Porch pirates find out karma’s not just a myth, it’s deadly

[jlw]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/06/porch-pirates-find-out-karmas-not-just-a-myth-its-deadly.html

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[theophrastus]

We simple minded expect(ed) there to be a direct connection between the stolen GPS rigged package and the consequent ‘single vehicle collision’. Oh, some sort fiction like: there was a flipper-zero* also in the package programmed to insert false packets in the car’s fly-by-wire CAN network? …and yes (you’re quite right), since there was a fatality involved, even nerdy musings are inappropriate.

(*“ey! leave flipper-zero alone! it’s just an educational device!”)

[Otherbrother]

@jlw

The package, which was equipped with a GPS tracking device, was eventually tracked down to the 300 block of West Maple Avenue in Monrovia. Upon arriving, police discovered a single-vehicle collision.

This was not far from my house.

Shame that it was fatal. It would have been much better and funnier karma if these folks had a non-fatal collision with this building that’s on the 300 block of West Maple, then had to face justice from the people who work there:

[Hanglyman]

Question for people who genuinely believe in karma: how do you factor in bad things happening to good people, or bad people getting away with their behavior consequence-free? It seems easy enough to invoke karma when it’s something like “these people did a bad thing and then a bad thing happened to them in turn”, but logically this would also have to mean that, say, the victims of the Holocaust were absolute monsters in a previous life or something. The whole concept implies a level of victim-blaming that makes me uncomfortable.

[Otherbrother]

@Hanglyman

It seems easy enough to invoke karma when it’s something like “these people did a bad thing and then a bad thing happened to them in turn”, but logically this would also have to mean that, say, the victims of the Holocaust were absolute monsters in a previous life or something. The whole concept implies a level of victim-blaming that makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah, some groups of hard-core (fundamentalist, if that’s the right term?) Buddhists do actually hold that view, unfortunately. (Although that’s obviously far from universal amongst Buddhists.) And plenty of other religious folks also believe that people who suffer terribly must have done something to invoke God’s wrath.

It should be pretty plain for anyone paying the least bit of attention that this life is obviously not fair, and we certainly can’t count on karma to even things out. I think that a lot of people invoke the idea of punishment/reward in the afterlife/reincarnation as a coping mechanism.

[nonofyrpenguins]

You need GPS tracking when shipping one of these.

[WTSherman]

Not to mention that if “karma” means that stealing a package has a proportional outcome of fucking dying, then karma can go fuck itself.

[Flossaluzitarin]

Stealing 4000 packages and driving with your eyes glued at 11:00 in Arcadia, “fun” fast/slow combination, and recommending cringe comedy series, and…stealing trackballs from Arcade machines triggers the Catholic Covetousness clause?

[MagicFox]

Karma is too often used in place of “poetic justice,” although in this case it wasn’t really poetic justice, either. Just a rejected story line from the Lemony Snicket series.

[Loren_Pechtel]

Given that picture of where he crashed I think the stealing the package actually was relevant. Consider the old saying “The guilty flee where no man pursuith”. His mind was probably on the police, not on his driving.

[Loudmouth]

I don’t doubt that story, which I desired by means of a corresponding dopamine hit would have a more direct link to the theft, instead of, perhaps, bad driving, but I would expect that the cause would be directly attributable to meth or drink-on driving.