Glasgow’s parking lot thugs get entrepreneurial
matthiasmcgregor.com
matthiasmcgregor.com
One day the parking attendant at a local shopping centre doesn't turn up for work, after fifteen years of faithful service without a single day off. The centre manager calls the local council, asking if they're sending someone to cover for him. The council have no idea who he is. After some investigation, it transpired that both the shopping centre management and the council assumed that the car park belonged to the other party. When the shopping centre was being built, the car park was finished before anything else. The bloke had just stood at the entrance with a yellow jacket and a sign and started collecting money. He did this so diligently that no-one ever had cause to notice him. He wasn't off sick, he had fled the country - £3 a car for 15 years worked out to £1.5 million.
edit: Then again, I suppose that's £100k a year, which might be kind of tough to earn without spending money on a degree first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Glasgow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Strathclyde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_School_of_Art
and all of the others....
[Edit: For anyone reading this, Glasgow is a great place, sure it has difficult neighborhoods, but most cities do and most cities don't have nearly as much character as Glasgow.]
I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html
One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.
The Wee Man says... Here You (that'll be right): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scNLfr1EP08
Actually, I seem to remember that I owe you some thanks, I blagged a very early copy of Java from you in early '95 - which led to some fairly interesting stuff (at least for Scotland).
Although, come to think of it, I suppose you could possibly consider reliable P2P transfer an offshoot of the piracy world, but I doubt you'd get too many people to admit that :) So I'm not entirely correct, but I think its a bit of a stretch to say that its quite often the case.
If porn is part of the "dark sectors of society" however, is obviously debatable.
Not all innovation is technical.
Or it might be that local authorities here are still somewhat sympathetic to the little guy... It's supposed to be Old Labour territory after all.
(I was worried others would be confused by your comment).
I can assure you that this is not what happens ;-)
In order to fight the scam, ticket machines now print your plate number on the ticket itself, so if you buy one from the thugs, you are risking a fine. The fact people keep doing it shows very clearly how parking charges in central Manchester are unrealistically high.
For instance, if you walk down University Avenue in Berkeley you'll see all sorts of people engaged in various levels of borderline-illegal dickishness -- blocking the sidewalk, harassing passersby for money, standing on a street corner with a ghetto blaster on full blast, whatever. Police officers go past in their cars but don't stop unless something serious is happening. If they were patrolling up and down on foot then they'd have the ability to slow down and talk to the troublemakers and hopefully move 'em along.
I live in Houston, and most of my interactions with Houston police have been negative. The one time I encountered a cop on foot, I was walking on a concrete wall about 3ft high in the early evening in an almost empty park with a friend, and he ordered me off of it. Another time, I was with a girlfriend who reported a hit and run, who even memorized the license plate and had visible damage on her rear bumper. The policeman insisted on getting a description of the car, despite my protests that my girlfriend doesn't differentiate that information. Nothing was done. I also remember another occasion where, despite my neutral, polite, and factual answers, the policeman kept escalating his hostility.
How well cops treat males in the US has mostly to do with their evaluation of your social class in the first second.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pol_percap-crime-polic...
At 2.84 per thousand that's a bit more than the UK (2.04) but less than Germany, Italy, Portugal, Latvia and other countries.
Take the internet tough guy act somewhere else...
Interesting bit about jail times being increased for possessing a firearm while committing a crime though.
I've heard it say that in Miami the criminals concentrate on tourists because locals might be carrying. But despite some of the most pro-gun laws, Florida is not exactly known as a low crime rate state.
And paradoxically, many states with strong laws against guns have lower crime rates that many strongly pro-gun states.
I'm pro concealed carry myself, but do not think the real world evidence supports a connection between that and lower crime rates. Perhaps if some place has a sudden radical change in gun policy some data can be extrapolated?
Similarly, it's not like in violent hell holes around the word almost everybody isn't carrying and still getting robbed and killed.
I've lived in places where anyone could be assumed to be armed, that all householders had firearms. I've lived in places where no one had firearms, except criminals.
The former had zero mutual fear, the latter had fear, but only on the side of the unarmed citizens.
Nothing says 'fear' like bars on the windows and bullet-proof glass in front of the counter at KFC, food served by turnstile.
firstly the anthropology is terribly negative and the conclusion are that without government we would leave in a violent state of nature. It's not that clear that without government the situation would be so violent and moreover, from scientific point of view, it's also not that clear that there was such a state of nature: homo sapiens could well have been really civilized when he became home sapiens.
Secondly Hobbes never concludes that we should be armed or anything like that. No. He concludes that we need a powerful state and that to build this state we need to give up some of our rights. We give some rights and the state acquire the obligation to protect us. If you think about it it goes totally against the American vision: Hobbes would probably agree that the citizen should give up their rights to be armed, to throw out the state of nature, and in return the state would protect them. This seems really hobbesian, not the reverse.
The right to bear arms seems to be something that is expressly protected by the Bill of Rights, and this is definitely an aspect of the relationship of the government with the people, not of people to each other. I'm sure Jefferson and Madison didn't want people to go around threatening each other with guns, but they still wanted the government to be afraid of people with guns.
Are also all communities based on mutual fear? And how much the concept of community is part of the concept of society?
There's a saying: the threat of capital punishment is absolutely effective. Its just that the criminals are the ones using it.
In these situations, a cheery, "Nah mate, I'm alright" combined with just the right amount of eye contact and a swift exit is more than enough to resolve the situation.
Do you really think its part of these guys business model to actually attack people who don't give them their parking tickets? How long do you think they'd be able to continue this scam if they that was their policy?
These people aren't totally stupid. They are perfectly capable of realising that its not worth spending the rest of the day dealing with the repercussions of assaulting someone in a carpark in broad daylight, when they could let you walk off and wait for the next "victim," carrying on the scam as normal.
Again, the point was missed. Its not about a single incident. Its about zero tolerance for disrespect, intimidation, shakedown, public bullying. So somebody other than you can park without knuckling under to some jerk.
That is exactly my point. You take care of it by not being intimidated in the first place.
In most of the US, this type of scam doesn't happen because we don't have this kind of parking lot. I think I've seen just one in my life. Most lots have either parking meters or gates and attendants.
I don't know where you are from. In Dallas, the downtown lots closest to the center (expensive) had gates and attendants.
Further out (cheaper) were lots where you slid cash into a slot matching one's stall number: a guy came around on a regular basis to collect the cash, but he wasn't stationed in the lot.
YMMV.
I've seen one "print a ticket" lot, in a beach town in southern CA; I haven't seen any others when living in MA, PA, VA, GA, or the Bay Area.
There are people out there who can operate a concealed weapon safely. I'm probably not one of them, so I do not own or carry a gun.
a: if they weren't doing this, they'd be dealing drugs.
b: dealing drugs is the worst of all possible activities.
Interesting scam none the less though.
The author didn't really assume they would be dealing drugs, he just wanted to show the advantages of their current scheme over another common illegal alternative.