Yeah, pigs don’t like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don’t know what they’re doing.
And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.
I have heard that very often. I wonder if bikes are harder to track down than other property for some reason.
Given the number of times I’ve seen cops on police forums and r/protectandserve use terms like “bikefags”, I think it’s just the typical cop disgust of anything they perceive to be weak or effeminate.
smaller, therefore easier to hide. Not registered with a central authority like, for example, cars.
Because even if they look for it and find it, whoever is riding just says it theirs and there is literally nothing the police can do unless it was caught on video or there is a meaningful identifying feature like a serial number or something else specific and unique.
Seeing a sketchy guy with a black and red bike with the same bike rack you had isn’t enough to prove anything.
If an officer approached me riding my bike around and asked me to prove it’s mine, I couldn’t either despite not being a thief.
Anything that’s not serialized and recorded is basically impossible to find. If you have serial numbers then they can inform local pawn shops, but even then the shops probably aren’t checking serials for anything under $500.
And if the thief just sells it on craigslist then no one is checking serials.
I reported my bike stolen in college and I got a call the next day that they had found it parked in front of a nearby church.
It was stolen on a Sunday. I guess someone didn’t want to be late to service.
It probably depends a lot on where you live. My wife’s bike got stolen and she was woken up by police coming to check on it (one of the maintenance guys at our apartment noticed a man at 7-Eleven riding it and recognized it; came back running to check if it’s indeed missing and called the police). We fully expected the police would do nothing about it (it was the cheapest Walmart bike), but an hour later they called that they found the bike and have the culprit in custody. It did help that the bike was a girly mint green with a wicker basket, so they instantly recognized it when they saw it.
Then again, in San Francisco, when my wife got her car window smashed and wallet stolen (she was late for class and dropped her wallet under the car seat, didn’t stop to take it; but it wasn’t the wallet that caught the thieves’ attention, it was the breast pump bag that looked like a laptop bag; they threw it on the floor when they saw what it was), we never heard anything back from the police.
Fun fact. Cops on average have lower IQ and often fail literacy tests. Furthermore it appears that critical thinking is discouraged in the job, with candidates being selected who lack critical thinking abilities over those that have them.
Certain departments specifically have IQ tests, in order to ensure you aren’t smart enough to easily get a better job elsewhere.
This internet myth has got to die. ONE case in ONE department, a quarter century ago, does not mean it’s a practice.
This argument did not go well
You can’t convince people to do their job with logic when they just don’t want to do their job. After minorities, the thing cops hate most is doing their job.
when they just don’t want to do their job.
It might also be a matter of getting a directive from their management not the care, because there’s not enough cops to go around for the ‘important’ stuff.
They don’t want to waste their limited time for simple property theft, which is ironic considering that’s what police are supposed to be doing (stopping theft).
The answer would be then to hire more police, but unfortunately that would mean higher taxes for the citizenry, and that seems to be a hard glass ceiling.
Wrong
The police exists to protect the status quo. Try overthrowing any immoral law or legally but immoral behavior and you’ll see how efficiently they move about.
Before handing out life advice maybe try it IRL and see how it goes. It’s kinda fun.
I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I’m assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there’s no partially existing bike.
each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting
hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour
edit: to use the entire hour we’d need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps
History is about 10k years, the 200k years is mostly pre-history. People didn’t write stuff down until they invented agriculture and needed to track trade between owners, workers, etc
True and interesting to note. OOP says ‘dawn of humanity’ though, not recorded history, so taking 200k as ‘human history’ is also valid.
Yeah, I’m used to the narrower meaning of “history”, meaning recorded. I like that definition as it lets you differentiate between it and prehistory.
Combine AI image/visual-pattern recognition and quantum computing, and this search could be completed before it was even started.
Ever heard of a logarithm? If you haven’t, you just reinvented it.
Also, your math is wrong: log base 2 of 200,000 is ~18
This didn’t go down well.
