A BART seat-slashing gang that was part of an upholstery racket (2019)
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
While searching for it I found the comic appeared as homework in a marketing class, with this wonderful student asking for help explaining the underlying marketing techniques:
https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/2-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The note reads something like this:
BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.
A month later we had a break in while I was home alone. He took off when he saw me. We got the door. Now we got a bulletproof 10.000€ door.
To this day I am convinced the door company sent the burglar.
It seems like a great way to identify potential marks, by looking for victims who (A) believe they have enough portable wealth that they are considering expensive security measures and (B) don't yet have any of those security measures already in place.
Most of the apartments are in multi-story buildings.
Mostly, mascot or emblem theft was a 90's media-generated gangster thing limited primarily to higher-crime areas to wear car emblems on a chain, so maybe they were gopniks but 15 years too late. Also why Rolls Royce invented the retracting bonnet mascot. They early ones were silver plated and later ones were optionally gold plated. (Of course like Porsches, Rolls Royce can and are customized, so I wouldn't at all be surprised if a solid platinum or palladium Spirit of Ecstasy exists.)
80's BMWs, Cadillacs, and Jaguars were big money makers for my dad. His dad and him bemoaned that they could've made more money if only they were dishonest. They both had experience working at dealerships as mechanics. They saw more tactics than these:
- Charging for parts not replaced (which is why you always ask to see the old parts)
- Magically finding other things wrong that need expensive, unnecessary parts (which is why you always get a written estimate before leaving, and appear to have a somewhat understanding of what constitutes the vehicle)
- Eyewash: overselling standard procedures or aspirational steps not performed, usually with the purpose of justifying higher prices and/or increasing customer satisfaction (if there's too much marketing, then you're the mark)
Also: In the US, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is 99.8% a confidence scam: it's a for-profit marketing company that sells a false appearance of authority and credibility with negligible actual due-diligence or accountability.
The “better” car companies simply design systems that force more labor hours into regular maintenance. For example, BMW’s ingenious battery placement that allows them to bill $700-$900 for 5 hours worth of work. Oh, and changing your own battery will void the warranty. Fortunately for BMW most of their clientele has enough money to not care.
Not in the US it won’t.
See Magnusson Moss:
2302.c here: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prel...
You'd have to be a lawyer to make that act work for you.
There isn't an automotive engineer in the world that would keep their job after submitting such a design, let alone get it into production.
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income.
> When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
French officials wanted a lifestyle more like home, including flush toilets.
So they built a sewer system. It was a perfect breeding ground for rats.
Now, Hanoi had a rat problem.
They hired exterminators, but it wasn't enough. So they offered a bounty to anyone who would kill a rat and bring in the severed tail as proof. It was much easier for them to dispose of a collection of rat tails instead of entire rat carcasses.
The locals quickly figured out that you could remove a rat's tail without killing it, and send it back into the sewers to breed more rats with fresh young tails.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
Here is an article that ties together the rat massacre, the cobra effect, factory workers' gloves, overtime pay, and heat-based bonuses:
I suspect if you time-box the reward that'll fix the cobra effect problem. Announce that you'll only pay for dead rats for ~4 months and at least in the final month people should realize that its time to kill the golden goose and provide all the rats they have instead of breeding for more.
Note that I'm not saying they won't, just that it's a bad idea in a new and exciting way.
You seemed to use the fact that a car was used as a taxi in Europe as evidence that the car is not luxurious.
My point is that cars used as taxis in Europe are often from upmarket segments, so it's not good evidence that a car is not luxurious (relatively - we're talking MB/BMW class here).
This does not mean I'm saying that a specific Mercedes from the 1960s was or was not luxurious. I find it hard to imagine any car from the 1960s would be luxurious by modern standards, my experience of older cars is they were very much metal tins on wheels.
BART should've just stopped replacing them because it was already depressing and created a feeling of unease even when it was just a few years old. BART is a symptom of the dysfunctional, lower-classing of American mass-transit in contrast to masses of unyielding cultural exaltation of the single occupant vehicle in gridlock. Hurray that they dug a tunnel under the Bay, but scant few actually want to board a tram that seems perpetually foreshadowing of an escape room or serial killer scene.
Also, 172k is a 75% of Brampton's bus system - from suburban Toronto: https://www.blogto.com/city/2023/07/brampton-beats-out-major...
Enforce anti-social/QoL laws, allow construction, and prosecute crime and I bet BART would see double it's 2019 ridership.
