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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

These workers by and large aren't carrying money worth stealing they are being robbed of expensive e-bikes. If these bikes were configured to become inoperable if they couldn't either phone home or talk to the users device then there would be no point in stealing them because nobody would buy them.

The end user could authorize their own new devices unless they lost access to both devices and info needed to do so and the manufacturer could handle same if and only if you were the original registered owner or ownership had been transferred in a verifiable way.

See why phone theft isn't as big a deal anymore they aren't worth anything if they can't easily be used anywhere.

The other ridiculous conditions are solved by making them threat their employees as employees and pay them a minimum wage for time spent including spent idling + millage.

If this plus vc money eventually exiting makes some portion of the work uneconomical so be it.

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That's a good idea, although this:

"He reported both to the police, but the cases went nowhere, an experience common enough that many workers have concluded calling 911 is a waste of time."

Is so frustrating. The theft of thousands of dollars worth of equipment with the threat of violence in a known location and the police aren't interested?

Yes? Especially if it's a bike. Police are incredibly bad at handling low-level property crime.

It's hardly low-level property crime:

"...food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses..."

Those are crimes that carry multi-year prison sentences.

> Police are incredibly bad at handling low-level property crime.

These are somehow strange and inexplicable societal values concerning crime.

A cycle blog here in Sweden recently had an article on several really simple measures that could be taken to help curtail bike theft (which is epidemic) but neither the police, insurance companies or reselling sites were interested in their suggestions. Bikes can be worth the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

Last week I was walking into a grocery store when 4 police were arresting a guy who looked very dejected, and I asked an assistant what had happened she said he was caught stealing a piece of meat.

> societal values concerning crime.

Police do not necessarily reflect the values of wider society, they may have their own values. Ranging from anti-cyclist prejudice to simple workplace laziness - I suspect the grocery guy was caught by staff and all they had to do was take him away.

Not in all jurisdictions.

My adopted home of Singapore seems to handle this really well.

There's always stories of people leaving there wallets and phones to reserve tables at the food court. Without any issue.

Having spent time in Singapore, plenty of crime never makes the news. Talk to some of the folks who do their National Service with the SPF.

But yes, it’s definitely a low crime jurisdiction but I don’t think enforcement has that much to do with it.

Yes, I can't tell how much is enforcement and how much is a more law abiding population.

Police are incredibly bad at handling auto-theft level of property crime.

It seems like the root issue isn’t the catching but the recatching. If you want to nearly eliminate it, punish it like Singapore does. I don’t think we have the will to do that (in fact, seem to be heading in the opposite direction), so police will continue to catch the heat for how much property crime continues to happen.

Police exist to protect capital, not labor. The system is working as intended.

A three thousand dollar electric bike that enables someone to carry out a valuable service is the very definition of ‘capital’.

Not him but i'm pretty sure that's not what he or anyone making that reference means in this scenario.

Owning a bike or a car doesn't net one the relevant power of what one refers to when one says capital in this scenario. For example the NYPD mentioned gets millions in donations and i can assure you those don't come from gig workers who feel like they need more protection from them.

The crime described in the article hurts capital too. Many companies have to leave markets due to the costs imposed by the described criminality. This bifurcation betweem labor and capital is an invention of socialists/unions, to draw attention away from the exploitation that they demand.

That hypothesis is belied by the fact that these companies allocate approximately zero of their considerable lobbying resources to fixing the issue.

Have you ever attended a local government hearing in a large city? It's filled with people on the dole, affiliated with a network of taxpayer subsidized nonprofits and social agencies, all promoting far-left ideological platitudes that the local politicians parrot for their own survival. There is no chance these companies could outlobby the forces against them. Basic policing in general is virulently opposed within these circles, I hypothesize because it precludes the alternative 'solution': more social spending, ostensibly aimed at solving the "root causes" of crime, but really designed to fill the pockets of Poverty Inc.

