[1] Yes, I'm aware of european cities where cars aren't necessary or are actually slower than public transit. That's not applicable to most of the US though.
The only reason I have a car is because there are some specialized transportation needs (towing) that I cannot get from my bike. I use my bike for everything from hardware to Costco to groceries to child care to ... lots of stuff.
Not that much. One site[1] lists the TCO of a compact car at around $33k/year if you drive it for 15k mi/year for 5 years. That works out to $550/month. Of course, if you're comparing this to getting ubers, there's no way that you'll be driving anywhere near 15k mi/year, so the TCO of a comparable car is probably $450/month. That's a lot of money to spend on uber/instacart, but keep in mind that if you have a modest commute of $20 each way, that only works out to 11 days a week, or half the working days.
If it's just a code, tons of legal ambiguity comes up. Can a gf shoot her exbf that she gave the keycode to last month?
How is this different from a physical key?
But I was refuting the specific idea that house locks are a tamper evident seal. They are trivially easy to bypass in a tamper evident manner.
True, the solution very obviously to reduce poverty. It's a social problem, not an engineering nor a policing problem.
Land value taxes are only taxes on the value of the land.
A land value tax would tax a giant residential building and the parking lot adjacent to it the same, which encourages maximizing the value of the lot rather than leaving it for parking.
They are not useless. Only some people have the skills and tools to open them - so they are useful at keeping most people out, even though they don't provide perfect protection.
Most thieves are not professionals, but for example junkies who look for something easy. A simple automatic light, is already doing wonders to keep them away.
But also, bricks through windows are equally not difficult and not expensive, though they do leave a bit more evidence. When my neighbors have been burgled, this is the preferred method of entry I've seen.
But that would be loud. You don't want attention when breaking in. (Unless you are a fucked up junkie not caring about anything anymore)
But yes, my parents for example are paranoid about always locking the front door 2 times(and get angry if I don't do it when I visit), but have a glass door in the back. There are also glass cutters.
"Raking house locks is a) not difficult and b) not expensive. You don't need to be a professional to do that"
But you do have to make some investment. They are illegal to purchase (in most places), I would not know, where to start looking. And then you have to learn to use them. And I know someone who did play with those a bit - yet he still could not enter my door at all. So it is a barrier.
Pre-Covid, it didn't matter if you were loud. You and your neighbors were all off at work all day. So long as a thief felt confident there was no alarm to trigger, they could make all the racket they wanted and no one would hear.
Today, it's a little more risky but of the half dozen houses on my street I'd probably only hear one getting broken into and that's only if I were downstairs. Our homes aren't on especially large lots either (7-10k sq ft).
That said, just because people have low-security locks on their house doesn't mean that better options aren't available. I have Medeco locks. They are harder to pick than what you get at the hardware store. So far, no break-ins from lockpickers! Also, I'll sell you a rock that keeps tigers away.
Lockpicks are legal almost everywhere in the US.[0] Even in places where they aren't legal, they're not exactly difficult to obtain, given that a perfectly adequate rake can be made from any key that fits the target lock, and there are only ~3 keyways in common residential use.
amazon. Not much of an investment needed https://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Steel-20-School-Toolbox/dp/...
(It is indeed cheap)
Dog owner gets up, yells at dog to shut up... because rain!
They've tried various blanks, and I've never gotten a satisfactory explanation from any of them. It's possible all my local locksmiths are inexpert.
The pins in new locks have pretty tight tolerances for the first couple years until they wear a bit. Its likely they are just using older equipment which isn't sufficiently precise to cut them. Get a key that is exactly right, and works with a bit of wiggling, use it as your primary key for a couple months and it will work just as well as the originals. The slight variations in the key ways/etc will knock the edges off the pins with enough use. Assuming the key is cut correctly from the right blank, you might just need a bit of lube/oil on the key. If you can see variations by eye in the ramps/etc its likely the key is just wrong.
No, not really. A large part of the security of locks comes from most people not knowing that they have the tools and skills to open them. It's like if everyone taped their door shut, and we depended on most people not knowing that tape is easily removed.
My kid accidentally locked us out of the house the other day by twisting the knob lock on our garage door. Turns out we never got a key for that lock when we bought the house - oops! And we didn't have keys for the back door, for complicated reasons. No worries, I took my wife's key ring and used the key to her parents' house to open our back door. In my experience, most keys work in most locks, if you just apply a light turning force and then rake the key in and out a bunch of times, ending with the key sticking all the way out except for a millimeter or two.
Which is always hilarious to me considering insurance has no problem with glass windows or fenced in backyards.
