Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records
mkaic.substack.com
mkaic.substack.com
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.
Or was it just a fan of your aunts, filling up her tank whenever it was low?
Yes, there were video surveillance cameras in the 1980s, hooked into VCRs for playback. And many places used them, including stores and gas stations. That's how gas stations could track down people who filled up and ran. Toll booths had them too.
Even before VCRs were cheap enough, there were film-based surveillance cameras. https://archive.org/details/armedrobberyoffe0000macd/page/22... from 1975 gives examples, including at a donut store.
(And it mentions a bank where they pressed the button to film a robbery, then after developing the film found it had taken pictures of the Christmas party months before, when the button was pressed by accident.)
I mean, we had webcams by the mid 1990s. It's not like Exxon couldn't afford something better for their stations.
I mean, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 I remember seeing many video clips of the vehicle making its way to the building. Checking now, https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-oklahoma-city-... says "A 1999 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by investigative journalist David Hoffman revealed that the FBI had twenty-two video surveillance recordings of the Murrah building and surrounding area stored at the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office." Its Wikipedia entry links to https://web.archive.org/web/20170510090822/http://newsok.com... saying "Agents also examined more than 900 security videotapes".
If most cameras 'very frequently didn't work' then that means there were huge amounts of non-working cameras in the area. Which seems like an expensive waste of money.
I can well believe that some cameras didn't work - I already mentioned the bank robbery where the cameras had run out film months previously.
In any case, the original claim "No cameras 20-30 years ago" is simply not true.
But a gas station for a major chain seems exactly the place that would have working cameras, because you're going to get people who fill up and drive away without paying.
It's really hard to know if my memory is faulty, so I looked for images of gas stations from the 1990s.
Zoom in on this picture from a Citgo in 1998 and you'll see four cameras hung from the ceiling - one pointing each direction, for each of the pumping islands. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-citgo-stat...
On the other hand, the five or so other US stations I found, from the same time frame, don't have an apparent camera. (Which doesn't mean they weren't there, though that seems unlikely.)
So .. I don't know. But I can say that at least some gas stations had video cameras going, and I don't place much weight in your argument that they "very frequently didn't work".
In the mid-1990s someone had a fender bender with a co-worker's car in the parking lot. The building had roof cameras, and he was able to get security to review the video the next day. However, it didn't have the detail for that purpose. So my anecdotal evidence is that it wasn't all that hard to have a working system 20+ years ago.
After all, it wasn't all that expensive for Jennicam to get started at that time, with automatic image capture and uploads.
Still, this picture of a Citgo from 1998 shows four exterior cameras at a gas station, at each end of both islands. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-citgo-stat... .
I'm therefore not willing to accept "No cameras 20-30 years ago" as an unconditionally true statement.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was something similar - I know that the whole setup was something his boss at the pet store had devised, including the “treat the car nice, fill it up” thing, so I’d wager this was maybe a Thing.
Unless OP’s aunt lived in Chicagoland, in which case it’s maybe a more specific Thing.
Recording was done on time lapse VHS vcr's which were really expensive costing around $1000+ USD at the time. And they only recorded one channel so you had to buy a costly multiplexer so you only recorded a few seconds of each camera losing all video between switching. Video was shoppy due to time lapse trying to record 24 hours onto one VHS tape.
So after all this money was spent once something broke it was so expensive to repair they usually let it stay that way hoping the presence of a seemingly working CCTV system was enough of a deterrent. Most small mom and pop shops couldn't afford the repairs.
Now, I probably wouldn't come to that same conclusion, even if I had a cheap/old/crappy car, but I can see how someone might.
Now in this case there was a disposal fee for old cars so if someone could take it off your hands for less, it was a win.
Nice elderly lady at work asks us to take out her car at lunch to diagnose a noise. We found her '73 Buick Skylark in the multi-story car-park and went to lunch. Ran great. Afterwards I asked, "I thought you were Baptist? Why did you have a St Chris statue on the dash?" Of course she didn't.
We had found the "wrong" car on a lower deck of the car-park but when we got back from lunch parked it on the uppermost deck, unaware it belonged to someone else. When we discovered our error, we imagined what the owner might go through when the car was discovered missing but we kept our mouths shut, fearing some sort of liability.
I bought that old lady's Skylark. Ran like a dang tank.
(1) https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=S...
His Toyota keys from a different year / model truck fit it just fine.
When I was learning to drive in a 1990 Ford I locked the keys in. Dad just asked a random person in the parking lot with the same car to borrow their keys. It opened the door and started the engine no problem.
A warning - this can actually become a hobby. Don't get wrapped up in high dollar modern pressings unless there is something you absolutely have to have. The world is still bursting at the seams with old records that are new to you and can be had for $1-$5 each. If you decide to get a cleaner you can bring many of them back to life and you'll be surprised how good they can sound. Mostly just have some cheap fun!
for now. then, you'll get that record. you'll enjoy that record. then the need for a new record strikes. a friend of mine and i started a small niche record shop in early '00s and made a go of doing online. it was so niche it never really did much more than supplying us and our friends with direct access to distributors for that niche music. eventually, we stopped and with that the weekly/twice-weekly vinyl delivery stopped. it felt like going cold turkey. it took a while to readjust.
like I said...for now ;-)
Romantic Flight and Test Flight are indeed spectacular, though I think my personal favorite is probably Forbidden Friendship!
