Hacker News Reader

Comment by victorstanciu | Hacker News Reader

I don't. I own nothing I would cry over if I lost it. My wife doesn't own expensive jewelry, all our money is in the bank, and all my work is backed up to external servers, so losing the laptops would only cause me some delay. We are not attached to any object that we own, and we only lock the door for our own protection. If someone wants to burglarize my home, all I ask is that they wait until we're not home to do it.

View on HN

There are non-monetary things you can lose.

My wife was chased through her parents house at knifepoint by burglars. She locked herself in the bathroom and was on the phone with 911 as the burglars tried to kick the door in. They had almost gotten in when the cops showed up with sirens blaring. They left.

Two weeks later, they broke into a house a block away and killed two residents.

At my last apartment, I didn't think much of the cheap-shit door locks so I added a hotel-style locking bar for something like $20 - something I'd never bothered to do in the past. When I was out of the house and my wife was home alone, a pair of men in masks (she peeked out the peephole when the battering paused) started trying to break the door down. My very sweet, loves-everyone, 50-pounds-soaking-wet 6 month old puppy let out some very uncharacteristic and very intimidating-sounding barks and they booked it.

These are statistically unlikely occurrences in most safe countries but they still happen. A bit of security doesn't hurt and doesn't really cost much.

Where do you live? This sounds like terrible luck, or maybe someone has it in for your wife.

This was all in the Vancouver area, which is quite safe by North American standards.

I doubt anyone in particular has it in for my wife, but she is certainly not short on bad luck!

We don't have anything beyond locked doors either. If a drug abusing burglar decides to make some cash for the next hit an alarm isn't going to be a show-stopper anyway, and at least here in Sweden we'd be paying up to $500 per month to some guard company that at best shows up after the burglar is already gone.

The real damage in a break-in for us would be the feeling of being violated and feel unsafe in our own home, and that's not something that an alarm or guard will be able to repair.

+1 from another Swede.

In the end the best home security is creating a state with good enough social security so that nobody gets desperate enough to steal all your stuff.

People may complain about the high taxes I have to pay in Germany, but at least I never really have to fear for my personal safety or invest a ton of money in heavy home security systems.

I find it difficult to believe that you truly have no preference between being burglarized and not being burglarized.

Not what I said :)

Also, in the UK I know several colleagues who have had house contents insurance claims denied because their alarm system was inoperative or malfunctional.

It's actually better in that case not to have any alarm system.

To contextualise this, in the UK we usually declare whether we have an alarm during the application for insurance, and we pay a larger premium if we don't have an alarm / other security.

So these people have benefitted by having a lower premium because they have an alarm and then not used it / found it inoperable in the event of a burglary.

Not to harm your peace of mind, but trust me when I say you don't want a frustrated (nothing valuable to steal) armed criminal at home. Chances are he is going to be either desperate or with no regards towards human life (or both) and extremely angry.

Stay safe.

On the other hand, and at least in the US, in only 12% of all households violently burglarized while someone was home faced an offender armed with a firearm, and most of the time when there's violence, the burglar is someone known to the victim.

I live in Romania. It's pretty much impossible to obtain a gun, and the overwhelming majority of burglaries are perpetrated when the owners are not home. Burglars usually stake a place out before hitting, and make sure that the owners are either on vacation or at work.

That's not a healthy attitude. You don't have to be attached to an object to be averse to losing something of monetary value. It's like you're trying to be weird on purpose.

Just another opinion: I find that attitude very healthy. As a society, you can have a general policy of not locking doors. Will work basically the same as a society with generally locked doors. Burglars will find a way in - this way or the other. There will be hotspots of crime in both cases. The overall rate will not differ that much.

You can be averse to losing something of monetary value and take sensible precautions to avoid losing them, (don't leave your wallet unattended, don't walk through a bad part of Camden at night, etc) but home defense seems to be a classic case of loss aversion.

"I'm terrified of someone stealing my $400 TV and $600 computer, so I'm going to spend hours and hours of time and lots of money on an alarm system, guns, reinforced doors, new locks, better windows, and a goddamn bubble from The Prisoner."

Hardly, he's just saying that since the odds of burglary are quite low(maybe not everywhere) and on a downward trend,[0] and since he doesn't have anything that is particularly irreplaceable, he's not going to be too concerned about burglary or take excessive precautions. And even if you did have something 'irreplaceable,' sooner or later it's going to be gone or transformed, it wouldn't hurt to incorporate that into your present awareness.

[0]Pretty sure I heard something like this recently. One factor postulated was that since the price of consumer electronic items and whatnot typically targeted in burglaries has been falling, the risk/'reward' calculation of what a burglar would find in an average house versus the risk of being caught and going to jail is serving to deter potential burglars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com