My front door is a pricey digital lock with a key for backup, and I don't think I could pick it with this method. That's why my first instinct was to try on our cheapest door.
In my suburban area, the biggest problem is unlocked doors on houses and cars. Despite this problem existing for many years, doors are still regularly left open. The criminals don't attempt to exploit the same neighborhood repeatedly. They pass through in waves and then go elsewhere before returning when everyone has let their guard down. When they attempt forced entry, or anything more than casual theft, they get a lot of attention and caught.
They could improve their takings by developing some lock picking skill, but it's also higher risk since they have to spend some more time on each target which increases the risk that an observer will actually notice them. I could easily imagine a dog walker ignoring someone entering a home through an unlocked door, or making it look like they are checking a door is locked when entry fails.
Good locks are expensive, but they also last a long time. And nearly unpickable is good enough. There is wall of window next anyway that then becomes much easier.
You can't shoot someone that walks into your home through an open door.
You can shoot someone that rams your door to open it.
>You can shoot someone that rams your door to open it.
So somebody destroys a door and that entitles you to take their life?
I think in both situations you should just refrain from shooting at all. Seems to work in most of the rest of the world..
If the door is locked, and they break in, you are not shooting them because they broke a lock. You are shooting them because theyve shown criminal intent by forcibly making their way through a locked door.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine
But the basic idea is that the natural right of self-defense extends to certain areas, including one's home. (That is, you do not have to wait until the intruder has his hands around your neck in order to defend yourself.) If you would prefer to not be allowed to defend yourself, that's you. In many countries (not just the US) invading people's homes makes for a dangerous and short career, as it should.
But Americans know that this (a pre-shooting checklist) isn't a reason for door locks for every American. And I'd guess it only is for a small minority of Americans.
The number one, by far most effective thing you do comes well ahead of those armed, home entry thieves, and that is you make your home scream "GO AWAY!"
Get a dog
Employ great lighting
Put the home alarm stickers on, actual alarm optional, [3]
Clean up.
Etc...
The criminals work on risk reward. You can bias that equation away from favorable meaning the baddies pick another home, not yours.
From there, should you really feel this scenario could happen, maybe consider a gun. But if you do, please get gun education. One bad scenario is to have a gun, and face experienced users. Your chance of getting you, and or family, hurt go way up!
I do mostly identify with the left, but am gun friendly having grown up rural and well educated about guns.
[3] - no joke! Neighbors had done the sticker thing for roughly a decade. That, plus the other suggestions work well.
If that's your definition of "hard", I'd say you're setting that bar far too low.
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Is that assertion based on study or "common sense?" It may well be that they don't feel the need to bring a gun because they know their victims are definitely not going to be armed anyways.
The real question would, do the criminals not use a weapon at all, or do they use weapons that just don't happen to be guns?
> broad social safety net that reduces poverty
People aren't being shot in the US because of poverty. The _majority_ of "gun violence" in the US is actually suicides. It's nearly 2/3 of that terrible statistical category. The remainder of murders typically involve alcohol and arguments.
The majority of murder victims in the US know their murderer by name and have been acquainted with them for years. Means. Motive. Opportunity. These things don't change.
If the legal rule is "you can't shoot anybody", which is what the post I responded to said, wouldn't that make it impossible to legally obtain weapons? Why just "hard"?
If, OTOH, you mean make it hard to illegally obtain weapons, where has this actually been done successfully? My reading of human history is that criminals who want weapons have always been able to get them somehow.
> The US thinking to me seams to go along the lines of handing out nuclear weapons to everybody so forces are balanced...
I don't know where you are getting that from. The US thinking is very simple: since it is impossible for governments to prevent all violent crimes or to ensure that police show up in time to protect citizens from being harmed by violent crime, citizens must be allowed to have the means of self defense. The best way to minimize the number of citizens that feel the need to have weapons for self-defense is to extirpate crime--but unfortunately the US in recent decades has been moving in the opposite direction.
Absolutely not the case. With toughened glass and modern reinforced doors it is very far from trivial. At least in the UK. I understand security standards can be much lower depending on the country.
Would this deter thieves? Possibly! Would thieves eventually be able to work around it? Also probably! Would it increase the friction of getting in and driving? Definitely!
Today, your house keys are basically useless for security -- getting into your house is trivially easy both destructively and not. But we all use house keys because they feel safer. Ask people to provide biometrics or long passkeys or keycards and eliminate the existing locks? It's a hassle most folks won't tolerate.
Likewise, people are comfortable with the walk up, push button, leave nature of fobs. Replacing that with "walk up, scan fingerprint" or "walk up, type in password" is going to tick off a lot of people.