Also, yes! The Jonsi track is great. I'm also a fan of the songs he made for the second and third movies. Really cool that they got him to collaborate on the whole trilogy.
I wish so badly that 2 and 3 had more of the same thematic material, but perhaps it's simply not possibly to improve upon.
I agree Dragon Racing was fantastic, but that was the only track that initially grabbed from 2 or 3. Gosh this makes me wish I knew more people with the same music tastes as me lol!
I hope the vinyl is everything you're hoping for mate! If it's not too tough to explain, I'd be interested to know what properties of it are appealing to you. I go for 12-bit FLAC for everything where I can get it, and I tend to notice compression artifacts more than most other people I know. I'm far from an audiophile though.
I know your pain! It's very weird having my music taste, because it's not like it's "underground" or anything—there are plenty of folks who enjoy film soundtracks! Yet the odds of bumping into someone who does on the street are still low, and even lower still that you'd find out about it.
You don't find anything rare because the volunteers at those charity shops get first dibs on everything (officially or no), and the shops themselves do; they will pick out the good record and either flog them on ebay or whatever, or move them to a more upmarket shop where the name changes from a charity shop but a vintage or antique shop.
I never expect to find anything valuable or collectable at a charity shop anymore. I mean besides the staff, there will always be people scouring it at all hours of the day looking for collectibles.
The other one there is house clearings; in some cases, when someone dies with no relatives or nobody interested, they'll hire a house clearing service, who also get first dibs on anything valuable or collectable. The rest is sold in either their own shops or sent to a charity shop.
I would be looking over my shoulder all the way home to make sure I got away with it. :)
Interesting tidbit I had held on to a record player for years to be able to digitize LPs, finally got rid of it (and the nice audio card that I used because it was no longer compatible with recent motherboards) and sure enough, within a year I find a whole slew or extremely rare Dinu Lipatti LPs and EPs (which have since gone to a pianist who also frequents HN because I think his is by far the better home for these) and that Wendy Carlos record as well as some other really nice ones. So I doubt I will ever play it, but still I'm super happy to have found it.
And if you're very unlucky it was made through an intermediary set of positive/negative.
They are!
And compact disc have a great thing going for them: 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is basically where it's at. Sure some are going to say you need 88.2 / 24 bit or whatever but IMO the creation of the CD audio format in the late seventies / early eighties was a stroke of genius. 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is my endgame. I'm totally fine with it since my first "portable" CD player (was weighting a ton) in the late eighties up until today. And it's going to be sufficient until my last days.
I don't need "more" than that.
Nowadays I don't listen to my CD directly: I rip them to FLAC and listen mostly to my FLAC files (my car takes WAV or mp3, not FLAC though, so I convert my FLAC to mp3 for the car) and, rarely, I listen to a CD (weirdly enough my car still has a CD player).
I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing. And I don't care if they start failing: I legally own bitperfect archives.
I love to own my music.
I still cannot believe that the first documents describing the CD format came out in 1980... That's 43 years ago.
> I don't need "more" than that.
> I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing
I'm with you regarding CDs, but 16 bit 44.1 kHz is only sufficient if you have good playback hardware (like a good DAC).
If not, a lower-end DAC can give more accurate audio reproduction just by throwing more data at the problem. For people who don't own/store their music but just rent/stream it, going to higher that 16 bit 44.1 kHz makes sense.
Think like screen resolution and text: displaying text shouldn't be that different in 1080p vs 4k. However, due to the algorithms use for scaling that also smooth the pixels at the border of each letter like ClearType (https://www.howtogeek.com/28790/tweak-cleartype-in-windows-7...), the higher resolutions get an advantage unless you use an old fixed-size font.
It's roughly the same with audio: if you use CDs as a source for your FLACs, get hardware a good DAC and the difference is unlikely to be perceptible. Use your ears and experimentation.
Walk in on the last day of the sale, an hour before close, "fifty bucks for what's left of the records", walk out with six crates of vinyl.
Wash Your Hands! And clean the records and sleeves thoroughly. The ripped and torn sleeves look like they've been chewed by mice... (in the biz we called it "rodentia scarring" or something equally fanciful)
Surely, if the records are themselves stolen, the original owners would be entitled to have them back.
If they weren't stolen, does the thief forfeit ownership of them through the mere act of putting them in a car they stole?
But the police have demonstrated on many many many occasions that they generally cannot be bothered to return stolen items to their owners or even, given the location of a stolen item to reclaim it from the thief.
A friend of mine is a realtor. He once was selling a house that was empty. A random package showed up at the address (correct on the package). He asked the owners if it was theirs they said no so he threw it in the back of the trunk and forgot about it for months.
Randomly while grabbing something in his trunk, he found it and was like “I should try and mail this back to the sender.” It didn’t have any return info on it so he opened it to see if there was any info inside. There was another box inside full of loose coffee beans and inside that was a metal tin. Now curious he opened the tin and found it packed full of little vials with powder in them.
He called the non-emergency police line in a bit of a panic thinking he should report what he found but they blew him off saying he should file a police report online. Not wanting to be in possession of drugs he drove it to a police station where the cop at the front desk was SO confused about what was going on and basically told him to get lost.
