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calmbonsai 5 hours ago

Yeah. I don’t see weather or theft addressed in this design.

I recall a wheel-mounted rotor system from a few years back that did address theft, tire-wear, and weather, but it suffered from far too little torque and very limited battery life.

rtkwe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It looks like their solution is to make it easy enough to install and remove you take it with you. My thought would be security bolts so the pool of thieves is at least limited to people with the right bolt head. Also it has a big battery built in so

SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Thieves will just take the whole bike.

Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Tbh solving this is one of the actual use cases for things like flock cameras.

Simply bolting things down harder is still defeated by a battery powered grinder.

AngryData 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Theft is solved by making society better, not worse. Make people not want or reliant upon crime to survive.

mik1998 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No one relies on bike theft to "survive".

a2800276 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

That's right, people steal bikes because they are inherently evil and want to make baby Jesus cry.

I think it's ok to define "survive" as an addict who needs (<-also loosely defined) a fix.

You don't generally commit serious white collar crime, tax fraud or do crypto grifts to survive. For petty street crime, I don't really see any other motivation.

adwn 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Theft is solved by making society better, not worse.

Phew, good to hear. Here I thought it would be a hard and complex problem, with lots of unknown unknowns, difficult political compromises, a generation-spanning efforts and many potential solutions with uncertain outcomes, partially contradicting each other.

Instead, we just have to make society better. So, what's step 1?

dreamcompiler 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cameras don't solve crimes, Flock or otherwise, unless the cops consider the crime serious. It is almost universal that cops don't consider bike theft serious. This is beginning to change in a few cities but not most.

Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

From what I can tell, they are mostly fully occupied with dealing with emergency situations and domestic violence calls. There isn’t the resources allocated to searching for bikes. Especially when there often isn’t much to go off.

Making the search process easier makes locating stolen stuff becomes more of an office job that’s cheaper to do so the math works out better.

jvuygbbkuurx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's actually solved by putting thieves in prison (by the help of flock cameras).

defrost 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it though? Does prison work as a deterrence to others?

blfr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable.

So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.

simondotau 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On one hand, you’re breaking existing networks; on the other hand you are establishing a social club for new ones.

KennyBlanken an hour ago | parent [-]

That person is insanely naive - either very young, or very lacking in life experience and worldly knowledge.

KennyBlanken an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods" is probably the most naive thing I've ever heard.

I also think you have no idea how much it costs per prisoner per year.

I also think you have no idea how much harder it is for someone to get a job, housing, a partner, etc after they have a conviction. Or how much whatever life they had falls apart, which includes partners, friends, family. And guess what happens when you strip away all of someone's social connections? They lose that safety net, and are now dependent upon whatever society as whole provides. And in the US we have people saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-ironically, not realizing the whole fucking point of that phrase is that recovering from poverty in the US is extremely difficult.

That money is better spent on helping people who are not able to afford basic necessities, because that is why a lot of people commit property crime.

I suggest you actually open up some studies on this subject because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Or just open up a chart reflecting the economy over the decades and compare it with property crime rates.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world by both headcount and percentage of the population. How's that working for us? We have one of the higher property and violent crime rates among developed nations. Far higher than nations where criminals are imprisoned for rehabilitation, not to punish. Things like giving them a cell that looks like a bedroom, not pen in an animal shelter.

ajkjk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The idea is that it lowers the number of thieves.

notourproblem 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

wahnfrieden 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Police here don’t even care to help if your car is stolen and you have GPS on it. Cameras and jail do nothing to help protect your property if the police refuse to work.

retired 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where I live that’s a win win for thieves. Earn money stealing a bike, have a roof over your head and free food.

KennyBlanken an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Aside from the fact that there's little to no actual evidence (not funded by flock cherry-picking, and doing a lot of extremely thin correlation/causation nonsense...

No, it's actually solved by providing social safety net programs and managing the economy to have entry level accessible jobs that pay a living wage. People steal because they run out of other options. The cost of flock contracts would be far better spent on food pantries, job counseling, emergency housing...

There is nearly zero correlation between the number of police and the amount of crime.

taneq 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t gotta be impossible to steal from, you just gotta be more annoying to steal from than the next guy.

a2800276 a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Well said by somebody who's very obviously never used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation ;)

Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They will still steal your seat, lights, wheel, and any other bit they can get.

Sure you can use all number of locks, security bolts, and stripping the bike down yourself every time you leave it, but it’s sucks. You’d rather public spaces just be safe.

wafflemaker 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Just follow the old Eve online adage - don't fly what you can't afford to lose.

If there's lot of theft and you can't store bike at a secure place - have a cheap bike.

neves 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can't use with mud guards

runamok 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

These sorts of seat mounted mud guards would work: https://ass-savers.com/ (yes, the URL is funny and seems a risky click)

giardini 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And WTF is it about mud guards now?

When i was young all bicycles came with mud guard (then called "fenders") front and rear. Now they seem to be anathema.

Every bike I rode w/o fenders put a stripe of mud up my back!

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Being cynical I would say it is yet another way to upsell.

Here in Germany if you want to get a cheaper bicycle, other than flea markets, usually they make you mount the pedals yourself, doesn't have fenders, lights might also be missing, depending on the offer.

silversmith 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

Are you looking at performance road bikes? Fenders and lights are removed for weight savings, and for pedals there are multiple clip-in systems, you are supposed to install the pedals that match your chosen system.

If, however, they are doing that for commuter bikes...

pjmlp 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

Regular city bikes.

This is the approach if you go offers on regular supermarkets that also sell bicycles.

Personally I am never going to give more than 400 euros tops, for a new bicycle, it is either that or not much beyond 100 euros at a flea market.

Getting the bicycle stolen or worse, revenge damage when they fail to steal it, is not worth more than that.