Back when I was a kid, some 20–30 years ago, my aunt used to get her car regularly “stolen” overnight. The car was parked in the street, locked, but it was an entry model (or whatever you call the smaller cars a company makes) and was easy to open and start without the keys.
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.
It would be so cool if this was just a case of someone regularly mistaking your aunt’s car for their own. “Huh, my key’s not working, oh well, I know a trick to get ‘er started”
Plot twist: Someone posts in this thread how THEIR uncle who worked nights' car was "borrowed" regularly through the daytime and always returned empty. (waiting for that free fill-up of course)
Happened to me. The key for one car worked on another car of the same model.
Nice elderly lady at work asks us to take out her car at lunch to diagnose a noise. We found her '73 Buick Skylark in the multi-story car-park and went to lunch. Ran great. Afterwards I asked, "I thought you were Baptist? Why did you have a St Chris statue on the dash?" Of course she didn't.
We had found the "wrong" car on a lower deck of the car-park but when we got back from lunch parked it on the uppermost deck, unaware it belonged to someone else. When we discovered our error, we imagined what the owner might go through when the car was discovered missing but we kept our mouths shut, fearing some sort of liability.
I bought that old lady's Skylark. Ran like a dang tank.
Certain 80s/90s Toyotas had something funny about their keys, where they were widely interchangeable between different cars. A friend of mine tells a story about how there were a few students at his high school with identical looking blue Camrys, which caused major confusion when they learned–by getting in the wrong car and driving home–that their keys worked in each other's cars.
Even easier, someone has the same car and their keys just work.
When I was learning to drive in a 1990 Ford I locked the keys in. Dad just asked a random person in the parking lot with the same car to borrow their keys. It opened the door and started the engine no problem.
My 90s Toyota truck got moved from one side of the street to the other one day. Turned out friends dad noticed it was street sweeping day so moved it for me.
His Toyota keys from a different year / model truck fit it just fine.
Those cameras were likely broken. CCTV was mostly crap back then. The old monster cctv cameras had tubes in them, before ccd's and so on. They had a habit of burning out, tube vacuum fouls giving blurry or little image, coax cable issues, etc. Even the CCD cameras were a pain as the recording tech was also crap.
Recording was done on time lapse VHS vcr's which were really expensive costing around $1000+ USD at the time. And they only recorded one channel so you had to buy a costly multiplexer so you only recorded a few seconds of each camera losing all video between switching. Video was shoppy due to time lapse trying to record 24 hours onto one VHS tape.
So after all this money was spent once something broke it was so expensive to repair they usually let it stay that way hoping the presence of a seemingly working CCTV system was enough of a deterrent. Most small mom and pop shops couldn't afford the repairs.
I wouldn't be surprised if the resolution of those cameras 20-30 years ago was bad enough that it'd be easy to hide one's face/features. And since the car wasn't theirs, they wouldn't care about the license plate showing up on a camera.
The latter. I knew a guy who used to steal a neighbour’s car to run weed across state lines between the pet stores that ran the show. He made more than enough to fill it up, which he did, religiously, as he felt it was bad karma not to - he usually did it one village over. Dude even got the thing valeted one time, although that was because one of the aquariums sloshed.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was something similar - I know that the whole setup was something his boss at the pet store had devised, including the “treat the car nice, fill it up” thing, so I’d wager this was maybe a Thing.
Unless OP’s aunt lived in Chicagoland, in which case it’s maybe a more specific Thing.
Yes, there were video surveillance cameras in the 1980s, hooked into VCRs for playback. And many places used them, including stores and gas stations. That's how gas stations could track down people who filled up and ran. Toll booths had them too.
(And it mentions a bank where they pressed the button to film a robbery, then after developing the film found it had taken pictures of the Christmas party months before, when the button was pressed by accident.)
I mean, we had webcams by the mid 1990s. It's not like Exxon couldn't afford something better for their stations.
Security cameras existed, but they very frequently didn't work. One of my college professors was murdered in a bank robbery around 20 years ago. The bank technically had cameras, but they didn't work and no one bothered to do anything about it. Consequently, there was no recording of the robbery and the police chose not to investigate the crime.
I mean, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 I remember seeing many video clips of the vehicle making its way to the building. Checking now, https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-oklahoma-city-... says "A 1999 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by investigative journalist David Hoffman revealed that the FBI had twenty-two video surveillance recordings of the Murrah building and surrounding area stored at the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office." Its Wikipedia entry links to https://web.archive.org/web/20170510090822/http://newsok.com... saying "Agents also examined more than 900 security videotapes".
If most cameras 'very frequently didn't work' then that means there were huge amounts of non-working cameras in the area. Which seems like an expensive waste of money.
I can well believe that some cameras didn't work - I already mentioned the bank robbery where the cameras had run out film months previously.
In any case, the original claim "No cameras 20-30 years ago" is simply not true.
And yet, think of all the servers that get hacked today because they are running unpatched versions of their operating systems. I agree with you that there were lots of CCTV systems 30 years ago. I'm just pointing out that the fact these cameras exist doesn't mean they are maintained or that employees know how to use them, and that this problem was more challenging in the past because stuff was mechanical and analog and not as easy to automate.
There's quite a range of gas stations, so it's hard to be certain about any specific one.
But a gas station for a major chain seems exactly the place that would have working cameras, because you're going to get people who fill up and drive away without paying.
It's really hard to know if my memory is faulty, so I looked for images of gas stations from the 1990s.
On the other hand, the five or so other US stations I found, from the same time frame, don't have an apparent camera. (Which doesn't mean they weren't there, though that seems unlikely.)
So .. I don't know. But I can say that at least some gas stations had video cameras going, and I don't place much weight in your argument that they "very frequently didn't work".
In the mid-1990s someone had a fender bender with a co-worker's car in the parking lot. The building had roof cameras, and he was able to get security to review the video the next day. However, it didn't have the detail for that purpose. So my anecdotal evidence is that it wasn't all that hard to have a working system 20+ years ago.
After all, it wasn't all that expensive for Jennicam to get started at that time, with automatic image capture and uploads.
That's really not true though. I worked at a gas station in the 90s and we didn't have any video surveillance. There were FAKE cameras INSIDE, but not connected to anything.
Unlikely, but the point is that the car kept getting returned, so it was (reasonably) safe to assume that it would continue to be returned after each crime spree. Sure, the thief could have crashed the car at some point, or gotten caught (and the car impounded), but I think it's not entirely crazy to judge that risk worth the benefit of the free gas.
Now, I probably wouldn't come to that same conclusion, even if I had a cheap/old/crappy car, but I can see how someone might.
Back in the good old days, a friend of mine had a sticker on his Citroën 2CV reading: "Can you also double the value of your car with one tank of fuel?"
Another upvote for Discogs - just be aware that there are many pressings of the same record so you will want to actually look at the matrix and runout codes in the "dead wax" which is the innermost smooth part of the vinyl. Anything that you want to salvage can be deep cleaned with a "spin clean" or like I do, with an ultrasonic tank cleaner.
A warning - this can actually become a hobby. Don't get wrapped up in high dollar modern pressings unless there is something you absolutely have to have. The world is still bursting at the seams with old records that are new to you and can be had for $1-$5 each. If you decide to get a cleaner you can bring many of them back to life and you'll be surprised how good they can sound. Mostly just have some cheap fun!
Don't worry, there's only one pricy modern record I can think of that I "have to have" — John Powell's How To Train Your Dragon score — and I've just ordered it secondhand, so I should be good for a while :) Thanks for the advice and the tip about cleaning!
>there's only one pricy modern record I can think of that I "have to have"
for now. then, you'll get that record. you'll enjoy that record. then the need for a new record strikes. a friend of mine and i started a small niche record shop in early '00s and made a go of doing online. it was so niche it never really did much more than supplying us and our friends with direct access to distributors for that niche music. eventually, we stopped and with that the weekly/twice-weekly vinyl delivery stopped. it felt like going cold turkey. it took a while to readjust.
Not gonna lie, did not expect to see someone looking for this soundtrack, but it's straight up amazing. "Romantic Flight" and "Test Flight" on that album are some of my all-time favorite soundtrack pieces, and the Jonsi track is also excellent.