Finally he just decided to call it a day and threw it away in a dumpster.
There is no case to avoid drug law reform, disagree on the nature of what is required but /something/ needs doing. This bullshit where there is nothing like the rule of law and equality before it has to go. It's a cancer that eats away at society and however bad you think it is, it's actually a lot worse.
Not saying you’re wrong, Im just surprised to hear this and am curious about the extent
"only crime", a minor one at that, and three serious crimes don't match up, and is possession of recreational amounts a serious crime in any jurisdiction?
As someone who has a record over an ounce, lol.
Cops LOVE weed being illegal. Claiming to smell weed provides an easy path to justifying a search that vanishes when it becomes legal.
There are also a lot of states that have a laughably low threshold for personal use and anything above that is is legally considered to imply intent to distribute. This then opens the door for all kinds of seizures of vehicles, computer equipment, and most importantly cash in a backwards "guilty until proven innocent" scenario where the person doesn't even need to be charged with a crime to lose their property.
If they acknowledge the issue and take the stuff, there’s now a record that Mr. Sharkweek’s realtor friend surrendered a bag of heroin or whatever.
That can jam you up in a few ways. A decade later you apply for a federal job, you’ll be explaining this story to a suspicious investigator. Some jackass prosecutor or person up the chain may decide it is a big deal after all, etc. Or… they pretend not to understand you and you (and the problem) go away
That's just not true
Only if they choose to make a report saying so. However, it's easier just to shrug instead of doing any paperwork or taking on any responsibility whatsoever, so that's the action they choose.
Before reading this, I think curiosity would have gotten the better of me were I in the same situation. But the story is a good life lesson: when you come in possession of a package with no return address, there’s probably a good reason why the sender didn’t want anyone to know who sent it.
But otherwise it just looks like they don't even want to try. In a normal small community police or you would try to find out who it belongs to, not just give up. :)
LA is one of these places.
If you place them in custody, you might as well provide them with some basic housing that costs less than jail. They have literally nothing to lose from fines, court dates, tickets, probation. They don't have a toilet, what else are you going to take away from them.
The police are correctly judging that the need to defecate is not a criminal problem.
Find a public toilet or use a restaurant/shopping mall toilet.
By definition, if there is a public toilet accessible to you, or you are welcome in a restaurant toilet without paying, you have somewhere to go to the toilet.
So what are they to do? Put a huge stack of records in the evidence locker with no crime actually attached to them (just vicinity to another crime)? Could suck if somehow someone else could identify them and want them that was also a victim of theft, but it really would just be stashing them and hoping by rare chance someone stumbles into the lost and found.
Personally I'd rather the stack of stuff sitting in the guarded, expensive to maintain evidence locker is stuff actually tagged to a crime and relevant to solving it
but then i re-read the article and see "and then they grab a few of the thief’s personal items from the car as evidence.". so it's not like the cops were following some policy that all the stuff in the car should be returned to the car's owner. just the stuff they don't want to deal with
I've picked up crates of much better condition records as trash before, with many great records that could have been sold for OK prices, if the person throwing them away knew where to sell them and wanted to bother with it. But a lot of people/places just don't want to even both with it. Best prices come from selling them one by one on a site like like discogs, but that takes a lot of time and effort. If you bring them into a record store that buys used records, they'll either take a few they think they can sell (paying you a fraction of what they intend to sell it for) and tell you to keep all the rest, or they'll take the whole thing (again paying just a fraction for the few they want) and treat the others as bargain/dollar bin stuff or just throw them away.
(Some of my favorite things I've found in crates of thrown-away records: some Sergio Mendes records (some were bland, but some were awesome), various new wave 80s records by people I'd never heard of but were fun to listen to, LOTS of good classical recordings.)
Alas deceased (which was a bit of a shock when it happened).
Jeck's thing was a sort of live analogue sampling.
If it had been me then I would have said "great, now I have to go and get legal advice". I would have refused them.
But at the same time what am I supposed to do? Unload them in the impound lot and drive away? That'd piss off the cops, who could possibly fine me for flytipping.
It's a shitty position for the cops to put you in.
Sure, they might objectively be junk, but they also might be somebody's junk, and returning it to them may make them very happy.
Well, they could, but I don't think his lawyer would advise him to answer that question.
Unless you like bad advice from someone whose interests are at best orthogonal and typically actually against your own.
On the topic of car theft, my dad used to have a BMW E30 325iX back in the days. The car was very sought after by thieves, so his cousin (who's a mechanic) installed a switch under the seat to cut-off the gas between the tank and the engine. The car was broken into a few times but never disappeared.
The lock did a couple of things I eventually figured out…
The engine would turn if it was Locked but it wouldn’t start. And it oddly locked the hood (which was a relief to discover the latch wasn’t in fact broken)
My car too was never stolen but it was broken into as well.
About 40 days later after my insurance written it off and the police called and said come pick it up from a junkyard. It had someone else's license places, and was severely damaged after a full-front hit on the telephone pole after apparently a high-speed police chase. Who runs away from the police in a Honda Civic?! Anyhow, even though it was hit hard in front, the airbag never engaged, so I guess I am glad it wasn't me. There was blood inside everywhere, clearly the two people who were inside were quite hurt. Anyhow, I opened the trunk to get my jumper cables and lo and behold - tools! in pretty good toolbags, too! Decent looking respirators! Strange chemicals! Lots of ammonia in large jugs! A wallet with lots of stolen checks in it. A small bag with some dude's underwear. But my old set of jumper cables is, alas, gone...