I think as a lobbying force to counter these destructive special interests, the best chance we have is property owners. If they organize at a larger scale, they could potentially fund their own army of local lobbyists capable of matching those of the beneficiaries of the tax payer funded social programs. Home Owners Associations already have some organization, and if they pool their funds together, could be a political force to reckon with.

Too busy arresting people for victimless crimes like smoking pot.

Notice that there was also a part in the article where the police simply didn't understand the bikes were that expensive, and educating an officer on that changed their attitude.

Frustrating, still, but improvement seems at least possible.

There are a number of reasons this wouldn't work, especially once the thieves have figured this out. They'll then be incentivised to stop the bike for both the phone and the bike, and before you as the driver were able to remote block both items would have been bricked by the thieves. It's easy to take apart an electric bike, especially the ones that have been customised.

Agreed with the treating of employees properly though, these guys go through the ringer just from regular customers and order systems I can't imagine adding thieves to the mix.

It doesn't have to work 100%. If it works well enough, it might shift things enough at the margin to alleviate the problem.

You just need to make stealing the bike annoying enough for would-be thieves to find something better to do with their time.

(Compare how flimsy most people's front door locks are, yet, they still help compared to no lock.)

There's still value in it if it's inoperable; the motor and battery are still worth enough to make it worthwhile, and I guess the frame can be repurposed too.

I mean look at cars; just taking the wheels or radio out is already worth the effort. The radio is less viable these days though, since they're built in so more difficult to remove, and there's a lockout if it's disconnected from power (for which you need a code).

I don't believe you can truly make the bike inoperable. Yes, you can make its electronics inoperable but I don't believe you can feasibly make its battery, engine or the mechanics inoperable.

I mean theoretically you could, but not in a safe way.

Bike thieves aren't bike mechanics and modern hardware has chips that could fail to perform their task or even brick themselves. It could fail to charge or stop charging at 10% it could spin up the motor but inadequately. It could appear to start but gradually turn off for no reason 10 minutes later leaving it in all instances a safe expensive human powered bike.

It could broadcast I'm a stolen bike with cords with the electrical pathway to the transmitter being also wired to something else more vital.

You could pass an encoded unique to device signal over the rest of the system with chips elsewhere expecting that signal and noping out if they don't get it to foil rewiring.

You could require a periodic modifier received over the air encoded in chip2 .. chip n but not available in chip 1 like a series of codes for your key fob to unlock your car.

You could absolutely make it as hard to defeat as defusing a bomb and lunatics who wave glass bottles are no longer stealing your bikes.

This has got to be 90% of the problem.

I'd rather build a much simpler bike with the parts - the chip won't do a thing. Heck even the battery pack and the brushless motor + the frame are fine on their right own.

E-bike theft in general is a problem, and battery theft as well.

Which suggests locking it at the battery level might more most profitable. Looks like they cost as much as $900. Crackhead thieves that wave around broken bottles aren't going to be highly inspired to buy a new $900 part to render their $2000 bike that they intend to sell for $1500 serviceable.

It takes a one step $1500 profit to a 2 step $600 profit. Might as well rip off the best buy for crack money instead.

Those batteries are vastly overpriced. The individual cells cost next to nothing and the BMS in them is an off-the-shelf component. But almost all of them contain some kind of DRM which makes it so that they only talk to their own manufacturers motor. This makes repairing them a fairly difficult thing, especially because they are typically constructed in such a way that opening them up is hard or will break stuff.

Triggering inoperability in a safe way is not an issue.

The problem is that you would need to reach mass adoption of the technology, so that the fact of that specific item not being worth stealing would become common knowledge.

> The other ridiculous conditions are solved by making them threat their employees as employees and pay them a minimum wage for time spent including spent idling + millage.

Compare https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/10/california-wants-... and https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/05/uber-and-wages-in...

Basically, there's not much binding riders to a specific delivery app. Many cities have multiple competing apps that riders relatively easily switch between.

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