Agreed! Powell is my favorite modern composer mostly for his work on the trilogy. I've listened to the soundtrack for years and remembered an Instagram post he made about it being pressed to vinyl a while back, so it was the first thing that came to mind when I realized I have a fully-functional record playing set up now!
Romantic Flight and Test Flight are indeed spectacular, though I think my personal favorite is probably Forbidden Friendship!
Also, yes! The Jonsi track is great. I'm also a fan of the songs he made for the second and third movies. Really cool that they got him to collaborate on the whole trilogy.
Yeah, the first movie will always be the best one, but despite 2 and 3 being not as good, they were still really good! "Dragon Racing", the intro track from the second film, is quite fun, as well as "Flying with Mother". "Stoick's Ship" reliably makes me tear up though so I can't listen to it too often. The third movie has a ton of new musical ideas in it, and there are several tracks from its score that I like including "Third Date", "The Hidden World", "Once There Were Dragons", and "Together From Afar".
Thanks heaps for the track recommendations, I will revisit both 2 and 3 ASAP!!
I agree Dragon Racing was fantastic, but that was the only track that initially grabbed from 2 or 3. Gosh this makes me wish I knew more people with the same music tastes as me lol!
I hope the vinyl is everything you're hoping for mate! If it's not too tough to explain, I'd be interested to know what properties of it are appealing to you. I go for 12-bit FLAC for everything where I can get it, and I tend to notice compression artifacts more than most other people I know. I'm far from an audiophile though.
> Gosh this makes me wish I knew more people with the same music tastes as me lol!
I know your pain! It's very weird having my music taste, because it's not like it's "underground" or anything—there are plenty of folks who enjoy film soundtracks! Yet the odds of bumping into someone who does on the street are still low, and even lower still that you'd find out about it.
I was about to say the same thing. I get decent albums in somewhat not great condition at flea markets in the $5 range, but most record stores aren't selling anything that cheap these days. Everyone has discogs and can see what things are selling for and set their prices accordingly. And I'm okay with that. Everyone needs to make a buck.
I like to collect music and have been building a library of certain genres. I had been buying a lot of vinyl over the last few years but recently I’ve been getting back into CD’s in a big way because of how cheap they are second hand. Like you say, a couple of decades ago one could pick up a stack of second hand vinyl for next to nothing and the current market for second hand CD’s really reminds me of those days. For example, I picked up a recent album I’d been after on CD, second hand, for less than 10% of its price on vinyl (again, a second hand copy). The disc arrived in excellent condition with detailed sleeve notes and photos, plus it was a remaster so probably sounded better than the vinyl copy anyhow and is potentially more durable. I get the aesthetic appeal of vinyl of course, but gazing at that disc as I slotted it carefully into the player, made me think what a fascinating artefact a compact disc is too.
> ... made me think what a fascinating artefact a compact disc is too.
They are!
And compact disc have a great thing going for them: 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is basically where it's at. Sure some are going to say you need 88.2 / 24 bit or whatever but IMO the creation of the CD audio format in the late seventies / early eighties was a stroke of genius. 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is my endgame. I'm totally fine with it since my first "portable" CD player (was weighting a ton) in the late eighties up until today. And it's going to be sufficient until my last days.
I don't need "more" than that.
Nowadays I don't listen to my CD directly: I rip them to FLAC and listen mostly to my FLAC files (my car takes WAV or mp3, not FLAC though, so I convert my FLAC to mp3 for the car) and, rarely, I listen to a CD (weirdly enough my car still has a CD player).
I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing. And I don't care if they start failing: I legally own bitperfect archives.
I love to own my music.
I still cannot believe that the first documents describing the CD format came out in 1980... That's 43 years ago.
I'm with you regarding CDs, but 16 bit 44.1 kHz is only sufficient if you have good playback hardware (like a good DAC).
If not, a lower-end DAC can give more accurate audio reproduction just by throwing more data at the problem. For people who don't own/store their music but just rent/stream it, going to higher that 16 bit 44.1 kHz makes sense.
Think like screen resolution and text: displaying text shouldn't be that different in 1080p vs 4k. However, due to the algorithms use for scaling that also smooth the pixels at the border of each letter like ClearType (https://www.howtogeek.com/28790/tweak-cleartype-in-windows-7...), the higher resolutions get an advantage unless you use an old fixed-size font.
It's roughly the same with audio: if you use CDs as a source for your FLACs, get hardware a good DAC and the difference is unlikely to be perceptible. Use your ears and experimentation.
Try charity shops and annual rummage sales. I can always find a bunch of good records there (classical mostly, but other stuff too) here in the Netherlands between the dozens of boring records for prices going from €2 down to €0.50. I like the serendipity of getting some record that looks like it might be nice for a few cents.
The Dutch charity shops have a lot of immemorable stuff though, as you said - a lot of classical (dime a dozen), Dutch artists, German stuff, and the well known pop artists. But never anything rare.
You don't find anything rare because the volunteers at those charity shops get first dibs on everything (officially or no), and the shops themselves do; they will pick out the good record and either flog them on ebay or whatever, or move them to a more upmarket shop where the name changes from a charity shop but a vintage or antique shop.
I never expect to find anything valuable or collectable at a charity shop anymore. I mean besides the staff, there will always be people scouring it at all hours of the day looking for collectibles.
The other one there is house clearings; in some cases, when someone dies with no relatives or nobody interested, they'll hire a house clearing service, who also get first dibs on anything valuable or collectable. The rest is sold in either their own shops or sent to a charity shop.
It's not always that bad (though often); it depends on the shop. Rummage sales are better: the people organising them tend to not filter out books or records as a rule (church rummage sales in particular are good), because those things were donated explicitly for the purpose of selling them for some benefit, and reselling second hand stuff isn't their core business anyway.
Still waiting for that chance… It's niche enough that it won't automatically be taken out, like a Beatles record, but still famous enough that a lot of folk would grab it and head over to the volunteer manning the cash tin, red-faced with shame and stammer: “So uhm, €0,75 / 50p / 75¢ per record, right?”.
I would be looking over my shoulder all the way home to make sure I got away with it. :)
I don't think you're missing anything except for maybe that (1) I'm in the Netherlands, (2) a million of these were pressed, many of them low quality (this is fairly common with high volume records, essentially there was a strong incentive to run the negatives past their 'best before' date to meet production quota spending as little money as possible because the occasional million seller was a real money maker for the record companies), (3) that what lists VG/VG may not be the same thing once you get your hands on it and that sending records of unknown audio quality or issue internationally is always a bit of a gamble. So I was very happy to find a very good quality early pressing for pennies. The state of the sleeve left me doubtful about the state of the record but it is as good as it gets.
Interesting tidbit I had held on to a record player for years to be able to digitize LPs, finally got rid of it (and the nice audio card that I used because it was no longer compatible with recent motherboards) and sure enough, within a year I find a whole slew or extremely rare Dinu Lipatti LPs and EPs (which have since gone to a pianist who also frequents HN because I think his is by far the better home for these) and that Wendy Carlos record as well as some other really nice ones. So I doubt I will ever play it, but still I'm super happy to have found it.
Looking at the Discogs offering now, I must say that I do see a surprising number of sellers in the Netherlands for this specific record, a number even offering near-mint condition. I did expect the usual problem of "$X plus $35 shipping and lots of annoyances with customs", but it seems to be much better than I expected.
Possibly remastered (so different sound), possibly much later negatives made from the positive (positives wear too, a positive master for a million seller is a very precious thing (see below)). Far less valuable. Usually much thinner than the earlier ones so more prone to warping if not stored very nicely.
And if you're very unlucky it was made through an intermediary set of positive/negative.
I used to buy/sell junk stuffs in nyc. I would doubt this is a stolen collection from the pics posted.
Looks like a classic dump of the non-valuable lps from a larger collection. Maybe a dealer already bought the good stuff and the relatives of a deceased family put it on the curb, maybe a record store dumped it on the curb, maybe someone even drove by skid row and offered it for free because it was discarded.
