Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)
telecom.csail.mit.edu
telecom.csail.mit.edu
- Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working".
- Having to increasingly go do cable TV disconnects because people were usually in a bad way and I had more than one colleague that had either had a gun pulled on them or straight-up shot and left to die up a pole for most of a day while trying to disconnect cable.
- Having to increasingly go on cable TV installs because people's shitty TVs backfeeding electricity into the cable line meant I was getting zapped at least once a week.
That said, I met a lot of cool people, gave out a lot of free TV/HBO because I didn't care unless the customer was a dick, wrote down a lot of funny stories and ultimately realized that I could go college in spite of dropping out of high school because I happened to install the non-traditional student advisor's cable modem.
My colleagues said they'd see me back at the shop in four years after I graduated with a philosophy degree. Jokes on them, I dropped out after getting a job at Google.
Back in those same years, it was a painful, nonstop pendulum swing every month-or-two, between a) cripplingly unusable internet, and b) working Internet but with absolutely every channel unlocked for free.
Everytime something happened that required a technician to come out while it was in state "b", it always triggered a stern talking to to teenage-me from a tech and them putting the filter back on and ruining the Internet again until finally the next time another tech presumably couldn't fix it without again removing the filter. I frequently had successive visits that left me stranded in state "a".
Comcast, man.
They tried non-monopoly power and wireline phone markets in their early history and they didn't work.
A lot of times a company would go bankrupt, but their wires would be on the poles and would degrade to the point of falling apart and dangling, which would then make contact with a live wire and folks would get electrocuted when they touched it.
We had free HBO in my house in the early 90s because the cable guy apparently just decided to let us have it. I never understood how that worked.
I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this.
I did a similar job early on in my career (involving cheap phone calling devices with customers including consumers and often dodgy 'calling shops'). But the most dangerous situation I faced was a customer with a heavy dose of the flu, lol. And roadside fastfood.
I take it you have not actually visited the United States.
That’s a shocking number of gun related incidents in the GP. Seems like accessing TV/internet must be an issue like road rage that brings out the absolute worst in people. People don’t go around popping shots at technicians or waving their weapons around in the US.
Maybe there's some selection bias: You'll tend to meet angry people, who are more dumb (couldn't fix the problem themselves?)?
Maybe in any weapon loving place, a job where you visit lots of people at their homes and help fixing something that's broken, is mildly dangerous?
However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation - I strongly suspect that the cable companies don’t allow their repairmen to pack heat.
It’s like the thin bread line - pizza delivery is more dangerous than being a cop.
I doubt it. That'd be a huge liability.
Remember that repo companies are often incredibly small single-person "companies" contracted out.
I think that's highly dependent on where in the US, and what kind of neighborhoods and people these technicians are working in.
The idea that such places exist in the US does not surprise me in the least. But at the same time, there are certainly places in the US where the majority of gun owners do handle their firearms responsibly.
My brother is an avid gun "advocate" (nut), but he still wasn't happy being threatened with guns from yokels who don't like paying bills.
And those people are often irresponsible in many other ways, too.
So there are plenty of people who call themselves "responsible gun owners" but turn a complete blind eye to bad behavior.
Or they will keep a loaded gun in their bedroom for home defense, something that is outright NOT responsible gun owner behavior, yet is the primary cited reason people own guns in the US.
Why? Well bad apples and stuff, it's hard to believe perfect discipline is maintained when some of those around you have less than perfect discipline.
It seems like a question that one could probably get pretty close to answering (although not perfect).
"Everyone"?
This is significantly biasing your perspective, and I don’t think you quite realize by how much.
There are many, many gun owners who are incompetent and irresponsible. There is an entire spectrum, and it’s not a purely bimodal distribution with 95% safety-conscious owners and 5% hoodlums.
well ok, I don't know but there are stats on how many adults have guns, and there are stats on misuses of guns. I suppose a clever statistician would be able to get to some potential overview of how many people who own guns have decent discipline?
Not saying that's you but someone on this site. It is difficult to find anything with a query on Google nowadays, but the things I do find - like https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ implies to me that the amount of the population that maintains your level of discipline is very low.
So many people provide direct evidence that they do not respect the danger or power of firearms, and most gun owners just look the other way.
The EU has 30% more people
There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.
There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.
There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.
I think the cultural problem is everyone wants to be like Stallone or Arnie, which would suggest the US population has an inferiority complex towards the old world.
Even gun suicides are far higher in the US per capita and per gun than in the EU.
The US has a gun fetish. People sleep with them for crying out loud!
But everyone still claims they are "A responsible gun owner" because all that actually means to the gun culture in the US is that you are white or rural or conservative.
> There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.
gonna need a fact-check on these claims, please, because initial googling reveals these are, at the very least, false or misleading
I live in the Northeast US and very few people have guns here.
Incidentally, even if it is difficult to purchase a gun, it's trivial to order a crossbow or airbow, which has just as much 1-shot stopping power (although, of course, after that 1 shot, reload can be a problem, less so with the airbow)
https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/05/which-european-country-b...
> Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.
> The European Union's 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017.
And the “20 times as many murders” is not right, but seems to be pretty close if they were just taking about firearms homicides.
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-....
> Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole.
I also live in the Northeast, but that’s a point against when talking about this stuff; when you live in the only reasonably run part of the US, it is easy to misunderstand how ridiculous things are in much of the country.
I actually don’t care to argue back. I object to the argument-less fact check request and insinuation that the figures are misleading, on principle. It is annoying to give your conversation partners homework for no reason.
You are not representative, as only one-third of individuals, and 42% of US households, own a firearm:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
Gun owners are in the minority of the population.
And you might not even know; not everyone tells everyone that they own a gun.
Firearms owners may well still be in the minority, but there's probably a fair bit of error there.
I'm sure everyone says they take these things seriously, and I'm sure you're a fine upstanding citizen who mostly interacts with other fine, upstanding citizens. However, we do know, due to the number of offenses made public thanks to Florida's Sunshine law and other public sources, that we simply can't make the generalization that people take these gun safety measures seriously.
What matters is what happens when their friend does something dangerous with a gun, and they don't seem to care. My entire family is "responsible gun owner" including my brother who definitely seems to care about safety, but all that goes out the window when another family member brings out the guns at a family BBQ while absolutely drunk. You can bet your ass nobody said anything. If you aren't willing to narc on irresponsible gun behavior, you ARE NOT a responsible gun owner.
Also, Kyle Rittenhouse took a gun across several state lines, possibly stirred up shit, got shot at, and killed the person doing so. While the actual event of shooting was ruled "self defense", how is it "responsible" to take your firearm to a protest with the intent of being a counter protester. If "Anti fa" did such a thing, these people would riot, but Rittenhouse was invited to talk at fucking CPAC.
That's the kind of person these people lionize. They are envious that he was able to kill someone with a gun and get away with it. They want to be him.
Even if you include full time criminals and suicides, that still means basically 0.001% of fire arms are used to kill someone every day year.
Most gun owners are decent people that want to protect themselves, not use it to cause hard to the innocent.
If nobody had guns, you wouldn't need to a gun to protect yourself from someone else with a gun.
The problem of course is that the genie is already out of the bottle. We can't take the guns away, they're all over the place in the USA already. Even if the Second Amendment was repealed, all that would happen is that only criminals would have guns.
We're fucked and there's no solution.
This is objectively false. You're attempting to portray a personal opinion as fact. Bad form, and definitely not appropriate for HN. Please don't do that here.
Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in the dumbest way possible. Less charitably, our country has a bunch of bullies that want to shout at anything they can bully. I don't think they'd actually pull the trigger, but, y'know, law of large numbers, times small but non-zero probability of homicide by virtue a gun being present on the scene equals probably at least one murdered cable tech.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-ca...
That wasn't my experience when I worked in customer service for a few years. Maybe 10% of people were like that and it was always because they were tired of not getting solutions to their problems, and that was always because their account fell into a bad spot in the customer service flow policy (suspicious activity, low LTV, fraud, etc.). It was really hard to take any of that personally.
I'd argue it's more like the corporate powers that be often have unforgiving policies and account review practices sending people to the moon with anger.
I think I see where the problem is on the corporate side.
Sucks to be in customer support. The job really seems to be a buffer between abusive company policies and the angry customers.