I brought everything home, including (perhaps stupidly? certainly my wife thought so) ammonia and powdered chemicals. As I discovered the powder stuff lye and clearly this was all meth-making equipment. The undies had to go, but I kept some of the tools and respirators. I freecycled ammonia. We made some soap out of lye, so that was helpful.
The people who stole it were put in jail for various offences for a couple of years, including stealing my car. The court asked me if I had any claims and I said naah, I don't want to add to someone's bad life choices... Then , except for the $500 insurance deductible, which they deducted from his jail wages for next 3 years, and kept sending me small checks for like $19.28 or $8.78 every few months. The checks followed me to another house even though I completely forgot to update the address with the court (nice) and stopped right at $500.
But that's speaking in idealisms, in practice they probably didn't give a shit and moved on to other things. Just another car crash / drug case.
My car was stolen about 15 years ago in Seattle. The block I lived on at the time was a popular place for car thieves to both pick up and drop off cars.[1] When it was recovered, there were a bunch of stolen credit/debit cards and other potential evidence inside.
The officer who took the report said I could try calling the detectives who were responsible for that kind of investigation, but he didn't think it would go anywhere, because either the mayor or the chief of police (I don't remember which) had told them to deprioritize car thefts. Sure enough, calls to that line went straight to voicemail, and I couldn't even get a call back telling me they weren't interested.
[1] The day I discovered my car was stolen, there was a silver Civic parked across from it in the spot where a neighbour usually parked her silver Civic. That day, it was not hers. It was a nearly-identical silver Civic that the car thieves had ditched before stealing my car.
They ain't gonna store them, or search for the owner... heck, they have tons 100 times more serious cases on hold...
Some of the most useful self-work I’ve done, for sure.
Anyway, if you want to explain what you meant, great.
You have disagreed with absolutely everyone for no reason!
Of course, everyone's different like that, I'm the stoic (or emotionally repressed and stunted) one in the house.
> “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Then it happened. They got my TomTom and my digital camera, plus _the entire backseat and hatchback full of old computers and printers that I was taking to e-waste the next day_.
The moment I pictured the thieves walking into a pawnshop with that stuff, and getting laughed right back out, I couldn't be mad anymore. I was still annoyed that I had to go get the window fixed and buy a new TomTom on eBay for $35, but the actual results of the theft just sent me into giggles every time. Still do.
Note for others: if you're in a jurisdiction that has decriminalized car theft, and you find your stolen car, just get in it, drive home, and tell the police you recovered your own vehicle.
Is this a thing?
comes to mind, though I seem to recall similar other stories. Between the reactionary changes due to the public perception in the past few years, the defund movement undermining morale and other sundry causes, several major city departments are very understaffed and property crime investigation gets deprioritized pretty quickly.
Edit: removed the editorializing paragraph prior to the article. It was largely redundant.
The defund movement didn't spring from nowhere, it is a reaction to terrible policework. The police created the defund movement. Fix the police and it will go away.
They certainly need fixing, but I'm also not convinced that doing so will make the defund movement go away. Voices within what we are calling the "defund movement" range from "change how funds are allocated" to "abolish policing entirely".
Ilhan Omar, as an example, said “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise, and that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us.”
It isn't exactly a call for abolition, but it is saying get rid of them and we'll figure it out later. Her voice wasn't alone; the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people.
That ended up never going anywhere; a spike in violent and property crime led the necessary city charter amendment to fail (Minneapolis city charter currently mandates a minimum staffing level of police, which it hasn't been able to meet since 2020).
The political motivations behind this far end of the "defund" movement argue that policing simply cannot be successfully reformed - that there is no "fixing" the police.
Yeah, but your original statement is kind of a lie-by-omission. You're saying they're not able to hire because a bunch of people mistrust the police, as if the blame lays with those people for being mistrustful. But you're leaving out that they mistrust the police because of the police's own actions to earn that mistrust, repeated over decades.
> the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people
I live here and you're way wrong. Lisa Goodman would never have voted to "completely defund the police." In fact there was never a vote to "completely defund and replace [MPD]". As you said, they couldn't do that without changing the city charter. There was a long and bitter fight over that charter amendment, with the conservative wing of the council and the conservative mayor fighting and continuing to fight tooth & nail to shield MPD from all reform attempts. I can't think of any meaningful votes on this topic that went 12-0. I wonder what vote you are actually thinking of.
Where have you been? There was even a referendum on the matter proposed by the council as a direct result of their earlier vote that failed at the ballot on the issue, after the first version couldn't even get past the charter committee. I've seen a few different vote numbers- I think Lisa either didn't show for the vote, or it did end up at 12-1. She was pretty much alone in opposing the matter though; the vote to send the amendment to the charter was only 11-2 because someone wanted to be a little more moderate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/12/minneapoli...
> https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/minneapolis-city-counci...
As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US. He is a Democrat and about as conservative as President Obama is. Frey didn't go along with defunding the police because the people who wanted the police defunded make up a minority and there was an election to win. "Having a funded police department" is something that clearly crossed political boundaries in terms of support.
https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/File/3806/Transformi...
