Hacker News Reader

Comment by Obscurity4340 | Hacker News Reader

Just nice to see it used against someone other than the little people for once

I used to know a family who ran a gas station in my city. I was surprised to learn they made almost nothing from the sale of fuel. The actual profit -- to them -- was in the convenience store goods they sold.

I'm not sure who eats the cost of the theft, but I'm guessing it's the same people that make almost no money from the sale of the fuel. These were not wealthy people; they were working obscene hours and barely scraping by.

For anyone interested, Freakonomics has an "Economics of Everyday Things" podcast with a good episode on gas stations: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/gas-stations/

They said they get $0.30 per gallon which mostly goes toward the other overhead, leaving $0.07 of profit per gallon.

Gas stations - especially in rural areas - are usually hanging by a very thin thread and if they go bust they leave the area underserved. I don't know what your definition for 'little people' is but gas station owners would definitely qualify in my reading of that term. They tend to make less than minimum wage. If they make any money at all it is usually from store items, and that's one of the reasons 'pump then pay' is a thing in those places, it is an attempt to get the customer into the store.

It’s stealing from gas pump owners who are still very much the little people.

Last I heard, gas station "owners" make such a minuscule amount of money from the gas pumps and really rely on what they sell

Barely making a profit on gas sales doesn't mean you're OK losing $3,000 of gas.

It's actually worse.

Having a zero-margin product stolen, means that your loss is 100% of the sale price.

Depends on if it is a direct corporate owned location, or franchised - but yes, I would argue that it hits many of the average small/medium business owners.

Things will be "interesting" over the next 10-20 with the switch to electrification - yet another entire sector that may no longer be viable for small/medium independent owners. (but, time marches on - we don't see many people lamenting the "buggy whip manufacturers" from days of old)

I actually think electric is one thing that could be squarely profitable for the small guy- think a small lot with solar panels or micro hydro and a few charging stations invested for much less than the cost of a house.

People often have an unrealistic notion of what solar can do. A single 50kW charger would require 125 400w panels minimum - around 3000 square feet of area - and still only be able to provide max current for a few hours of the day. And 50kW is still slower than most people will tolerate if they’re not at home/work.

Fast chargers pull huge amounts of electricity requiring significant electrical connections and infrastructure that's pretty expensive to build up. You could provide level 1 or 2 chargers maybe on a DIY but even a single fast charger is going to need a LOT of solar and batteries to provide round the clock service.

As other people mentioned, the money of owning a gas station comes mostly from the convenience store attached to it. This isn't going away, quite the opposite. "Fast" charging is quite slow by gas station standards, which means more time for the drivers to go in and shop.

Sort of. Most people will charge at home, so there will be less of that style of store with chargers. Along highways and in busy rural areas you will still find them - for travelers and truckers, but overall there is less need.

Though there is still need for a store close to home where I can get a bit of milk quick, my morning donuts, and all the other things. I hope such stores move closer to where people live - suburban people should experience the big city convenience of walking to such places and when they don't have a hope of competing for drivers they may as well move closer to where people live. (if zoning allows!)

If you can afford to setup a charger fast enough to bring people in. They're not going to stop and browse your candy isle for 3 hours while your low wattage level 2 charger trickles 30 mph of charge into their batteries unless that's the only option available. Faster charging, even staying within the bounds of AC Level 2 charging, requires beefy connections to the electrical grid to support more than one or two charging points.

Many places will make the transition but you'll also need to change your interior to dedicate more space to people waiting while charging.

Some would argue they are complicit of a giant crime against humanity and environment.

I mean, it's not like the thieves were stealing gas to put it back in the ground.

and stealing gasoline helps the situation?

Did I write that?

The gas station owners aren't the criminals. The people who built suburbs are.

Please try to make substantive comments, not wild flames

Cool, so theft is morally justified depending on whom is being stolen from. Also, burning 800 gallons of fuel will release over two tons of carbon into the atmosphere, but I guess we just blame the oil companies for that too.

This is where we are at now, the ultimate luxury, everyone has complete moral immunity for life for absolutely anything they do so long as someone else has more money than them, never mind if they are in the top 10% of the world's wealthy overall.

Seriously, it feels like all morality is situational now. People have no principles.

Something as straightforward as "stealing is wrong" doesn't apply. "Stealing from people I don't like is fine".