Indeed. When companies abuse their customers, customer service is not only the only way by which a problem can even hope to be resolved, but it is the job of customer service to do so. They are representatives of their companies, the interface between the customer and the service their company offers.
Now, I don't sanction abuse, of course, and pulling guns on people is insane, but that's not what you have in mind here, and knowing how tortured and stretched the definition of "abuse" some people have is, I will say you do sometimes need to be somewhat aggressive and push to escalate your problem to get the customer service rep. to transition on their script's finite state machine to a helpful state and outcome. In those cases, don't blame the customer. Blame the corporation.
Corporations often like to drag their feet to maximize profit with all sorts of ridiculous and unsavory tactics. It's like being automatically enrolled in something by default and burdening the customer with unsubscribing; on average you can steal at least a little money from those who don't unsubscribe, or do so only after a couple months have passed. The time and burden of doing so (a form of theft), and the lack of genuine consent (Pacta sunt servanda, buddy!), doesn't seem to be accounted for.
That's 1-2 a day minimum!
Yikes on linking to the wrong article that totally invalidates your argument.
The people who are pointing loaded guns at their crotches are mocking people who take the four rules of gun handling very seriously, including both Fudds and most "normal" gun owners. They're trolls that exist almost exclusively online. They don't make up anywhere near half of gun owners and they're unwelcome at pretty much any gun club or public range.
Of course they don't, because they're not journalism, they're activism. They don't report - they incite.
Thank you for taking the time to actually provide useful information.
The source you cited specifically says it is not to own the libs.
You also lump in a disproportionate amount of street gang-related shootings, which have different causes and different solutions, and make it look like suburban teens are uniquely at risk from firearms . . . when they're not. The vast majority of firearm homicides in this country are suicides, and the next-most involve street gangs and the drug trade, and involve young men with criminal records killing other young men with criminal records using illegally-obtained pistols.
[edit: Just to clarify, I think there's an equally strong argument to be made about freedom of movement as a societal benefit, and an individual right, that outweighs the harms caused by humans driving their own cars.]
These days this is not done with bullets but with carefully planned public manipulation through media and social networks.
And if it really comes down to bullets, the government owns a lot bigger guns than you do.
They don't tend to use direct force either, but there are private militias...defending yourself from a gang or haywire corp is also an important thing.
People like to take the big argument, defense from govt, and tear it down from a broad level, and then ignore the many other lethal threats posed. There have been a couple shootings in recent memory, where citizens quickly resolved the matter far faster than law enforcement could have hoped.
Situations too, where men armed with axes etc. went on killing sprees in other countries and mostly people were unable to respond.
I don't think everyone should bear arms, or even that it should be common, but I do think the right to defend yourself is a pretty inalieable right. If gun ownership can help with that, then by all means...
In other words, as the state declines to protect you, you have a better claim on the natural right to protect yourself.
Just wondering if you have any evidence to back up this assertion.
It's ironic that some of the most vociferously anti-gun people in the US are also the ones with the clearest view of the police as an armed gang. But absent armed police and without the right to protect themselves, what do they think will fill the vacuum?
Trust makes the society safe. When there is a lack of trust, careful security measures can be used to compensate. But security can also lead to an arms race that makes everyone less safe, as measures that improve someone's safety may have a negative effect on others.
The stoic natural rights theory on which the US is founded definitely tips the balance towards self-defense over the collective. It’s the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
The historical evidence shows that countering a police state / authoritative government with violence/force is less effect than with non-violence:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44096650
Since 1900, if a movement used violence in their methods for change they had a success rate of 25%; movements with non-violence had success 40% of the time. Further, most movements who did use violence to have a 'change of government' were much more likely to end up with authoritative government.
How does owning a firearm protect you from state violence without an implied threat to shoot police?
I don’t get the obsession behind open carry though. What good is people walking around in shopping malls with large semi automatic rifles on their back?
This is a phenomenon I've head described as "nutpicking." Take the absolute worst of a demographic and then go "why are you all like THAT?"
Claiming US gun culture is all about going to the mall open-carrying a semiauto rifle is on the same level as claiming gay men all prance around in assless chaps and leather. No, they don't, and it shouldn't be any mystery why claiming that is so offends people.
And I believe this is the experience of the overwhelming majority of gun owners in the US.
It occurs to me I haven't seen any estimates for how many people open carry on a daily basis. (You would think SOMEONE would collect that data SOMEWHERE.)
The states are sort of (in)famous for how many people own firearms, but I assert the number of people who open carry on a daily (or weekly) basis is much smaller than the number of people who own firearms.
I'm going to stop short of accusing nojvek of nutpicking, but encourage them to look around. The stats I've seen are that one in three Americans owns a firearm. If you were walking around and one out of three people were open carrying... well... I think that would be a little unusual unless you were in a gun show or at a shooting range.
Gun-culture in America can be weird, but it's often portrayed as being weirder than it actually is.
[Edit: also. how did we go from cable modems to guns so quickly?]
I was kind of freaked out but everyone else operated as if it was normal.
I found that pretty jarring. Was only there for a few days but almost everyday I saw someone with a gun on them on the streets.
Yes my sample size is low, but it’s still a strong memory in my mind.
More to the point, none of the few nutjobs who insist on doing this has ever actually carried out a mass shooting. At least not to my knowledge. Generally, if you find yourself around someone who's carrying openly, you can be sure you're less likely to be shot than you would be just walking around a random mall by yourself.
Firearms can, in many situations, allow you to enforce your will over that of other people who may be intent on harming you or others.
The thing I never quite understood is why so many of us believe they'll encounter those situations walking to train station in the urban core.
So in one sense, I think I can understand the thinking behind it but at the same time think people are mistaken for how often you'll need to shoot someone while walking home in the city or in the burbs.
That being said... I worked part time as an agent for a bail bondsman to pay for college and frequently carried large sums of cash with me through bad neighborhoods. I open carried with the approval of the sheriff's office and municipal police departments largely as a reminder that I could shoot back. But I never had to. The last person a potential criminal wants to shoot at is their bail bondsman... I never drew, aimed or fired my firearm in two years of working that job. In many ways I think it was like part of a "costume" that communicated I had the weight of social convention on my side.
Like others have said, you've got a lot of other things in the US to worry about than guns. However, since we're sharing gun incidents, mine is that I had a sheriff's deputy LARPing as a SWAT officer bust in to the bathroom at work and point a rifle at me while I was trying to use the urinal. Lots of yelling until they realized that I was not a part of the drill and had my pants unzipped. Not happy that they didn't inform us that the cops were going to use the building we're in for school shooting training. Dangers of working in a repurposed school I guess?
Well, in US so many times heavily armed police act like chump in face of serious criminals so not sure that general populace are proud of professionalism.
Meanwhile plenty of them are in right wing militias.
About ten years ago, i was buying weed from a cop (i got the hookup through his highschool friend). He bragged that every one of the ten or so AR15s on the wall in his bedroom over his gravity bong and below the bullet holes was registered to a different person. Why he thought that might have interested or impressed me is something I still try to puzzle out on late nights.
Interestingly, same city for both events.
Because a Glock doesn't have a safety lever. It's built into the trigger mechanism.
What, so pressing the trigger automatically disengages the safety? As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision.
Correct. There's a few other internal safeties to help ensure it doesn't go off unless someone is pulling the trigger and (hopefully) intending to fire.
It's still drop safe and not going to go off by itself, but if you fire it (and there's a round in the chamber), it's going off.
>As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision
There's certainly tradeoffs. It's simpler and you're not going to accidentally forget to disengage a safety at the worst possible time (when you actually need to be using a gun), but it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm which is a risk not everyone is cool with for obvious reasons (and even experienced operators (incl. Law Enforcement being generous, which largely carry Glocks) are human and can make mistakes).
That's much better than the opposite problem: forgetting to engage the safety and accidentally discharging.
> it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm
I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.
If you're following the firearm safety rules you're not pointed at anything/anybody you don't wish to destroy so it's a moot point. (yourself included, though at least in that case nobody else was harmed needlessly)
A safety lockout (or lacktherof) shouldn't be a factor in your pointing of a gun at someone and pulling the trigger.
>I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.
It's extremely rare for someone who isn't being extremely negligent to be in a position where they could "accidently" kill someone.
