Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
Simlar (sad) story in Spain, very recent. Airtags and Find My are known by police by now. When my friends bag was stolen, he located it on the police station via Find My. It was located in a residential multi-story house nearby, which was known by the police. The place is known to house several members of organized petty crime. Police told him they cannot do anything as they can't enter the house without a warrant and won't get one just based on his testimony.
Yeah, or the police in my state capital, who, when I got confirmation that my stolen phone was being sold on eBay, by a seller who lived near me, whose eBay profile contained nearly 100 phones, and 50-60 laptops, all 'without chargers/accessories", some "activation locked", etc., as well as the strong implication of theft on eBay (I was actually contacted by someone who'd bought my phone from him, and when he discovered it was locked, with my info on the screen, contacted the seller who initially refused a return/refund on it, until the buyer said "So you know, if you don't, the phone is actually telling me who the real owner was, and how to contact them, and I can send them and/or the police your info..."), the police said:
Police: "Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Me: "Isn't selling known stolen property a crime in itself?"
This is why I never understand the expansion of surveillance tech and how people believe it will make us safer. So many people have these types of stories and how does expanded surveillance solve those problems? The police already know a crime has been committed, who did it, where they are, and we need more surveillance?!
I would agree with that, but then you have the situation of "how?" - I volunteered for an organization that had a large part of their funds embezzled by the Treasurer. When they were arrested and charged with theft, the prosecutor came to an association meeting and asked what our thoughts were. The person had sufficient income that they could reasonably pay back the money in a (relatively) quick time frame, and the prosecutor noted that "in these types of cases, often the victim has to choose between retribution/punishment, and recompense" - not that we were choosing his punishment, but he was asking our input.
As in - he could afford to pay if his job was kept, etc. But charge him with the felony, he would likely lose that job and the ability to repay anything in any meaningful manner.
Then you have the State of Florida, who charges you $75/day if you are in jail at all, regardless of the outcome of your case, charges being dropped or dismissed. You could be arrested for a BS traffic stop on Friday, the prosecutor drops it on Monday morning, three days incarceration. Or a not guilty finding. Doesn't matter.
And then, failure to pay this is a Class B Felony.
You could let the victims decide, or make it (depending on the type of crime) that they first pay off the debt and then go to prison (perhaps with reduced sentence) or the other way around.
I think you're oversimplifying. Those are hard questions to answer and have the impacts extend beyond the victim and perpetrator. There are social costs to each of those decisions. Part of the legal system is to ensure there is that balance. That is the social contract. Determining if this is done effectively (or even at all) is a different question, but one that can only be answered through answering a million smaller questions like this one.
Of course it’s difficult. But simply not holding them responsible at all for the costs they incur on society, and not making police and judges at least partially responsible for actually solving cases or ensuring recidivism is reduced is also not an option.
Do you read Chinese, Hindi, and Vietnamese to read about thefts in those countries?
Latin-based-language countries also have more relations to the english world (mostly through Britain historically conquering most of them), and so as an English speaker you're more likely to see news about those countries.
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply something else, but if you are, please don't. The relationships between languages, what countries are reported in the western news, what countries americans (i.e. the HN audience visit), and so on is complicated, multi-faceted, and cannot be easily boiled down to language as a root cause of anything.
Because they happen to be at the mediteranian cost (for reasons related to how the roman empire conquered and reigned) and are popular tourist destinations today.
I don't think you'd find any link between countries with latin based languages and theft. Differences in crime rates are going to be much more likely to be based on economic inequality, social policy, enforcement, and how crime is reported
The connection to the language spoken in the countries that you are making is completely spurious. The real reason is the the current elected politicians have a great deal of tolerance for the African thieving and fencing gangs, and exert their influence so that the gangs enjoy protection from the consequences of the justice system over the native population. A reduction in crime could happen from one day to the next if the people are willing to abolish the two-tier system, reintroduce a measurement of accountability and enforce the law.
I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
In certain places in America. My county sheriff's office would be more than happy to have something to do that isn't picking up somebody's stray dog. I'm sure this is true for the UK and Canada too.
I called the non-emergency line for the local police department when someone went home with my wallet after I left it on a plane, tracked with an AirTag. 2 hours later an officer said they didn't have probable cause but could knock on the door and ask anyway. I think he basically offered for there to be no trouble if they gave it back, thief claimed they were "going to return it to lost and found", and sure enough I was able to go show my passport at the station and collect it the next day.