I found that link here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/us/minneapolis-city-council-r...
The actual relevant bit is, "[Be it resolved that] the City Council [of Minneapolis] will commence a year long process of community engagement, research, and structural change to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety in our city." There is nothing in there about funding levels or even the structure or presence of the department. I don't think you can characterize that as a resolution "to completely defund and replace the police department."
> As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US
Everything is relative. Within the politics of the city of Minneapolis, Frey's positions are pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, which is still to the left of national politics, yes. He opposes police reform, he vetoed full-time bus lanes over the recommendation of the designers, he opposes rent control, big business owners fund his campaigns, his biggest wins are in the richest areas of the city. He wins thanks to Republican voters, who don't otherwise have a feasible candidate to vote for here.
There was no one in the city who had any delusion that the "research" would produce anything but the amendment to the city charter. The only real surprise was that they had done such a terrible job at writing the amendment - it was very vague and hand-wavy.
The point remains- city councils and noisy activists constantly rallying for police to be defunded was and remains a factor in the increase in early retirements, transfers out, and difficulty recruiting new hires.
There was also a recent HN submission where a blog post author used a GPS tracker to find their car but relied on the police instead of recovering it themselves, with predictable results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30442044
In you are belted… most crashes you’d prefer it not go off, subjected you to any or all of: Powder burns, hearing damage, major dental destruction.
They should always go off if the front of the car is damaged as the description here.
At least that is what I have learned and which sounds reasonable.
- no seatbelt, you want the airbag to catch you (better than no airbag)
- with a seatbelt, ideally the airbag doesn't (need to?) go off, but if it is necessary you'll be glad of it
> They’re primarily intended to provide some protection for unbelted passengers
I don't think they're meant for unbelted passengers; they should be belted first. I once saw a program about the difference between regular airbags and airbags designed to be used without a seatbelt, and the latter were enormous monstrosities that could knock you out. They were determined to be a bad idea. (I wish I knew where I saw this, but it was decades ago and I don't.)
No phone-calls for you. * you're a chill person, i think you did everything perfectly, but gosh! how they must have suffered. Fuck 'em. Well done.
There is an exception for "innocent intent" if you are planning to bring it to either the owner or the police, but I wonder what happens if you lack that intent, but you got it from the police!
But the records could have been taken from the trash. If nobody reported stolen records then they can't be considered stolen.
What if you found a jar of peanut butter in the car? Would you try to find out if it was stolen and hunt down the rightful owner?
Those companies have been in the news for having easy to steal cars due to leaving out cheap and completely standard on all other brands anti theft stuff just to save a few bucks.
First thoughts: How does that work? You live by yourself right? I was born in 1988 and I barely live by myself.
Nope, they’re 20-21 and I’m just getting old.
Recognizable artist names in that heap? Not many. There's a lot of vinyl out there. The world's been hard on shellac 78s. But vinyl?
If you factor in the cost of listing records on eBay, organizing them, and shipping them, the idea of selling a bunch of used records ends up being a losing proposition. There’s too much vinyl out there and people only want the stuff they recognize, for the most part.
You get the same feeling when you make a typo in your Spotify search. There’s a ton of music out there. There has been for a long time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/magazine/the-brazilian-bu...
https://thevinylfactory.com/features/inside-the-worlds-bigge...
That's what reactors do when the control-rods are pulled out!
I discovered this playing with old records in the basement well before you were born and I'm pretty sure I drove my mother insane with it.
Also, the person on your substack who suggested Cat Stevens is very correct.
If you are curious to catalog them, or see value of them, discogs.com is a great site.
Vinyl collections all have stories around them. Some of the stories of how they were lost, some are how they were collected, and some are intertwined!
some girl probably got tired of taking care of the guy, kicked him out, and in lieu of being paid back for all of the food, utilities, gas, etc she had shelled out for him over the course of the relationship and then on top of not coming to collect the damn crates after 3 months, would not qualify as theft by anybody's definition. the fact the transaction was for $1 just makes it worse. this whole back story is 100% made up and is just supposition on our parts, but it is 100% believable. it also just adds to the legend of one's own collection. "oh that one, yeah, let me tell how i got that one..."
if you've ever lived with someone with a vinyl addiction, you know exactly how much space crates of records can take up. you also know how heavy they are. if you've never known anyone with this affliction, count your blessings.
I just love jokes that are a hard truth from a world I don't know well. A favorite along these lines: "What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice."
Edit: just watched this. Boy, is Clark going to be pissed!!!
Many years ago, I helped my brother in law move to a new house. He found a stack of records (4 or 5 crates, maybe) in the attic and said he didn't want them anymore. I tried to convince him not to get rid of them but he insisted, and then carried them out and put them on the sidewalk next to the trash.
I decided that this could not be allowed to happen, so I grabbed them, put them in my car and took them home. A few months later, never having touched them again, we decided to participate in a neighborhood garage sale in our ritzy area of downtown Chicago. I pulled out all the records and put up a sign - $5 each or 5 for $20. Did a pretty brisk business, except one guy was thumbing through them and pulled one out, took it out of the sleeve, examined it in various angles of the light, etc. And then told me to put it away and not to sell it, it was too valuable. Apparently the very famous producer/masterer/somebody? "signed" it with a sharp object near the center of the record (not sure how exactly that works). If I remember correctly it was a Boston album. Still in my closet, too.