Could a safety prevent such an occurrence? It's very well possible and that might be a reason to prefer a firearm with sufficient safeties that increases your comfort.
On the other hand some people decided that they're cautious enough and by in large most people avoid accidents and practice good safety practices to avoid harm should one happen.
There's trade offs either way, but ultimately it's preference.
Relying on a safety to keep it “safe” is usually the first step in ventilation of the floor or ceiling.
Play-guns for the shooting range? Sure, add fifty safeties if you want.
But guns are used for other purposes, and there is a failure mode where the person holding the weapon intended to fire and end someone's life and the gun fails to do so because the safety was still engaged.
Many things are purposely designed "fail-safe" but some things are designed to "fail deadly" for very good reasons.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the negligent discharges that can be categorized as "I thought the safety was on and was pulling the trigger like a moron" is much higher than "I knew the gun only had a grip/trigger safety and was pulling the trigger like a moron".
ok, so the group "most people using firearms" and the group "most people using websites" do not significantly overlap is what I'm hearing?
https://crimefictionbook.com/2016/02/04/do-glocks-have-safet...
But (as I learned only recently) there are guns around with actually no "proper" safety and one model at least is particularly prone to fire accidentally:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...
A lot of the issues in general seem to come about around holstering which is one of the situations where you're most likely to be "breaking" the rules pointing towards yourself, certainly not ideal.
Reholstering is one of the stronger objective arguments for a safety, but that still assumes the safeties themselves are properly designed.
Glocks have a system that is systems called "safe action" where there is a system of internal locks that prevents the weapon from firing in situations where the gun is dropped, hit by a car, struck from the side, &c -- this is not really what most people are thinking of when they think of a safety. It turns out to be very important in practice, though. If a police car gets hit by another car and the guns go off that's going to be a bad day for everyone.
It does seem like the right balance hasn't been found yet.
This sort of thing is unfortunately somewhat common:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...
One of the golden rules of gun safety is to not point a gun at something you do not intend to kill (the rule usually uses "destroy" because gun culture loves playing down the danger of guns) so if this is actually an issue then responsible gun owners are not as common as they should be.
For the most part, the development of striker fired pistols and duty holsters was driven by police and military use; these are contexts where a person draws a pistol several times a day (on some days) and hundreds or thousands of times a year. General process safety concerns -- like reducing the number of "safe" states that people have to think about -- do matter in that context.
"Loaded straight into fairly skinny jeans without checking the safety." -- Glocks do not have safeties.
The idea with most newer striker-fired pistols, like the Glock, is that the gun goes in a hard-sided (molded nylon or kydex) holster. If it's not in the holster, it's ready to fire. If that is not safe in the situation you are in, put it back in the holster.
Rifles, shotguns, &c, are never holstered; so if it is time to fire the weapon, you deactivate the safety; otherwise, it is left on safe. Because pistols have the extra step of being holstered, it turns out be work well in practice not to have the intermediate unholstered-but-safe step.
Handguns are registered to a tiny degree. The NICS checks records may be kept only on paper, and are kept by the gun dealer until they close business. Then the BATFE or a related govt. office gets them. By order of congress, this office is not allowed to computerize.
A registry connects a particular gun -- a particular serial number -- to a particular person. A NICS check doesn't do that -- it's a criminal background check. Just because you have a NICS check, it doesn't mean you bought any particular gun. You could pass the background check and then decide you don't want the gun after all.
You may be referring to a Form 4473 -- the DRoS (Dealer Record of Sale) -- which does record which person received which gun (with serial number) -- and all licensed dealers maintain these records, for all guns they sell (not just handguns). These records form a sort of a search tree, since the manufacturer records which wholesaler the serial number went to the, the wholesaler records the retailer and the retailer records the end user. These records are useful in regulating the traffic in arms; but the decentralized nature of them means that the government can not go on fishing expeditions -- can not just go out and query the database and see what looks interesting today.
Here's how the DRoS are used in regulating the arms trade. Say police come across a big box of guns from Colt. They can go to Colt with a suitable warrant and say, hey, where did these go to? And then go to the wholesaler, on down the tree. It turns out this information is often sufficient to localize shady gun dealers who are trying to sell to the mob, the cartels, &c.
However, some states have banned private transfers of handguns or of all guns. This means, in practice, that people must perform the transfer through licensed dealers.
It is illegal in the United States to be in the firearms business without a license. It is legal for private people to transfer firearms to one another without filling out a 4473. So on the one hand, we have the business of selling guns and filling out 4473s and maintaining records according to the ATF's rules, and the majority of transfers of guns take place according to these rules; and on the other, we have people who give a gun to their son or daughter as a birthday present, or sell a few guns they no longer use. In the middle, we have a grey area -- people who sell a few guns every year, &c. Occasionally, people in the grey area get caught; and it's not a good place to be in; so people who occasionally sell guns but have no interest in being in the firearms business will actually transfer through a licensed dealer (the seller transfers to the dealer, who then transfers to the buyer, charging a nominal fee). For example, when people sell guns on GunBroker.com, they almost always intermediate the transaction through a licensed dealer.
This is what people are talking about when they say "universal background checks" and "the gun show loophole". Now, "the gun show loophole" seems like a completely ridiculous idea. I do not see how progressives can believe it exists; and I do not see how this could possibly occur with any frequency. The ATF knows where the gun shows are. Maybe progressives think the ATF is not going to the gun shows looking for people selling guns without a license? I don't think anyone who knows anything about selling guns believes for one moment that the best place to sell guns illegally is a place, like a gun show, that is literally crawling with cops from agencies at all levels of government (not only to keep an eye on things but also as customers).
Though one of the gripes with NICS is as far as I know it does not fail safe, if a local LE or reporting agency ignores the request or does not process it in a timely manner, the person may get a false pass.
Regarding NICS, it is supposed to instant -- National Instant Check System -- and it is generally quite fast. The issue is not with an agency ignoring the request but rather with agencies not forwarding the data they are supposed to forward. If it's not in the database when the check is run, the check comes back clean -- most NICS checks complete in a few minutes.
If for some reason a NICS check does not complete in two or three days or something like that, yes, it defaults to open and the person gets their gun. That is how it should be. There must never be a possibility for the government to prevent the trade in arms, either for particular people or for the whole country, simply by delaying things without explanation. Process delays are one of many tools governments abuse. If the data is not in the database, another 2 days is probably not going to get it there. Something has to be done about the agencies that don't forward their data, yes; but opening up an avenue for sideways stuff on the part of the government is not the solution.
In the United States, it is illegal to transfer a firearm to a felon (and probably to all other categories of person who would be denied by NICS) -- this is another reason, one I didn't mention, that most sales brokered by GunBroker go through a licensed dealer. A licensed dealer has access to NICS. A regular person doesn't. If they do a private party transfer and, lo and behold, the person they transfer to is a felon, they are in big trouble. They would rather not be in trouble so they delegate to the dealer to handle the transfer.
Dealers maintain none-paper records, too -- as do manufacturers. They have DRoS systems which are electronic. This makes it easy for them to provide data to the ATF when a suitable warrant is presented. What prevents the data from being a resource for government fishing expeditions? It's two things:
* The ATF is formally forbidden from centralizing the data in a big data warehouse -- it is technically against the law to maintain a federal gun registry.
* It is legal to transfer guns, albeit only in special circumstances, outside the system.
These two things together prevent the available information being used for a fishing expedition. Firstly, the government is not allowed to assemble the data; and secondly, the available data is imperfect -- it is not proof that a particular person owns a particular gun or even any guns.
The way this data works, it's not a big problem for combatting the illegal traffic in arms. A large part of that is identifying where, exactly, the arms exited the formal arms business and entered the black market. The data is perfectly suitable for that.
The data can't be used to show that this or that person definitely has this or that gun; and it can't be used to show which people have which guns, or how many people have more than ten, or anything like that. That is a good thing. Those are guns held by private citizens; they are private people, it's their private business.
Gun registries are not of much use for solving crimes related to guns. Criminals don't use leave behind guns that can be traced to them; and if a criminal is apprehended with a gun that may have been used in a crime, the gun has to be tied to the crime through physical evidence -- powder residue and stuff like that. It's not like there's some serial number at the scene of the crime that can be used to find the gun somehow!