There's a recent video of a woman getting arrested, not for the first time, for admitting that she might be praying to herself inside her head, silently.
Because there is a law against people impeding or trying to influence people within 150 meters of an abortion clinic. Her admitted goal was trying to influence people entering. Will her defense be that she does not believe prayer has an influence on the world?
Most would agree that 150 people standing in front of the abortion clinic would obviously an attempt to impede or influence people. What if someone stands there "praying" but really noting faces and license plates for future harassment? Where does the law draw that line?
The ADF is a discriminatory, corrosive organization that has done real harm to millions by rolling back civil rights in the US, and now they have taken their agenda internationally.
The hypocrisy of calling this a "thought crime" is stunning. ADF is the same organization that brought a case against a Colorado law that banned discrimination against LGBTQ businesses, because a baker was worried she may have to bake a cake for a gay wedding - which she was never asked to do. So some thoughts are legally protected (prayer) while others (concern) are justifications to roll back civil rights. But the thoughts of others (terror and shame while entering an abortion clinic, feelings when discriminated against, love for a same sex partner) are irrelevant and not worthy of protection.
Their stated purpose is "advancing every person’s God-given right to live and speak the truth" - but only "live" and speak the "truth" that they deem to be correct, based on their evangelical and politically-charged interpretation of Christianity. And they want that legislated.
I believe in free access. I also believe those going to get an abortion shouldn’t be impeded by protesters in the immediate vicinity when getting their healthcare.
She was standing alone, across the street, on the curb/grass next to the sidewalk, kind of doing a homer simpson into the bushes.
There were no other people visible, she made no noise.
She didn't impede anyone, and it would have been very difficult to tell she was protesting, if that's in fact what she was doing (I'm not her, so I don't know).
I don't believe in God, so those particulars (or that it was an abortion clinic) aren't important to me. She was arrested for thinking silently to herself.
Do you believe God was listening to the prayers and influencing the people at the abortion clinic? From what I read the lady was standing there and not blocking free access. The law says you may not influence.
Tbf, it's not the case that they are more worried about wrongthink because they're just not worried at all by petty theft - or almost any other instance of micro-criminality.
Would you believe me if I said the police aren't worried about it because even if they put in the effort and catch thieves, they won't be prosecuted very hard. Since 2014, "low-value shoplifting" (under £200) in England and Wales can only be tried in the Magistrate's court and have a maximum sentence of 6 months (now ~1 year since 2024), no matter how many summary offenses you're convicted of. So if you steal under £200 of stuff, hundreds of times over, it's the same outcome. You'll be back on the street very soon.
The government is currently seeking to amend that:
> The bill will remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less, by repealing Section 22A of the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 and the legislation that inserted it (section 176 of Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014).
> This will ensure that all offences are tried as ‘general theft’ (an either way offence with a maximum custodial sentence of seven years), instead of summarily in the magistrates’ court, unless the defendant elects for jury trial
"Either-way" here means that the offence can be tried either as a summary or indictable offence; an indictable offence can carry much more serious penalties.
I don't disagree, and I would add that the court system is so clogged up that one might not even end up behind bars at all - because by the time the hearing is finally scheduled, the perp might well be on another continent.
Still, the public would appreciate some effort - if anything to actually get some of their stuff back, if not to inconvenience thieves.
It is the case in reality. We are talking about an objectively measurable outcome, and delusional thinking from the propaganda victims does not change it.
Oh for gods sake, can we stop this nonsense mad twitter trope spreading through HN. Having been a cop in the UK, we will happily got nick a robber if they're on the move and tell us where they are, and we don't arrest people for "wrong thought" on twitter unless that happens to be repeatedly messaging your ex and telling her about how you're going to do murder them.
yes, some of my stupid colleagues will once in a blue moon arrest people for twitter nonsense, but that barely ever happens which is why it makes the news and they pretty much never get convicted.
In Canada the police are pretty lazy and it's mostly due to who they hire, and also a LOT of political garbage as it's a federal police force throughout the country in most cases -- run from Ottawa.
Not much real police work happening any more unless you criticize the government or do something they can use as a reason to grow their budgets or otherwise further political agendas.
If there is a video of a crime they do like that...easy! Also they can show it to media for props.
Lazy cops just love centralized 'social' media and the fools who post their lives on it for them to snoop through.
Last year here in Chicago my wife's bike was stolen overnight. It has an airtag hidden in a bell on the handlebars. When we woke up and noticed it was missing, we traced it to a park not too far away. We ran over there and called the Chicago PD who showed up in <10min. We told them a description of the bike and showed where FindMy said it was. They went and retrieved it. Surprisingly happy ending & I was impressed the Chicago PD were so helpful!
