So thieves broke into your storage unit again
oldvcr.blogspot.com
oldvcr.blogspot.com
The paradox is that the monthly cost of a unit will quickly exceed the value of whatever is stored there unless the items have sentimental value or are very expensive. In TFA, their losses from theft was $500 and their insurance limit was $2,000. Within two years they would exceed that in rent payments on the unit. A Google search suggests the average storage unit tenancy is only 10 months. That's reasonable. Long-term storage only makes sense when the value exceeds what can reasonably be entrusted with the lax security of a storage facility.
This is a tough one to manage psychologically, although it’s almost certainly also true of nearly anything you are storing in your own home. The difference of course is that home space is bundled inflexibly—you usually don’t have the option of paying 2% less for 2% less space.
When you chose your house there were presumably several options with different amounts of storage space at different price points. You could just treat the addition of a storage unit as increased granularity between those housing options.
But the stuff I use occasionally (like camping gear and car-fixing/woodworking tools) would not fit also into that same apartment, nor would my collection of hobby-related stuff like my (small, but non-zero) collection of vintage audio and computer gear.
I mean: I'm not hoarding MicroSD cards here. I, like many others, have things that take up space.
In order to keep these seldom-used things out of the way while maintaining the hope of having a tidy, presentable home, I need a place with a garage or a basement or an extra bedroom -- or a storage facility. Those things all tend to cost extra.
1. You are temporarily moving to a place outside your local area, or to a much smaller place. I was moving around for a year and a half, so I left my furniture and non-valuables in a storage unit until I would be settled again.
2. You live in a small unit in a big city. $100-$150 for an extra 50 square feet a month might be cheaper than the equivalent space and is a great choice for occasionally used items. if it's 4 dollars a square foot for living space or 2 dollars a square foot for storage space, that's a deal.
3. Short term holding: You're moving out of your rental in July, in AirBnbs until September when you've closed on your house.
If you're in a suburban house and don't have enough space, that's a bad reason to have a storage unit.
Undoubtedly, some of these rent storage facilities.
For situation 3 I was able to leave stuff with family but I would have paid for storage again. I lived in a few furnished places for a year.
I plan to use it again for situation 2 when my free storage situation ends. My place is tiny and I can just store something in the facility next to my office for cheaper.
They have their place. The argument that people pay more to store something then the value probably applies to all the junk in people's homes/garages. Must be billions in real estate in the bay area storing old junk.
Pretty sure it’s out of business now. They were owned by a big local storage unit company looking for a new market.
a lot of people love their holiday decor. Not how much resale you can get on a giant skeleton, but it’s not an easy lift. Seems like a good use case for storage… a few thousand a year to make you happy thinking you’re bringing holiday cheer to neighbors and kids.
At least one house the owner seems to dress the skeleton up with current holiday attire and decorations which is an amusing solution.
5. You are trying to hide things from your spouse.
7. You're storing the tools / materials for a small business.
Sometimes, the best place to store something... is the store.
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
As I understand UK law, if you buy stolen goods, the original owner can just claim it back and you take the loss - simply to discourage buying with knowledge it was stolen.
I guess the pawn shop would go out of business but it does seem if you let them act as a fence you are solving for the wrong problem
Resources held in common have historically been subject to significant control via social, civic and legalistic processes. What is typically referred to as "a tragedy of the commons situation" never turns out to be what Hardin originally suggested - individuals taking advantage of the lack of controls. Instead it is invariably individuals who first dismantle the control systems in place in order to pursue their own selfish ends.
This matters because the "tragedy of the commons" concept has been used to suggest (successfully) that communities cannot manage commonly held resources, which is false. What is true is that communities frequently cannot manage a sustained attack by selfishness and greed against their own systems of management, and that's a very, very different problem.
My understanding is that overfishing and climate change are prime and valid examples of the tragedy of the commons.
You seem to be claiming that the problem is with systems of management, but the entire point of the tragedy of the commons is that it happens when there isn't management. Which is abundantly the case at the global level of international waters and a shared atmosphere, because there is no such thing as a world government, nor do most people want one.
So how exactly has there "never... been a tragedy of the commons"? How are overfishing and CO2 not exactly tragedies of the commons? What other principle explains why they weren't solved decades ago?
Speaking of which, Elinor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons, outlines the conditions for the successful management of a commons. Notably neither private ownership nor governmental control is ideal, the best outcomes are by cooperative organizations where those with a direct stake in the commons are the managers.
I don't understand why not. That's the literal definition of a commons in the political economy sense -- a public resource everyone can take from freely. (As opposed to a public resource that is managed via licenses, auctions, limits, etc.) On what basis would you not call them a commons, in political economy?
The entire point of the "tragedy of the commons" is the tragedy of overfishing, the tragedy of CO2 levels, because nobody is in charge of managing it.
Part of Ostrom's point is that this sort of commons has rarely, if ever, existed. It's a misunderstanding that Hardin's work created or amplified. Resources held in common are in fact always managed and not "free for the taking".