And it definitely wasn't John Cusack, I would have recognized him.
Typically a set of dies lasts only 1500 pressings.
If you're into vinyl: halfspeed masters and Japanese pressings tend to be a step up.
Oh yeah, the original shrink wrap is still there, just opened on one edge so the record can come in and out. The shrink wrap has a large sticker on it with a Rolling Stone blurb printed on it, letting me know that Boston is a great new band and reviews of a couple songs on the album.
None of it is in great shape, so I doubt that it is worth much of anything.
EDIT - The signature is "Wly" https://gloriousnoise.com/2017/vinylology-101-how-to-buy-bos...
I did not even know that this show existed. Having only recently signed up to Hulu, I'll have to dig this up.
I'm really glad you got your car back, too. Hope the repair costs aren't a big drain.
At $120? Any software dev in LA with any experience is probably at $75/hour, and they don't have to outfit an entire shop with compressors, lifts, and pricey alignment racks. At $120 in Southern California, you ought to be crowing about the deal you got.
It reminds me when I was a pro mechanic years ago, and the biggest whiners about the hourly rate were doctors and lawyers. Excuuuuse me, Mr. Bills-at-Twice-the-Rate-I-Do?
I mean, you’re not seriously trying to compare capex between an automotive shop and a software dev are you? :-)
My dev machine was about 5k, and I will build another one in another 3-4 years. My tablet was 1.5k. My phones for dev purposes are numerous and run 5-800 each. These get replaced every year or three. My primary laptop was 3k, I will buy another in another 3-4 years. My secondary laptop was 1k, it will probably last 4-5 years. My monitors were 1.5k each. I’m sure I’ll use those for 6-7 years. I have three. My test server was 5k. I will probably build a new one in 5-7 years. My sit/stand desk was 1k, my chair was almost 1k. Etc, etc… All of my tools are expendable on a much shorter time table than your mechanic tools.
Your 10k of snap on tools are good for life.
lot's of places have a placard with a $200 rate, but they never charge that much. (replaced headlights, they broke a wire, spent all morning on the car, cost was $250 in labor).
at least my experience, dealing with independents. i am sure a dealer has no shame on the rate and the hours.
Wheels took, Producer shook, Got car back Made a track.
Discogs is a decent and easy-enough resource for checking if any of them are notable. There are often etchings in the runout (the inner groove near the label) that you can search for on Discogs to identify specific pressings. You can also sell through Discogs, but it sounds like you're leaning toward keeping them and LA is full of local shops that would buy or take them.
A record clamp can mitigate warping without costing a ton, though it won't work miracles.[2]
There's also always using the long-gone ones as wall art.[3]
1: https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/how-to-fix-split-seams-on-r...
2: https://www.turntablelab.com/products/turntable-lab-record-c... - Turntable Lab is just a solid shop in general for new vinyl and accessories.
3: https://mingoaudio.com/product-detail.html?id=733813497923
We had a couple (man and woman) who would come in the day of releases with like a dozen DVD's of high selling releases. It was so obvious so if we thought or knew stuff was stolen, we'd completely low ball them in effort to dissuade them from coming back. After a while, my manager said he wouldn't take this couples stuff any more - which lead to a heated conversation before my manager told them he wasn't an idiot, he knew they were stealing shit for their drug habit and they should stop coming here to sell their stuff.
Anyways. . .
One day some teenagers come in with two huge CD carriers of CD's. All very eclectic stuff. My manager was spotted some really rare stuff like Pearl Jam bootlegs, and some other stuff. He was looking through it and it was clear we were both seeing the same thing. He told me to tell these kids we'll go through it and come back in like 20 minutes because it will take a bit to go through it all. My manager pulls me into the back and is like, "Clearly this shit is stolen. This isn't just a random box of CD's either man, this is someone's collection. Some of the stuff in there is ultra rare, some of the stuff I would love to have in my collection. We have to do the right thing here man."
Kids come back and he he gives them like $30 for the collection, it was like pennies on the dollar for everything. These kids, they don't care, they got $30 to blow on whatever. My boss tells me he's going to put an ad in the local alternative paper about the collection to see if he can get it back to the rightful owner and to set aside in the meantime, its not even going into our inventory. Two days later, gets a call. My manager tells him to come in. Says if he can identify the case and five of the CD's in the collection, he'll give it back. Dude not only told him the five, he listed the entirety of one of the cases. It was pretty obvious it was his.
We did this a few other times and were successful, so it kind of made up for some of the other stuff we were expected to do. So many stories working there, it was as close to working at a pawn shop as you can probably imagine.
There are also devices to connect to that input which you can stream to, with Bluetooth or Wifi or similar. I have two Chromecast Audio things, but Google discontinued them.
Either way, enjoy the new setup!
A man left a set of bagpipes in his car he parked and went into a bank. He then realized he had forgotten to lock his car. He rushed back but it was too late. To his horror he saw that someone left another set of bagpipes in his car.
Oh and my Dad's friend had a great idea for anyone having their car broken into. Place mousetraps in console, glove box, under the seat, on the seat and turn off the dome/interior light.