That's not a common occurrence, police in Switzerland is highly passive, and the judiciary system is highly complicit with criminals (drug dealers,thieves, white collar crimes etc), and against women (rape victims can be told to close their legs better by judges).
Care to back up your outlandish claims? I live here for 15 years and all you write is completely untrue for everything I ever experienced, saw, heard or read. Or you mean some case from early 70s?
Saying "i am getting my gun and going to retrieve my stuff" guarantees that 6-8 police cars will converge on the location within minutes. Once there, they will apprehend the thief since they are there already.
What? As someone who has worked in emergency services, with a brother-in-law who was a 911 dispatcher in a capital city for 10 years, what dispatching prioritization system puts "violence in progress" lower than "threat of violence", unless the cops are bored and just want to roll their SWAT team at the slightest provocation?
Then you’re fucking comically unlucky, there’s a shooting and some old enemy offs someone at the same address and flee, minutes before the police gets there.
Some pissed off riff-raff family member decides that you look like the killer.
You’d better have a top notch lawyer in your family or prepare to spend lots of money hiring one.
I think the idea isn't to really bring a firearm into the situation, it is just to tell the cops that you are considering doing so.
Which, in your hypothetical "you might get extremely unlucky" scenario, should give you no problem, since you never had a firearm on you in the first place.
If you're really concerned about that you could go to a local bar and call from there. Make sure you have the attention of the bartender while making the call. Easy alibi, the bartender won't forget something like that
I don't think this is true. It's probably true that there's a pervasive belief that a hungry person probably shouldn't be punished for stealing food.
Other kinds of property crime? The costs of enforcement are high compared to the losses caused by individual cases, prioritization is understandably a difficult problem to solve.
It goes far beyond hungry people stealing bread. Look at one of those academic fraud discussions had here on HN over the past week and you'll find people saying that using AI to hallucinate an academic paper isn't a good thing but instead of judging the people who do this we should blame society itself while being understanding of the frauds. The mentality spoken above is pervasive and insidious.
I think those commenters were just on cruise control, applying a pattern of thought with which they are well accustomed, to a scenario which is even more clear cut than usual crime. If it were instead teenagers stealing cars to joyride, we'd get the same cohort pleading for leniency because it was social circumstance that made them do it. It's not just hungry people stealing bread, there's an automatic reflex to defend any criminal as being a victim of society and this only becomes as bizarre as you experienced when the criminals involved are in particularly privileged and trusted positions.
It's not a hard problem to solve, you scale the punishment for the cases you prosecute so high that it makes the expected value of stealing a suitcase negative
My experience with small police departments in the US is that they either don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with small property claims. If you’re a business they’ll be there in 10 minutes, but individuals aren’t afforded the same courtesy. Eventually, citizens realize it’s just not worth the cost or the hassle to report a crime unless it helps with an insurance claim.
My experience with large police departments in the US is that they either don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with small property claims. Some people tried to steal cars (including mine) in my neighborhood in Chicago, we had them on video and they were still in the area and the police didn't do anything. Large police departments also generally won't really do much. Though my friend in Houston did have the police investigate car break ins at his apartment complex but that might be because multiple guns were stolen from cars (so at least there are certain things that will get their attention).
My one and only experience of dealing with the police in the US was when I was visiting NYC. A tourist was being attacked on the subway because he was taking pictures and since we were still at the platform I jumped out and told 2 officers further down the platform what was going on. I expected them to sprint into action, but they could not have cared less and casually strolled along towards the carriage!
In a similar vain I was the first on the scene of a car crash in the UK, where the driver had exited the vehicle through the window (no seat belt) and was bleeding in the road. When the police turned up they casually and slowly walked up the road towards the scene.
It made me wonder if there was a good reason for this, like to control adrenaline, make better decisions, have time to assess the situation. Or if they were just jaded from seeing it a lot.
When working for LUL (London Underground limited) I was told to never run towards an emergency because you risk tripping and falling and then you’re another person that needs help instead of being able to provide the help. So maybe that’s why? I’d walk with urgency though, not casually stroll.
I believe there to be some merit to the notion that it is better for society if many of the generational cycles which lead to crime are broken. Sometimes that involves off-ramps from the road to incarceration.
That said, the policy can be, and certainly is, applied in imbalanced ways when justice is pursued over pragmatism.