Wash Your Hands! And clean the records and sleeves thoroughly. The ripped and torn sleeves look like they've been chewed by mice... (in the biz we called it "rodentia scarring" or something equally fanciful)
But the police have demonstrated on many many many occasions that they generally cannot be bothered to return stolen items to their owners or even, given the location of a stolen item to reclaim it from the thief.
I’m gonna try to condense a very long and very funny story down to a few paragraphs here.
A friend of mine is a realtor. He once was selling a house that was empty. A random package showed up at the address (correct on the package). He asked the owners if it was theirs they said no so he threw it in the back of the trunk and forgot about it for months.
Randomly while grabbing something in his trunk, he found it and was like “I should try and mail this back to the sender.” It didn’t have any return info on it so he opened it to see if there was any info inside. There was another box inside full of loose coffee beans and inside that was a metal tin. Now curious he opened the tin and found it packed full of little vials with powder in them.
He called the non-emergency police line in a bit of a panic thinking he should report what he found but they blew him off saying he should file a police report online. Not wanting to be in possession of drugs he drove it to a police station where the cop at the front desk was SO confused about what was going on and basically told him to get lost.
Finally he just decided to call it a day and threw it away in a dumpster.
The cops were doing your friend a solid. Much to the chagrin of HN, cops aren’t dumb, but can’t tell you it’s no big deal.
If they acknowledge the issue and take the stuff, there’s now a record that Mr. Sharkweek’s realtor friend surrendered a bag of heroin or whatever.
That can jam you up in a few ways. A decade later you apply for a federal job, you’ll be explaining this story to a suspicious investigator. Some jackass prosecutor or person up the chain may decide it is a big deal after all, etc. Or… they pretend not to understand you and you (and the problem) go away
If they acknowledge the issue and take the stuff, there’s now a record that Mr. Sharkweek’s realtor friend surrendered a bag of heroin or whatever.
Only if they choose to make a report saying so. However, it's easier just to shrug instead of doing any paperwork or taking on any responsibility whatsoever, so that's the action they choose.
And yet there are many, many people serving a decade or more in prison for possession of less.
There is no case to avoid drug law reform, disagree on the nature of what is required but /something/ needs doing. This bullshit where there is nothing like the rule of law and equality before it has to go. It's a cancer that eats away at society and however bad you think it is, it's actually a lot worse.
> Do you have evidence people are doing 10+ years where their only crime is possession of recreational amounts?
"only crime", a minor one at that, and three serious crimes don't match up, and is possession of recreational amounts a serious crime in any jurisdiction?
Yes. The whole point of three strikes laws were to make low-level drug offenses punishable by life in prison. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to do it for the first offense, so they made it happen after three, and the courts OKd it.
I'm going to need more than that as when I checked yesterday it was only felonies and what most people would think are actually serious crimes that were counted as strikes. The closest I could find to a "minor" crime was Rummel v. Estelle[1] where the offences totalled $230 of fraud, but the offences were felony fraud, so I couldn't find any sympathy for said fraudster, it actually reduced any possible sympathy - if you're going to do something that risky it should be for a big reward.
> If it's not a distribution-level amount of drugs I think police just don't give a fuck, especially in larger cities.
As someone who has a record over an ounce, lol.
Cops LOVE weed being illegal. Claiming to smell weed provides an easy path to justifying a search that vanishes when it becomes legal.
There are also a lot of states that have a laughably low threshold for personal use and anything above that is is legally considered to imply intent to distribute. This then opens the door for all kinds of seizures of vehicles, computer equipment, and most importantly cash in a backwards "guilty until proven innocent" scenario where the person doesn't even need to be charged with a crime to lose their property.
How I explain US federalism to Germans: in 2014, an amount of marijuana that could be purchased in a nice, state-regulated shop in Colorado by anyone over 21 years old could have gotten you a $100 fine in New Mexico, and up to 6 months in jail and a $2000 fine in Texas.
Not him but my friend has a record that he got last year over 0.06g (0.002116438 of an ounce, according to Google) of weed. At that amount it's less than an average breadcrumb but it was good enough to lock him up for a day and have his entire house searched.
> It didn’t have any return info on it so he opened it to see if there was any info inside.
Before reading this, I think curiosity would have gotten the better of me were I in the same situation. But the story is a good life lesson: when you come in possession of a package with no return address, there’s probably a good reason why the sender didn’t want anyone to know who sent it.
(author) Agreed. I wonder if it was motivated by them not wanting to deal with the paperwork and the (potentially impossible) investigation to try to find the original owner and return them. If I ever do find out who the original owner is (and they can prove it) I'd be more than happy to hand them back over.
(author) I'm also curious about this, which is part of why I was hesitant to accept them at first. Many of them have price tags on them and look like they have changed hands several times, which makes me believe they are indeed stolen. My best guess is that the reason they gave them to me is because they don't know who the original owner is, and being in LA there are many, many potential candidates.
Based on the age and condition, I highly doubt they're stolen -- they're probably just trash. Maybe they were stolen from someone else who was trying to sell trash records, but I doubt they were stolen from anywhere legit unless it was from the dollar bins that a record store uses to make a little bit of money off of essentially trash. You may find some that are nice to have/listen to, but you probably won't find anything valuable (to a record store).
I've picked up crates of much better condition records as trash before, with many great records that could have been sold for OK prices, if the person throwing them away knew where to sell them and wanted to bother with it. But a lot of people/places just don't want to even both with it. Best prices come from selling them one by one on a site like like discogs, but that takes a lot of time and effort. If you bring them into a record store that buys used records, they'll either take a few they think they can sell (paying you a fraction of what they intend to sell it for) and tell you to keep all the rest, or they'll take the whole thing (again paying just a fraction for the few they want) and treat the others as bargain/dollar bin stuff or just throw them away.
(Some of my favorite things I've found in crates of thrown-away records: some Sergio Mendes records (some were bland, but some were awesome), various new wave 80s records by people I'd never heard of but were fun to listen to, LOTS of good classical recordings.)
Ah, makes sense. I do music production on the side, so I'm really hyped about these even if they do mostly turn out to be trashy — "it's not low-quality, it's ~~vintage~~". Plus, the unplayable ones make great wall art!
I'm very excited to find some unique pieces to chop up! I don't work with samples too often, so I guess this is the universe's way of telling me I should start doing it more!
The cops gave you a problem. They gave you something that was not theirs to give.
If it had been me then I would have said "great, now I have to go and get legal advice". I would have refused them.
But at the same time what am I supposed to do? Unload them in the impound lot and drive away? That'd piss off the cops, who could possibly fine me for flytipping.
It's a shitty position for the cops to put you in.
Presumably they could ask the car thief where the records came from if they caught him, but it seems likely that the police found the car but have no idea who stole it. In which case, the records are just random objects with no identifiable owner.
(author) They actually arrested the record-dealer out of the car, so they do know who was selling them. Still possible that the seller got them from a middleman or a chain of middlemen though.
Have you considered posting on Craigslist (or Facebook or similar) to see if anyone in the area just had a bunch of records stolen -- and could name some of the ones not obviously pictured in your blog post?
Sure, they might objectively be junk, but they also might be somebody's junk, and returning it to them may make them very happy.
Legal specifics or requirements aside for the moment, I for one would not feel obligated to contact anyone who stole my car to deal with these records. There are risks here that I would not be comfortable with in this scenario. I would not initiate or consent to any meeting with this person or their representatives.
Exactly it doesn’t make sense. They are someone’s property and in my experience police follow a defined process and which would not include giving the car owner the records. Perhaps the author is omitting a crucial detail to make the story more mysterious?
As others have said, it's largely all "junk", at least as far as value per record is concerned. So all they have is some stuff that _might_ have been stolen, with no knowledge of where they came from or who put them there.
So what are they to do? Put a huge stack of records in the evidence locker with no crime actually attached to them (just vicinity to another crime)? Could suck if somehow someone else could identify them and want them that was also a victim of theft, but it really would just be stashing them and hoping by rare chance someone stumbles into the lost and found.