When so-called tragedies of the commons occur, it is invariably because someone has first attacked those systems of control to further their own ends. In the case of fishing, most traditional fishing communities and systems have objected to the arrival of industrial scale fishing, but they have been ignored and sidelined because of the interests of the owners of those new systems. So the problem is not that people/communities cannot manage resources held in common, it is that they cannot effectively resist power, wealth and greed if and when it arrives. But that very inability is also contingent on broader political and economic conditions, and is not inherent to the fact that the resources are held in common.
Climate change may well be the first true example of Hardin's original concept of "tragedy of the commons". It has a number of properties that traditional resource "extraction" behaviors do not share (including the invisibility of the problem until it is too late). But when people talk about "tragedy of the commons", they are typically referring to much smaller scale situations than the one(s) that have led us to where we are with climate change.
There's also a case to be made, given the remarkably early understanding of the consequences of fossil fuel utilization and the documented behavior of the companies involved, that climate change is precisely the type of failure I'm describing rather than the one Hardin did. We have systems of control for the things fossil fuel has negatively impacted, but people who became very, very, very, very rich from their use actively subverted and captured them for their own purposes.
I acknowledge that the shift is subtle: from the problem being "humans cannot manage resources held in common" to "human systems for managing resources held in common are frequently not robust enough to withstand selfishness and greed". Nevertheless, I think it is an important one.
You say 'There wasn't ever "a big sea full of fish and anyone could just do whatever they want".' But to the contrary, that's basically always been the case. Fishing boats were limited by technology and the size of their local markets, but once those limitations disappeared because of inevitable technological progress, then that's exactly what happened. And we see this happening especially with Chinese overfishing today.
You're claiming that supposed "systems of control" existed in the first place and then were attacked, but that seems entirely counterfactual to me. There was no system of control for a problem that technological progress hadn't created yet -- humans don't see that far enough into the future. And if four countries that border a sea want to limit fishing but a fifth one says I'm going to overfish as much as I want, well then what do you think is going to happen?
I don't see what benefit there is in attacking the concept of tragedy of the commons. It's not some kind of fatalistic viewpoint of what must happen (which you seem to be claiming -- "that people/communities cannot manage resources held in common"), but rather a warning of what will happen when resources aren't properly managed. Claiming the tragedy doesn't exist seems like it would only benefit the people who want to to exploit our shared resources. By recognizing its validity, we can do our best to create and improve systems of management (especially international systems) to prevent the tragedies from occurring.
Even with your view, there's a subtle shift involved in talking about it as an issue of whether or not resources are properly managed or not, because the question is, quite directly, what is the best way of ensuring that this happens?
TOC has been routinely used over the last half-century of so to justify the answer to that being "privately owned", and reasonably given the name Hardin came up with: it's a tragedy of the commons, implicitly not affecting privately held resources.
> And if four countries that border a sea want to limit fishing but a fifth one says I'm going to overfish as much as I want, well then what do you think is going to happen
It depends a lot on scale. If country #5 plans to sell the fish to countries #1-4, it won't work (or at least, it may not work). If country #5 plans to eat all the fish it catches and has no effective internal population that will be able to gain control over its fishing behavior, then ... tragedy.
But notice the key point here: it's not as if country #5 is ignorant about the situation. Countries #1-4 will be quite belligerent in their objections to #5's behavior. So the problem here is not that "people just blindly take from a commonly held resource and destroy it". It's the people (in this case, country #5) willfully ignore the social structures in place to protect the fish in order to pursue their own greed and selfishness.
I don't think so. I'm just regurgitating what I learned in political science classes decades ago, and what the mainstream understanding still is today in the general media.
And what you're omitting is that while yes, the solution from the point of view of the political right is privatization, the solution from the point of view of the political left has always been more active government management/regulation, international treaties, etc.
You seem to be ignoring the entire history of solutions on the left, and treating the problem as if it's solely an invention of the right. I don't know why.
And with the fishing example, I never suggested country #5 was ignorant, or that countries #1-4 wouldn't object. I never used the word "blindly". But you're claiming that people in country #5 are "willfully ignoring the social structures in place" and that's false. There are no structures and never were. (Again, see: Chinese overfishing.) And you're admitting "then... tragedy" in my very example.
So I still don't understand why you're claiming ToC doesn't exist, except that you think it's a justification for privatization. But you're ignoring it's also a justification for regulation and cooperation. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Think about it: if I set you the challenge of "come up with a regulation model for this fishery" the nature of your solutions will be fundamentally different than if I set you the challenge of "prevent selfishness and greed from overriding the cultural, social and historical patterns for this resource use". Depending on your own particular political outlook, it is possible that given the first problem you would still focus more on the type of problem described in the second but that's not inevitable at all.
> There are no structures and never were.
Chinese overfishing ... when I look this up, the most common word associated with it is "illegal". Perhaps you mean the overfishing they carried out in their own waters before increasing (and now decreasing) the size of their distant fishing fleet(s).
> But you're claiming that people in country #5 are "willfully ignoring the social structures in place" and that's false.