I'm sure at some point it's cheaper to pay people to do nothing and have laws enforced, rather than indirectly paying people to do crime by letting stuff get stolen without consequences. Politically it sounds insane, but it would make for a more trusting society.
My friend/colleague had her phone stolen while she was napping in the hospital room of her terminally ill husband. Fortunately it had MDM. Called Palo Alto PD, I sat with them and tracked it from the hotel and it was already in San Jose. They worked with SJPD live and walked them into the guy who happened to be in a parking garage peering into cars. Caught him with a backpack full of stolen phones.
The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.
Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.
Oh yeah, justice in the free and best country in the world. Prisons are hell on earth, so after his release, he will murder first person on sight and he will be back in no time.
Switzerland is the Singapore of Europe (I mean this in a good way!) - the state just functions in a way that other European countries can only dream of
I grew up in the US, live in Italy now, and just spent a few weeks in Switzerland. It felt constricting. I missed a bit of the chaos - particularly while driving.
And morality and their conscientiousness (what a word).
If you look at the map of Europe, lay it over with that fiscal discipline and above, there is no mystery how things like income are spread out across the map, it all makes sense. Also a good confirmation that well regulated but proper capitalism is the easiest path for any country to long term prosperity.
My car got broken into in Oakland, California. Multiple pieces of luggage stolen (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place). Luckily I had an AirTag that showed the exact location of the stolen items. I called the police but they said they couldn't do anything. Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in. Regardless, I was put on a waiting list, they finally called me back 3 days later. I promptly left the state a few months later.
Ahem. There are neighborhoods in the US where you leave nothing in your car because otherwise your car will become a target. It's often "the rule" in these places that you also leave the doors unlocked because that way "they" won't break your window trying to get in. They open the door, see there's nothing of value to steal and move on. In other places in the US it's (still but fading) normal to leave your car doors unlocked because "everybody knows everybody and no one would steal from each other." Code switching is knowing which of the neighborhoods you are in and how to adapt.
I totally get and respect the perspective of the parent poster, I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society. If it were, we wouldn't have disclosures and disclaimers and limits of liability for everything we do all day long.
>I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society.
Completely false, you mean Urban areas are not high trust.
I live in a place (In the US) where kids walk to school, don't lock bikes and our downtown has free umbrellas to take and give back whenever there is rain.
You can also do that in high-functioning societies. In Japan people leave their purses, phones, etc to hold their seat before ordering in a café, going to the bathroom, etc.
In Japan, there's so little crime that they make an effort to crack down on things like creepshots. The desire to tackle stuff like that is more than most countries do, where it's swept under the rug and ignored.
In America, you can proudly say you grope and molest women and it's considered presidential behavior.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The subways during rush hour are packed liked sardines - nothing like the US. Groping or not, women do not want to necessarily be squished from all sides by men.
For what it's worth, everything was in a locked truck with no visible way of seeing any items.
From what I heard from others, apparently the thieves have a device that allows them to detect electronics (I had two laptops, cellphone, and a few other devices). I'm not sure how accurate this is, but i'm not sure why my car was the only one on the street that was targeted as there were no visible signs of valuables in the car (nothing visible from windows etc.) Funny part is a few weeks later nothing was found except for my Kindle which a kind citizen found and returned to me. Apparently thieves don't like to read?
Fault doesn’t necessarily imply guilty.
People need to understand that.
“I should have known better” means while I am not guilty of what happened to me, I could have avoided it by not doing X. So, the real world is messy, and next time I will ac accordingly for my own good.
It is not smart to die or have your things subtracted just because you want to make a point of how things should be, a point that nobody will care about.
I grew up in a small city in the US and was taught early on to never leave any property in view in your car. The US also has a worse issue than other parts of the world because people often leaves guns in their cars.
Not made up at all. In large parts of the US people leave guns in their cars all the time. It ends becoming one of if not the largest source of stolen guns.
> did you feel really smart putting that totally made up "because people often leaves guns in their cars" in there?
I can’t tell if you think people obviously do leave guns in their car, and GP should know better than add the phrase in, or, that nobody does, and GP should know better.
I can tell you have seen people do both in different parts of the country.
You obviously didn't Google this, since there are states in America where the people are PROUD to show off the guns and gun racks in their trucks. Yes, they proudly display these guns. (Texas, looking at you)
Sure but in a less broken society thieves would be apprehended and theft risk would be low. Instead the police do nothing and honest people live like a school of fish trying not to stick out for fear of the nearly-authorized property theft rampant in SF.