Some advice for you is to sell off those records you know you don't like and use the proceeds to fund a basic record washing machine. That will make a big difference to your enjoyment of the albums you keep. That lot looks old and gnarly and you'll want to get the dirt out before it gunks up your stylus. Brush alone won't do it and you have too many to comfortably do by hand.
Otherwise I assume you've followed the steps to set up your turntable properly and balance the arm rather than just plugging it in and using it? Get that (badly) wrong and you can really make a mess of the records.
Probably not his stuff but you might want to try to figure out who just lost an entire record collection... it's probably not the thief's own.
It really should have been. Missed opportunity. I cannot believe how irresponsibly they sold their cars…
When I got there to pick it up, I found other people's stolen mail, hundreds of feet of speaker wire, a car stereo, and a lunchbox full of hundreds of house keys among other items. It was as if they used it as a heistmobile. Unfortunately, a lot of my stuff was stolen like a camera and some clothing, but they didn't touch the thousands of dollars worth of climbing and snowboarding gear. It was almost as if they didn't even know what it was.
I remember distinctly as a kid my older brother’s car getting broken into in North Texas. The thieves broke a window and stole my CD case from his truck. Circa 2004-2006, they did $400 USD worth of damage and got probably $40 worth of Rush, Styx, Rich Mullins and Blink 182 cd’s, mixture of original and burned. I am pretty sure given the questionable taste and definitely questionable mix that they didn’t get their money’s worth.
Tl;dr thieves often have no idea how much stuff is actually worth and will happily do 10x worth of damage for a perceived 10% gain
Saves them 2$ and 10 mins, costs someone else a new bike and being on foot for a couple weeks.
In my (grandparent) example, motivation appeared to be purely money. In parent's example, motivation was mostly transportation and convenience. And a total selfish disregard of everyone else but themselves is present, just like in my example. In your example, motivation is several things that take a fair amount of time to unwrap. And it really depends on type of tagging. Something that Banksy tags, for instance, is on a different level than some "420 blaze it" that you would see on a highway underpass.
It's fair to say in all three cases that the person doing the bad is being callous - a disregard of the property owner's time and money occurs. In the former cases, it's from a space of likely callous disrespect. But in the latter cases, like the Banksy-esque ones, it's intentional.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here beyond that tagging isn't just a knee-jerk bad thing. I guess I want to say "people who are taggers generally suck, but there are a few people who are awesome that also tag so don't throw all people who do tagging into a single bucket of suck
That is not to say I think Bansky's property destruction is ok. I'm happy to see the art, not happy to have someone's property destroyed. I'm really happy when artist get permission (and sponsored) to make street art. Plenty of that in SF.
To anyone that disagrees tell me where you live and I'll be happy to come tag your house and your car and your laptop PC and see if you really find it ok
The next day we drove into SF with the car cause we needed it to pick up some things. We street parked somewhere, to go for dinner, and almost immediately a cop walked up to us and told us we really shouldn't park there otherwise the car will get stolen. We were like wtf geez, okay then. Iiirc we found a parking garage instead.
So yeah, as a Canadian, wtf San Francisco, get your shit together!
frustratingly it seems an easy problem to solve. given it's likely a few small groups it should only take a few honeypot cars to catch them.
Sf effectively has no police tho
It’s not. Ignition interlocks have been very common for at least 20 years. But there’s apparently a lot of money to be made cutting a few corners and under pricing competition by a couple hundred dollars.
Unsure if they've finally done anything about it now that they're well known for it.
I probably still wouldn't buy a new one for a few years. I'd imagine thieves either don't know this, or do but can't tell model years apart clearly. Meaning there's a good chance your car may be broken into still, just not driven off with.
Amateurs. They could have just used a USB cable instead of hacking at it with a screwdriver like animals: https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-thieves-are-stealing-hyund...
Cars are pretty dang expensive already, and in terms of benefit to society, there’s probably a lot more bang for the buck in requiring safety features that protect human life before we start worrying about property.
Ignition immobilizers have been required in Germany/UK/other European countries since the 90s and Australia/Canada in the 2000s.
It's just the US that has that regulation gap, probably because the US market in the 90s sorta self-regulated to include it on everything so mandating it's requirement after the fact might've felt silly.
I guess the moral of the story here is there's always a corporation willing to break norms for profit.
But I also like being back in the states where the government doesn’t seem to meddle with daily life quite as much.
Collectively, the EU is probably better, especially in crowded cities. Individually, it’s not so clear.
The US right to free speech is inconvenient at times for the collective. (I have no interest in hearing pro-Nazi speech. I have even less interest in living under a government with the power to ban that speech or other unpopular speech.)
When I lived in Germany, I had to register my address with the local government and update it quickly if I moved. In the US, I can move without reporting it to the local government. I’m sure there’s some collective benefit to the local police having a fairly accurate record of where everyone is regularly sleeping. Individually, I’m not interested in being obligated to share that information.
I believe the US approach is better, but I acknowledge that’s in large part because I was raised/indoctrinated to believe that.
The IRS gets our address because most people are required to file their tax returns, and we put our address on those forms.
The USPS doesn't need to find anyone. They just deliver to the address on an envelope. If the person isn't there, it's the sender's problem. You can however voluntarily tell the USPS you've moved, and they'll forward your mail for a period of time.
