There are any number of apocryphal tales along the following lines:
One day the parking attendant at a local shopping centre doesn't turn up for work, after fifteen years of faithful service without a single day off. The centre manager calls the local council, asking if they're sending someone to cover for him. The council have no idea who he is. After some investigation, it transpired that both the shopping centre management and the council assumed that the car park belonged to the other party. When the shopping centre was being built, the car park was finished before anything else. The bloke had just stood at the entrance with a yellow jacket and a sign and started collecting money. He did this so diligently that no-one ever had cause to notice him. He wasn't off sick, he had fled the country - £3 a car for 15 years worked out to £1.5 million.
I suppose it's tax free, but I'm pretty sure that he could have earned quite a bit more if he'd worked a steady job for 15 years and was as diligent about saving money as he must have been.
edit: Then again, I suppose that's £100k a year, which might be kind of tough to earn without spending money on a degree first.
[Edit: For anyone reading this, Glasgow is a great place, sure it has difficult neighborhoods, but most cities do and most cities don't have nearly as much character as Glasgow.]
Seconded: Glasgow also has some of the most amazing architecture, especially in the Park area [1].
I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.
One of my all time favorite bits of software was written in Glasgow at the Turing Institute by Arthur van Hoff (later of the original Sun Java team and one of the founders of Marimba). It was a lovely user interface builder created on top of Sun's PostScript-based NeWS graphical environment: HyperNeWS.
One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.
Hey that's one of my favorite pieces of software too! I moved to Glasgow to work on it with Arthur. The Glasgow School of Art rocks on Friday nights! ;) And you are correct about PdB's true meaning.
I've smiled at many a piece of HN serendipity in the past, but never expected it to happen to me. I wrote this car park post, and also DJ'd at the arty last friday night. Perfection.
I knew sitting here in Edinburgh and writing nice things about Glasgow would pay off... :-)
Actually, I seem to remember that I owe you some thanks, I blagged a very early copy of Java from you in early '95 - which led to some fairly interesting stuff (at least for Scotland).
This is not thuggish but I figure I share it here anyway since it s pretty entrepreneurial: A long time ago I was a housekeeper in Yosemite National Park. When I wasn't working, I d roam around the valley, checking out its nooks and crannies. One day I decided to hike up Yosemite Falls. For those of you who dont know about the fall, it is only 7 miles round trip but the elevation is a steep 3650ft. This means lots and lots of brutal switchbacks under the intense summer heat. Many tourists overlooked that (or they didn't know how to read a topo map) and didn't bring any food or water, thinking it was just an easy stroll in the park. When they reached the top, exhausted and dehydrated, welcoming them there would be a man filtering water from the creek with his pump and selling it for a dollar a pop. So there it was, a line of out of shape, thirsty hikers, buying ice cold water from a man under the shade, with the gorgeous Sierra Nevada as a backdrop.
This is one of the reasons why parking inspectors here in Vancouver shoot car's dashboard with 5MP camera prior to issuing a ticket. That's not say there are many parking places left that do not require entering a parking spot number when buying a ticket, or binding a ticket to a specific car in some way.
A friend of mine was scammed at a private pay lot. A parking thug was posing as the attendant and took his money. He comes back some time later and finds his pickup truck booted. The PITA thing about this, is that the private lot has no incentive to prevent this sort of scam, so long as it's not prevalent enough to scare people away from lots in general. In fact, there are parties involved who would benefit by encouraging this scam.
Not even a "scam" but definitely an example of moral hazard: I used to live next to a pub which had very little parking which was always full. Across the street was a large parking lot which mainly serviced a bank. Posted signs said that the parking lot was for "customers only" (of the bank) and indicated that violators could be towed. But of course, people driving by at night looking for parking to go to the pub would assume that since the bank was closed, there would be "no reason" for them to be enforcing this rule. Unfortunately, the tow company contracted to enforce it did have about a hundred good reasons. From what I could see they managed to catch a few people every single night. The pub knew it was a problem: they put signs inside the pub warning people not to leave their cars there. Obviously, they had probably had some pretty pissed-off designated drivers (or would-be drunk drivers) at 2 a.m. and having to cab it across town to collect their car.