In many parts of the world, including major cities, it would be okay to leave your belongings in a locked car.
I regularly leave my backpack with my laptops in it in the front seat of my car in the south US and nothing has ever happened in ten years of doing this.
It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.
Shared this in another comment, but my luggage was in a locked truck, nothing visible from the back windows. They broke in by smashing the windows, unlocking the door and using the latch to fold the back seats down to expose the trunk.
I imagine they see it the way I do: the SF Bay Area has thieves like this because it's part of local native culture. You get the good with the bad. Sort of like going to the elephant graveyard and being eaten by hyena pack. Sure, it's not your fault for walking around graveyard and getting eaten by hyena. But this is where hyena is. I have lost (and sometimes recovered) many items to these hyena. Ultimately, they are not people or anything. They're like hyena. You don't say it is fault of hyena. It is animal and local culture is animal lover. Why stress about it? Like many, GP decided that he leave hyena here and go elsewhere where it is people and not animal.
But the thieves actually are people, not "wildlife". And there is no reason to tolerate this kind of quality-of-life crime. Nobody is better off for it.
One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
It’s a coastal elite view.
As for whether they’re people and not wildlife as you put it, I suspect I’m more right than you are. Some of them have almost been acquitted because after killing people while robbing them it was offered as an explanation that they are too stupid to know that killing was bad.
> Decuir and Mims were convicted last year of armed robbery, but a jury deadlocked on the first-degree murder charge, leading to this second trial… Attorneys also argued that she had a low IQ…
> One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.
In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
> How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
Theft is considered acceptable in coastal elite culture so long as it is from a multi-store chain. I haven't yet figured out how many stores transforms a chain from independent (theft-unacceptable) to corporate (theft-permitted, perhaps even encouraged). It is somewhat underspecified but at a sufficiently franchised operation, it is considered moral to steal.
> The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
In this case, the person most affected did not make a statement as to his intended outcome. This is probably because he was killed in the commission of his crime, but we have no peer-reviewed studies that have proven that so we must consider it speculation.
I generally believe it is not a crime victim's fault for being a victim of a crime, and the police services need to stop saying things that perpetrate this mindset.
Victim meets with police, signs affidavit, prosecutor goes to judge with affidavit, warrant written specifically for those items only. Should be simple and even digital if we wanted it to be.
An airtag alone will never be enough for a search warrant. They are not accurate enough and don't prove any actual crime was committed (maybe someone found your looted backpack in the trash). If there was security camera footage of the theft or you knew the thief and the cops could verify where they lived, that could likely be enough.
I guess the question would be how easy it is to fake this evidence. I don't know this tech. Could I throw my airtags in someone's bag and just take that to the police station and say look here on my phone, that's where my bags are, and then it's a he said/she said? Then the airtags aren't really adding anything to just your word "they took my bag".
Local police are never supposed to deal with immigration issues anyways, it isn't in their jurisdiction and they would have to call feds in to deal with anything related to it.
Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.
Right. Plus local police don't have jurisdiction over immigration issues. My comment was more a reflection on how the gov generally is, sadly (and horrifically in Minneapolis etc), much more responsive to undocumented cases than actual crimes.
One time I was driving down a twoo-lane road with a police car a few hundred feet behind me. An oncoming pickup truck veered several feet over the center line and almost hit me. I flagged the police down to tell them and they were nonplussed even though they literally saw it happen. Drunk driving, a greater threat than property theft, was of little consequence to them.
On the other side of the country my motorcycle got stolen and the police found it the next day. I picked it up from the tow yard shortly thereafter.
Unrelated to airtags but last year a couple wheels were stolen off my brand new car. My city in California falls under county sheriff jurisdiction and they actually assigned a detective to the case.
Sadly even once he got the subpoena and other paperwork to track down the criminals through Facebook (they had listed my wheels two weeks later on Marketplace) he couldn't find them since they were using VPNs.
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
> I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was. Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
When I lived in London, I once came across a criminal operation that was producing fake documents, in what looked like substantial quantities. British & foreign driving licences, National Insurance cards, passports, ID cards etc. Not especially high-quality, but still.
Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)
In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)
I had a camera stolen on a Zürich streetcar and when I reported it to the police they acted like it was the first crime that had ever been reported in the canton, a very serious matter indeed.
yeah this should be the standard, same here in Australia unfortunately the police will just pretend to care by taking more information and then does nothing.