In reading up a bit more about this (with China being country #5), I come across articles with titles like "China’s IUU Fishing Fleet: ariah of the World’s Oceans". So I don't think it's false at all.
> But you're ignoring it's also a justification for regulation and cooperation.
That's not an unfair point, but what I'm really getting at (mostly based on Ostrum's work) is that regulation and cooperation have always existed historically, and telling the story of ToC-style problems as if they haven't bends the solutions in ways that do not reflect the history.
It sounds more like a hodgepodge of brittle norms.
So how could any culture on Earth have been ‘successful’ at managing one 500 years ago?
They may have been ‘successful’ in presuming that they could one day manage such in the distant future, but no more than that.
This applies to most things, technological advancement creates new physical realities that must be adapted to…
But then don't make the claim (as Hardin did) that common ownership of resources leads to tragedy.
Or the catching of live tortoises to use as meat on long sea voyages.
>Lax maintenance and poor accessibility (remember, LA) made the park undesirable for families to visit.
>"Undesirables" began frequenting the park, as their chances of being harassed by police at the behest of the families who were no longer visiting was much lower.
So, what is commonly seen as a tragic outcome caused by individuals abusing resources is really a matter of authorities abusing their prerogative to hold or not hold to what could reasonably be considered their responsibilities.
For your examples: there are international laws and agreements that "govern" (maybe more like "suggest") best practices wrt fishing and carbon emissions, based on publicly-available research and inquiry. Further, the entities causing these issues aren't "free radicals"; they're mostly formally-incorporated organizations that are subject to state regulation and their own policies (which, when known by the public through their actions, are subject to public pressure - either wallet diplomacy or the threat of further regulation). It's a choice for the US government to not hold companies accountable, or to not ratify, say, the Kyoto Protocol, or to ignore studies on fishery health in favor of placating the fishing industry. Same for every other country. And every country has some ability to influence others through the shape of their relations. I suppose you could exclude pirates.
Tragedy of the commons assumes that individual actors haven't bound themselves together by some kind of expectation or obligation. The most authoritative version of that is government, of course, but you can have lesser agreements. In those cases, it's not merely a matter of individual entities abusing resources, but of flaunting self-imposed "management."
^This is the most important part of this comment, sorry for taking a while to get to it.
This is not my impression. I’ve always heard “tragedy of the commons” invoked precisely to advocate that commonly held resources must be regulated.
This is absolutely not reflected in the history of resource extraction in the United States. Time and time again, companies have become owners, begged to be trusted because their interests are "aligned", only to destroy the resource, and frequently the communities around it, and then move on.
The version of game theory you're imagining an owner is playing (unbounded, repeated interactions) is not the version played by the companies that have taken ownership of so many resources on our planet.
Financial and legal liability for the people responsible.
2. mining. The owners care only about what's in the ground, not what's above it, and so there are repeated cases of them poisoning waterways and the rest of whatever is downstream because they actually have no incentive to preserve the land itself. [ Note: this really covers multiple resource extraction industries, but I'll leave it as just one example for now ]
3. topsoil. Farms across the country have been losing topsoil for more than a century. Despite the long term implications of this being acknowledged by everyone involved, practices to stop it from happening are limited, and generally constrainted to non-corporate, non-vertically-integrated farmers.
Just in the part of the world where I live, but inherited from the Arabic world via Spain, are the acequias of New Mexico. Contrary to US law, they hold water to be a communical resource, and are managed at the community level, typically with an individual elected to be the "majordomo" who make decisions about allocations but is constantly subject to input from and being overridden by the community itself. When acequias "go wrong" (i.e. there are water shortages), it is typically caused by some combination of:
1. an actual water shortage
2. poor decisions on the part of the majordomo
3. someone stealing from the system
What it almost never is: a "tragedy of the commons" as described by Hardin et al.
I kindly invite you to visit the kitchens of undergraduate house-shares. I think you may soon appreciate there are "tragedy of the commons" situations happening all the time :)
"Oh hello guy who looks like he sleeps rough, I would love to buy your thousands of dollars worth of power tools that you can't even tell me what they are for pennies on the dollar."
The pawn shop has to, at 'bare minimum' do the proper paperwork (typically copying ID and taking fingerprints among other things.) The general "way it's supposed to work" is that now the police have a clean lead to the thief or part of the ring; If the shop doesn't follow the procedures, at least where I live, you -don't- have to make them whole and there's a crapton of fines.
That said, it's still a bit of a sham in some ways. In 2011 a former niece absconded with ex-wife's <6 month old Laptop, <1 year old DSLR, Her TV, and the wedding ring [0] just after my ex moved in with her brother at the start of the separation (Ex BIL also had TVs etc taken). It wasn't until their Fourth trip to the pawn shop [1] where the wedding band engraving made it just too hard to pretend the stuff wasn't stolen [2].
[0] - kinda knew that's when it was over, lol.