I don't know about innovation - I can't think of anything off the top of my head that has been innovated by the criminal and/or darker sectors of society. I can certainly see a massive demand for certain innovations (that are later created or innovated by other sectors), but I wouldn't conflate the two. This isn't like military applications where you may see inventions created and used for nefarious purposes then later retooled to support society as a whole.
Although, come to think of it, I suppose you could possibly consider reliable P2P transfer an offshoot of the piracy world, but I doubt you'd get too many people to admit that :) So I'm not entirely correct, but I think its a bit of a stretch to say that its quite often the case.
TamDenholm mentioned porn kings, and I think they are a good example of the "darker sectors" driving innovation. The porn industry were some of the first to provide streaming of videos for example. While they may not be the inventors, porn is often a driving force in adoption of new technology, it being a new format or a new delivery vector for media.
If porn is part of the "dark sectors of society" however, is obviously debatable.
Porn has also been somewhat instrumental in affirming individual freedom and occasionally pushing the boundaries of civil rights. Similarly, illegal p2p helped shaping a debate on the limits of current copyright legislation (which is far from over).
I haven't seen a parking ticket machine that doesn't require you to input (and then prints on the ticket) the numerical portion of your car reg for some years in England.
I'd suggest this is strongly regional (and observe that Glasgow is in Scotland, not England, but anyway...) - I have had to input part of my number plate when buying a physical ticket (as opposed to online/phone ticketless billing) but it's been a rare occurrence.
Interesting... I've never seen such a machine here in England (seen some that automatically scan your registration plate and print it on the ticket, though, e.g. at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5).
I'm in England, and I see them all the time. Lincoln was the first city I saw them pop up in (several years ago) but anecdotally I'd say about a quarter of the machines I come across require you to input your number plate.
Around Greater Manchester, reg-tracking ticket machines are still the exception. It might have something to do with costs -- i bet they break more easily (they need input buttons) and cost more upfront.
Or it might be that local authorities here are still somewhat sympathetic to the little guy... It's supposed to be Old Labour territory after all.
Homeless people in Miama have been following a similar scheme for a while now, albeit less scary and more annoying. Of course, now the city is beginning to replace the machines that print tickets, with those that electronically keep track of funds, the homeless people disappear and the city increases their income by forcing people to pay for a spot which a previous car had payed for.
Well the transferring of a ticket from one vehicle to another is not (to my mind) particularly amoral. After all the space has been paid for. By forbidding transfers the council effectively get paid twice for the space when someone leaves early. Maybe this over-lap is built into their business model, but I doubt it. It's free money for them.
True, where I live it's considered polite to put your ticket back on the machine if it has more than an hour or so on it, so the next person can use it.
I agree that transferring the passes is not particularly amoral nor should it be illegal, but selling a pass to falsely contest a parking ticket is. That is what the author (mis)labeled entrepreneurial.
The same scheme has been run in Manchester (England) at the Victoria Station car park for as long as I can remember. Luckily my Italian accent and angry face is enough to keep thugs at bay, but I bet they're tolerated by local police as long as they don't threaten the locals too much.
In order to fight the scam, ticket machines now print your plate number on the ticket itself, so if you buy one from the thugs, you are risking a fine. The fact people keep doing it shows very clearly how parking charges in central Manchester are unrealistically high.
One thing about being an American living in another country has made me realize about the USA is that there are tons of police compared to other countries. This is a good and bad thing. It's a bad thing when you're being pulled over and harassed for looking suspicious. It's a good thing when you have bullies like this. If you call the police, they will usually respond promptly and eagerly looking to make an arrest.
Really? My observation about the US is that there's hardly ever a policeman around. Oh sure, they exist and they'll turn up (often en masse) when called, but otherwise they don't leave their cars. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a policeman walking a beat, at least not here in California, which tends to increase low-level antisocial behaviour.