They have different sources (one, poor access to mental healthcare, the other, poverty) and probably need different solutions too. I personally dont care as much about mass shootings, because in the grand scheme of gun crimes, lots less die. Nevermind Suicide, which is just access to mental healthcare.
I'm really interested in making poor communities safer, and reducing the transactions in illegal guns - but tbh, thats like trying to bail out a rowboat with a thimble - and without dealing with the underlying causes of gun crime folks debating in this space are effectively arguing about what color a building ought to be, while its also actively on fire.
In the end, I think everyone who buys a gun should have to go thru the same process, and should undergo a background check, and that a fail dangerous system is bad - now how we go about fixing that issue? thats another question entirely.
Private people, although they have the right to do so, don't generally transfer guns directly to strangers, because of the possibility of criminal prosecution for transfer to a prohibited person.
There are some improvements we can make to NICS -- but they all have to do with making sure the data is actually there.
https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2022-04-29/...
Keep in mind that, in the absence of data indicating a conviction, a person is just going to get cleared in a few minutes. NICS checks basically never take even an hour, let alone a day; the time limit of three days is there to prevent the relevant agencies from engaging in malicious delays.
You have to have time limits like that for most government procedures; and we can't presume, in the absence of evidence, that someone should be denied. You are suggesting we give up something fundamental and general -- the presumption of innocence -- when you argue that NICS should default to closed.
I interpreted this as the cop having simply stolen the guns from their registered owners through some sort of search or seizure process.
Maybe it would help with the sleep terrors, maybe it would result in a rainbow colored cat.
Another thing that people do is set up a holster behind the headboard or somewhere else where they know to get at it.
There are loopholes, but there are reasons to prefer a gun that was last purchased under someone else's name, ideally someone you don't know at all.
Regardless, the thing I found interesting was the COP's perception of the value of the guns.
Case in point:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/08/texas-vigila...
The guy had a choice:
* Replace a wallet
* Shoot a guy dead
Obviously, we don't usually hear about the people that pick the first option, but there are plenty of takers for the 2nd.
Yes, with a bit more depth to the reading, you'd know that the robber had already collected the money and was leaving when he was shot in the back.
And what happens when another do-gooder walks into this taqueria, sees this guy shoot someone, and then grab money off the body? Wouldn't that person be in the clear to shoot the first guy?
What if the 2nd guy is a police officer?
As for the risk that someone else might mistake the shooter for the robber, anyone who has taken a concealed carry class has learned that there are risks to defending yourself. It's a choice you make because you don't think there are better ones.
But fundamentally, I'm objecting to your characterization that this guy was looking to legally kill someone or that it was motivated out of a desire to keep his wallet. The robber was threatening people's lives. The danger was not over. Shooting the robber was a reasonable choice given what the shooter knew at the time.
In the end, the Irish government decided to bankroll the rollout of fiber to "commercially unviable" areas (under the guide of a National Broadband Scheme). That prompted one of the unsuccessful telcos to suddenly find ~ 300k of those homes commercially viable!
Trying to understand why some properties have been hooked up and others not is a fruitless exercise. During the COVID lockdown, I discovered that most churches (which had a strong interest in broadcasting masses to their congregations) has either been deemed commercially unviable or not indexed at all. Many hoops were jumped through.
EDIT: Actually, from context they may be talking about a prior rollout. But the idea's the same.
Yeah, this was OpenEir (which is now just Eir’s standard commercial offering, though I think the rural buildout was subsidised). I was thinking of NBI, a separate network which is supposed to fill in what OpenEir didn’t.
Meanwhile I’m on coax; that’s the price you pay to live in the city center. (For whatever reason, Dublin city center tends to be behind on this stuff; my old apartment, beside Trinity, didn’t even get _VDSL_ until 2016 or so).
Edit: I don't say that MENA immigrants targeting public services is not an issue. I say that this issue exists globally too, it's a result of having a lot of uneducated demoralised people, whatever their background or origin.
At the same time it is possible Polish sports fans are more rabid in their “support”.
It's the aftershocks of all the coronavirus/antivaxx conspiracy theories. The people who got brainwashed hard attack doctors/ER teams because they see them as murderers.
(Edit: full disclosure - one more search and the sixth had a common Turkish surname (no mugshot)).
Second, the nationality of the perpetrators is often masked in case it is a foreigner.
Third, a random Google search isn’t exactly representative.
Obviously native Europeans have attacked police, medics etc. But organized mobs attacking firefighters, paramedics etc is a new phenomenon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39047455
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-faile...
> Second, the nationality of the perpetrators is often masked in case it is a foreigner.
Ah, well, if we're going by nationality, I'm 6 for 6 - that last bloke with a Turkish surname was an ex-policeman, so I reckon he was probably a British national.
I think the random Google search is one up on a random internet denizen's unsourced opinion, to be honest. I kicked the tyres of your opinion with the most basic, cursory test and it came up short.
Checking out the "offences by outcome" uk gov spreadsheet[1] is a bit of a wash. Africans aren't any more overrepresented than they are for violent crime in general (less, in fact) and Middle Easterners seem to be lurking in the giant bag of "Not Stated" ethnicity. Though at least for assault of emergency workers in general (as opposed to predictable group attacks on entering an area) "White British" are still (barely) the majority.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The other "low income, uneducated people" never do such things, always the same group.
>The other "low income, uneducated people"
You are horribly misinformed if you actually believe this.
I live in the EU and that's not true, I know multiple people who own guns and go to the shooting range every other weekend
It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, and depending on the country can range from “California difficulty” to “basically an NFA stamp” but they’re out there.
Often they are not “the scary black rifle” type, but they’re still firearms.
Then again, in the USA you can buy a Gatling gun and you rarely hear issues around that - https://youtu.be/9U8850jgTwk?si=5UTz7HsgaLxgbFuS
Oddly, crossbows are also restricted, though may be licensed as above; as I understand it this is due to a legislative error which no-one has gotten around to fixing.
And in other countries, they make no distinction between a black-powder blunderbuss and fully automatic military weapons - they're both equally hard to obtain, so the people who do get a gun end up with a select-fire rifle.
Pistols are often more heavily regulated than rifles, because they're concealable.
In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want. Artillery not so much if it is autoloading. The "own a musket for home defense" copy pasta comes to mind.
Is this... common? Can't imagine why anyone would want one.
(It's probably $5k to $10k to get a working cannon, and most owners are probably reenactors and movie-proppers.)
There was also a tradition at our high school to shoot off a cannon each time our football team scored a point at home games (just the powder no projectile).
Europe? Literally lots of people have guns, where I live, from 01 Sept there's plenty of gunshots ringing out scaring one of my dogs. I know two people in the uk that have shotguns (police checked, locked away in the attic). There are many ww2 firearms in circulation (Serbia, I believe just had an amnesty), so 'literally' is incorrect. The difference is: guns aren't common, and certainly aren't often carried, and most definitely not openly (apart from farmers and hunters, but the gun must be unloaded and broken(. My fave is talking to Americans that 'can't wait to get back home so I can carry my gun, for protection, it's my right'. Not a single one of them has been threatened whilst here. Nor have they been threatened in the States....but it's their right to protect themselves from the government. I always ask, if their government started being 'oppressive', how long would either sides' ammunition last? Not a single person I've spoken to has more than a few days ammo available.
I used to work at a multinational, we were quite amused when we saw an update to the US workplace rules that prohibited firearms anywhere on company property. One of my colleagues has his rifle in the office - he was going on a hunting trip and leaving immediately after work. Of course it was locked in a gun case and the bolt was stored separately, but it was amusing.
That being said, I never saw a gun or even heard of someone having it (in my city of Novi Sad, at least - things may be different elsewhere).
Homicide rates for 2021 (according to macrotrends.net):
Serbia: 1.06 US: 6.81
Exactly.
Not only outside-EU countries; I live in EU country that has ratio of registered guns to cops ~4,5:1.
The difference to US is, that a) there's no open carry and b) no legal owner is going to threaten with a gun over something trivial (it is a good way to lose your license).
These two things make people carrying guns invisible, but not non-existing.
It's especially absurd when you realize that these people scream that they need guns to protect them from an oppressive government. Meanwhile in the US, we have millions and millions of dollars a year in Civil Asset Forfeiture, which even when justified is a direct impingement on your Fourth amendment rights, and just an assault on justice in general. These same people are also loudly applauding laws in states like Florida and Texas that explicitly oppress people of certain types. They also support laws that prevent women from getting absolutely NECESSARY health care.