[1] - Part of a chain that used to have their own show that was a bit of 'Pawn stars crossed with Jerry Springer'
[2] - Ironically this worked out; since the wedding ring was never recovered but gold had gone way up, Renters Insurance covered the pawn shop costs and the added value back from the ring handled the deductible (The rest of the ring amount went to her costs related to the separation.)
The percentage of people who see the word "notarized" alongside "inventory sheet" and simply give up must be quite high. Notarization accomplishes nothing besides causing a headache. Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
The number of cases of people adding random expensive things that would be added to insurance inventories during a claim has to approach 90% if there is no potential for consequences.
Unfortunately a lot of people think notarization gives some kind of legitimacy to a document, or likely in this case, it's probably not the hassle of getting it notarized, but used as a scare tactic to prevent some people from committing insurance fraud by listing inflated or made-up items (people might conflate it with perjury).
> Insurance companies don't make money by paying out claims, you know.
This is why if you want actual insurance (not "check the 'you must have insurance' box") you don't pick the cheapest company and check reviews, ignoring any reviews that don't mention a claim.
Insurance is for you and you should pick it from your own choice of company and you should tailor the policy for your own needs.
Same with financing.
In my case, I get a lot of my insurance from a guy in my town and he has an office that I can walk into if I need help.
Insurance is for losses that will have a major impact on you. It’s putting a price on risk.
In my country a family perhaps pays about €5k total a year for two cars, health, house and the assortment of legal and liability insurance. That is quite modest (not for all income classes though), since there are catastrophes possible in nearly any avenue of life. A minimalist insurance scheme would save one about €2k/yr. That just isn’t that worthwhile utility wise.
Interestingly some of 'valuable property' insurance I have used for my camera gear encourages you to submit your invoices, photos of the item, etc on your policy profile. Makes it easy to remember to toss a photo of the item, photo showing serial number area, close-up of it, invoice alongside the other info.
I don't own and no local insurers will offer me non-owner insurance. I have to get the crappy expensive insurance at the rental car desk.
Some credit cards like American Express offer their own insurance as part of the membership fee as long as you pay for the rental with their card, and decline the coverage offered by the rental car company.
Granted, the equation changes dramatically when various drugs are involved.
Maybe that's why property crimes short of grand theft aren't really enforced in California?
There is a hope we will undo this soon.
Just a phone alert to say "door to unit #xyz has been opened" would be a huge improvement. Wire up a cheap webcam for extra credit.
I can speak for U-Haul specifically because I have used them and a customer can see the sensors in their unit. The sensors are deactivated when a customer checks in.
https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/K_IeKTxlLTzLBd4F9Ett...
If I don't sign in, as soon as I try to roll my door up the alarms are going to go off. If I don't sign out after closing the door and leaving, the next time I try to sign in I will be denied entry until I speak to a manager and be yelled at about signing out when I leave.
Edit: “You have a land mine collection?”
No, but after storage unit #2, I’d daydream about starting one.
I didn’t say I’d actually do it. I’d surely daydream of it.
There are some neat videos out there where people make their own with Arduinos etc.
If it kills someone or causes grievous bodily harm, it's still on you. Yes, even if it's a burglar. You also have to think about the fully legal situations when it's firefighter or a cop with a warrant. Or an edge case like a stupid kid.
…but I understand.
Honestly, the laws in your locale are unjust and need to be rewritten. There should be absolutely no liability to the owner (or renter) of a property if someone burglarizing it gets hurt accidentally.
I'm not sure how you could rewrite self defense law to cover this case.
So it’s of the sort of thing where if someone is in your house, and falls off something and hurts themselves because of something negligent you did or whatever, then yeah they can sue for damages. Regardless of if they had your permission to be there, because you had a duty to not leave something obviously dangerous just lying there.
But it does lead to a lot of weird/unjust situations - either if the law does exist, or if it doesn’t.
The "glitter bomb" series is pretty funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo&list=PLgeXOVaJo_...
- you're hit by a bus, and your family is clearing out the storage locker.
- management is alerted to a bad smell coming out of several units, and they have to enter yours to verify that you're not accidentally storing dead raccoons.
- the police are serving a warrant on a unit, and accidentally open yours due to a typo.
- a homeless teenager just needs a place to sleep for the night.
If the fees wouldn’t cover replacement of the contents within 6 months, they are too valuable to store in a storage unit.
Obviously it's up to you to figure out if it makes financial sense. But for people in urban areas with small apartments, it can be a heckuva lot cheaper than upgrading to an apartment with another bedroom.
On ebay? Sell the stuff now, buy it again if you need it. Doesn't work for everything, of course, and I don't practice it, I've got tons of space and tons of clutter.
Interestingly, I read a blog post where someone was using "fulfilled by amazon" as off-site storage, but I think it was a pseudo thought experiment more than an actual storage solution, similar to those folks who use data-as-video on YouTube as infinite backup storage
Sounds expensive.
Because yes, you have to pay sales tax on eBay, even for used items that already had sales tax paid on their original retail purchase.
You can rent skis for a season for $400, I suspect most rental places are than $100/month.