> most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports
Its sort of a combination of two reasons.
First in many cities, police departments are underfunded. And so running around looking for your stolen phone or whatever minor item is low on their to-do list compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.
Second, for minor thefts most insurance companies just need a quick box-tick "police crime report number" before paying out. So if the police know they can get you off their backs just by quickly giving you a report number, well....
> compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shoting their brains out
I'm guessing people have that impression from TV, but it doesn't seem to match reality.
> the data suggests that officers spend relatively little time responding to major violent crimes: 4%, 3.7% and 4.1% in the three locations, respectively.
Just like that excellent Yes Minister episode about hospitals - I imagine they have more then enough internal busywork so they have no time for their customers. Which the older am I the more this seems true.
Anecdotal evidence but they spend a significant amount of time at the burger joint next to my place, while blocking the bicycle lane instead of parking legally.
If they're not responding to either violent crimes or nonviolent crimes, what are they doing all day?
According to a police administrator I once knew, filling out all the endless paperwork that makes the studies possible so people can complain about what little time cops spend fighting crime.
And it's probably under your deductible anyway. And replacing various cards is your deal with your credit card etc. companies. Relatively few of us carry around a lot of cash.
I had a backpack stolen from me at Zurich HB. The police sent a car out on the freeway to chase the train the thieves were on, and nabbed them at the next station. The thieves tossed the clothes I had in the bag, but I got my laptop back
That's awesome. I'm glad that trackers have reached a price point, reliability and form factors that I can easily put one in everything I care about. I even have card ones in my wallet, my steam deck / e-reader case, etc.
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
Given that the battery in my Airtag lasts about a year, I'd rather have to exchange a CR2032 once per year than to buy a new tracker whenever the built-in rechargeable battery inevitably dies. (I think there are actually rechargeable CR2032s too – best of both worlds?)
There are, and I got cursed with a BMW that uses one of them. Eventually after 10+ years it finally dies, and it's basically impossible to replace and actually make it work again, so I just have to replace the 2032 in it every few months.
FWIW, there's https://a.co/d/gOk1RkB which takes an airtag and AA batteries, and should need replacement in 10 years. Unless they make BMWs a lot smaller where you are, you can fit it somewhere. Now I just need a retailer that sells speakerless airtags.
Funny story: I actually forgot my backpack in the train at Zurich HB and it went to Basel and back again to Zurich HB, where I was able to get from the train.
All the while I was nervously looking at Find My, seeing it travel and just hoping it wouldn’t be stolen.
Reminds me of a Big Lebowski scene. That is surprising because it is an easy win for them. They would be all after it.
I have recollection of french police using civilian appearance to collect a bike thief in a meetup between him and the bike's original owner presenting himself as a buyer.
Same story in Bulgaria. A backpack with an iPhone and an iPad was stolen from a car. Had to go to the police department to file a written complaint. Weeks after that the devices were still visible in FindMy but police could not identify and catch the thieves.
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
I wish I had this in the early 2000s. The theft of my carry-on bags flying with Alitalia turned out to be an organized crime ring of flight attendants and ground crew. They didn’t get caught until 2013, the whole rotten lot. Never flown with Alitalia since then.
Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I lost my flight as a result.
I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
Chat offers a far better experience than using Google—no more searching through spam-filled results, clicking between sponsored links, accepting endless cookie banners, and trying to read a tiny bit of useful content buried among ads and clutter.
It has the potential to bridge the gap between pure conversation and the functionality of a full website.
I agree. But Google has gone in that direction long ago: ads are now harder to distinguish from genuine search results. In many cases, the organic results are buried so deep that they don’t even appear in the first visible section of the page anymore.
Google could also have allowed invisible pay-for-placement without marking it as an ad. Presumably they didn't do that because undermining the perceived trustworthiness of their search results would have been a net loss. I wonder if chat will go in that same direction or not.
Pretty sure it's illegal to present advertisement and not label it as such in some form.
But as with everything, as new technologies emerge, you can devise legal loopholes that don't totally apply to you and probably need regulation before it's decided that "yeah, actually, that does apply to me".
Why does it not make sense? If I was involved in a robbery at age 18, as a dumb kid, should I still be called "robber xyz" for the rest of my life? Especially if I turned my life around?
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:
> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/
> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
Truth (in English law) is merely a defence to an accusation of libel or slander, and it is not an absolute defence. If you say or print true things about a person, that lowers their reputation in the eyes of an ordinary person, and you are motivated by malice, then you have still committed the crime of defamation.