The ONLY "right" they care about is the right to own guns, yet how many of them took up arms and came after the government after ruby ridge? Only one really did, and they used a bomb to kill a hundred innocent people in a completely unrelated part of the government.
EVERYTHING about "gun culture" in america is about "feeling" powerful, about being "strong", about fear of nebulous bullshit that doesn't exist. These people will seek out a video of some drugged up criminal taking twenty bullets before finally collapsing, and use that to justify buying the biggest handgun they can afford because of "stopping power" as if they need to defend their home from the damn hulk, and definitely don't care about over penetration accidentally killing their kids in the next room over.
These people simply want a world where might makes right, but are terrified because they aren't "might", so they get guns. They OBSESS over hero fantasies, gathering on message boards or facebook to talk about how they "totally would have stopped that shooter". They joke about shooting children that date their daughter, they make jokes about how "someone" should shoot people for being wrong. They just generally don't think other people deserve safety or life, and that the penalty for any action should be swift death from a cops gun. They then are stunningly silent when a cop shoots a legal firearm owner because the cop got jumpy about a black guy saying he had a gun. They often ARE the cops actually. Meanwhile an actual active shooter shows up in their local school and they take their sweet ass time doing nothing while hearing kids dying. Remember, the gun heavy community of Uvalde had many of their children murdered while heavily armed cops sat outside and prevented parents from trying to save their kids on their own. Did the local community rise up against this government force and overthrow a useless and dangerous government? No, they voted for them again in the next election. Because gun nuts would never shoot a cop, because they are friends.
Which is funny, because what do they think "the government" they would have to overthrow is? The ATF, and worse, liberals. That's as far as it goes. When they say "The second amendment is to protect us from an oppressive government", that means liberals sending the ATF to confiscate their guns and THAT'S IT.
What's funny is that the main historical example of a large scale uprising against the american state, the civil war, was fought like any other military conflict: with state owned firearms, including United States owned firearms stolen from american armories. They also seem convinced the the army would be on their side, instead of most of the military staying loyal to their commanders as is the norm in that situation. They point to Afghanistan as "look the US can't fight a resident population with guns", utterly oblivious to the fact that Afghanistan is what the US military looks like when its trying to play good cop. If you want to know what the US does to an armed and rebelling community, simply look how the US treated labor unions in the early 1900s. Here's a hint: They flatten an entire city block to kill them and it doesn't even make it into a history book.
And to top off this stupid shit pie? The NRA, the main advocate organization for gun ownership in the US, was run by Oliver North, of Iran-Contra infamy, until 2019, and their main funding comes through Russian hands nowadays.
Anecdotes aren't the strongest, but no worries, many of the small group of people I hang with have the combined capacity of a batallion, along with manufacturing capabilities in the case it's needed. All really great people too. We'd welcome a Euro like yourself in a heartbeat despite any differences we may have. Good luck out there.
Just like sending aid to Ukraine does not in any way excuse the US of invading a sovereign country in the middle east for fake reasons and then attempting colonialism for 20 years under the guise of "bringing democracy"
But you already knew that.
In the US, because of obscene paperwork and often actively hostile to poverty policies, it might be easier to just join a gang to survive.
Sadly I’ve heard many stories of cable/dish techs dealing with this nonsense.
The first step, of course, is coming to an agreement whether that subpopulation of 'irreversibly irresponsible' people should have the right to bear arms or not; in USA there doesn't seem to be a consensus about that.
So you will think twice to get it and you really don't want to loose it. Basically turning gun owners into the most law abiding citizens there is.
If you're talking about countries like UK or similar, where you can't legally defend against attackers and biggest cities are controlled by gangs with kitchen knives and acid bottles. Even police don't have guns and can't arrest them, cuz racism or something. GG EZ.
Good grief, where do you get your information?
* In the UK, it's perfectly legal to defend yourself ("reasonable force").
* Beat policemen don't carry guns; firearms officers do. Any policeman can arrest anyone they suspect of an offence.
* Drug dealers rob one another; it's a direct result of prohibition. If you rob a drug dealer, he isn't going to report it to the police. That's nothing special to the UK (or to big cities).
Come on, this is totally untrue. I grew up in rural Ireland and it's very common for farmers to own guns. Hunters too.
Check here [•] - Finland, for example, is only a couple of percentage points behind the US in number of households that own a gun (42% vs 37%).
The difference is in the culture, not gun ownership. In Finland, Ireland, and every single developed country in the world (and most developing countries too) except for the US, privately owned guns are for hunting or for killing pests, not for threatening humans. That's the difference.
•https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_g...
All of that is to say that the companies really do put the techs in harms way in their operations.
Nevertheless never heard of such a thing happening.
In your average American neighborhood none of this would happen. In the rougher poor neighborhoods, everybody thinks everyone is out to get them (and frankly they might be right), is on edge, and likely has a loose association to the law or social mores.
Without going into an entire sociology diatribe, in America there are many reasons someone may end up poor, but low impulse control, lack of education, and an inability to follow rules tend to top the list, all of which can lead to very troubling outcomes that wouldn’t happen among the gainfully employed average, whom also pay their bills and would not be targeted for disconnection of service.
The majority of Americans own or have access to firearms (although it’s barely a minority of “households”), but incidents involving firearms happen in poorer neighborhoods predominantly. The mix is not great, and we should do something about it as a society but it’s a complex and somewhat intractable issue that’s not fully solved by just throwing money at it (just look at council houses in the UK as an example of similar outcomes despite social support).
Why did you think this?
> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people.
Nothing about the parent comment implies otherwise. You're intentionally making up points that nobody made in order to push your agenda.
> I'm really a bit surprised to hear this.
...and you're not really surprised - this is just another use of emotionally manipulative language.
Little did I know that the antenna in Europe is actually energized by design (I think I found out later?) and I received several non-damaging but definitely "means business" shocks whilst trying to manipulate the cables.
A normal rooftop antenna is not energized. However, if that's in a house, there likely is a power amplifier placed in the line (or, for more fancy setups, a powered splitter box) to make sure every antenna socket can have a TV plugged in without compromising signal integrity.
wtf. Wanna drop some links?
It was the neutral to their house failing and using the cable line shield and it's associated grounds as a neutral.
One guy who ran a event ticket operation (selling tickets to events) we installed a T1 for the phone company wouldn't go out unless they could bring a security guard. The same guy once came to our office and waited outside in the parking lot and followed one of my coworkers home demanding that she fix his internet. Her father came out and confronted him and he took off.
Another time someone was mad that his address didn't qualify for DSL because "the man was keeping him down from getting fast internet".
Later in life I worked at the phone company and linemen told me stories about being high on a pole in rough neighborhoods and being accosted by folks on the ground brandishing pistols demanding to know whose phone line they were tapping (they tried to explain that stuff is done remotely but they didn't understand).
as a non-american... who is supposed do be "the man" ?
For approximately two months, we had absolutely zero internet service, while Comcast continued to collect our monthly fees. We kept calling, and they kept sending out tech after tech. I don't recall what the final tech fixed, but they complained that all of the previous techs should have spotted the issue. We never got reimbursed for those two months of non-service, but we did magically start getting cable tv after the final tech visit. We figured it was their gesture of kindness for the Comcast hell we'd been through.
Sometime around 2015, Comcast seemed to get better. I was able to get dual-stack v4/v6 to the house and bandwidth exceeded advertised rates. When I returned their cable modem after buying my own, returning it was zero-drama / no paperwork problems. Also... in 2015, if you got dual-stack, your support calls were handled by a group with better hold times and generally knew more about what was really going on (rather than reading off a script.)
My last experience with Lumen was pretty horrific. Worse than any problems I ever had with Comcast (including the time we didn't have internet service for 3 months.)
It's very strange to hear myself say this, but I now have a generally positive opinion of Comcast.
What the fuck are you going to do about it? Spectrum's ancestor agreed to not offer service in this county so go ahead and switch back to dialup you worthless maggot.