But skis especially can usually fit in the back of a closet or under a bed.
Kayak? Get a season pass for the rental place.
And the kinds of people who live in places where they don't have room to store a surfboard year-round, are the kinds of people who don't have a bunch of wall space for one either.
I think you might not be totally understanding the concept of small urban apartments. Putting skis in the closet or under the bed year-round doesn't work, because your closet and underneath the bed are already full. (And it's not just skis, obviously -- it's boots and poles and helmet and bulky jacket and snowpants and gloves and everything.)
And why would I want space for a vehicle when I have public transportation that is much faster?
The bottom line is, if you want to own stuff, then you must store it. You know what is more expensive than storage? Buying stuff you need or want and reselling it, again and again. Or leasing it in general. Some stuff has poor resale value, takes a lot of energy to choose and accumulate, and is not easy to replace.
But when you’re buying a place, you’re looking to have isolation from shared walls, and generally a larger property will appreciate more in value than a smaller property With some limits in both directions up and down in size.
When I left SF, I spent about 18 months traveling before permanently moving in anywhere. I did the math on "cost per cubic foot to store vs. cost to replace" then, and interestingly, furniture and most housewares didn't make the cut—except for a few sentimental items. An unexpected bonus of instead donating that stuff to Goodwill was that when I moved into my new place, I got to outfit my kitchen with much nicer stuff than what I had previously accumulated.
(Now I live in the Midwest and have a garage for the outdoor gear, which in addition to vehicle storage, also doubles as machine/metalworking/woodworking shops.)
Of course he eventually got caught. The insurance company had already paid the owner of one of the campers, so it went to auction, and he bought it. Kind of funny.
Last time I cleared out my old stuff there was nothing I could do to get people to take most of the crap at zero cost.
Well, until Lloyd’s did lose a lot of money in 1991, and the Names had too much exposure. Berkshire Hathaway cover them now, I believe.
AFAIK, there is reasonably clear evidence that deterrence has a very low impact on this sort of crime, so laws based on deterring through fear-of-sentence would not seem to be likely to have much effect.
What is it that you're proposing/desiring?
That tweaker/junkie who steals your bike, breaks into your storage unit, whatever? He's not an organization man. The dude with a standing offer to pay twenty bucks for the bike, or ten if it's shitty? He's with an organization.
What I propose is that we start enforcing the law and treat theft as a crime, not a nuisance or fact of life. Roll up the organizations, toss them in prison, and repeat over and over until the message gets out.
This isn't a problem which can be solved at the tweaker level. What we can do, and simply choose not to, is get every single dude with twenty bucks or a baggie to trade for your bike. All that's lacking is the political will.
Could you share some of this evidence?
https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/deterrence.pdf
second result, summarizes and links to several review papers:
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
This doesn't seem to be in conflict with what the GP said ("supporting laws and politicians that catch and punish criminals effectively"). It seems to me that many people have a problem with thieves not being punished at all.
New HN commenter "smeeger" whose subthread we are in seems close to favoring violence as punishment for relatively minor crimes, for example.
Still, yes, things that significantly increased the likelihood of being caught and punished do seem like a good idea, and do not require sentencing being changed.
oh and your hands are waving a lot more than mine… you clearly dont want to think too hard about this
England sent prisoners to America for nearly 70 years before sending any to Australia, mostly Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas.
That looks like the greater D.C. area. Coincidence?
1.) Corporal punishment
or
2. ) Exile to Amchitka, with some camping gear, a knife, and fishing line/hooks.
It seems more effective and less intrusive to deal with the upstream socioeconomic causes of crime (too much inequality, not enough opportunity, an overemphasis on materiality and consumption, and an underemphasis on community and expression).
"increased surveillance" isn't the half of it.
This comment honestly left me speechless.
It's important to remember that accepting crime, especially low level crime like this is a policy choice. It's the same people doing the same crimes over and over. They have run ins with the law and they just get let go to continue terrorizing the rest of us.
For instance, the number of state prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%. You can cut crime. You can just prosecute these people and take them out of society for their most destructive years (18-40) and we can end this madness.
Even a 15 strikes and you're out policy would make a huge impact on the quality of life for the rest of us
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.
While there are arguments for this sort of thing, it is also based on a wilfull misreading (or no-reading) of what we know about the reasons why people commit crime at all.
That person that has been arrest 15 times before cannot continue to commit crime if he's behind bars. You don't need to "read" the data to come to this conclusion.
People commit crime in large part because they can get away with it.
It's not complicated.
The problem is: why is this person doing this, because there are at least two outcomes:
1. we lock them up, and a part of the problem is gone
2. we lock them up, and someone else steps in to do the same thing
From my perspective, there's ample evidence to suggest that #2 is more likely, and thus even if locking them up has some moral weight behind it, it isn't likely to be a solution to crime in general.
but you know damned well that most of the time it doesn't even go to trial. they're arrested, released, arrested, released, charges pressed, charges dropped; an endless merry-go-round. eventually people stop even reporting crime, why should they bother when the criminals don't get put away?