English libel law is an evolution of the former English law known as scandalum magnatum -- "scandalizing the mighty". Basically, if you say bad things about powerful people, those powerful people will crush you with the law.
As an example, Robert Maxwell embezzled millions from his company's pension fund, and also used that money to sue anyone who slighted him - including anyone who said he was embezzling from his company's pension fund. He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.
Calling someone a robber means they are currently a robber. It can be inaccurate and untrue in the same way that calling someone a bartender would be inaccurate and untrue if they are a lawyer who hasn't tended a bar in 20 years.
I don't like the idea of prosecuting people for this, but I don't think it's illogical.
Honestly I don't know, I think it would depend on how long ago the crime was and if there's a credible reason to believe they won't do it again. I do think there's a meaningful difference between "they murdered someone" and "they're a murderer", and in general I do prefer to describe people's actions as opposed to using "they're a ___" labels.
The problem is that getting those things right is 4x more difficult in a SPA app than a legacy, server rendered, app.
- No native back and forward button implementation. Now you must listen to an API and emulate the legacy behaviour.
- The concept of links, its also emulated via onClick events. This means that anything can be a link, so in many cases rows become links and their content is not really selectable as text. Legacy HTML has clear limitations for this not to happen.
- Same with buttons. There are no native buttons anymore. Anything can be a button, including any DIV with an event listener. Good luck tabbing through every DIV to get you to a button, that's also another difficult implementation.
Again, none of this is down to SPA frameworks (other than back/forward history APIs, lot of people break this unfortunately, though I've never understood how they manage to as I've never had this problem on projects I worked on). What often happens also is that people embed a bunch of iframes, and history within iframes can act very weirdly.
Links in Vue Router at least are just regular <a> tags. Yes the framework handles navigation when clicking these, but nothing prevents anyone from wrapping anything they want in an <a> tag even with no JS. You could make an entire table be clickable as a link if you wanted to, framework or not. "Legacy" HTML will render these just fine and browsers will make it a regular link, even though HTML validators will fail it.
Literally the first element anyone makes in frameworks will be a generic Button element that is simply a <button> with some styling. People abuse divs as buttons with or without frameworks because again, nothing prevents you from making any arbitrary element in your DOM have an onclick handler and act as a button. Tabbing through can even work with the correct ARIA attributes, and can even be broken on regular plain <button>s if abused hard enough.
I would seriously suggest people try out Vue or especially Svelte, they're about as simple as you can possibly get (especially Svelte 4) while giving you a lot of power and flexibility. I've worked with plenty of server-rendered apps in the past, and trust me, people would butcher things just as badly and easily there.
I wholehartly disagree - all of the mentioned problems are problems created by the developer. All these things work with the common SPA frameworks - developer just tend to forget what an anchor or a button is and use a span or div for it.
Having the proper tool and using the tool properly are two different things - and the web is a place where people forgot to do things the proper way.
I love Rails, its been my to-go framework for reference. But I could never get as confortable with Ruby as writing JS or PHP. I do not know the reason.
If debugging is hard to you in Ruby because of monkey patching, it's an issue of not knowing the debugging tools. Attach pry or Ruby debug, and show the source location of a method, or log them. This isn't surprising - debugging Ruby is different to debugging most static languages, and more tutorials on how to do this well would be nice...
Also the use of monkey patching in Ruby peaked something like a decade and half ago. Outside of Rails, it's generally frowned on and introducing new methods is usually addressed by opting in by including modules these days.
Can you give an example of where monkey patching made debugging hard? I have a decade of Ruby experience and can't think of a single time it was an issue
This is one of those things that sounds like it'd be a problem but it really isn't
One of the many reasons of why frameworks like React are used so extensively is because they provide a bridge for the lack of modern HTML implementation of basic control elements, like multi-selectors, search selectors, calendar pickers, and autofill inputs.
Now what we see around the web as "controls" are just a group of <div>s with hidden JS behaviour, lacking both accessibility and deeper integration. With hundreds, if not thousands, of implementations for things like calendar pickers, search selectors, etc.
> lack of modern HTML implementation of basic control elements, like multi-selectors, search selectors, calendar pickers, and autofill inputs
It was about the spot where CSS popped up then everyone decided native controls was not useful. Every framework since then has basically reinvented them. They had to as the browsers and standards didnt help. Plus the fact that for awhile the junk would just not render correctly at all or weird between the different browsers.
> We need better native controls for the web.