Not that I agree that stealing is acceptable (it's not), but this is expected and what happens deep into class warfare when inequality skyrockets and hopelessness sets in. People do what they can to make a buck, and justify it as evening out a perceived imbalance. We should expect to see more and more of this as more and more economic gains are captured by the rich, squeezing more of the middle class into poverty.

The massive wealth inequality has a role to play. People are willing to accept people having more money than them but 10 people owning 50% of the wealth while the rest are literally suffering through multiple jobs and still live paycheck to paycheck, that’s when people think of revolting. What we’re seeing now is the initial stages of a soft revolution where ideas are introduced to the larger public and reactions are gauged. Things aren’t bad enough for an actual revolution but these are the first signs of the growing discontent.

Morality has always depended on circumstances. When life gets hard, ideals held about morality or ethics tend get looser and looser until they fly right out the window.

Please try to make substantive comments, not wild flames.

> everyone has complete moral immunity for life for absolutely anything they do so long as someone else has more money than them, never mind if they are in the top 10% of the world's wealthy overall.

I've never seen anyone introduce the idea of "wealth absolutism". From your comment though I'm not sure if you would allow the bottom 10% to feel complete moral immunity.

Then they have cause to sue the bastards that sold them the pump equipment.

Society actually works a lot better if every possible way to steal from your neighbor isn't considered fair game.

At what point is it negligence on the part of the manufacturer?

Society works better if every exploitable loophole is not considered a valid excuse to steal from your neighbor.

You're talking past each other.

Through, not past.

I have no idea what that means.

Unless you mean "talking through" in the sense of teaching a lesson, because you're not. Your argument does not invalidate what they are saying, or bring any notable information to light. You merely started a waste-of-time tangent. Theft bad, everyone knows that.

They are are trying to weaken the societal obligation of not stealing by punting the obligation on equipment manufacturers to make things hard to steal.

It is cowardly and weak to abuse the legal system to compensate for societal problems by shifting blame onto easy targets. I have no interest in entertaining that line of reasoning.

It's not punting to go after negligence. And saying the goal is to weaken obligations against stealing, not even a side effect? You're throwing up quite a strawman there.

And a manufacturer is not an "easy target" at all. If suing a big manufacturer is easy in some circumstance, it means they screwed up badly.

It's shifting responsibility.

And yes, it is an easy target, because the goal is to find someone to yell at; nobody cares about winning lawsuits. It's about DAs finding a scapegoat to yell at, to avoid the fact that they have failed to disincentivize crime.

It's not negligence because nobody should be under any obligation to defend their property against theft. It's the job of the state to punish crime.

> It's shifting responsibility.

If you design a dispenser that dispenses at the wrong time, you have some responsibility.

> And yes, it is an easy target, because the goal is to find someone to yell at; nobody cares about winning lawsuits.

If you're not going to win, you lose even more money. Why would you file it?

> It's about DAs finding a scapegoat to yell at,

That has nothing to do with lawsuits.

> to avoid the fact that they have failed to disincentivize crime.

It's not possible to go after every little thing.

> It's not negligence because nobody should be under any obligation to defend their property against theft.

I'd better never have you watch my property, if you think there's no obligation at all to defend things.

Leaving valuable items in the middle of the sidewalk is negligent, even though it's a crime to take it.

Do you believe women bear responsibility as victims of sexual violence if they put themselves in unsafe circumstances?

People are different from property. Jesus what are you doing.

Also the correct analogy for the lawsuit would be leaving someone else to unsafe circumstances. Perhaps a vendor that sold the woman pepper spray that didn't spray. Would that vendor be blameless because a crime occurred and only the criminal gets blame?

Edit: Though if you really want an in-depth answer to your question, I would say that just by being an autonomous human being you are self-protecting in a way that meets the bar. Your items can't do the same, so you need to apply protections to them if they're in a place with easy public access.

Should women choose to put themselves in unsafe circumstances just to prove a point about how they ought to be able to?

I understand you're sentiment, however, never mind the fact that gas station owners are barely scraping by, theft is theft. We cannot win by debating ourselves because instead of dismantling the security state (that's what iot is), the result will be a doubling down (secure iot, install backdoors, take registration, etc)

Super nice to see. I am so looking forward to living in a society that continues to devolve to the point that thievery is generally accepted. Oh btw, give me your wallet

The thought behind it might be: perhaps now someone with influence will pay attention. At least, that was my interpretation.

Most of these stations are owner-operated. They usually aren’t owned by BigCo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com