Hacker News Reader

Comment by geraldwhen | Hacker News Reader

Theft is defacto legal in America. It’s too dangerous to prosecute theft; if you do, you could be accused of racial policing, which would cause riots.

Better to legalize theft. The police here won’t even respond to car theft other than to help file an insurance claim.

View on HN

Can you give an actual example of this happening? Because it seems all the riots come from needlessly killing people rather than arresting them for stealing.

People get killed in the process of enforcing laws. All laws are eventually enforce by violence and that violence kills people. The state house rep who wanted to tax cigarettes didn't mean to have Eric Gardner killed but given a large number of police encounters it was bound to happen.

The way police responded to 2020 was to pull back because in general its a numbers game. Given enough encounters bad outcomes will happen. Pulling back plus the insanity of 2020 caused a rise in crime. Police are starting to reengage and crime is starting to go down.

Very weird retelling of the events surrounding Eric Gardner's death. The riots weren't because cops were arresting him, they weren't even surrounding the fact he died. The riots were about the fact that you had 3 cops choking him to death even after they already had him subdued while he repeatedly tried to say he couldn't breathe and given the history of cop killings, all 3 were going to walk away with no repercussions.

If I write enough code, bugs are going to happen but when bugs happen we have a review and triage the issue, yet when cops kill people suggesting that they need better training or more oversight is suddenly an insane proposal.

They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that. We underfund police compared to other OECD nations. We also have a much more dangerous environment for them to operate in.

The individual actions are terrible and every effort should be leveraged to reduce thoes outliers but they will still occur. In 2020 we as a society to put a lot less emphasis on enforcing social order and that causes crime.

> They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that.

No one agrees on what type of training they need.

> We underfund police compared to other OECD nations.

This is just not true. The US spends 32 billion dollars on policing[0] while the UK spends 433 million euros[1]. Even if adjusted for PPP that still massively puts the US ahead.

[0] https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/2023-doj-budget-highl...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-funding-for-...

They increased funding by 433 million

£15,877 million in police funding for England and Wales has been agreed for the financial year ending March 2022 overall funding has increased nominally by £433m (2.8%) compared with the previous financial year

My mistake I read that number wrong. The most recent number I can find is that during the 2022-2023 budget year, the UK spent around 25 billion pounds which puts them closer to the US when compared in USD but still under. Which begs the question, what do you consider well-funded?

So per capita the UK spends more than 4x as much?

No. The number I quoted is how much the US spends federally on funding the DOJ. It does not include state and local budgets.

Its about 190B which is about on par so I was wrong. From my experience with friends who are LEO they get about 1 week of training a year which isn't enough.

I don't have anything to contribute to the theory, but an anecdote: for a couple weeks last month in NYC, seemingly every street tout had sealed boxes of Apple AirPods sitting on their blankets, next to their fake bags, watches, etc. Other guys were specializing in the trade, standing on street corners holding 2-3 boxes of AirPods, but nothing else.

These appeared to be legit products, but obviously stolen. Where did these come from? Why weren't the sellers arrested on sight? Is it that hard to know that Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller? Is possession of stolen goods no longer a crime?

I was low-key hoping that the police had some kind of sting running to get the source of the theft, but...who knows?

So many questions.

AirPods fakes are extremely, extremely convincing these days. I would be surprised if they were real stolen products from the Apple Store.

If so, these were exceptional fakes, down to the quality of the packaging.

Yup, and you can even buy them for $10-20 off sites like Aliexpress or Temu. They even do the popup for pairing when you open them. The audio quality and ANC is not so great, as far as I know, though.

Are stolen iPhones even usable with cellular networks?

> Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller

They are like Apple store geniuses in a more federated architecture.

The counterfeit/replica market for electronics, especially Apple stuff, has gotten really, really good. You often won't be able to easily tell just from the sealed box if it is a fake or not -- though opening usually offers some clues because the counterfeits often don't have the same attention to detail with the opening tab stickers and whatnot. And the stuff that is often hardest to tell, at least with a cursory glance, are AirPods and AirPods Max headphones.

Because I have some friends who don't listen to me and insist on buying things from Facebook Marketplace, I've seen some very convincing looking AirPods Max headphones (you can tell they are fake because of markings inside the ear cups amongst other things, they also usually feel lower quality but that's hard to judge if you aren't familiar with the real things) that will often pair exactly like legit AirPods because the reps have managed to either clone the H1 chip or reverse-engineer the pairing process. The fakes often have real (stolen) serial numbers on the boxes so if you aren't familiar with how Apple does their plastic sealing and just ran a serial number off the box to see if it was legit through the Apple serial number checker, you'd probably think they were legit until you opened them up.

At this point, I would guess that at least 90% of the "sold as new" AirPods and AirPods Max on eBay are fakes.

This is very different from the old-school world of grey-market cameras sold off of street corners in New York that were often legit but were either fenced and/or from foreign markets without official support/warranty.

The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

> The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

To add another product category, replica watches are almost indistinguishable from real watches these days, Rolex are probably the most widely counterfeit watch brand.

A good replica sub goes for $1,000 while the real watch is around $10,000

Replica watch subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RepTime/

Rolex Submariner Legit vs Replica Video: https://youtu.be/oYY0bI_Aiqc

Yeah...but your average street tout doesn't have a $1,000 replica Rolex on a blanket -- they have a $20 Rolox. Also, those fake bags, watches, etc. don't have packaging. These "AirPods" came with boxes that were basically exactly like the real thing.

Obviously, any New Yorker knows about knockoffs, but these were qualitatively different. They were also prevalent for a week or two, and then seemingly disappeared...as if there was a sudden crackdown or something.

The fake bags definitely have packaging. Fake documents, fake dust covers, fake Hermes boxes. They go all out in some cases. Usually not for the $30 hand bags sold on the street (though you’d be surprised as to the fake documents some of the Louis Vuitton's have inside), but the higher-end reps can be astonishing. A $30 bag masquerading as a $1000+ bag on a street corner isn’t going to have the same accoutrements that a $30 pair of fake AirPods masquerading as a $150 pair will. But a fake $800 bag masquerading as a $18,000 bag will usually come with the goods. Same is true for watches. It’s just the cheapest stuff sold on the street in those categories don’t bother.

The fake AirPods box thing I’ve seen for a long time, again, the tell is usually small differences in font/printing and how they do the pull tabs. The box fit is often different too, but since most of these are presented sealed, people don’t know.

Maybe this really was a ring of fenced goods, who knows. But my guess having seen these things for years is that they were almost certainly a big group of the very common fake AirPods that proliferate eBay and Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and the like and that are probably incredibly popular in foreign markets where the official products are both more expensive and a greater percentage of GDP.

Agreed. They have equal right to resources and they are just exercising their rights. By denying snatchers or thieves of iPhones etc one is excluding them from modern information economy.

> which would cause riots

What a thing to just state as fact with confidence, this is like older individuals lamenting how nobody wants to work anymore. It must just feel good to say?

This might be somewhat true in some costal cities where there was a deliberate policy choice to make petty theft a misdemeanor (and thus encourage more crime), but this is just flat out not true where I live in the south. Theft is still very much prosecuted and not tolerated. I have never seen anyone just walk out with bags of stolen goods here, and our store aisles are not covered in locked plexiglass. Decline is a choice.

It’s not in coastal cities either, except where the police stopped enforcing the law as a negotiating tactic. For example, in San Francisco note how the work stoppage was focused on getting rid of a DA who threatened to prosecute a police officer who shot an unarmed man:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/02/today-in-acab-2/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com