Traffic jams, AirTags and GPS darts are ways NY, NJ are trying to stop car theft
gothamist.com
gothamist.com
In the US we still have domestic spying and facial recognition at airports but somehow car theft is still possible. In the Bay Area people even openly shoplift.
It isn’t as far-fetched as you make it sound. If the incentives stop rewarding competence, then people focus on other stuff instead.
This seems inline with the general decay we’ve seen across the Western world where actually doing work and doing it well has a lower ROI than engaging in shenanigans to artificially boost one’s earnings such as office politics, fraud, etc. A certain airplane maker recently got to see the end result for example.
Over a longer time, and not just police, but yes. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.
Look at what the NYPD is doing right now, they spend $6 billion a year. They're spending millions more to claw back 5 figures in lost subway fares. That's tax payer highway robbery.
Atlanta recently rolled their helicopter out (at least $60k per sortie) to catch a guy who shoplifted $100 from Walmart. Something's clearly not working here.
The police are (often deliberately and strategically) far less competent at achieving the goals of the laws than the laws, assuming good-faith enforcement, themselves permit them to be.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/14w5plt/serio...
Top rated answer: >> Give criminals more hefty punishments because they are usually not put in jail for long and charges are often dropped. Usually when arrested the same offenders are smashing and grabbing again right after release.
You are statistically probably well educated, probably working in tech, and probably earning 2x or more than a police officer with none of the danger. As a tech person, you could probably trivially write a query that would tell you what camera to look at at what moment, or have the engineering background to develop a system to find where people fence bikes and stolen laptops.
Instead you're probably making some asshole VC or CEO richer by selling out the future for next quarters profits. That police officer actually has skin in the game making society a better place and is literally in harms way when they do their job.
You think the government owes you something, but what I don't think you fully realize is that the government is us; we are the government, you and I.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/women-report-assault-incidents-...
The reason I post this is because I read it this morning and it's the first thing that pretty much popped in my head here. You guys have a huge gap in policing and enforcement of punishment. It's so blatantly broken and broken on purpose by the left/establishment/politicans/etc.
crime is down overall and the media's job these days is to get clicks... hyping crime is a tried and true way to do that
Maybe that's just fewer guns and better mental health supports (whether official or cultural).
To keep drivers safe, all cars sold after 2007 in the United States are required by law to have a Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) installed.
Most TPMS sensors have a battery life of 5–10 years.
Although a unique ID can be used to avoid other TPMS sensor’s messages on the road, this unique ID can also be used by an attacker to track a vehicle’s movements.
This ID is broadcasted unencrypted and, therefore can be used to track when a particular vehicle has passed nearby.
Possibly to do in a single area, impractical to deploy widely.
Your EzPass has better range, and is also being tracked. https://www.popsci.com/article/diy/ezpass-hack-covert-scanni...
Probably because the tyres were routinely changed, occassionally because the plates were changed ..
This goes to the domain of "who cares about plates | body VIN | engine VIN | tyre relationships".
Even 3 weeks ago, someone rolled up to our building parking lot at night here in long Island and stole plates off a car. We had it on camera.
The cops had them arrested the next day because they drove by one of thousands of plate scanners with the stolen plates fitted on a car.
Basically even every police vehicle has plate scanners on its rear pointed forwards into both lanes.
Seems like a really tricky shot to land since the only way to aim the device is by pointing the patrol car at the target vehicle.
It's still many years away, but I could see specialty homing drones doing a better job of this. By that point, remote disabling of vehicles might be mandatory.
In one instance, they were using a dart that had a huge magnet on it so as soon as it hit the trunk, it stuck really well and all the cops backed off and they then had a chopper follow the car back to the owners house where they made an arrest later in the program.
In another instance, the guys clearly knew what the cops did, because he ducked off the highway into a residential area where the cops had several calls of a car that pulled into their neighborhood at a high rate and four dudes jumped out like a clown car while the car was still in drive, which then ran over one of the residents mailboxes. They got three of the guys within minutes as they swarmed the area, set up a perimeter and boxed them and then brought in the K-9.
Even the cop said car thief's know the cops are using this tech and since they were also using the magnet, it makes a very loud "thud" when it attaches to the car's frame and thieves now will ditch the car and go out on foot to try and get away, making it far more easier to catch them as opposed to having to do pit maneuvers or other high risk moves to end a chase.
Congratulations, you've created a massive black market in the US. If the penalties are stiff enough to actually prevent people disabling it, you've massively increased the prison population, too.
The ones that would are either pro-cop (and are willing to overlook an incredible amount of police overreach and abuse, as long as it's directed against the right people), or the counter-culture antifa types that get demonized by the press, and are hated and feared by the first group.
I suppose there's also a few comfortably-privileged libertarian types that talk a big game about these issues, but when push comes to shove, don't actually push.
Unless they have some other reason to dislike your tribe, in which case you might get the book thrown at you.
Or maybe police will be able to override FSD on a stolen Tesla and drive it to the nearest police station.
People are crying foul about “dystopian” nanny state. In reality, that worst case scenario has already come to life. Except it’s not the government, it’s private entities vacuuming up all of your data. Your phone, your “smart car”, IoT devices, your smart home, various free software, emails, voice recordings, search history, watched video history, social media engagements, purchase history. All of these possible vectors. It’s all packaged up, and sold to advertisers or used to train LLM models.
Even the government entities have been caught buying up private data [1]
September 11, 2001 (2001-09-11) — changed the game on privacy. PATRIOT Act is awful.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i...
If anything, Neal Stephenson did nothing more than mention a simple idea that was practically laying on the ground in broad daylight, and technology finally caught up to the point where it's implementable and deployable.
No. Plenty are wrong. And both science fiction and the technological frontier are constantly advancing. Your argument is close to those who argue everything was predicted in their holy book of choice.
The Diamond Age had specialized drones to shoot them and used barbs and nanotech - "When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage"
The hard part is when you miss you don't hid a kid walking to school in the skull and kill or blind them.
Pictures of the non-nano real life tech - https://www.google.com/search?q=GPS+darts+police&tbm=isch
The Diamond Age invented "magic", then missuses it constantly (vacuums and hydrogen/helium at normal atmosphere are all about the same). There is not much to see there for predictions, it's fun fiction.
> One punishment for any crime. Execution. [1]
It seems to me that, at least when talking about crimes that harm others, criminality isn’t curable; the kind of person who cause others harm isn’t just going to stop because someone told them “no” or gave some kind of punishment.
To reduce crime those situational factors need to be fixed before the criminal is created.
If you commit crime you do the time. After getting released if you commit crime you should do exponentially more time.
https://gothamist.com/news/traffic-jams-airtags-and-gps-dart...