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Comment by joehewitt | Hacker News Reader

The article tiptoes around the issue of "stealing" referenced by the headline, as if the "stolen" fruit is only taken from public property. As you will learn if you plant fruit trees in your front yard, there are quite a lot of people who think nothing of trespassing on private property and stripping your trees. In Hawaii it's become an epidemic - most of the stolen fruit is not consumed by famished thieves, it is sold at farmers' markets. Penalties are so minimal for this crime that the same thieves return over and over with no fear of being caught.

Thi issue has many of my fruit-growing friends ripping their hair out. Believe it or not, not all residential fruit trees are neglected afterthoughts - many of us put blood and sweat into these trees and live for the day we can harvest them.

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Great point. I, as a farmer, do own quite a lot of wallnut trees that could be mistaken for public property. I am ok with random people picking random wallnuts, but most of the theft is done by organized groups that resell my fruit on farmers market. Each year I do think about reporting them to police (as amount of fruit stolen is higher then treshold of breaking law), but then I realise that amount of trouble I will get them into and probable damage to their life is higher than some wallnuts I just let it go. Now I just hope that the area will get rich enough that they will just don't care about picking my fruit and I will finally get something more then just few lefovers.

Is it really you getting them into trouble if you're doing your diligence as a farmer/business owner?

You didn't make them take the product in the first place, and your hope about poverty going away(..area will get rich enough...) strikes me as naive.

> strikes me as naive

This is interesting because your viewpoint focuses on the law and who is technically in the right, while his viewpoint values community cohesion and well-being. This tends to be the line between conservative and liberal viewpoints regarding treatment of lawbreakers - hard line reactions which favour the capital holder versus rehabilitation, decriminalisation, consideration of the social fabric.

That said, stealing someones walnuts and reselling them is a douche move. Being a centrist, I'd recommend approaching them about it and providing a warning. If you'd prefer not to approach, leave signs near the trees indicating theft will be reported and what the punishment could be. If they don't heed the warning then report them. The correct answer is often somewhere in the middle.

Community well-being would be not reporting those who just take and eat/keep/etc his walnuts.

On the other hand, these people are deliberately stealing his walnuts and re-selling them. There's no community well-being here to preserve, they are stealing and profiting.

> There's no community well-being here to preserve, they are stealing and profiting.

I agree that they're stealing and profiting from someone else's resources but there is a community cost to someone receiving a criminal record or worse for a relatively minor crime. And was it a friend's son or someone else only a few degrees of association away?

They should be punished if they continue after being warned but when the punishment exceeds the grade of the crime, anyone concerned about community would stop to ponder the cost-benefit of reporting the thieves. What we should have is punishments that better suit the severity of the crime, like community service.

In the Everyone Wins category: the thieves apologise, return the remaining walnuts and any money made, and offer to help the owner tend to their house and garden. Alternatively they can sell the walnuts on the owners behalf, generating money without having to pay for labour. In the everybody loses category: you strip someone of their ability to get certain jobs due to a criminal record and they turn to more crime to make up for the shortfall in income. Or you send them to jail and rather than having a well-tended-to garden your tax dollars are paying to have a harmless thief in prison.

Police can be asked to give warnings. It goes a lot further than a property owner

Can we perhaps instead of 'punished', maybe 'brought to justice' or 'rehabilitated'? Negative consequences should be focused on making the affected persons whole, and secondarily on getting the person to the point where they're not likely to repeat the crime. Insisting on proportionate suffering is in my opinion morally dubious, and risks devolving into "eye for an eye" mentalities, or worse.

This level of understanding is a rare find, thank you for looking deeper into the situation and choosing a very daoist choice, a Middleroad

> I am ok with random people picking random wallnuts

Is that typical for farmers? Like if I'm walking past a field of corn (or whatever) and I take some for myself (not to sell) - they are OK with it and don't consider it stealing?

(I've never done it, but been tempted - not because I can't afford it, but because it looks really fresh and tasty :)

No one cares (as long as it's within "reasonable" proportions). Any animal would happily eat 10 times the amount of corn you took.

And, man, we're loosing so much fruits, because of global warming and cold snaps nowadays... If you find a few appealing apples on the way, please, enjoy and don't waste them.

Although if there's a cash register or mailbox nearby, the farmers would of course prefer to get paid.

Typical prices in grocery stores for apples seem to be around a dollar a pound, but apparently farmers get roughly a third of that: http://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/fruits/apples/comm... I'm sure they wouldn't mind you cutting out the middleman if it meant a little extra for them. But so far all the apple picking operations I've found are tourist attractions, and charge even higher prices than a grocery store.

Unless you're leaving the field with 5kg of apples, I doubt they'll care. But, this is coming from someone who plant fruits to eat them. We're not selling anything to grocery stores.

I have a commercial blueberry operation. So long as you're hand-picking, and not doing it for commerce, help yourself. The amount you take will be trivial when compared with the amount taken by animals.

Besides, I can't begrudge anyone who loves blueberries.

Is there much overlap between blueberry farming and traffic modeling?

I bums me out that simply interacting with our criminal justice system can be so ruinous that people are reluctant to report crimes.

This is an excellent point. In the US there is no good path to reform of felons for instance. People ought to have a reasonable path to redemption.

Using the law to enforce a point is always equivalent to the use of physical force. The law simply provides such a vast weapon that the party in the wrong must back down or die.

If you wouldn't be willing to hold a gun to someone's head to make them change their actions, then you shouldn't call the police.

Are they aware that it's private property and your maintained trees? If so, and if you don't want to involve the police you might also consider a "name and shame" approach at the market itself by simply asking (loudly) "Why do you keep stealing the nuts from my trees and selling them?"

Edit: at the least they could provide you with some of the gathered /picked nuts.

Now that's a good suggestion. Social pressure is a perfectly valid means of retribution that doesn't require the overwhelming threat of the law.

If the ownership of the land is a little ambiguous, you might want to try a few simple 'please don't pick the walnuts, these trees are on private property' signs. It will stop some people convincing themselves that it is probably ok to do.

Do you also believe that code should be open source?

And how much blood do you put into your trees?

There's a pretty marked difference - using code doesn't consume it.

But don't we put "sweat and blood" into our code as well? Don't we, in fact, put more effort into our code than into our trees, which the sun freely shines on and which (in Hawaii) the rain freely falls on, on the earth a patch of which you call your property for reasons no more clear than the reasons you would call a piece of code you wrote your "intellectual property"?

Are the birds that eat the grapes and crap out the seeds stealing? They are propagating as they consume. Are your neighbors that eat the grapes and crap out the seeds merely consuming? Why is it that for your average Westerner, nature is always something consumed? Is it not more like a "given" resource that some of us put effort into harnessing, much like the free flow of ideas is directed into computer programs?

My point is that people will come up with no end of arguments for why code should be free, yet I just knew that the top comment on this post was going to be some moralist maintaining the importance of private property in one sphere, while implicitly maintaining the necessity of its transgression in another sphere.

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