1. Pointing a firearm, AR-15 or otherwise, at the cable guy (or anyone else) in a threatening way is a felony in all 50 states, just like in Europe and elsewhere. Using threat of force to prevent a person from leaving is an additional felony (kidnapping) in all 50 states, just like in Europe. I assume you called the police as soon as you got out of there and the perpetrator went to prison for many years? You left that part out, and it's important to stress because non-Americans seem to be getting an erroneous or exaggerated perception of everyday life in the USA.
2. A nitpick, but the firearm in question likely wasn't an AR-15 as "around then" was midway through the valid time frame of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban [1] and while a limited number of pre-ban AR-15s were grandfathered in, they were rare and very expensive. The floodgates opened after its sunset in 2004, after which they became very popular, unlike before the ban.
3. "Pulling a gun on" the cable guy, or shooting the cable guy and "leaving to die up a pole," like all murders, is a felony in all 50 states. You made the right decision to leave such a dangerous job, I feel awful for all your colleagues, and I do hope that the perpetrators did a long time behind bars.
4. Fortunately, that spate of violence seems to have been localized in both space and time: to the best of my knowledge, while such incidents do occur, they're rare. I don't work in the industry, I know several people who do (for many years), and they've told me that they've never had anything like that happen, the main problem they encounter is peoples' hostile dogs in the yard/house. A web search turns up a few incidents, but not many considering how many cable installations take place in America each year. Also, keep in mind that it goes both ways: sometimes the cable guy attacks the customer (and there's no need for a gun, e.g. [2]).
5. "People's shitty TVs backfeeding electricity into the cable line" My guess is, it's not shitty TVs, but rather faulty wiring in the user's house (ground loop, etc.). Anyone who's performed with enough PA systems has had the experience of grabbing the mic and getting a 110 VAC shock.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2022/0...
Given your explanation, maybe you should question the veracity of his comment.
We really need to look long and hard at what we allow jail time for. Jail time in service of big media corporations seems just insane.
There is no theft. In the digital world there's merely copying, but in this case it was just tuning into an existing signal with a wire.
Theft of property would require that you broke into HBO's office and stole the master tapes, for example.
As to the telecom aspect, it can go either way. In Canada, it is considered theft to use a telecommunications service without the rights to do so. Under USA federal criminal law, I believe it is just referred to as unauthorized reception.
Property theft and intellectual rights theft are two very different things. If I steal your car, you are now out a car and the use of a car. If I steal a copy of your artwork, you still have that artwork and can still sell copies of that artwork. I only start impacting your bottom line if I start selling copies.
To the extent you are impacted by a copyright violation, you can be made whole with a market rate payment for the copies created and a penalty. That's what civil law is for.
Wage theft has a much bigger negative impact on people's lives yet it's basically never criminally prosecuted. So why should copyright theft ever be criminally prosecuted?
> Also note that cable theft (e.g., the physical tampering element) can damage emergency communication lines and can create dangerous electrical problems.
Fair point, though I can't see why we'd punish that more harshly than we'd punish unauthorized digging (which is typically just civil to replace damaged lines.)
No, it isn't. The hint is right there in the name. Copying does not deprive people of their property. That's why they came up with the word Infringement to use instead of Theft, because they are fundamentally different things.
It worries me that there are people now who think that information is like property and that it can be owned.
Huh? The term "Intellectual Property" is a metaphor, not literal. There is zero intrinsic moral imperative against copying; copyright is a policy decision to encourage creation under a capitalist system. Other systems for encouraging creation have existed in the past (and exist concurrently with copyright).
If copyright were a property right, then "fair use" would be legalized theft.
Copyrights are transferable intangible assets created by the legal instruments of the capitalist system. If you were to buy the copyright to the Metallica catalog, you can license that catalog for a return on your investment. It would be an asset of your estate like any other paper investment.
[Edit: Also... La propriété, c'est le vol!]
Charges like disrupting business operations or unauthorized access I can see, but theft? nah.
>ORS 164.125
>Theft of services
>(2) ... “Communication service” includes, but is not limited to, use of telephone, computer and cable television systems.
If we accept how this law wants to redefine Theft, then trespassing, squatting, illegal parking, and many other violations should now be called theft too since they involve using a resource in an unauthorized way and are actually depriving others from using the resource (which does not happen with cable modems). Spamming comments should also be called theft too since they're using server resource in an unauthorized way.
But I have to submit: If discussed within the context of Theft of services in ORS 164.125, then I supposed the misuse of Theft can be excused. That said, I really don't think we as a society should humor or follow how some lobbyist or politician decide to misuses words.
Pennsylvania: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/18/00.039.02...
Texas: https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-31-04/
New York: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/165.15
In any case, in the United States, theft of service is generally treated as a criminal matter. I don’t see why this should be treated any differently, or how it would be fair to single cable companies out for exclusion from protection for having their service taken for free. Inn Keepers, other utility companies, and many other businesses enjoy the same or similar protections for their services.
Unless someone tries claim you are stealing electric current, this claim of theft is absurd - first you must attach a device to the cable, then spend your time watching said device (presuming it has a screen). Until that happens, it belies belief that you have "taken" anything. After that point, one must assume somehow this is content enriching your life somehow (dubious), or that you are recording and reselling content (which would be obvious fraud, at the copyright level).
Before then, the fact is that another entity is blasting all content continuously on all their lines. That's not theft.
I'm not arguing that people should be intentionally jacking into other people's wires, or saying cable should be free for everyone, just that the legal definition of theft here is absurd. That you can then be prosecuted for something you have not done by no fault of your own except malpratice of the people involved in originally laying the lines, is ridiculous and a sure sign if cronyism and protectionism, not one of a healthy judicial system.
Survey says...XXX
Texas Penal Code Section 31.04 - Theft of Service
https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._penal_code_section_31...
Electricity theft does extract a resource from the grid (electricity provider needs to supply the energy you're using on the other end). Similarly, phreaking uses phone lines which is a finite resource too (and phone company would rather keep those available for paying customers).
Cable on the other hand runs all channels to your household in the first place. By removing the filter, you aren't creating any additional load on the cable network or using any additional resources for free.
But I was thinking of overall service theft, and did not think of the filter. That case is different.
This makes me think, though. I lived through this time, and adding the filter makes zero logistic sense. EG, why have anyone, who isn't paying, even connected?
Then I remembered something.
I lived in a house, where there was a shared box for 2 units. Someone had pried open the box, and removed the filters. As a result, the cable guy disconnected the wire at the pole.
This resulted in something different. Instead of a cutoff, most channels came through, just very fuzzy. And as a kid, I lived in a rural area, and we owned an antenna booster/amp, which had made signals poorer than this, crystal clear.
It seemed that leaving an uncapped end inside a box on the pole, with loads of signal, bled enough for a usable signal to get through.
So this is probably why a filter was placed. And of course, to prevent the long wire from picking up local over the air stuff too.
Ah well.
For example I have a small amount of engine oil that needs disposal. I could dump it in the drainage ditch in front of my house and probably the only measurable harm it might cause would be to weeds that are growing in the ditch. By time it got to where oil could harm anything valuable it would be so diluted that it would not cause any detectable harm.
Yet doing so is illegal. It needs to be illegal because if a large number of people did it there would be measurable harm even though the harm from any one of the individuals would not be measurable.
With any kind of theft of services you need to look at not just the direct harm an individual might cause to the service provider (which may be immeasurably small) but also the harm to the service provider and to the people who are paying for the service if theft of services were widespread.
To give an extreme example if I am the only customer in my town who is actually paying for service with everyone else committing theft of services to get that service the service provider is likely to either withdraw from the market or raise rates significantly, either of which harms me.
Of course it would never actually get that extreme, but if even a few percent of people are doing it the service provider will probably start spending money on technological solutions to stop that. And the costs of those technological solutions will likely be pushed onto subscribers. Those solutions may also require installing more equipment at the user end to use the service (e.g., set top boxes) that can reduce the user's privacy.
To the oil ditch example, I certainly could see something like "it's $1000 and cleanup costs". The only way I could see jail time being justified is if you routinely decided to go around spraying the neighborhood with motor oil.
But for cable, there doesn't seem like there's ever a case where an individual could warrant jail time. Fine + cable bill for the free months of cable seems like more than enough for most people and for the "serial offender" it seems like lifetime subscription would be more than enough to avoid future problems (court mandated cable would be an interesting punishment :D)
I got one of those old "TV cards", so you could hook up an antenna and have TV on your computer (yeah, this was before "internet" was better than TV for moving picture entertainment) and had heard about software that could decode foxtel signal.
