Hacker News Reader

Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

> Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone.

that's not even true for adults. Why would you assume it's true for kids?

View on HN

It is close enough to true where I live anyway. I don't know your situation.

Which part is untrue?

> and will allow you to make a call from their phone.

People can be wildly reluctant to just hand over a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment to a teenager in a busy street and hope they don't run off with it. Smartphone theft is still a thing.

When I was homeless I would just ask people to call on my behalf. If it was an innocuous message about 10-50% of people would be willing to do it. I've even gotten people (complete strangers) to make phone calls for me while I was in handcuffs and everyone thought I was the bad guy but even then they were willing to make a call. You don't ask for the phone, you ask for someone to relay the message.

> People can be wildly reluctant to just hand over a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment

Who owns a $2,000 phone which isn't insured and should they really be leaving their house?

I own a $60,000 dollar car that's insured, still doesn't mean I'm going to just let anyone use it when I depend on it.

I would assume that you cannot merely walk in to the nearest Apple car store and get a new car the same day if something bad happened to your car, so I don't really understand your statement as there is no equivalency here to exploit in your analogy.

I mean, you can go get a new car the same day, hence rental places while insurance figures everything out.

How about this, I'll pick a random day in your future while you're out doing stuff to show up and break your phone in half. How much is that going to ruin your day?

What hellscape are you living in? I have never had anyone try to trick me like that. I'm not saying theft doesn't exist in Denmark, but it is not something I have ever considered when helping a person out.

Any tourist area with a lot of people is going to be an area with potential for pick pockets and other theft of opportunity types. Even Vatican City has a crime rate often upwards or in excess of 1.5 per resident, and that's only what is officially recorded. Most people don't bother reporting a loss when there's no chance the police can do anything about it anyway.

The vatican city, having essentially no residents, would obviously be an outlier in any statistic measured against residents.

I take your point though, but I have to wonder who in their right mind would go to times square to ask to borrow a phone. Surely you'd go somewhere less busy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com