IT consulting pro-tip: Customers would rather pay for your time and expertise, than be made to feel stupid that they didn’t think of something so simple themselves.
After working in desktop support for a year after college, I realized that people just wanted their problem solved and to not feel frustrated. That realization made my job immensely easier because I pivoted from copying a file in 30 seconds and walking away to talking to them a little bit and letting them feel good after we were done. My ticket closing speed slowed down a little but people felt better and I consistently got positive feedback.
Dude same here. I usually say stuff along the lines of ‘yea it took me forever the first time to figure it out’ or ‘it’s a common issue that a lot of people have, I’ll get it sorted in a sec for you no problem’. Make it seem like they’re not stupid, regardless of the truth and then fix it, keeps em happy and more willing to cooperate with you as well.
I also talk through what I’m doing and if they show interest I’ll teach them so they can fix it in the future, ‘ah I’ve seen this before, took me like a hour to figure it out on my computer, for me it was a chrome update that broke how downloaded files open. Here let me right click the file, and go to open with, we hit Adobe pdf and check the always open with this program button, that should do it let’s test it out. OK seems like its good to go. Let me know if you have any more issues’. If they don’t show interest then it’s no problem.
Are you my kindred spirit!? :P Thats almost exactly what I do too!
My favourite is when someone apologies for not knowing something or having dumb questions. Apart from “there is never a dumb question” because there usually isn’t, I typically respond with “if everyone already knew how to do everything, I’d be out of a job” which always seems to go down well.
When I started in support 15 years ago my boss said: “First you solve the person, then you solve the problem”.
He was a good dude.
What would you recommend for solving people? Does a household base like NaOH suffice?
Same story here, actually. I cut my teeth on internet telephony (modems) support for an ISP. People would call up furious about not being able to connect. I learned that chatting people up during a long Windows reboot did a lot to humanize their struggle and get them to calm down and loosen up. First few times were organic, then I started looking for pretenses to do this, just to bring the temperature down for the rest of the call.
Call centers tell you to empathize but that’s not something you can teach. You can either do it or you can’t. So they give those terrible scripts, and then some of them require you to speak the scripted lines, even when you know all it does is piss the caller off.
No hears that scripted pablum at the start of call and thinks it’s genuine. No one. “I’m sorry to hear your having issues sir, but I’ll be happy to assist you.” genuinely comes off condescending at this point. They know you know it’s scripted, they know you know the representative has to say it, but they make them do it anyway.
Here’s what I found doing ISP call center work, and it worked virtually every single time: imply through tone and pointed comments you’re as frustrated as the called with how shitty the service and the hardware is. They’re never prepared for it, it always catches their anger off guard.
Don’t outright say “Yeah, Cox is absolute dog shit, and that POS gateway we make you pay for isn’t worth the cost of the the technician we’re sending out to ‘fix’ it.” You’ll get in trouble for that.
But if you’re careful and creative, you can make them appreciate you think that
Just yesterday, I was helping this manager set up a new system of ticket line (the kind where you get a ticket number and wait for it to be called in a panel). He complained that they didn’t have a proper printer just for these tickets, so he made the tickets in excel and printed them. To the right of the number, someone would mark the service, from a list of 6.
“Why not use a single letter prefix and print different piles of passwords? (A01, A02, A03; B01, B02, etc)”
That’ll use too much paper. We’ll also need more tickets than before
“That will use less paper, you can print 2 tickets using the same space. Also, the amount of tickets always depends on the number of people that show up, but you’ll have a better idea of which service is being needed each day”
Mr manager didn’t like the idea and moved on to another problem.
Eh, it’s less intuitive than you might think, as someone who already knows how to do it.
I once had to explain this process to a software engineer who was quite senior to me. The guy wasn’t any idiot, he was a pretty competent engineer, he just didn’t know this trick.
The cops might even already know how to do it, they just don’t want to, because they’re cops.
This method will take forever to find the exact moment, said Officer Zeno.