Personally I'd rather the stack of stuff sitting in the guarded, expensive to maintain evidence locker is stuff actually tagged to a crime and relevant to solving it
(author) This was my thought as well — honestly it's still kind of my thought. The best explanation I can come up with is that the records are stolen and can't be traced back to their owner, so they can't be returned? I'm not sure. If I found out who the original owner was I'd be happy to give them up.
It's Los Angeles police; they're lazy, and anything that involves them not doing paperwork (as they'd have to catalogue every individual record there) is right up their alley. Homeless people defecating on the Metrolink right in front of an officer? Not an eyelash batted. I see this daily.
Which is why I'm baffled when people make laws to make it harder to defend oneself, because you can "just call the police." But there's a solid chance they won't get there in time or at all, due to a variety of reasons including the above.
If you were required to catalogue hundreds of records, taking many days, instead of being out catching criminals, would you? Just on the off chance that someone wants them back?
What are you supposed to do about people who haven't got anywhere else to go to the toilet?
If you place them in custody, you might as well provide them with some basic housing that costs less than jail. They have literally nothing to lose from fines, court dates, tickets, probation. They don't have a toilet, what else are you going to take away from them.
The police are correctly judging that the need to defecate is not a criminal problem.
The question was not 'what do you do if you need the toilet?' but 'what do you do about people who haven't got anywhere to go to the toilet?'
By definition, if there is a public toilet accessible to you, or you are welcome in a restaurant toilet without paying, you have somewhere to go to the toilet.
I don't know what standard of proof they use. Maybe it's too high and indeed impossible to be certain about the owner.
But otherwise it just looks like they don't even want to try. In a normal small community police or you would try to find out who it belongs to, not just give up. :)
I suspect the cop either had to keep them (and catalogue each individual record as evidence) or just let them walk and shrug his shoulders if someone can to claim them.
i had a reply typed up about how the contents of a car shouldn't necessarily go to the police, and it would make sense that all the stuff found in a recovered car is assumed to be the posessions of the owner.
but then i re-read the article and see "and then they grab a few of the thief’s personal items from the car as evidence.". so it's not like the cops were following some policy that all the stuff in the car should be returned to the car's owner. just the stuff they don't want to deal with
Wild guess: there's just too much stuff that they get back that they don't have the time nor the storage to handle them while original owners might never show up to get them back.
Some decades ago, my dad's best friend's car got stolen in Geneva. They found it a few days later 50km away in France. The police returned the car to him and said it was used in a jewelry store robbery in Geneva. Not sure how or why, but they returned it to him with its contents it was found with; two Mont Blanc pens (worth 700$ each) and a few high quality tools that were probably used to break into the car. We got a fancy pen in the family since...
On the topic of car theft, my dad used to have a BMW E30 325iX back in the days. The car was very sought after by thieves, so his cousin (who's a mechanic) installed a switch under the seat to cut-off the gas between the tank and the engine. The car was broken into a few times but never disappeared.
I had a used late 80s VW GTI with a starter disable switch. It was actually a circular key that would pop out under the steering wheel.
The lock did a couple of things I eventually figured out…
The engine would turn if it was Locked but it wouldn’t start. And it oddly locked the hood (which was a relief to discover the latch wasn’t in fact broken)
My car too was never stolen but it was broken into as well.
My crappy 10 year old Civic got stolen from in front of my apartment on the day of my wedding reception. My wife freaked out but I wasn't phased too much - she still praises me for it - and called the police for the report, and a friend for a ride. We had a great party that day and a fun topic to discuss at it. Anyhow, the car was found few days later in a really bad part of town, but police didn't call us that quick like they did this lucky recipient of vinyl, so it was re-stolen from the place it was dropped off.
About 40 days later after my insurance written it off and the police called and said come pick it up from a junkyard. It had someone else's license places, and was severely damaged after a full-front hit on the telephone pole after apparently a high-speed police chase. Who runs away from the police in a Honda Civic?! Anyhow, even though it was hit hard in front, the airbag never engaged, so I guess I am glad it wasn't me. There was blood inside everywhere, clearly the two people who were inside were quite hurt. Anyhow, I opened the trunk to get my jumper cables and lo and behold - tools! in pretty good toolbags, too! Decent looking respirators! Strange chemicals! Lots of ammonia in large jugs! A wallet with lots of stolen checks in it. A small bag with some dude's underwear. But my old set of jumper cables is, alas, gone...
I brought everything home, including (perhaps stupidly? certainly my wife thought so) ammonia and powdered chemicals. As I discovered the powder stuff lye and clearly this was all meth-making equipment. The undies had to go, but I kept some of the tools and respirators. I freecycled ammonia. We made some soap out of lye, so that was helpful.
The people who stole it were put in jail for various offences for a couple of years, including stealing my car. The court asked me if I had any claims and I said naah, I don't want to add to someone's bad life choices... Then , except for the $500 insurance deductible, which they deducted from his jail wages for next 3 years, and kept sending me small checks for like $19.28 or $8.78 every few months. The checks followed me to another house even though I completely forgot to update the address with the court (nice) and stopped right at $500.
>so it was re-stolen from the place it was dropped off.
Note for others: if you're in a jurisdiction that has decriminalized car theft, and you find your stolen car, just get in it, drive home, and tell the police you recovered your own vehicle.
comes to mind, though I seem to recall similar other stories. Between the reactionary changes due to the public perception in the past few years, the defund movement undermining morale and other sundry causes, several major city departments are very understaffed and property crime investigation gets deprioritized pretty quickly.
Edit: removed the editorializing paragraph prior to the article. It was largely redundant.
The defund movement didn't spring from nowhere, it is a reaction to terrible policework. The police created the defund movement. Fix the police and it will go away.
This misses the point. Police departments are having a hard time recruiting; this is one of the reasons people don't want to work in these departments.
They certainly need fixing, but I'm also not convinced that doing so will make the defund movement go away. Voices within what we are calling the "defund movement" range from "change how funds are allocated" to "abolish policing entirely".
Ilhan Omar, as an example, said “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise, and that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us.”
It isn't exactly a call for abolition, but it is saying get rid of them and we'll figure it out later. Her voice wasn't alone; the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people.
That ended up never going anywhere; a spike in violent and property crime led the necessary city charter amendment to fail (Minneapolis city charter currently mandates a minimum staffing level of police, which it hasn't been able to meet since 2020).
The political motivations behind this far end of the "defund" movement argue that policing simply cannot be successfully reformed - that there is no "fixing" the police.
>Police departments are having a hard time recruiting; this is one of the reasons people don't want to work in these departments.
Yeah, but your original statement is kind of a lie-by-omission. You're saying they're not able to hire because a bunch of people mistrust the police, as if the blame lays with those people for being mistrustful. But you're leaving out that they mistrust the police because of the police's own actions to earn that mistrust, repeated over decades.
> the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people
I live here and you're way wrong. Lisa Goodman would never have voted to "completely defund the police." In fact there was never a vote to "completely defund and replace [MPD]". As you said, they couldn't do that without changing the city charter. There was a long and bitter fight over that charter amendment, with the conservative wing of the council and the conservative mayor fighting and continuing to fight tooth & nail to shield MPD from all reform attempts. I can't think of any meaningful votes on this topic that went 12-0. I wonder what vote you are actually thinking of.
> In fact there was never a vote to "completely defund and replace [MPD]
Where have you been? There was even a referendum on the matter proposed by the council as a direct result of their earlier vote that failed at the ballot on the issue, after the first version couldn't even get past the charter committee. I've seen a few different vote numbers- I think Lisa either didn't show for the vote, or it did end up at 12-1. She was pretty much alone in opposing the matter though; the vote to send the amendment to the charter was only 11-2 because someone wanted to be a little more moderate.
As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US. He is a Democrat and about as conservative as President Obama is. Frey didn't go along with defunding the police because the people who wanted the police defunded make up a minority and there was an election to win. "Having a funded police department" is something that clearly crossed political boundaries in terms of support.
The actual relevant bit is, "[Be it resolved that] the City Council [of Minneapolis] will commence a year long process of community engagement, research, and structural change to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety in our city." There is nothing in there about funding levels or even the structure or presence of the department. I don't think you can characterize that as a resolution "to completely defund and replace the police department."