Muni, SF'S bus (well, and intracity rail) system (with roughly the same population as Brampton) is 440k+ weekday average ridership.
Not sure why you are comparing completely unrelated things here.
Don’t forget that the news only reports deviations from the norm. If it’s normal, it isn’t news.
Some lower-tax (lower than California) destinations are incredible places to live as well - it’s not a choice between anarcho-capitalism and California.
So there’s at least a tiny bit of generosity there.
Neither is "donating" your income to your own charitable organization, which is a well-established tax avoidance scheme rather than actual humanitarianism.
> Bigmotor allegedly inflated insurance claims after employees intentionally damaged vehicles, in some cases with screwdrivers or golf balls. Japan's three major nonlife insurance companies stopped doing business with Bigmotor in June 2022 in response to the allegations.
Japan actually has social services to help homeless people and provide them shelter; the ones you see are people who refuse help.
What I’ve seen in other countries is that there certainly are homeless, but the attitude is “you go to a shelter or you go to jail”.
Does wonders for keeping visible homeless to a minimum.
I don't know, but I seriously doubt it.
I generally only see them in certain public parks. There's one weird encampment in some woods next to one of the rivers, in a large park that's on a flood plain; not exactly easy to find or heavily trafficked.
Yes. I encountered a homeless person in the CBD of Tokyo, sleeping in the bushes of a (very small) divider between a main road. Almost totally hidden, by those bushes. With enough items to look like they'd been there a while.
Same can be said about other western countries.
People will chase money and power by any means.
I remember when I was young we would slap the seats on the bus and release big horrible clouds of dust.
In Buenos Aires in the 2000s they bought some old trains from Japan and they had red velvet seats. They were not as bad as you think considering they were used.
Carpet gets immediately ruined with beer and vomit, as most trains turn in to parties on wheels a lot of the time.
Even the brand new Elizabeth Line in London has fabric seats. We just can’t shake our traditions in the face of obvious hygiene sense.
You protest too much.
It's illegal to be intoxicated on the railway (and on the TfL network in London, carrying open alcohol containers and drinking alcohol is banned), but enforcement is very, very low. It would require a huge cultural change to alcohol in this country which nobody seems willing to embrace.
Hilariously we also have "beer trail" services and routes, specifically designed to promote a pub crawl using trains.
We really do have bad relationship with alcohol in the UK.
And sure enough, today these trains are rolling diapers. No way would I ever sit on one of these things. The level of stupidity here is just unbelievable.
There are always people doing disgusting things wherever they are but they are such a minority that it doesn't really affect the everyday experience of others in general. Maybe you only had a few bad experiences?
In many cities in the US, the answer is _nothing_.
I've ridden commuter buses in the US that had cloth seats and commuter trains that had soft plastic-like seats, and they were quite nice -- but they also cost twice or more as much as a regular bus/ train ride. That price cuts down on certain behaviors.
Probably nothing much to be honest. The train would get cleaned at the end of the line I guess. As to drugs, I don't think anything would happen either (apart from the other passengers leaving the car at the next stop) but people don't do that.
I think the problem is elsewhere, these behaviours just aren't supposed to exist in modern society. I don't know what is with the US society that enables them though.
For one thing, hard seats are not uncomfortable. A well-shaped wooden seat on a rocking chair, for example, is comfortable for hours. And most public-transport trips aren't long enough to really tax one's ass anyway.
For another: Public trains in the USA are a haven for homeless and bums. When you've driven past a coffee shop that has picnic tables on the sidewalk and seen a homeless guy with his pants literally filled with shit sitting at one... you understand the problem.
I don't care what country you're in; cloth seats on mass transit are dumb. They just can't be adequately cleaned. In Paris, a city allegedly suffering from a bedbug outbreak, I'd expect most people to question their use.
And herein began the second scam...
Note that someone can sue(state/county/etc), and still have criminal charges.
Also it's easy to see how slashing a seat or breaking a window is vandalism but somehow we've decided anti-homeless architecture and literring pedestrian spaces with subsidized rental e-scooters isn't even if it also drastically reduces quality of life by modifying shared public spaces.
[0]: I dislike how grafitti and defacement is lumped in with functional damage as "vandalism" except for rare cases like road signs. I like to think that there is a tangible difference between changing the appearance of something and damaging it in such a way that it is no longer fully fit for purpose. Even if one believes that "maintaining property value" is a primary purpose of a building's wall or "providing ad space" is a primary purpose of a train exterior, I'd argue that there is a clear moral difference.