. Also someone could gift a bunch to friends/family. I'm sure there are tons of tricks criminals use to offload stolen goods.
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Why do I feel like this would be the simplest solution to this problem, and in fact so simple it's likely to occur in the next few years... ...okay, reality check, even if the autopilots get good enough, it'll still be incredibly easy to whack a drone into the train's overhead wires if you have a big enough stick, and now they potentially have to fix the cable, or maybe a blown transformer. Right.
How do you wack a flying drone? If it's in danger of hitting wires it can just fly higher? And how do you wield or even carry a 50m (150ft) or longer stick?. Do you mean shoot it down?
Now I actually think about it (thanks), what would a drone be doing? Yelling really loudly? Getting footage of people's faces?
It's probably only a matter of time until drones end up equipped with taser units :/ (I honestly don't want to be around when they can actually shoot things...), but besides that I now realize they wouldn't really present a legitimate threat (yet). They'd just be very oversized mosquitoes.
I'd completely forgotten this is America though, where people can and do shoot at stuff they don't like and/or is annoying. That would be significantly more effective than a giant baseball bat (which would definitely look hilarious but be a lot less precise).
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In no particular order: The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us. Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed. Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike. Atomization and alienation have taken root. The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and…
Most places are weak on crime. We have a judge in Minneapolis over the last week: 1. Some guy chased a woman in his car and she ran to a fire station. He crashed into the fire station and fought firefighters. Released 0 bail. 2. Violent criminal with a long past let out of jail to attend funeral and hasn’t returned. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have constant 0 bail for young carjackers who steal peoples ca…
Is the problem really that too few people are in prison?
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In no particular order: The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us. Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed. Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike. Atomization and alienation have taken root. The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and…
I think some of these things ring true but you missed a few obvious ones, most of this stuff has been going on in California which is being governed into oblivion by its leaders: - California is getting very soft on crime recently, people now realize they can rob and steal what they want and there are zero consequences for it, this has lead to almost a complete collapse of order in most major california cities(see ex…
California's incarceration rate is already double or triple that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe.
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Most places are weak on crime. We have a judge in Minneapolis over the last week: 1. Some guy chased a woman in his car and she ran to a fire station. He crashed into the fire station and fought firefighters. Released 0 bail. 2. Violent criminal with a long past let out of jail to attend funeral and hasn’t returned. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have constant 0 bail for young carjackers who steal peoples ca…
The US has a larger share of its population in prison than any other nation, about 6x higher than Canada, Japan and Western Europe. Is the problem really that too few people are in prison?