>From my perspective, there's ample evidence to suggest that #2 is more likely
why? this is like the "lump of labour" fallacy but for crime.
and yes, getting rid of just a few career criminals does disproportionately reduce crime. here's a funny natural experiment from ireland:
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/number-of-burgla...
Then there are the crazy person punching an Asian lady on the subway crimes and these fall squarely in 1
100% of people would commit crimes under the right circumstances. As an extreme example, 100% of us could sustain a life changing head injury that renders us more violent and aggressive than we were before, and that could happen at any moment. The most kind and timid person you know could turn into a monster if they fell down the stairs. You could turn into a monster if you fell down the stairs. The only thing you can do to stop that from happening is to protect your head, it doesn't matter how good or virtuous you are presently.
You can't incarcerate your way out of crime. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Then I should be imprisoned if I present a threat to the public. I don't understand what your point is.
It's an easy trap to fall into for two reasons. It would appear that you and those you know aren't capable of being criminals. This is more comforting than it is true. Everyone, including good people, has the potential to do something horrible; the problem of evil isn't that it's present in a certain group who we can imprison, the problem is that it's present in us all.
The second thing which makes "lock them all up" a seductive proposal is that it's cynical. Cynicism can feel like the opposite of naivete, so it can feel like you're being clear eyed and realistic about the situation and that the people you disagree with (say, prison abolitionists) are naive bleeding hearts. But cynicism is actually just another form of naivete. It's making the same error - blinking while staring into the abyss - with different aesthetics.
But some people are actually more predisposed towards criminality than others. We aren't blank slates.
It's clear that both contribute, which is important because that means there are neither "ur-criminals" nor "not-criminals". While some may, by their nature, be more likely to commit a certain type of crime, none are free from the possibility of doing so under some circumstances.
The problem with this is that's it is extremely easy for people to define "threat" in ways that are convenient to them or that support their prejudices, a la Reefer Madness.
Crime isn't an internship program.
> 73% of the prior offenses are violent and 80% are property related (obviously non-exclusive)
First, correct the assumption that multiple arrests mean you're just living your life "terrorizing" society. Perhaps start with using words that are objective and neutral, not just to fan the flames of passionate rhetoric.
because it has vastly more crime than comparable nations. you have to look at what happens to crime in the US over time, when you are more or less stringent about jailing criminals; predictably as you fill the jails, crime goes down, and when you empty them, crimes goes up.
>It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.
people try to smuggle this false premise into discussions about law and order all the time. the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals. you put them in jail so that they can't commit crimes. if they commit crimes when they leave, put them in jail again. jails mostly don't rehabilitate criminals, but that's a failure of the idea of mass rehabilitation, not a failure of mass incarceration. crime is a choice.
> more or less stringent about jailing criminals
is quite different than "fill the jails, empty the jails"
Quite a bit of research on the effect of deterrence on crime seems to strongly suggest that it is the level of certainty of being caught and punished that has a deterrent effect, not the severity of the sentence. This would correlate with "more or less stringent about jailing criminals".
> the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals
This is a statement of belief, and there are people who believe otherwise. I don't have a strong position either way, but I don't like people asserting that their opinions are self-obvious truths about the world.
America has measurably larger underclass than, say, EU measurable in absolute and per capita terms across metrics like offense rates, incarcerations, income equality, education...
And yes, the US has a larger underclass than the EU, which just might have something to do with why we have more crime, no? And if so, increasing incarceration rates is not likely to help much, is it?
I think you're onto something in calling your point out, but at the same time, it's daring commenters to ask you what any society's response to crimes should be.
Rather than be coy, I'll stick my neck out and claim incarceration is about optimizing for outcomes among the peaceful/orderly middle and higher classes. We don't have to worry about the philosophical question of why crime occurs, or whether incarceration will work overall, it works well enough to deflect crimes away from certain locally policed areas and demographics and that flawed approach is good enough to keep the unkind, leaky system going.
Actually I focus more on protecting the peaceful/orderly poor. Poor people are overwhelmingly law-abiding, but they suffer from the overwhelming majority of crime. On the other hand it's mostly naive rich people who subscribe to these theories that put the blame on everyone except the criminal, and they most of all can afford to insulate themselves from the predictable chaos when those theories are put into practice. Poor people don't have that luxury.
“But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”
So one reading of this statistic is "incarcerating people turns them into criminals"
which suggests that maybe the better way is something else than locking people up and giving them a black mark which prevents them ever getting a viable job?
The fact is that there are a sizeable number of people, for a variety of reasons, who don't have the interest or capacity in holding a viable job. It would be nice if this wasn't the case, but the world exists as it exists, not as we wish it would.
I don’t think any advanced security storage solution is likely to get many clients since they usually choose based on pricing.
Insurance is a heavily regulated industry. Please complain to your state insurance commissioner.
Your reward for being such a diligent and highly achieving collector ... is the thieves target you preferentially. "You gained a Torture++ Level, Congratulations!"
