What will happen in the next exciting episode of Florida Man?
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They end up in Alabama?
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Sadly apparently more killing:
Florida man shoots son-in-law in birthday surprise gone awry https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49924581
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Was hoping for comedy, but got tragedy.
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Re: cutting the heads off of parking meters
Can be done in under 90 seconds with the right tool, i.e. a large circular pipe cutter, and that’s for the manual version.
Düsseldorf had a real problem with that from the 1970ies well into the 1990ies - they never caught the guy, mostly because he was fast, but wasn’t greedy. They just used to find the emptied parking meters when the water level of the Rhine was low. They tried upgrading the meters by sticking a loose square pipe over the round pole, but that was too costly. In the end, operating parking meters became too expensive anyway; every town discontinued them and switched to ticket machines.
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I just realised that Florida Man is an anagram of Random Fail.
It all makes sense now.
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It is entirely possible that the ride-rent apps could give a position with enough accuracy that a scooter could be activated without a QR code. Or a NFC could be used. While I don’t know that either method is used by ride share companies right now, either could be, and one of the two could be done without changes to scooters in the field (as a workaround to “someone is sticking our scooters!”). The QR sticker would remain because not all phones have working NFC readers, or accurate positioning, and sometimes many scooters are placed close together.
(and it is likely the sticker peals off if you have somewhere you want to be, and don’t want to walk I imagine a non-trivial effort could be put into removing a sticker…)
Is that really the official motto?
Of course not!
(I love the opening that the patch left me and powerpoint.)
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Used to be, with approx 2.5’ of scaffold bar, some mole grips and a 12&1/2 ton bottle jack, you could remove the cash box from a BT Telephone box in under 5 minutes. Apparently.
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Is there any way the scooters would be able to detect if their brakes weren’t working and refuse to start?
Probably, or at least they could test the breaks as soon as you apply initial acceleration by holding the break briefly and applying only modest power to the drive wheels & making sure you don’t actually go anywhere. The downsides are this wouldn’t work well on an uphill start, and it would probably “feel bad” right when they want to make a good first impression.
Probably better to design the commercial rental scooters to have no exposed wires (which at least one of the scooter companies is already doing as it reduces vandalism attrition more then it increases the per unit cost).
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I live here. That’s accurate.
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I found myself formulating plans at least this malicious after a particularly enraging bike commute in which the obliviousness of scoot tourists put me and themselves in danger repeatedly. I don’t support endangering users, but taking action that renders the scooters as unusable as they make the sidewalks and bike lanes seems fair to me.
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Vandalism aside, and I fully agree that cutting brake lines is a step WAY too far… what a moron. Never crime near where you live.
I wondered that too, briefly, until I thought about how that would add to the production cost, and unless it was required by law, they wouldn’t be bothered installing a system like that.
As far as I know, cars don’t even have a feature like that.
Take a portable belt sander (or something similar) to the wheels and flatten one side? I’ve dealt with shopping carts that are jacked like that. It’s unpleasant.
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