> As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US
Everything is relative. Within the politics of the city of Minneapolis, Frey's positions are pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, which is still to the left of national politics, yes. He opposes police reform, he vetoed full-time bus lanes over the recommendation of the designers, he opposes rent control, big business owners fund his campaigns, his biggest wins are in the richest areas of the city. He wins thanks to Republican voters, who don't otherwise have a feasible candidate to vote for here.
By the time this was voted on, 9 or so of the council members had already stood on a stage at a protest and promised to defund the police.
There was no one in the city who had any delusion that the "research" would produce anything but the amendment to the city charter. The only real surprise was that they had done such a terrible job at writing the amendment - it was very vague and hand-wavy.
OK. And so nothing has changed. We still have the exact same public safety system we did before May, 2020. MPD still employs many Derek Chauvins. I will cheer when MPD can't meet its staffing goals because that means fewer Derek Chauvins in my city. And I will continue to vote for local politicians who will try to reduce the harm MPD can inflict on my city by reducing MPD's budget and influence. It would be great if we could have something better. I will keep striving for that, against the conservatives who want to keep Derek Chauvin on my streets.
Also interesting to note is that (AFAIK) approximately zero "defundings" have actually happened. In fact many have increased, spearheaded by President Biden himself.
If most of those failed attempts were like the one in Minneapolis, it was because most people didn't want the city defunding the police after the upswing in crime.
The point remains- city councils and noisy activists constantly rallying for police to be defunded was and remains a factor in the increase in early retirements, transfers out, and difficulty recruiting new hires.
Everything I listed are publicly given reasons that police departments have heard for the wave of early retirements and transfers out of troubled districts, and police have always prioritized response times based on capacity.
Would you mind elaborating? Why would it not be okay to drive your own car once you find it? Sure you might get stopped by police, but should be able to explain and prove the ownership.
Why ask me? GP is the one who found the car but had it re-stolen, ask them why they didn't recover it.
There was also a recent HN submission where a blog post author used a GPS tracker to find their car but relied on the police instead of recovering it themselves, with predictable results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30442044
The best part is you can. Not saying it’s easy (and certainly far easier for some people than others), but how you react to events is one of the very few things that’s actually under your control.
Some of the most useful self-work I’ve done, for sure.
Something really useful that I learned was just to delay my responses to surprises. I did this to stop getting angry at things that I misunderstood, by giving myself more time to think about what was being said, but I found it is useful for all sorts of things.
All sorts of things. Therapy. Psilocibin. A girlfriend (now wife) with a wildly different worldview than my own. Retreats. Meditation. ‘Conscious community”. Workshops. Yoga.
I've been trying to get less angry, and I found that reading Meditations helps me a lot. It's all about reframing.
> “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
I mean it happened and getting upset over it at that point won't bring it back or improve the situation, will it? It's about being able to relativise things.
Of course, everyone's different like that, I'm the stoic (or emotionally repressed and stunted) one in the house.
I always thought I'd blow a gasket if my car was ever broken into. What a violation of personal space! And all my stuff!
Then it happened. They got my TomTom and my digital camera, plus _the entire backseat and hatchback full of old computers and printers that I was taking to e-waste the next day_.
The moment I pictured the thieves walking into a pawnshop with that stuff, and getting laughed right back out, I couldn't be mad anymore. I was still annoyed that I had to go get the window fixed and buy a new TomTom on eBay for $35, but the actual results of the theft just sent me into giggles every time. Still do.
It's unclear how chill they were at the time. You seemed to read something as very chill. It's a lot easier to be chill once the financial impact is blunted by insurance, restitution and tools. And it also helps that time has passed, so now it's a funny story.
OP's wife praised them for taking care of the issue with a level head. That's very different from being chill. Not anti-chill, but a different dimension. In fact, it's probably a better trait!
It's possible you are using the word "chill" in a way that is unrecognizable to me. And, from context, how other people responding to you interpreted your usage. I don't think so, but then again I may have have no idea what you meant.
Anyway, if you want to explain what you meant, great.
I’m shocked the police didn’t search the car. They always seem very eager to tear everything apart to pop someone with additional charges. Maybe because they weren’t alive on account of the blood loss...
My car was stolen about 15 years ago in Seattle. The block I lived on at the time was a popular place for car thieves to both pick up and drop off cars.[1] When it was recovered, there were a bunch of stolen credit/debit cards and other potential evidence inside.
The officer who took the report said I could try calling the detectives who were responsible for that kind of investigation, but he didn't think it would go anywhere, because either the mayor or the chief of police (I don't remember which) had told them to deprioritize car thefts. Sure enough, calls to that line went straight to voicemail, and I couldn't even get a call back telling me they weren't interested.
[1] The day I discovered my car was stolen, there was a silver Civic parked across from it in the spot where a neighbour usually parked her silver Civic. That day, it was not hers. It was a nearly-identical silver Civic that the car thieves had ditched before stealing my car.
If the lye and ammonia aren’t illegal to possess, they probably can’t take it, and wouldn’t want to even if they could. (Of course I’m sure they noted it as circumstantial evidence in their case against the perpetrators.)
You'd think - same with the vinyl records for that matter - that it would be seized as evidence. I mean that underwear could be from a murder victim or somesuch.
But that's speaking in idealisms, in practice they probably didn't give a shit and moved on to other things. Just another car crash / drug case.
As an owner of tools and a former tradesman I can tell you exactly what was stolen out of my tool kit. I would file a report and the police should be able to match that with recovered property.
Airbags aren’t supposed to go off in every crash. They’re primarily intended to provide some protection for unbelted passengers. Thus the original name SRS - “supplemental restraint system”.
In you are belted… most crashes you’d prefer it not go off, subjected you to any or all of: Powder burns, hearing damage, major dental destruction.
I think you may have gotten that wrong. Airbags are worse if the seatbelt is not worn. The timing for it firing takes into account that a seatbelt restrains the forward movement of the person. No seatbelt means moving forward quicker which means getting the full brunt of the airbag. Best case whiplash, otherwise a broken neck or similar.
At least that is what I have learned and which sounds reasonable.
I dimly seem to remember that there might be differing strategies in place in some parts of the world (maybe something like US vs. Europe?): In some places seatbelts aren't assumed in determining the airbag timings, whereas elsewhere the timing and triggering level are optimised based on the assumption that seatbelts are being used.
If there's blood, I think it's fair to say they should have gone off. I'd have those airbags checked and possibly replaced.
> They’re primarily intended to provide some protection for unbelted passengers
I don't think they're meant for unbelted passengers; they should be belted first. I once saw a program about the difference between regular airbags and airbags designed to be used without a seatbelt, and the latter were enormous monstrosities that could knock you out. They were determined to be a bad idea. (I wish I knew where I saw this, but it was decades ago and I don't.)
Funny thing, this could technically constitute receipt of stolen property. [1]
There is an exception for "innocent intent" if you are planning to bring it to either the owner or the police, but I wonder what happens if you lack that intent, but you got it from the police!
The examples under 1.3 [1] indicate that the standard isn't 'actual knowledge', but also include situations where the recipient 'should have known' that the property was stolen.
Name and shame the car company - this must have been a hyundai or kia (KN).
Those companies have been in the news for having easy to steal cars due to leaving out cheap and completely standard on all other brands anti theft stuff just to save a few bucks.
(author) It was indeed a Hyundai, and I'm guessing its vulnerability is what motivated the thief to steal my cheap car instead of any of my neighbors' six-figure cars parked next to it.
From the second I read the headline I knew that it was going to involve a Kia or Hyundai. It is utterly reprehensible that these companies were selling new cars without immobilizers as recently as last year! No layperson buying a new car would have any reason to suspect that this was the case especially when you consider that my Honda Fit (hardly a luxury ride) was equipped with one way back in 2010. Their choice to save pennies during manufacture has directly led to a staggering amount of damages to people whose only mistake was trusting a car manufacturer to do the right thing. I hope they get sued and I hope that they get taken to the cleaners.
Dunno about other countries, but in Poland they steal either total shitboxes (below 2000 PLN - around $500 AFAIR in value) or luxury cars. My friend's parents had their week-old SUV stolen from them. Then they bought another one from insurance money and it was stolen as well. Of course, no traces of the thieves...