The reality is people want all of these controls with a nice simple way to skin them. But the browsers made it very 'interesting' to do. There is no real reason at this point other than 'i just want to' for these controls being recreated yet again (and they will be with the next framework).
Totally. It is like the browser venders just kinda stopped iterating on them. When the reality is people just want the controls and the ability to skin them. Also with all of the events that all of the newer controls have.
Actually, compare everything they have to native elements. If the project can afford it (in terms of bundle size, etc — it's fine for intranet), I don't even bother with native controls anymore.
I'm on a sub-optimal connection, so the Ant Design one took me about a minute to be responsive, while the native one worked in seconds.
I also am confused by this Ant demo page. Is every single date item supposed to be selected in a different element?
In this comparison, I vastly preferred the native date picker over the Ant ones. But I am probably misunderstanding the demo page. Or maybe it's just giving you "too many" options? I just need to pick a date and this seems like overkill, at best.
I really like my native pickers and UI compared to those examples. I can start with the fact that those are not usable on iOS 18, and they took almost a minute to load.
This goes back to the jQuery and MooTools days, back when Microsoft was holding back web standards. Then when the web started pushing forwards again, some developers didn't want to learn new things and went out of their way to teach new developers not to learn the standards.
That's how we ended up with developers who reach for frameworks instead of just using a simple html element or attribute.
Now we have an entire industry of bootstapping con-artists who are just teaching people to just search for a react thing that does what you want and if that doesn't work use an LLM
They're not actually being taught how to program.
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Now it's true that some commonly requested features (e.g. date pickers) don't have what everyone needs. But most people also don't realise that a date picker is one of those few specific features where everyone wants it to do things differently. Even when you think you want what everyone else wants, you'll eventually hit a corner case where you realise you need one extra thing changed. There's no way to get everything right in a standard so you'll need to create your own or reach for a 3rd-party implementation.
But just because you may want to use non-standard code for a date picker, doesn't mean you shouldn't learn about (and use) things like <dialog>, <details>, <hgroup>, <menu>, <slot>, etc...
What we'll probably end up with in a few years is the generic standard datepicker, but it'll become extensible, so you can add/remove alter that one extra thing you need. (kind of like <select>'s new ::picker psuedoelement)
I just rebuilt a custom Select/Combobox component in react for a Business, and I promise you I had no intention of differentiating. I wish I could have used more native browser behaviour.
Businesses differentiate to create revenue. Standardization and commoditization are important strategies as well. “Commoditize your complementary goods” and all that.
A web design shop may want to visually differentiate and therefore not use openui. But a restaurant that just wants to have a simple website probably doesn’t want either 1) a crappy looking website, or 2) to invest heavily in web design
Businesses differentiate when there's a good reason or no common solution. Nobody creates a new calendar picker or database or... "just because" but because there's no easy alternative. Yeah, there will be exceptions, but if you're paid to create something, your manager will usually not be impressed by "but the wheel I reinvented is slightly different!", unless you justify it with a specific requirement.
> Yeah, there will be exceptions, but if you're paid to create something, your manager will usually not be impressed by "but the wheel I reinvented is slightly different!", unless you justify it with a specific requirement.
Depends on the org. Some places incentivize wheel reinvention by having rubrics that basically resolve to “if you want to level up, you need ‘org wide impact’”, which translates into “all the existing databases suck (for …reasons…) so I need to write our own”.
The company might not actually want this behavior but if the people in charge don’t see how important it is to make sure incentives align with expected behavior, the wrong behavior will always happen. So while it makes absolutely no sense to write your own database and Calendar Picker Platform (Now With a Fully Staffed Team!), unless the rubric incentivizes the right thing that is all people are gonna do.
I get where you're coming from and we all know Google as the bad example here, but looking at it industry-wide, I'm not sure it holds. Like in a lot of cases, "you're not Google" applies and the similar incentives will not be there for a large majority of companies. Software is a cost centre for almost everyone.
Most business just adopt something existing, we saw this with Bootstrap, then with Material UI. Now things are a bit more diverse but still.
I feel like the pressure to differentiate is coming from internal design departments rather than business itself in 90% of cases. It's just people generating extra work for other people.
No one prevents businesses from using their custom implementations if they so wish. Just as nothing prevents them from doing so on literally every platform from desktop OSes to mobile OSes
This leads newer devs to "learn React" instead of learning web dev, so even after the web catches up, they still reach for React components when a simple html element would do.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
But also the thief and his accomplice.
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