We’re now in the habit of making sure that someone is home to receive packages when they arrive, but we have had several deliveries stolen from us over the past four or five months. We also regularly see packages throughout our apartment complex slashed, opened, and emptied. We don’t live in an especially bad part of town. Similar thefts happened when we lived in house in a suburban neighborhood on the other side of the country. The video didn’t seem that surprising to me…
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That survey was paid for and publicized by Xfinity Home, Comcast’s home security branch. It’s a sales pitch.
Like I said above. You feel free to believe whatever bubble of info you desire. You have shown you do not want to have a good faith discussion and instead care only to believe your own narrow view. Have a nice day. I do not care to discuss this further with you.
It isn’t about the situations themselves being comparable. It is absolutely relevant that because something hasn’t happened to you ever doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to others with frequency.
As I said to the other person. If you feel strongly about living within your bubble and narrow view of the world. By all means enjoy that and do so.
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DUUUDE! You’re the goddamn Batman!!!
As a design improvement I suggest only 1 phone plus 3 linked keychain cameras. They have suitable resolution/battery life and only cost about $10 each. The one phone would still allow GPS tracking and live to the net feed.
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And not for the vast majority of America as the lockers are not everywhere yet and not for large packages as the last thing I ordered (a keyboard) was too big for the locker.
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I guarantee that this stunt did nothing to deter future package thefts. The risk/reward ratio is just far too high as the rate of online shipping increases. There’s really no downside to swiping packages for thieves even if they get the occasional box of poop or dirty undies.
My niece is a porch pirate. She’s a sweet girl but just hopelessly mixed up and addicted. She’s been arrested many, many times already but has no self control to alter her behavior. We’re just waiting for the sad call one night that she OD’d.
Last week we saw her picture on one of the local news websites about porch pirates - picture was clear as day and we knew it was her. We texted her and asked what’s up but she didn’t respond. We also turned her in to the hotline. Not sure what’s going to happen but probably not much. She knows the system so well that I’d be very surprised if anything comes of it.
Not expecting any sympathy for her - she does horrible things and deserves punishment, but it’s hard for me knowing this sweet girl that we used to babysit has made such a mess of her life and will likely be dead soon.
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And even if you do have lockers near you they fill up during Christmas season, so you can’t count on them being available to ship to during high volume, high risk times for porch theft.
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That’s not an office, that’s a circle of hell.
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Wasn’t there a thread on a spray for training people to handle $badjobsmells?
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Me, I was thinking the glitter idea was just about perfect. It was just missing a little something … Glue, maybe? 
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Maybe replace it with something that flies out at the consistency of shaving cream but is actually 2 pack expanding PU foam. That stuff sticks good.
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Sticky foam!
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The South has sporting goods stores which carry, so help me god and goddess, skunk juice.
If he could put an aerosol in that critter, I’d buy it even if I had to pay interest rates.
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Saw this on Slashdot and putting it out here, despite this probably being a mostly dead thread by now.
Another person used Google Street View and Zillow to analyze the third thief’s video from inside her home, and determined the side yard and outdoor area bore a striking resemblance to the home next door to the friend’s house. Posted to Imgur, the thread of evidence led to others questioning Rober on some of his later edits to the published video, including deletion of small sections and blurring out details.
According to Rober, he offered to provide the box to people who were willing to place it on their doorstep, with the offer of financial compensation for successful recoveries of the package, and one “friend of a friend” volunteered to help. Rober has since confirmed that two of the five reactions used in the video were suspicious, and were subsequently removed, but insists the reactions for times when the box was stolen from his doorstep were genuine.
“I’m especially gutted because so much thought, time, money, and effort went into building the device and I hope this doesn’t just taint the entire effort as ‘fake,’” writes Rober in text placed underneath the video. “It genuinely works (like all the other things I’ve built on my channel) and we’ve made all the code and build info public.”
Rober ends the statement by apologizing for “putting something up on my channel that was misleading,” adding he will be taking “all necessary steps to make sure it won’t happen again.”
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I posted farther up about whether package theft is as prevalent as the media makes it out to be. I’m skeptical, but there’s not very good information out there. Interesting that the video was at least partially faked.
I read an article today that gave some numbers for Raleigh and Durham. Police say that Durham, a city of 267,000, has had 56 reported package thefts since Oct. 1. Raleigh, a city of 464,000, has had 26 packages stolen during the same period. For Durham, that’s approx. 1 package stolen per 14,000 residents each month. For Raleigh, it’s 1 per 51,500 each month. Given how much petty property theft there is here, that doesn’t seem like a terribly alarming rate to me. It sure does suck for the victims, though.
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Gotta say I wouldn’t know for sure if a package was stolen off my porch, and I wouldn’t report a package I didn’t receive to the police as I’d have no real information to give them other than “I didn’t get it”. I’d take it up with the shipper. So I don’t think police reports are an accurate measure of how many packages are stolen. They give you a minimum number. But the true number is, I think, much higher.