You spent so much effort solving the last burglary, and chose such a highly secure location ... that now the thieves view your collection as a high level challenge.
... and are immediately notified of the available achievement. Some Prison Warden voice announces "There's a griefer, diligence punishing achievement available in Borg sector # of #." Their thief tools immediately 0-Day, exploit, jackpot, lottery level up to be better than your facility.
I mean, I guess it is their job, so can't really fault them for that.
Would you mind explaining what the perverse incentive is here? If I want to insure a pillow that I claim is worth $1 million, why should it matter what others are willing to pay for it?
Even in the legit cases the insurance companies have to account for the "don't worry, it's insured" mindset. Keeping the ceiling on the insurance value is intended to leave at least some of the incentive to prevent the damage with the owner.
The insurance companies cannot rely solely on the "don't be careless" contract clause.
So what, though? Can't they just adjust the premium to account for that? It's not like they can't do their own modeling of what the item is likely worth -- if they see it's 1% of what you stated, then they can just as well cite you a ridiculous premium so that you wouldn't feel it's worth it. What's wrong with that?
We'd have to fund the courts to resolve the inevitable insurance fraud accusations, not to mention the additional firefighting crews to put out the additional fires that consume the $1 pillows.
This doesn't pass the smell test, though. The premium would take care of that. You've told them you have a pillow, and that you want it insured for $1M. They could easily look at it and go "hm, this is worth $10", and give you a absurd premium of $999,900 in exchange for your absurd valuation. So happy accidents won't be worth it anymore. What's wrong with just letting the premium take care of it?
Offering a deal that nobody honest would take is a waste of time for everyone involved.
I'm not suggesting any insurer should be forced to offer a deal. They're welcome to just shrug and tell you to pound sand. What I don't see is the logic behind having an international code prohibiting the offering of such deals. Is the international code trying to dictate to the insurance company what is worth their time?
There are ways to bet on things where you don’t have that underlying risk: gambling, derivatives markets, prediction markets, etc.
These aren’t insurance and aren’t regulated as such.
Because the actual value of the item determines your incentive to commit fraud.
If you insure a $10 pillow for $10, when you damage your pillow, you personally will definitely be out $10's value in goods in the hope you'll recover that $10 later. Since your only outcome is mildly negative, you don't have any incentive to file a false claim.
If you insure your $10 pillow for $1 million, as soon as the insurance is in hand, will have a strong incentive to destroy the pillow and try to collect a million dollars, since $1 million - $10 = $999,990.
This incentive exists regardless of what premium you had paid for the insurance (since it was a prior cost), and can't really be perfectly mitigated. Yes, you can criminalize fraud, ask for evidence, etc. but courts aren't perfect and it's always possible to be clever and fool people.
Also, some people are honest, and others are dishonest. An insurance company can't perfectly tell ahead of time who is who. Let's say I quote you $500k premium to insure your pillow for $1mm. A fraudster will see this as an opportunity to profit by $500k - $10. An honest person would see this as a terrible deal. Therefore only fraudsters would take this deal. If you continue to work backwards, as an insurance company you know there's no premium that you could quote that would end up in honest people taking this deal—there's no stable equilibrium where the premium charged ends up outweighing the (potentially fraudulent) claims.
Btw, this situation is famously described in George Akerlof's paper The Market for Lemons (he called it "market collapse"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons#Conditio...
Another way to see this: rationally as an insurance company, if you ask me for a policy for $1mm on a pillow, due to the risk of fraud I will likely be quoting you close to $1mm as the premium. You (as an honest person) rationally would never take this policy. Therefore, I shouldn't even bother offering it, to save everyone involved time and energy.
It makes the market for insurance much better if everyone actually has insurance. Because it reduces cost. It also keeps the industry legitimate, preventing gambling legislation from applying, and anti-gambling activists from targeting insurers.
You'll have to go to a bookie if you want to gamble.
I don't get the comparison to gambling either, that reads more like an appeal to emotion than actual reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurable_interest
(I don't know if that will make you more sympathetic to the legal rule or not.)
As far as insurance gambling goes, it feels fundamentally different? In gambling, the "house" that sells you the ticket sets the rules and introduces the element of chance. In insurance, the entity selling the financial product here is in no way in control of the outcome, which is the exact opposite of gambling.
By demanding an insurable interest, insurance companies keep out gamblers and frauds. It also helps strengthen the idea that insurance shouldn't be abused or manipulated for a payout.
I don't see why this is true. The insurer still knows the item and its market value. So if the insured amount is higher than the market value then it only needs to increase the premium in those cases, not for everyone else.
I would love a clause in the contract where for non-rare goods you have the option to have the insurance company make you whole by buying you a same model, same trim or higher, same miles or lower, same year or newer car. Like you claimed the market price was less then half of what I can buy it for, use whatever contacts you clearly have and buy it for that.