For instance, if you walk down University Avenue in Berkeley you'll see all sorts of people engaged in various levels of borderline-illegal dickishness -- blocking the sidewalk, harassing passersby for money, standing on a street corner with a ghetto blaster on full blast, whatever. Police officers go past in their cars but don't stop unless something serious is happening. If they were patrolling up and down on foot then they'd have the ability to slow down and talk to the troublemakers and hopefully move 'em along.
My observation about the US is that there's hardly ever a policeman around.
I live in Houston, and most of my interactions with Houston police have been negative. The one time I encountered a cop on foot, I was walking on a concrete wall about 3ft high in the early evening in an almost empty park with a friend, and he ordered me off of it. Another time, I was with a girlfriend who reported a hit and run, who even memorized the license plate and had visible damage on her rear bumper. The policeman insisted on getting a description of the car, despite my protests that my girlfriend doesn't differentiate that information. Nothing was done. I also remember another occasion where, despite my neutral, polite, and factual answers, the policeman kept escalating his hostility.
How well cops treat males in the US has mostly to do with their evaluation of your social class in the first second.
Armed robbery (via gun or otherwise) and a fairly fixed area of operation (near an appropriate parking lot) probably would not last very long. In some states, merely being in possession of a firearm while committing this sort of crime would up your jail time a bit even without drawing it, and even more so if you actively threatened someone with it.
Don't gun toters have a saying like "If you are going to pull your weapon, you better be prepared to use it." Would you actually be willing to shoot someone over a parking pass? Or are you suggesting that this type of scam doesn't happen in the US at all because the risk of getting shot by running this racket are too high? I don't understand how guns are relevant here.
You're assuming the owner has to be willing to draw. They don't-- it's the diffused cultural knowledge that someone might be carrying concealed. "An armed society is a polite society." Also the reason why happy slapping never caught on at all in the US, but was big in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Australia. But not the States!
You're assuming the owner has to be willing to draw. They don't-- it's the diffused cultural knowledge that someone might be carrying concealed
I've heard it say that in Miami the criminals concentrate on tourists because locals might be carrying. But despite some of the most pro-gun laws, Florida is not exactly known as a low crime rate state.
And paradoxically, many states with strong laws against guns have lower crime rates that many strongly pro-gun states.
I'm pro concealed carry myself, but do not think the real world evidence supports a connection between that and lower crime rates. Perhaps if some place has a sudden radical change in gun policy some data can be extrapolated?
Similarly, it's not like in violent hell holes around the word almost everybody isn't carrying and still getting robbed and killed.
It's not mutual fear but recognition of a fact of life: citizens who might be armed should not be messed with.
I've lived in places where anyone could be assumed to be armed, that all householders had firearms. I've lived in places where no one had firearms, except criminals.
The former had zero mutual fear, the latter had fear, but only on the side of the unarmed citizens.
Nothing says 'fear' like bars on the windows and bullet-proof glass in front of the counter at KFC, food served by turnstile.
My point was: if we already live with such conditions we may have lost the fight to live in a decent society. And a society which is not decent is not a society, it's only an amalgam of people.
One of the founding principles of the United States government was the Leviathan from Thomas Hobbes' book. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Leviathan_%28... It's not just a book about government, it starts with a discussion of the nature of humanity, and then works out (using thought experiments) what a peaceful society would have to be like, given human nature.
Hobbes draws an anthropology before stating his theory of the state. But we should take care here, a few points:
firstly the anthropology is terribly negative and the conclusion are that without government we would leave in a violent state of nature. It's not that clear that without government the situation would be so violent and moreover, from scientific point of view, it's also not that clear that there was such a state of nature: homo sapiens could well have been really civilized when he became home sapiens.
Secondly Hobbes never concludes that we should be armed or anything like that. No. He concludes that we need a powerful state and that to build this state we need to give up some of our rights. We give some rights and the state acquire the obligation to protect us. If you think about it it goes totally against the American vision: Hobbes would probably agree that the citizen should give up their rights to be armed, to throw out the state of nature, and in return the state would protect them. This seems really hobbesian, not the reverse.