I had a recent opportunity to overnight in Warsaw and decided against it on account of many stories like this one. Having a vehicle stolen when you're near your home is bad enough, but whilst on a trip it is on another level entirely.
Something similar happened to me - I had a car stolen (a block from the Fremont, CA police department, no less), and when it was found a month later it was full of stolen goods. I found bolt cutters, several garage door/gate openers, an LA sheriff gun holster, a gold ring, gloves, a car jack... lots of supplies that one would use to steal things with. And the police told me to keep it all and do whatever I wanted with it!
I recently dealt with a car theft and they took my jack. The dealer said >$600 for a new one (lol) so between that and the ring, you got quite the haul
It's $600 because they likely don't keep it in stock anywhere nearby, and they only had a few in existence. For those you're better off going to a junk yard and getting one from the same brand vehicle.
There's a lot of old vinyl out there in the world. Twenty years ago, a DJ friend bought out the vinyls at a record shop for $4-500. We filled my Dodge Caravan with them, with the back seats removed ... bottoming out the suspension ... twice. Slowly driving them to his home as the van complained. So I'd guess at most about 40-50 cents a pound for that ... at-least half-ton? of vinyl.
Recognizable artist names in that heap? Not many. There's a lot of vinyl out there. The world's been hard on shellac 78s. But vinyl?
Funny. "By age 30, he had about 30,000 records. About 10 years later, his bus company expanded, making him rich. Not long after that, he split up with his wife, and the pace of his buying exploded."
That's what reactors do when the control-rods are pulled out!
If you factor in the cost of listing records on eBay, organizing them, and shipping them, the idea of selling a bunch of used records ends up being a losing proposition. There’s too much vinyl out there and people only want the stuff they recognize, for the most part.
You get the same feeling when you make a typo in your Spotify search. There’s a ton of music out there. There has been for a long time.
Ah yes the sheer weight of the stuff - I remember helping a mate move house, he had a couple of tea chests into which he'd packed his records - trying to get them downstairs they might just as well have been filled with concrete
A long time ago in a history far far away (early 2000s), friends of mine stopped into a used record store on the off chance that maybe there might be something they like. They go digging and come across a trove of a specific type of sound in what looks to be a fairly well curated collection. A few were well known and out of print. They divvied up between them and went to check out. That's when they learned that some girl had come in to sell the whole lot of vinyl for $1. Everyone agreed that it was a pissed off girlfriend/ex of some DJ. For a moment, there was almost a shared "is this bad karma" before that quickly dissipated.
Vinyl collections all have stories around them. Some of the stories of how they were lost, some are how they were collected, and some are intertwined!
That scene was definitely “in the movie” when I saw it, or at least one of the times. (Possibly some Australian regional edit? Possibly even perhaps the local cinema release edit?)
I’ve seen it way way more than three times and never seen this scene. I should’ve watched the deleted scenes on the DVD I owned while I still owned it, maybe it was in there.
You know what though, I think it's not so uncommon among vinyl collectors.
Many years ago, I helped my brother in law move to a new house. He found a stack of records (4 or 5 crates, maybe) in the attic and said he didn't want them anymore. I tried to convince him not to get rid of them but he insisted, and then carried them out and put them on the sidewalk next to the trash.
I decided that this could not be allowed to happen, so I grabbed them, put them in my car and took them home. A few months later, never having touched them again, we decided to participate in a neighborhood garage sale in our ritzy area of downtown Chicago. I pulled out all the records and put up a sign - $5 each or 5 for $20. Did a pretty brisk business, except one guy was thumbing through them and pulled one out, took it out of the sleeve, examined it in various angles of the light, etc. And then told me to put it away and not to sell it, it was too valuable. Apparently the very famous producer/masterer/somebody? "signed" it with a sharp object near the center of the record (not sure how exactly that works). If I remember correctly it was a Boston album. Still in my closet, too.
And it definitely wasn't John Cusack, I would have recognized him.
As far as I know, the "signed" thing is something else.
The music from tape will be scratched to a template for the press. This template is called (in DE) "Mother". The first run on this "Mother" is signed by the guy who is in charge for the press. These records get hand signed. "Highenders" go for these if they can, because they have the best quality. (as far as I know)
They really do have the best quality. The pressings get progressively worse until a new negative is cut if the record has enough success for a second run. They simply wear a little bit with every pressing. Not enough to notice over the first few hundred but after many 1000+ pressings you can definitely tell the difference. If you have access to an early copy and a late one compare the really high notes, that is where it will show up first.
Typically a set of dies lasts only 1500 pressings.
If you're into vinyl: halfspeed masters and Japanese pressings tend to be a step up.
I appreciate the replies. I went into the closet and found it. It is indeed Boston's debut album from 1976. There is some information inscribed into the center area on Side 1, including a (serial?) number and what looks like a signature. "Wey" or "Wly", most likely. No idea. Some quick internet searching didn't get any hits.
Oh yeah, the original shrink wrap is still there, just opened on one edge so the record can come in and out. The shrink wrap has a large sticker on it with a Rolling Stone blurb printed on it, letting me know that Boston is a great new band and reviews of a couple songs on the album.
None of it is in great shape, so I doubt that it is worth much of anything.
As much as I like the original movie (and the book), that remake was _great_. Zöe Kravitz was fabulous, and the soundtrack for the whole series was awesome. Very highly recommended from me.
how could you tell what songs they were from the shitty youtube compression? if those free songs on youtube sound anything like that video clip looked, you can keep your free bullshit, and I'll take the vinyl everyday of the week and twice on sunday.
you must not have known many DJs. they're kind of like drummers. what do you call a DJ without a girlfriend? homeless.
some girl probably got tired of taking care of the guy, kicked him out, and in lieu of being paid back for all of the food, utilities, gas, etc she had shelled out for him over the course of the relationship and then on top of not coming to collect the damn crates after 3 months, would not qualify as theft by anybody's definition. the fact the transaction was for $1 just makes it worse. this whole back story is 100% made up and is just supposition on our parts, but it is 100% believable. it also just adds to the legend of one's own collection. "oh that one, yeah, let me tell how i got that one..."
if you've ever lived with someone with a vinyl addiction, you know exactly how much space crates of records can take up. you also know how heavy they are. if you've never known anyone with this affliction, count your blessings.
> what do you call a DJ without a girlfriend? homeless.
I just love jokes that are a hard truth from a world I don't know well. A favorite along these lines: "What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice."
Taking something that doesn't belong to you and selling it is theft and sale of stolen property no matter how much you dislike the theoretical person you invented for this comment.
possession is 9/10 of the law. good luck getting any cop to actually take a report on a situation like this. not really sure why you're trying this hard on a story that has clearly been stated as made up back story. talking about trying to kill a vibe with missing the tone of the room
I don't have the affliction (yet) but between the new cabinet and the 9 crates of records, my studio apartment is already feeling a bit on the cramped side ;-)
have a cat? cats love sitting on the top of crate of records. it looks/feels just like that scratching pad you so desperately want them to use. they also love the height of having a couple of them stacked on top of each other. at least, mine do. i just so happened to have a bit of wood left over from a project that is 95% the width of the crates that i place on top. now, it is the perfect cat ledge, but now the stylus is the only sharp pointy thing that comes in contact with them.
Judging by the condition of the records shown in the picture, and by the description of the records as "late-70's to mid-80's", a not particularly collectible vinyl era that produced mass amounts of low-grade (thin) vinyl, I would bet these records are not worth much. You would be lucky to find any gems in those crates.
(author) Most of them are in pretty rough shape, too. Covers disintegrating, warping, dust, etc. A couple are even cracked. That's why my current plan is to hang on to them, catalogue them, maybe give a few away to friends and family as birthday presents — and of course, if the rightful owners are ever found, return them. Selling them just seems like a really big hassle, honestly they'd have to be worth a few bucks apiece for me to consider dealing with all the logistics of it.
