Anthoer thing to add to their databases indefinatly

You could quite literally remove the word “stolen” from the title…

As someone observed some years ago, burglary is a dying art. What with Moore’s Law, and manufacturing in China, so little stuff is still worth stealing. Things like tablet computers are a temporary and local exception.

I live in an apartment complex which is mostly student housing. Students, being young, are not bound by our obsolete notions of economic value. It is really rather amazing what goes into the dumpsters at term-end. The dumpsters overflow under extreme strain, so the debris is not actually in them, but on top and beside them, and it is easy to see what is being thrown out, without going to the extreme of dumpster-delving (some locals do come around to delve). There are small appliances of course, but also large quantities of clothing, books, household linens, furniture, and even items such as computers, and (in what I can only regard as satirical commentary) a set of golf clubs. The students have an accurate idea of what it costs to carry something as checked baggage on an airplane, the minimum charges of house movers, and the time-cost of running a yard sale. But they don’t have the kind of puritan compulsions which make me ashamed and angry when I have to throw something out because the Salvation Army flat-out doesn’t want it. That’s your bottom-level truth– in a more perfect cybernetic economy, durable goods become worth almost nothing.

Food is worth something, because it doesn’t stay bought. However food generally has little or no resale value.

The most recent New York Police Department abuse scandal (the James Blake case) involves a bungled investigation for credit card fraud in respect of a neetzie-cuckoo internet company which delivers durable goods (in this case, cellphones) to customers at street-corner locations. In the first place, the obvious remedy for the credit card companies is to harden their systems (eg. Chip & Pin). As for the goods themselves, and their mode of delivery, there is an old saying, “comfortable as an old shoe.” New shoes tend to involve blisters. That can be viewed as a metaphor for consumer durable goods. The enterprise of trying to deliver durable consumer goods to people so instantly that the goods cannot be delivered to their registered addresses is doomed to failure. One does not, after all, want to change into new clothes on the public street. Much the same applies to electronics, which are useless without personal data. The more expensive an electronic device is, the more complicated it is, and the more difficult to learn to use. The case would probably not have arisen if the internet business had restricted itself to delivering things to hotel guiests, either in their rooms, or via the hotel desk clerk. The natural point of delivery for stuff is to wherever the customer keeps his stuff. A company with a business model of delivering durable goods on street corners is bound to find itself drifting into conspiracy with credit-card fraudsters. I think the deliveryman was doing his best to turn State’s Evidence, and therefore pointed to whoever he could see.

My experience in West Virginia is that a minimum economic order for delivered pizza is about thirty dollars. When I’m feeling sick enough that I don’t want to go out, or I’m treed by winter snowfalls, I order one pizza item, and a bunch of salads, which can sit in the refrigerator for a few days. I presume prices in New York are rather higher. There seems to be a real question whether a basic “burner” cellphone, the sort of thing one might need for emergency communications, would be economically deliverable under a “pizza delivery” regime. Consulting Google, the price of a basic Tracfone seems to be about ten dollars, then once you’ve got it, you can use your credit card to load it up with minutes. It is not really plausible that an emergency replacement of a cellphone would be a big enough deal to be worth a courier’s while.

Over the last ten years or so, the single biggest set of hassles I have had about money have involved health insurance. If you make “worst-case” sets of assumptions about your health, you can easily be talking two or three hundred thousand dollars a year. To get the insurance premium down to a more reasonable level tends to involve “stress and strain.” When I was younger, I had university tuition issues. The tuition rate was not negotiable, but the number of hours of enrollment was, and likewise the meeting of specific requirements. The name of the game was to convince one’s professor to allow one to enroll for one credit-hour, reading books instead of attending classes. Money worries are associated with things which, in many countries, are government benefits.

The whole economy is swinging away from a street cop’s dimensions.

The future of crime is probably “crimes against the person.” I don’t know if you have ever heard of the case of Erica Pratt, the little girl in Southwest Philadelphia who, back in 2002, was kidnapped on the strength of a (probably false) rumor that her family had come into an insurance settlement. This was an ordinary little slum girl, whose runaway father and uncles were apparently street-corner men, involved in the usual range of illicit dealing. However she’s a good girl, in spite of everything. One of her male relatives got killed in the course of business, and rumors flew around the neighborhood about a life-insurance settlement. So some men kidnapped Erica and demanded ransom. This was not particularly realistic, because as anyone who has ever dealt with insurance companies knows, they work in mysterious ways (“like God, only not half so generous,” as someone put it). Being entitled to an insurance settlement is by no means the same thing as having available cash. The girl managed to escape, and of course the kidnappers were caught, as one might expect of such stupid men, and given good, solid thirty-and-forty-year prison sentences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erica_Pratt

Incidentally, re MAC addresses: they are 48 bits (256 trillion addresses), so the likelihood of collisions, in an area of a couple of hundred yards, with, say a thousand phones, is on the order of a hundred billion to one.