But the Leviathan is a construction of the people. The Leviathan can't take or be anything that the people didn't have to begin with. So if the Leviathan might have the power of, say, capital punishment, one must first allow that the people had the power of capital punishment first, in their "natural state", and then gave it to the Leviathan. Every power the government has - owning guns, levying taxes and fines, imprisoning criminals, printing money - is a power that individuals used to have, that have been given up (in varying degrees) to the Leviathan.
The right to bear arms seems to be something that is expressly protected by the Bill of Rights, and this is definitely an aspect of the relationship of the government with the people, not of people to each other. I'm sure Jefferson and Madison didn't want people to go around threatening each other with guns, but they still wanted the government to be afraid of people with guns.
Certainly most folks wouldn't shoot someone over a parking pass - that would be criminal. But its not about the parking pass. Its about the intimidation. Should you put up with an implied threat to your life or health?
There's a saying: the threat of capital punishment is absolutely effective. Its just that the criminals are the ones using it.
If you need a firearm to deal with an attempt at mild intimidation in a carkpark, you should take a look at your self confidence.
In these situations, a cheery, "Nah mate, I'm alright" combined with just the right amount of eye contact and a swift exit is more than enough to resolve the situation.
Do you really think its part of these guys business model to actually attack people who don't give them their parking tickets? How long do you think they'd be able to continue this scam if they that was their policy?
These people aren't totally stupid. They are perfectly capable of realising that its not worth spending the rest of the day dealing with the repercussions of assaulting someone in a carpark in broad daylight, when they could let you walk off and wait for the next "victim," carrying on the scam as normal.
In a civilized society, you don't have to "deal" with ongoing intimidation. You take care of it. If bullies are tolerated, they grow bolder. Its the story of the decay of neighborhoods etc.
Again, the point was missed. Its not about a single incident. Its about zero tolerance for disrespect, intimidation, shakedown, public bullying. So somebody other than you can park without knuckling under to some jerk.
Which works for a few - you among them. So the strong survive, and that's your bar for a 'civilized society'? Of course not. Your timid niece needs to be able to park her car too.
In most of the US, this type of scam doesn't happen because we don't have this kind of parking lot. I think I've seen just one in my life. Most lots have either parking meters or gates and attendants.
Most lots have either parking meters or gates and attendants.
I don't know where you are from. In Dallas, the downtown lots closest to the center (expensive) had gates and attendants.
Further out (cheaper) were lots where you slid cash into a slot matching one's stall number: a guy came around on a regular basis to collect the cash, but he wasn't stationed in the lot.
Nah, just a contingency plan to scare em off for a few days while you find new parking. Most thugs aren't going to risk their lives for a $30 parking ticket. They see a gun and they'll leave you alone for a little bit. Don't be surprised to see your car keyed up while you're gone though.
Quite. And what's to stop the 5 criminals from carrying guns as well? Pull a gun and get yourself killed in self defence. Great job, Captain America. This is why guns are a stupid thing to give to the public.
"Compared to other illegal activities they might have engaged in such as selling drugs..."
The author didn't really assume they would be dealing drugs, he just wanted to show the advantages of their current scheme over another common illegal alternative.
Also (strangely) carries the assumption that these guys can't be multitasking and looking for other moneymaking opportunities, which might or might not include dealing.
One day the parking attendant at a local shopping centre doesn't turn up for work, after fifteen years of faithful service without a single day off. The centre manager calls the local council, asking if they're sending someone to cover for him. The council have no idea who he is. After some investigation, it transpired that both the shopping centre management and the council assumed that the car park belonged to the other party. When the shopping centre was being built, the car park was finished before anything else. The bloke had just stood at the entrance with a yellow jacket and a sign and started collecting money. He did this so diligently that no-one ever had cause to notice him. He wasn't off sick, he had fled the country - £3 a car for 15 years worked out to £1.5 million.