There's a company called Seamzeazy that sells adhesive sleeve repair patches, but they're fundamentally just creased cardstock with double-sided tape.[1]
Discogs is a decent and easy-enough resource for checking if any of them are notable. There are often etchings in the runout (the inner groove near the label) that you can search for on Discogs to identify specific pressings. You can also sell through Discogs, but it sounds like you're leaning toward keeping them and LA is full of local shops that would buy or take them.
A record clamp can mitigate warping without costing a ton, though it won't work miracles.[2]
There's also always using the long-gone ones as wall art.[3]
I would go so far as to say it isn't worth your time to catalog them. If you can find a 2nd-hand record store that will take them, accept whatever they offer. Otherwise, throw them out. Don't hoard them in your home beyond the point where the novelty of it wears off.
The novelty is still pretty darn strong for now, so I'm planning on keeping them for a bit. I also do music production as a hobby, and am really looking forward to finding obscure/lesser known records and sampling them in my own songs! I figure eventually I'll get rid of most of them one way or another, but I'm not in any rush.
If they even make an offer. When my dad died a few years ago, I combed through his considerable music CD collection for stuff I wanted (not very much), then tried selling the rest to a 2nd-hand store. They didn't even make an offer---the guy said "This is, hands down, the worst CD collection I've ever seen." He refused to let me throw them away in the nearby dumpster. Ouch.
Wound up being ~1200 bucks because they had to fully replace the lock, the ignition, and the battery. Also because they charged me 120/hour for labor, but what can I say—LA repairs for LA prices! I also didn't spend time getting competing quotes from different shops, so it's totally possible they charged me way more than market rate, but at the end of the day I have my car back and I am fortunate enough to still be able to pay my bills so it all worked out in the end.
so it's totally possible they charged me way more than market rate
At $120? Any software dev in LA with any experience is probably at $75/hour, and they don't have to outfit an entire shop with compressors, lifts, and pricey alignment racks. At $120 in Southern California, you ought to be crowing about the deal you got.
It reminds me when I was a pro mechanic years ago, and the biggest whiners about the hourly rate were doctors and lawyers. Excuuuuse me, Mr. Bills-at-Twice-the-Rate-I-Do?
At the end of the day, I didn't care too much about price because they did good work, were friendly, and got me my car back! You're right, highly skilled labor like mechanics work has the right to command higher rates.
I am trying to compare them. I know the software dev might not be as high, but it is directly comparable and can be expressed in USD for easy comparison.
My dev machine was about 5k, and I will build another one in another 3-4 years. My tablet was 1.5k. My phones for dev purposes are numerous and run 5-800 each. These get replaced every year or three. My primary laptop was 3k, I will buy another in another 3-4 years. My secondary laptop was 1k, it will probably last 4-5 years. My monitors were 1.5k each. I’m sure I’ll use those for 6-7 years. I have three. My test server was 5k. I will probably build a new one in 5-7 years. My sit/stand desk was 1k, my chair was almost 1k. Etc, etc… All of my tools are expendable on a much shorter time table than your mechanic tools.
dallas / ft worth you pay about $125 an hour for shop labor.
lot's of places have a placard with a $200 rate, but they never charge that much. (replaced headlights, they broke a wire, spent all morning on the car, cost was $250 in labor).
at least my experience, dealing with independents. i am sure a dealer has no shame on the rate and the hours.
I used to work at a music shop buying and selling used CD's, vinyl music and DVD's. It was pretty common for us to deal with stuff that was obviously stolen.
We had a couple (man and woman) who would come in the day of releases with like a dozen DVD's of high selling releases. It was so obvious so if we thought or knew stuff was stolen, we'd completely low ball them in effort to dissuade them from coming back. After a while, my manager said he wouldn't take this couples stuff any more - which lead to a heated conversation before my manager told them he wasn't an idiot, he knew they were stealing shit for their drug habit and they should stop coming here to sell their stuff.
Anyways. . .
One day some teenagers come in with two huge CD carriers of CD's. All very eclectic stuff. My manager was spotted some really rare stuff like Pearl Jam bootlegs, and some other stuff. He was looking through it and it was clear we were both seeing the same thing. He told me to tell these kids we'll go through it and come back in like 20 minutes because it will take a bit to go through it all. My manager pulls me into the back and is like, "Clearly this shit is stolen. This isn't just a random box of CD's either man, this is someone's collection. Some of the stuff in there is ultra rare, some of the stuff I would love to have in my collection. We have to do the right thing here man."
Kids come back and he he gives them like $30 for the collection, it was like pennies on the dollar for everything. These kids, they don't care, they got $30 to blow on whatever. My boss tells me he's going to put an ad in the local alternative paper about the collection to see if he can get it back to the rightful owner and to set aside in the meantime, its not even going into our inventory. Two days later, gets a call. My manager tells him to come in. Says if he can identify the case and five of the CD's in the collection, he'll give it back. Dude not only told him the five, he listed the entirety of one of the cases. It was pretty obvious it was his.
We did this a few other times and were successful, so it kind of made up for some of the other stuff we were expected to do. So many stories working there, it was as close to working at a pawn shop as you can probably imagine.
(author) This is a great story. Thank you for sharing! Others have suggested I should put up a post on Facebook/Craigslist/community forums to see if I could find the owner (presuming they are stolen, which I still don't know yet). I might give it a go, but my gut tells me the odds of it working are low living in such a densely populated city where there are probably records getting stolen from people and stores on a daily basis. Still might be worth a shot though.
If you haven't owned speakers like that before, you should also try connecting a computer or phone to the Tape1/CD input. An RCA to 3.5mm jack cable shouldn't cost more than $5.
There are also devices to connect to that input which you can stream to, with Bluetooth or Wifi or similar. I have two Chromecast Audio things, but Google discontinued them.
Ooh, will have to give this a whirl. The guy who sold them to me was very enthusiastic about how well they'd served him over the years so I'm excited to get them wired up once my wire arrives tomorrow.
Another thing to consider: head over to your local Goodwill and snag a cheap-ass CD player and a few CDs. I don't know your experience with audio but I used a similar set of speakers for years to stream music through Spotify, and the difference in audio quality between streaming and a CD blew me away. HQ audio files that you have locally will work just as well.
A man left a set of bagpipes in his car he parked and went into a bank. He then realized he had forgotten to lock his car. He rushed back but it was too late. To his horror he saw that someone left another set of bagpipes in his car.
Oh and my Dad's friend had a great idea for anyone having their car broken into. Place mousetraps in console, glove box, under the seat, on the seat and turn off the dome/interior light.
Assuming you've made a good-faith effort to find the owners of the records, congrats on the haul! Takes a bit of the sting of the theft out I hope.
Some advice for you is to sell off those records you know you don't like and use the proceeds to fund a basic record washing machine. That will make a big difference to your enjoyment of the albums you keep. That lot looks old and gnarly and you'll want to get the dirt out before it gunks up your stylus. Brush alone won't do it and you have too many to comfortably do by hand.
Otherwise I assume you've followed the steps to set up your turntable properly and balance the arm rather than just plugging it in and using it? Get that (badly) wrong and you can really make a mess of the records.
(author) I've only tried out a few records so far, and that was last night when I set it all up for the first time. I didn't think to re-calibrate the turntable because the seller told me that it had been serviced by the previous owner, but it's probably a good idea to double check anyways.
I had my car stolen from an apartment complex garage in like 1991. Sure it sucks to have my car stolen but the only irreplaceable thing was 36 mix tapes that were in the car. Guess that's an issue that no longer exists :P
I'd like to point out the possibility that the thief used the car to steal these records from someone else... I can think of one person in LA who has such an eclectic and ratty ass record collection, who goes by "northern crates" on twitch and is a good old friend of mine; he's spent years scouring record stores for rare and unheard Motown.
Probably not his stuff but you might want to try to figure out who just lost an entire record collection... it's probably not the thief's own.
Don't let these guys bully you into thinking you need to play Shirlock and solve the case of missing junk you didn't steal. No good deed goes unpunished and all that. Enjoy the tunes.
This is quite funny. I once bought a car at auction, it turned out to be a former undercover police car, it had a large binder with open case files under the passenger seat as well as a really nice finger printing set. Both dutifully returned to the local police. I wonder what else they leave in their vehicles, if those case files had made it to a reporter there definitely would have been a scandal.