After a lot of futzing about, and failed attempts, it started working well enough to be watchable - although most of the content was shit, it was foxtel after all.
My point being - the signal is sent through the cable either way. Whether there's a device at the end of it or not. Equipment, hardware, personnel, power was provided by me to get it working. The previous residents paid for the connection of the cable itself. The data is all sent down the pipe whether or not someone was watching it at the far end, just due to the nature of cable at the time.
I get your electricity analogy though, but I really don't know if it applies to the data being sent down the cable. I doubt it cost "faceless them" any extra as my understanding was that the cable was a shared signal by the street (or some other small-ish communal size).
Once I got it working, I mostly lost interest :)
A lot of older sci-fi books, eg Heinlein, had hacker types discovering some highly profitable thing, but being uninterested except it was fun to figure out. This was often to the mystification of "normal" people, who would plead for them to work the idea into profit.
Often they were tricked into making the process profitable, by being told how impossible it was.
I responded in more ontopic detail in another comment.
But I just recall small exchanges, im many of his works, where Long or another character, would notice some scientist archetype come up with an idea, yet not care one wit about exploiting it.
It was all about the puzzle of discovery, and Long/etc was often amused.
“Grand theft auto” is “taking without consent” in most of the U.K., although in Scotland it’s “taking and driving away”
It’s a sad sign of American cultural hegemony that GTA wasn’t called TADA.
Either way the amount of power abstracted from a cable signal is infinitesimal.
If no unlawful deprivation of property has taken place then no theft has taken place. Why is this concept so hard to understand?
They want to be able to install a cable all the way to someone’s house, and then have the state prosecute them if they dare touch it.
One could argue this is a major purpose of the state. When you can't deputize the state to resolve disputes, you get gang violence (see the drugs trade for more examples than you can count)
At least Comcast made some attempt to fix it... and also got stonewalled by the State's Attorney's office.
I think the work by this attorney really did a lot to take the blame off of Comcast, which is probably why the author felt fine not suing at the end.
Yes, that would be less likely. I was more thinking if you reported it stolen while it was in your friend's possession and they get pulled over.
a better friend will be sharing the cell with you
The Police exist to protect the money of corporations.
And I don't think just because the only witness states no crime occurred that the prosecutor will drop the charges. I would say in at least 50% of domestic battery cases the complainant will call the prosecutor at some point and tell them that no crime happened and please can they let the defendant out of jail. In almost zero cases this happens, in my experience. Normally they run it all the way to trial and sit there holding up the court waiting for the no-show witness to turn up before the judge acquits.
They wouldn't have time to do anything like due diligence on all the cases they're asked to handle. Criminalization is the go-to answer for everything nowadays. And I'm also sure that most of the time the court is unwilling to actually enforce any of a lot of different standards, or to go through its procedures in a way that actually accomplishes those procedures' purpose.
Dereliction of duty is pretty much SOP for lots of people, many of them in supposedly responsible jobs that affect other people's lives.
Wow, that brings back memories! I remember reading this article when it was posted to Slashdot because I had /just/ ordered @Home service.
Instead I went with DSL service with the phone company (forgetting the Ma' Bell branch at the time). The service never worked, it took 30 days of calling support, going through the script to get past Tier 1 (remove software, install software...etc), only to be put on hold for 30 minutes before getting dropped.
I finally went with @Home, which worked without going to jail.
The early days of broadband were an interesting time. It was a nice upgrade from ISDN or Dial-Up, though.
[1] - https://yro.slashdot.org/story/99/04/26/1229227/get-a-cable-...
There's also a general feeling that the pandemic "changed things". I can't quite put my finger on the whole extent of that, but I can definitely see the overall feeling of everyone being out for themselves contributing to shamelessly playing the BATNA.
Whenever that happens, I am reminded of what my life was like when all of my work emails were promptly responded to. I am also reminded that I should be glad to have escaped a world where such timeliness-at-all-hours is the expectation!
And yeah, I expect if this happened to anyone today, the first bit of advice anyone (including myself) would give them would be to get a lawyer to handle it.
I didn't notice right away so a couple months went by. I called them, they stopped charging me, and credited my cable account back. But what is utterly crazy, is that that credit is never used. The months come and go by, and balance is still -$50 (i.e. I have an over payment of 50)
I called a few times to get to money back, because, it's my money. I received 3 different explanations that were obviously made up and contradicting each other (call centers make shit up all the time). Eventually someone told me the balance will be paid off when I close my account and the only way I have to recover it is to change operators. Except they don't have competition where I am.
It's trivial, not a jail time, but this simple enough process of "take that amount and write a cheque" is already impossible because a) no-one knows b) no-one cares c) I'm not gonna sue on such a low amount d) I can't leave e) there's no incentive whatsoever for anyone to expand some effort to understand what is happening to my account f) no-one has any sort of any power, and escalations are a myth
You can get away with ignoring customer complaints, but generally not their lawsuits, unless you're okay with losing by default.
A perfect example of how the private sector cannot self regulate to the benefit of consumers simply because a profit motive exists.
Every time I've made an ombudsman complaint I have received Good Service™ from the company and a speedy resolution to my problem.
"Sometimes, operators turn on a signal by accident or forget to deactivate it after a tenant stops a cable subscription. People are liable for any services they use in this way and it is generally advisable to contact the cable company to report an unexpected cable signal"
https://www.mylawquestions.com/what-is-cable-theft.htm
That's absurd, it can only be the result of corruption.
What distinguishes a belief in free markets is believing that misbehavior—that government bodies have a right to punish and prohibit—does not include mutually voluntary interactions, like selling high-risk financial instruments to willing customers, who according to a court, are deemed to have provided informed consent to those risks.
Also, "Capitalism" used to mean "using capital to increase capital." We now use it to mean "using capital to increase private wealth."
I understand what you're trying to say and am not refuting it. I just think it's funny we let "bandits" [1] redefine the vocabulary of the social construction of commerce.
1. Obviously I do not mean to imply bankers are "bandits" in the classical sense. Not a single one of them went to jail in 2008. Were they bandits, they most certainly would have wound up in the hoosegow.
You call ACMA when someone is interfering with your licensed radio spectrum, and from experience, the service is excellent!
- Why was the Maryland State Attorney so keen to continue with the prosecution, despite a hostile witness? In general, why do individuals and companies appear (to an outsider) to have so much influence in the USA to 'press charges'? From a theoretical perspective, it doesn't seem like there is any advantage to the criminal justice system in allowing people to persuade the prosecutors to open a case, since a large company like Comcast could churn out hundreds of vaguely plausible but socially inconsequential claims of fraud, when the prosecutors could surely find better things to spend their time on.
- Why is it possible to attempt to 'avoid being served' at all? I can't see anything wrong with receiving the notice by mail like any other correspondence. Are police officers in the USA really expected to just drive around as glorified (and armed, for that matter) postmen for the prosecutor's notices of petty criminal charges?
- Finally, and, for me, most importantly, how could the author have acquired a criminal record from a case that was dropped prior to a trial, let alone a conviction? It seems really dodgy that, in order to 'expunge' the record of a crime that the state doesn't necessarily think occurred, you have to agree to indemnify a third party from your claims of damages when that third party had no involvement originally except to initially report the 'crime', and even more so in this case, as the author opens by noting that there wasn't even a contractual relationship between them!
I'm under no pretence that my own country's judiciary is perfect, but it appears to me that the USA has a number of bizarre procedural bottlenecks that could be fixed with little more than a stroke of a pen. That begs the question: who stands to gain from this? Eagerly awaiting responses from knowledgable and/or wise Americans!
Speaking in generalities without knowing Maryland's state situation specifically, but whereas US Attorneys (federal) are executive positions (nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate), state level is (including Maryland) an elected position (you'll note the author mentioning voting for one of them). So politics ends up playing some role in that they want to get reelected, so be "tough" on certain causes of the day etc. Britain has plenty of history of that too fwiw. Prosecutorial discretion should play a role but it's not always pure. That said this was probably nothing special, merely in the same category as minor thefts, where if someone was guilty it'd be some sort of plea. Very bad to be caught in the grinder, but no sort of conspiracy. Someone complained of a small crime, state didn't do a good job with it.