Only 8 states don't require USSSS registration before obtaining an ID/driver's license and would automatically register (CA, CT, IN, NE, OR, VT, WA, WY), and of those, Washington and Indiana still automatically register unless there is an explicit opt out.
It's also a requirement for consideration of financial aid or in-state tuition for college, so many public universities won't allow application without proof of USSSS registration first and also helpfully auto-register on application or during enrollment.
My experience in CA is public high school would refuse to even award a high school diploma if you're 18 by graduation and didn't register and would also auto-register on your behalf if no explicit opt out was given. Funnily enough, mine registered me in the 30 days _before_ I turned 18.
They weren’t anything too substantially significant, but neither is a Hyundai ignition key.
I'm guessing maybe the police didn't want to deal with storing all these boxes, taking up space while waiting for someone to claim them.
If the records didn't belong to the car thief, shouldn't they be confiscated and it be announced somewhere so the rightful owner could come pick them up ?
Then the police can’t really confiscate them because there is no basis to do so.
We had 33 and 45 RPM buttons, and turning knob to fine-tune RPMs to be correct. (There was a little orange impulse light that shone on the edge of the disk which had small markings, and when they were "standing" in the impulse light, this meant the RPMs were exactly as needed.) So I played with both, unil at my age of 7, dad just unsoldered both the buttons and the knob. :D I still could play disks in reverse though. xD
If anyone tries to claim them it should be fairly easy to verify if they are the rightful owner by asking them the names of at least 10-15 of them.
Also contact the police of nearby counties as well, your own county's police is probably too lazy to see if there is a theft case elsewhwere in the state.
Also dig through them to see if there are any notes, in case any of them might have been gifts, there might be some clues as to who the rightful owner is.
> I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks.
Thanks for unlocking a weird childhood memory I had forgotten about! I was born on the dawn of tape cassettes, so vinyl had just started phasing out. Didn't stop me from using my grandparents' vinyl setup to play Splish Splash way too fast.
At some point I worked a lot with digital audio on low level (I built a VoIP library from scratch, among other things). You get the same effect when you play something at higher sample rate than one at which it was recorded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doz1QJ7LwjA
Sounds pretty good, though not exactly like Springsteen :)
Not to Dolly Parton range though!
I told the cop on the scene that it wasn't mine and he said he was going to "confiscate it for evidence" and he put it in the trunk of his car.
I dont think he used it for evidence.
He discovered Nightcore for hipsters :P
I clean them with a drop of dish soap. It works miracles.
(I mean liquid dish detergent, meant for handwashing dishes. The powder stuff will scratch.)
You'll still need to pick the fuzz off of your needle now and then. I make a little brush for that by tearing the corner off a sheet of paper.
I use iso alky on a cotton ball to clean the scanner all the time, too.
Dish soap is fine on vinyl records, but use distilled water. The "residue" is more likely to come from unfiltered tap water than soap. And let them air dry completely before re-sleeving them because they can and will grow moldy, especially if the records are put away wet with paper sleeves.
You don't need a fancy brush for cleaning the stylus, but a polyurethane gel pot is even easier to use (just dip the stylus tip in it), more thorough, and trivial to clean.
The only "fancy" vinyl accessories that've really provided a lot of value for me are a grounded anti-static brush: https://www.turntableneedles.com/grounded_carbon_fiber_lp_br...
And a cartridge/stylus upgrade, which for this setup probably doesn't need to be anything more than an $80 Ortofon Red and could easily be less. AFAICT this Pioneer has a replaceable cartridge.
I just wet it under the kitchen faucet, put a drop of palmolive on it, rub it in the direction of the grooves with my fingertips, rinse it, shake the drops off, lean it against something vertically to dry.
Nobody believes it's that simple, but it is. I've cleaned many hundreds of used records that way. It's just a piece of plastic.
https://www.amazon.com/KARIUS-PEDERSEN-WALLWZ-TRUMPETTISSIMO...
I used to play a trumpet, and have no idea how a mere mortal could make it sound like that.
Obviously, I'll need a turntable. Can I simply get a turntable that has L and R line out, connect that to two of the line in inputs on my audio interface (a PreSonus AudioBox iTwo) and record L and R from the turntable as two tracks in any handy DAW (probably GarageBand), split those tracks up to match the song splits on the LP, mix corresponding L and R (with the L track panned all the way left and R track panned all the way R) and export those?
When the police recovered it, she found it had new shocks, new covers on the seats, a CD added and the engine tuned up.
Capitalism would say of course not, that's the best you were willing to pay for.
As a mid-50's, the "I think they're called singles?" made me chortle.
Good luck with your collection, though I hope that somehow those records can be reunited with their rightful owner.
Maybe someone wrote something on a sleeve or left some price stickers on some of them, etc. that can be used to identify it from all the other potential claimants that just want to get the music from you for free.
Re: returning to the rightful owner — I certainly plan to look through them, but so far I'm thinking that most of them came from a record shop (many have little generic price stickers still on them), of which there are dozens in LA. Additionally, since they're vintage they've probably changed hands many times, and it's also unclear how long ago they were stolen.
All that said, if by happenstance I do get an opportunity to return them to their rightful owner, I'd be happy to.
Those crates really tie the room together :)
Buddy, the same could be said for your insurance coverage. Carrying "liability only" in the second largest city in the USA is an infantile decision.