Generic, cookie-cutter, boilerplate policies probably net the insurance companies a fair amount of profit. People who actually care about the actual items they are insuring are possibly the highest risk, and as such, the premiums are also the highest. In my state, an umbrella policy that would cover my home, land, frontage, vehicles, farm equipment, well pump, etc is ~$500/month, with limits of around $1mm (this was 8 years ago or so, they probably went up in premiums). a half million on two vehicles is only about $200/month and homeowners varies but is ~<$100/month. The issue is how i'd get the rest of the stuff i said insured, because in my state, the homeowner's policy doesn't cover anything but the home (and contents to a limited extent) and whatever you call a tree on your property falling down and causing injury or damage not due to negligence.
When it does work is when insurance has no influence on the price of goods, and is a minor consumer. For example, when fire insurance pays to replace your goods that burnt up.
When it doesnt work is when insurance is the predominant purchaser of those goods. A good example would be US health insurance, which has an 80/20 rule just like your proposal. Health insurers by law (ACA) must pay out 80%, with 20% allowed for opex and shareholder returns. The Hazard is that as an industry, to increase returns, you want the cost of care as high as possible, thereby maximizing your allowable profit.
It is a similar problem to how power is regulated in California, which has a mandated profit cap as a percent of costs. As a result, these regulated companies have the highest opex and cost of power in the nation of approximately $0.50/kwh
My proposal even doesn't say what the ratio should be. If there wasn't legally defined maximal price margin (say 20%), I don't see what it would change in your argument - the companies would be free to ask for even more. Conversely, there is nothing that prevents the companies from lowering the margin as a result of competitive pressure from consumers.
The difference between a cap system and a uncapped system is the incentive to increase the base price as well.
My question is about the incentive to decrease prices (e.g. due to competition). Why it should be affected by the price cap? That's what you need to explain.
You usually see %profit caps as a failed band-aid in markets with poor competition. For example, customers usually dont have a choice in electric company.
There is also really poor competition in health insurance for a number of reasons. Insurance is tied to employment and both options and mobility are limited. Within those options, it is verry difficult to discern differences. I certainly cant tell if a 10% cheaper plan is that way because it is more efficiently run, or if it provides 10% worse coverage.
Last, while firms may compete on total price, they can collaborate to raise the costs for the industry at large. For example, health insurance companies would want to wholesale price of drugs to rise for everyone.
Im not saying that %profit caps are worse than unfettered monopolies (although they might in some cases). My Point is that profit can have huge market distortions, and economically sound solutions would focus on addressing the fundamental issue of poor competition.
1. Know your insurance contract, know what's actually covered and what not (sometimes describing the same facts in two different yet truthful ways will result in your claim being accepted or denied) and have a non-shit insurance company (check reviews that talk about how they handle claims or ask friends that had claims).
2. "Self-insure" risks where the variance won't hurt you. In other words, if you can grudgingly eat the loss if it happened, don't get insurance and eat the loss if it happens. If you have a lot of disposable income, you don't need insurance for something that won't noticeably shift your budget. Likewise, pick high deductibles. What would you rather do: Eat a $300 loss, or have paid $200 in additional premiums and spend two hours of filling out their paperwork?
3a. An exception is if you just really want the peace of mind, are willing to pay for that, and think you can find an insurance company that will actually pay.
3b. Another exception is if you think they miscalculated the premiums. I know that this is unlikely, but it ties into the "peace of mind" criteria - if you think a risk is more likely than it actually is, just insuring it might be an easy way out. The premium might also be accurate for the average, but you might also think or know that you are at a significantly higher risk than average.
For the latter two points, I like to consider insurance cost "per decade" or "per lifetime".
No, premiums don't need to cover payouts. You have to pay the premiums before you get any payouts, so the company invests them and makes money that way.
So from a systems approach, the better solution likely is something like:
Employ and provide safety for the people stealing from the units so they do not feel compelled to steal.
Imagine if the money spent securing these things, which is a multiple of this persons efforts, were spent on solving the root cause? Sounds like a better return on investment
The root cause is social inequality of various kinds (including drug dependency). That should be something for society to resolve, not a burden for storage unit or home owners on their own - short of automated guns, there's not much any individual can do to keep out thieves.
Side note. If I also accept it this is why cryptocurrency being able to reduce the cost of securing a transaction is still interesting to me. When you use a bank you don’t see the army of night guards, vaults, auditors, and IT people keeping it safe.
Of course, you don’t hear about internal bank problems either.
In theory, a well designed security system at a self storage center could be good enough to deter thieves relative to the value of what's stored there. In practice, the fact that owners pay for the security, insurance pays for break ins, and customers are supposed to evaluate the whole mess leads to a lot of naivete and show and not a lot of effective solutions. Show me a self storage place that guarantees you against the loss of your stuff and I'll show you a storage place with effective security. I'll also show you one that's more expensive that the competition and doesn't have much to show a consumer to justify the surcharge.
Looking at self storage places locally, they all seem to compete on price. When I eventually found one that seemed to be competing on security, it was 50% more expensive.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/sites/default/files/documents/crim...
If you use the disc lock the storage facility sells, you'll likely
pay an additional markup on it, but it's also guaranteed to be
acceptable to their partner insurance company.