Dunno dude. If my bank is robbed there’s no real impact to me - all the money is insured. If someone graffitis my house then it looks horrible and I have to spend time and money cleaning it up.

How many times has that happened to you?

I don’t know, it’s not like the bank publishes heist metrics :)

Touché.

Most houses in Germany are not covered in graffiti.

Except in Berlin. My house front is covered completely with ugly tags. Not even nice graffiti. My 2 year old can draw better.

Same here, especially since they put scaffolding for construction work on our building.

> My 2 year old can draw better.

Seems like you got the idea. Give her some stencils and have some fun.

I actually wouldn't mind if the house would be covered in nice grafiti! Get some cool artist and have him spray the front, i don't mind. The bullshit tagging is just the worst and stupidest thing to do.

It's the difference between vandalism and art.

So your solution to vandalism is to give in to vandals and vandalize your building yourself?

You're typing vandalism to make it seem like I also support breaking stuff or something? I have no problem with living in a building with stuff scribbled on it, and it sounds cool to have a customized building by the neighbours. Imagine all the kids that live in the building leave their name somewhere, it'd add to the history. Right now my building is white, and has bright orange metal bars. Is white with orange bars better? I don't know, it's just what it is and I didn't decide it either. I really don't see scribbles as counting as vandalism. I know it counts by law, but I don't have to agree to the law I just have to follow it, and out of all the laws that can be broken, it's one that never lost me any sleep when I see people doing it.

My university for example, in every single room, every single table is scribbled on and marked for years and years. When I arrived there as a fresh faced student I saw scribbles that were 30 years old. Some people left their names, some people said they didn't like professor X, some people left Maxwell's equations on there. I'm so glad the university didn't consider it vandalism. This could be applied to so many more things. It had zero negative impact on my education or experience in the classroom, so how can it be considered vandalism?

fr breaking things and making them not unfunctional is not the same as drawing on them. you make a great point. I really doubt that most of the people writing here have ever even painted the outside of the building they live in. We don't actually choose any of these things. But if we all DIY customised everything, we would actually have more agency. And I love seeing evidence of actual public interaction with things around me.

I was thinking about societies in general. Bank robberies are absolutely worse.

They can involve multiple lives being at much greater risk and a large amount of resources allocated to criminals. The fact that it doesn't come from the bank but an insurance agency doesn't change anything. The money comes from somewhere.

The context was the graffiti subculture around the German rail system, although I didn't specify, that's what I was referring to. Of course graffiti on private residences is practically just vandalism. There aren't subcultures around that though, besides subcultures that just revolve around general vandalism.

In that vein, you should probably get graffiti insurance if that's a concern.

The point of the post was that merely having a subculture attached to something doesn't make it good or bad. The addition of the bank robbing was to make that point obvious by attaching a subculture to something obviously bad. If you thought they were saying that graffiti is bad because it's like bank robbery (which is bad) then you misunderstood the point of the post.

Two of my replies just said that graffiti was worse than bank robberies. That's hilarious and crazy to me.

I get your point though, on reading the comment I replied to, after reading yours, it's clear to me that the equivalence implication is fairly weak. Your interpretation seems more accurate.

I am not sure I agree. You are making the life a little worse to hundred of thousands of people by making them feel like they live in a trash city every day.

I am for tough penalties on the authors of grafitis. At least make them pay the full cost of cleaning them up plus heavy fines.

I was thinking about this in the context of the graffiti subculture around the German rail system. It's pretty interesting and different from random tagging.

I somewhat agree with you if we are talking about low effort tagging, especially on homes.

However if I had to choose between some ambitious criminals being given a large amount of money or if some wall getting a bad piece of art on it, I would always choose the latter.