It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.
the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.
The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.
yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304608
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
> small-scale crime like this
You mean murder?
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Such as who?
Pick your favorite polluting industry, look up the big CEOs, there you go. It's not hard to find examples.
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You could have so easily left out the word “leftist” and had a nice point, but instead you chose to start a fight.
You started the fight by making the (leftist-coded) comment about CEOs, that other comment was the response.
Huh. I figured "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" was a politically neutral observation of fact.
In the context of discussing a hypothetical murder committed during a home invasion robbery and murder, implying that a smarter criminal would become a CEO instead so they could legally kill people is an attempt to equate running a firm with committing home invasion robberies and murders. This is an extremely ideological statement, not neutral in the least; and the specific ideological framework grounding it is a certain type of leftism.
They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.
It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
The neutral viewpoint, I think, is that "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and some get away with it."
Although yours is more neutral than "CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" which you often hear from the same populations that cheered the assassination of a CEO that did nasty things and most definitely did not get away with it.
It's definitely become more politically charged in the wake of the Luigi event, when framing CEOs as violent people implicitly authorizes "self-defense" cheered on by what is usually associated with left-wing leaning actors.
I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers. And right now, it is far right who is having genocidal rhetorics.
Which far right or fascist ruler came close to what Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot did in terms of numbers?
Which of those three that you named are killing people "right now"?
Where did I claim they are killing people right now?
Thankfully they are all dead, but not before killing high tens of millions. What "far right" ruler is killing millions right now?
I might catch some flack for calling Putin right wing, but he's definitely further right than any of the major killing events I can think of that have happened in modern times. He's certainly way further right than Hitler, who took control of the capital and the means of production and relegated capitalists to basically being token pieces who produced what and when the Nazis order largely at the price Nazis ordered on behalf of the "German people" in a totally "non-socialist" socialist party that just happened to practice the core tenants of socialism when it came to economics.
Actually, already Hitler. The numbers are tight and Hitler did not finished his project. He was stopped by force. His plan was to exterminate Slavic people in the next generation too.
And right know in America, it is squarely fascists and racists who win the numbers and are on the path to add some.
Numbers are nowhere near close. Just Mao is responsible for at least 3 times for what Hitler was responsible for. Under Pol Pot a quarter of the population was erased. Stalin's numbers double that of Hitler.
If I had a nickel for every time I replied to an HN comment to give the blindingly obvious example of "Adolf Hitler," I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Sure, you got one and he is way bellow the most successful far left dictators in terms of numbers. First you claimed numbers are higher for far right and then you said they are close. Why would you even make up such nonsense?
I wasn't the one saying the numbers are higher for one side or the other.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
That wasn’t me.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
I'm sorry, you are right I mixed you up with another user. You didn't make those claims.
The numbers I remember from when I was more into History:
* Hitler is responsible at least for 10 million to 15 million deaths.
* Stalin from 15 million to 20 million.
* Mao from 40 million to 70 million.
* Pol Pot from 2 million to 3 million.
* Kim Il Sung for over a million.
There are of course others, but I don't remember numbers for them.
10-15 vs 15-20 is definitely comparable in my view, considering how fuzzy the numbers are.
I'd put Hitler much higher, though. That figure must be excluding a lot of war deaths. For non-war deaths, there are 6 million Jews, maybe 3 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, plus a bunch of other groups with smaller numbers. Taking just those big ones, that gets us to 12 million non-war deaths.
But surely we should count at least some of the war dead. Deciding what to attribute to who is very subjective. Starting with the strongest case, 3 million Soviet POWs were killed in captivity, hard to blame anyone else for that. That's up to 15+ million. There's a good case for including Allied military deaths in the European theater, since they were killed by Axis forces. The vast majority of those are the Soviets, which accounts for another 5-8 million (not double-counting the POWs killed). I'd also include Axis military deaths under the general principle that you get credit for what happens when you start a war. That's another 5-6 million. That puts us at 25-37 million.
Then you can get really fuzzy. There's many millions of Soviet citizens who starved due to wartime disruptions, do they count? There's around a million German civilians killed during the war, or died in the immediate aftermath due to the Allies, do they count?
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.
It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.