>In general, why do individuals and companies appear (to an outsider) to have so much influence in the USA to 'press charges'? From a theoretical perspective, it doesn't seem like there is any advantage to the criminal justice system in allowing people to persuade the prosecutors to open a case, since a large company like Comcast could churn out hundreds of vaguely plausible but socially inconsequential claims of fraud, when the prosecutors could surely find better things to spend their time on.
This is a weird statement. In the majority of cases who else would you generally expect to kick off a case but the victim of a crime? It's always up to the government whether to start (or stop) a prosecution, but we thankfully do not live in a panopticon and thus the biggest source of starting criminal trials is... people reporting crimes. Prosecutors do have limited time and resources, so what they choose to pursue is going to depend on a lot of calculations both sometimes unreasonable and often completely reasonable. Whether what they pick is the best use of their time or not is not a trivial question. And again, Maryland AG is an elected position, so if people were angry about them going after cable fraud at all they'd be free to campaign against them on that.
>- Why is it possible to attempt to 'avoid being served' at all? I can't see anything wrong with receiving the notice by mail like any other correspondence.
Millions of people have no permanent address, or may only check their mail once in a long while. Mail sometimes goes missing (for weeks, months, or permanently). We're talking criminal prosecution here though even civil suits are no joke. It is an absolutely vital small bit of justice vs the opposing party (and particularly the vast powers of the state) to at the very minimum ensure people absolutely know they are being sued. And in turn have a chance to muster their defense, meet court deadlines and so on. There are reasonable safeguards if a court decides someone is purposefully evading, but there is a bar there.
>Are police officers in the USA really expected to just drive around as glorified (and armed, for that matter) postmen for the prosecutor's notices of petty criminal charges?
Yes, and the government can suck it the hell up. There are also professional servers who can be hired. But reasonable efforts must be expended to ensure someone being prosecuted or sued has been given adequate notice of that fact. The flipside is abuse of default judgements, which is far, far worse.
>- Finally, and, for me, most importantly, how could the author have acquired a criminal record from a case that was dropped prior to a trial, let alone a conviction?
They... couldn't? Author clearly is not a lawyer and was confused on something there. Maybe they're talking about some sort of credit report Comcast had filed as well. Or they just wanted the court records sealed (they mention getting spam mail pretty fast) or I don't know. But they weren't convicted of anything and thus had no "criminal record".
>I'm under no pretence that my own country's judiciary is perfect, but it appears to me that the USA has a number of bizarre procedural bottlenecks that could be fixed with little more than a stroke of a pen.
I could pick a handful of cases from British history going back decades and draw broad conclusions about the entire country as well and it'd also be silly.
They don't. Individuals and companies cannot bring charges against someone. They can report a crime (like Comcast did in this case) and then the government can determine if they want to prosecute. Someone saying they want to press charges is just signaling that they are willing to cooperate with the prosecution. Likewise saying that you wont press charges is just signalling that you won't cooperate with the persecution. In either case they don't actually have to listen to you.
>since a large company like Comcast could churn out hundreds of vaguely plausible but socially inconsequential claims of fraud
Filing a false police report is a crime. If Comcast actually testified in court then it would be perjury. They'd also likely be subject to lawsuits from everyone they falsely accused once this was all discovered.
Because you know it would take a judge exactly 1 minute to consider two facts - 1) you had a contract for that cable and 2) installing a video trap is not your job - before he'd slap the charges back into the face of the cable companies attorney.
Yeah, I wouldn't care about that.
> I live, you would just lough out loud, lean back and continue watching TV.
Here where I live I wouldn't even connect a TV unless I have paid for the service. I wouldn't know if they forgot to install a video trap.
> it would take a judge exactly 1 minute to consider two facts - 1) you had a contract for that cable and 2) installing a video trap is not your job
Yeah well. But what if Comcast brings in "evidence" that they have installed a video trap? Maybe their guy documented installing one but forgot to actually do it. Or maybe he installed it on the wrong line. Now you are not laughing because on paper it seems like you have opened up the box and removed the video trap.
I guess the reason is that they probably could have sued for malicious prosecution and asked the court to expunge it without signing a waiver, but it was easier to just sign.
When's the last time an honest, reputable business changed its name? I've seen name changes in restaurants, social networks, apartment buildings, duct cleaning scammers, and it's never for a good reason.
My layer 3 service is from A&A, which suits my needs. Other people probably wouldn’t want to chat with the engineers on IRC when there’s a problem though so they would go with talk talk or Bt or whatever.
I spent a lot of time soldering descramblers which worked for a year or so until the coding changed again. Only for personal use. They usually only managed video anyway, not audio. But it didn't matter as in the premium material I was interested as an exploring teenager the video was way more important than the audio >:)
Of course this was pre-internet which solved that material access issue.
But I don't think people ever actually went to jail for this stuff. With the premium boxes there was no way to detect it, they could only go after the sellers of the kits.
Always get a lawyer.
Plus bail money.
Innocent people frequently wind up in prison and even after exculpatory evidence is discovered, it takes A LOT of effort to get them released. Because the state argues "they were provided with due process."
Do not assume that the mere existence of exculpatory evidence will allow you to evade successful prosecution.
(But thankfully, it worked fine in this case and works in many other cases.)
But here’s the rub: I’ve seen very intelligent people run up against the legal system before - some civil cases, some criminal. The ones that came out well were the ones that realized their opponent was an uncaring machine designed to grind people into dust in a competition whose rules they found alien. The others thought they didn’t need an attorney, and that their intellect would carry the day.
Totally unfair. Biased against plenty of disadvantaged people, even. Sucks, but them’s the breaks.
Could you tell us more about the source of your experience please?
> pro se works more often than owenmarshall implies,
And there are very well documented cases where a pro se defendant gets themselves into bigger trouble.
I'm not trying to imply you should represent yourself on a felony case, but at least in California in the past, people have successfully had cases dismissed when they appeared in court, representing themselves with documentation the prosecutor should have looked at before filing the case.
Not saying you shouldn’t get a lawyer, but I don’t see how you can claim she “overestimated her competency”
* EDIT: fixed gender pronouns
Or she got lucky?
You know if something in your home catches fire and smoke is billowing out of it is recommended to call the fire brigade and to try to put it out. Yes, sometimes you will get lucky and it will just peter out. And because of that sometimes you will find stories where something caught fire, they did all the wrong things and yet they ended up all okay. Would you conclude from that that they "estimated their firefighting competency accurately"?
Oh, give over. It's a basic fraud case, you're not hiring a white-shoe firm to represent you.
A few hundred bucks gets a lawyer to look at the case and make the phone calls - or send a letter or two - on your behalf. And the bonus is that they actually know what to say, as opposed to whatever you frenetically google, and know who to say it to, as opposed to whoever you happen to find in the phone book. Just having a lawyer signals to your counterparty that you are not winging it; that combined with an incredibly weak (at best) case & a complainant who has backed away can lead to your case being dismissed with less investment in time & worry than if you did it yourself.
And actually with several others. Since then the similar paranoid defensive dealing with overly kind and eager representatives saved me lots of trouble. It is exhausting not to trust anything and is shame we have to waste time and energy on such instead of just honest processes.
Edit: I found it https://www.nexttv.com/news/get-cable-modem-go-jail-142544
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Cahners+Busine...
How stupid does a politician have to be to promote this as a criminal offense? It just denigrates criminal law.
Edit: my bad, it was promoted by Barry fucking Goldwater, a bona fide fascist. So not stupidity, just genuinely evil cruelty.
That's one of the things I miss about slashdot was the summary. Why click the link? I wish hacker news would implement that.
05 September 2023: Hacker News Front Page
I doubt there's been a webpage that was slashdotted in 1999 and then became front page news of other website more than 20 years later.
The original poster had the time, money, and wherewithal required to document the issue, pay for legal representation, fight the case, chase expungement, and absorb the damages to her character from the remnant records of her criminal charge that remained even after expungement of official records.
Far less has destroyed the livelihood of far more people.
Sure, on the scale of evil it's nowhere near the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I don't think this is shrug your shoulder and say "tough titty" territory either. How would you like it if you were unlucky enough to not have been able to sort this out and be in jail for it? On the bright side, it's not as bad as getting your house bombed!
However, that's not how the story was told.