Agreed, but given the fact that it was pretty easy to miss and that I had the car for a few weeks before I noticed I figured they really did look it over just missed it.
My van was stolen outside my apartment in Oakland a few years ago. I called in to report it had been stolen and got a call back less than 5 minutes later by an officer who was with my van in another part of town about to have it towed. It was just parked in the middle of the road.
When I got there to pick it up, I found other people's stolen mail, hundreds of feet of speaker wire, a car stereo, and a lunchbox full of hundreds of house keys among other items. It was as if they used it as a heistmobile. Unfortunately, a lot of my stuff was stolen like a camera and some clothing, but they didn't touch the thousands of dollars worth of climbing and snowboarding gear. It was almost as if they didn't even know what it was.
I was at an Airbnb in Alameda a few years ago for RSA Conference. My boss' rental car was illegally towed from our designated parking space, in the middle of the night. That sucked to notice in the morning. We took an Uber to get to the ferry, while my boss called the police to report it stolen, they already had information that it was towed. He got the car back pretty quick. They had guard dogs at the towing place apparently. I don't remember the rest of the details, since getting the car back was all second hand story.
The next day we drove into SF with the car cause we needed it to pick up some things. We street parked somewhere, to go for dinner, and almost immediately a cop walked up to us and told us we really shouldn't park there otherwise the car will get stolen. We were like wtf geez, okay then. Iiirc we found a parking garage instead.
So yeah, as a Canadian, wtf San Francisco, get your shit together!
sf is worst for car break-ins. organized crime drive down the street with one person walking and looking in cars. if they see something they bust the window, grab the stuff, hop in the van.
frustratingly it seems an easy problem to solve. given it's likely a few small groups it should only take a few honeypot cars to catch them.
They probably didn’t, as you are most likely aware.
I remember distinctly as a kid my older brother’s car getting broken into in North Texas. The thieves broke a window and stole my CD case from his truck. Circa 2004-2006, they did $400 USD worth of damage and got probably $40 worth of Rush, Styx, Rich Mullins and Blink 182 cd’s, mixture of original and burned. I am pretty sure given the questionable taste and definitely questionable mix that they didn’t get their money’s worth.
Tl;dr thieves often have no idea how much stuff is actually worth and will happily do 10x worth of damage for a perceived 10% gain
I think both your example and parent's example are distinctly different from my example in terms of motivations.
In my (grandparent) example, motivation appeared to be purely money.
In parent's example, motivation was mostly transportation and convenience. And a total selfish disregard of everyone else but themselves is present, just like in my example.
In your example, motivation is several things that take a fair amount of time to unwrap. And it really depends on type of tagging. Something that Banksy tags, for instance, is on a different level than some "420 blaze it" that you would see on a highway underpass.
It's fair to say in all three cases that the person doing the bad is being callous - a disregard of the property owner's time and money occurs. In the former cases, it's from a space of likely callous disrespect. But in the latter cases, like the Banksy-esque ones, it's intentional.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here beyond that tagging isn't just a knee-jerk bad thing. I guess I want to say "people who are taggers generally suck, but there are a few people who are awesome that also tag so don't throw all people who do tagging into a single bucket of suck
tagging is 99.9999% a bad thing. I challenge you to walk down Mission St in san francisco and find a single instance of Bansky level commentary. Also, I don't define what Bansky does as tagging. Tagging is basically writing your name/nickname/logo or just writing something meaningless like "fuck the man".
That is not to say I think Bansky's property destruction is ok. I'm happy to see the art, not happy to have someone's property destroyed. I'm really happy when artist get permission (and sponsored) to make street art. Plenty of that in SF.
To anyone that disagrees tell me where you live and I'll be happy to come tag your house and your car and your laptop PC and see if you really find it ok
> blows my mind that a screwdriver is all it takes to bypass the lock and ignition of a car made in 2016. c’mon, is that really the best we can do?
It’s not. Ignition interlocks have been very common for at least 20 years. But there’s apparently a lot of money to be made cutting a few corners and under pricing competition by a couple hundred dollars.
(author) Yeah, as I understand it my car (a 2016 Hyundai) represents the low end of security. My original statement in the post was more intended to mean "why isn't this better regulated in 2016"
Ignition immobilizers have been required in Germany/UK/other European countries since the 90s and Australia/Canada in the 2000s.
It's just the US that has that regulation gap, probably because the US market in the 90s sorta self-regulated to include it on everything so mandating it's requirement after the fact might've felt silly.
I guess the moral of the story here is there's always a corporation willing to break norms for profit.
The US lacking basic regulation that Europe has had for decades sadly does not surprise me in the least. There are a lot of things I love about living in the States, but this kind of thing is not one of them.
US resident visiting the EU at the moment. It’s indeed enjoyable to be in the highly-regulated EU in many ways. I think it makes their typical crowded city more practically livable than the equivalent in the US.
But I also like being back in the states where the government doesn’t seem to meddle with daily life quite as much.
Collectively, the EU is probably better, especially in crowded cities. Individually, it’s not so clear.
The EU as a whole has different priorities with their regulations but they’re not always more strict. It depends. Last time I was over there I was surprised by a couple of the things I saw that would be ADA, fire code, health code, or OSHA violations back home.
They weren’t anything too substantially significant, but neither is a Hyundai ignition key.
As two examples: it could easily be collectively more convenient if individuals had fewer rights and less privacy.
The US right to free speech is inconvenient at times for the collective. (I have no interest in hearing pro-Nazi speech. I have even less interest in living under a government with the power to ban that speech or other unpopular speech.)
When I lived in Germany, I had to register my address with the local government and update it quickly if I moved. In the US, I can move without reporting it to the local government. I’m sure there’s some collective benefit to the local police having a fairly accurate record of where everyone is regularly sleeping. Individually, I’m not interested in being obligated to share that information.
I believe the US approach is better, but I acknowledge that’s in large part because I was raised/indoctrinated to believe that.
You are actually supposed to notify the USSSS (for the draft) within 15 days if you are a man between the ages of 18 and 27, but I assume most people don't.
I'd say a significant majority of people do, but inadvertently.
Only 8 states don't require USSSS registration before obtaining an ID/driver's license and would automatically register (CA, CT, IN, NE, OR, VT, WA, WY), and of those, Washington and Indiana still automatically register unless there is an explicit opt out.
It's also a requirement for consideration of financial aid or in-state tuition for college, so many public universities won't allow application without proof of USSSS registration first and also helpfully auto-register on application or during enrollment.
My experience in CA is public high school would refuse to even award a high school diploma if you're 18 by graduation and didn't register and would also auto-register on your behalf if no explicit opt out was given. Funnily enough, mine registered me in the 30 days _before_ I turned 18.
Well, neither of those are local government which the parent comment referenced. Even if we did report moving to our local government, the IRS or USPS won't necessarily get that information.
The IRS gets our address because most people are required to file their tax returns, and we put our address on those forms.
The USPS doesn't need to find anyone. They just deliver to the address on an envelope. If the person isn't there, it's the sender's problem. You can however voluntarily tell the USPS you've moved, and they'll forward your mail for a period of time.
That's good. I really also hope they shook up their designs at the same time.
I probably still wouldn't buy a new one for a few years. I'd imagine thieves either don't know this, or do but can't tell model years apart clearly. Meaning there's a good chance your car may be broken into still, just not driven off with.
I wouldn’t worry about this situation in particular. Most thieves still just want to steal stuff out of your car which is still easy no matter what you drive.
I mean, pretty much every other consumer product has even worse locks. In the physical security world, locks are really only a deterrent on their own. There will always be some exploit that’s the lowest hanging fruit for thieves.
Cars are pretty dang expensive already, and in terms of benefit to society, there’s probably a lot more bang for the buck in requiring safety features that protect human life before we start worrying about property.
So there is no info or post-it notes on any of the record sleeves that indicate the original owner? No markings or perhaps labels indicating where the records were purchased?
I'm guessing maybe the police didn't want to deal with storing all these boxes, taking up space while waiting for someone to claim them.
(author) I think your guess is probably correct. So far I haven't found any traceable ownership markers, but if I do, I will make an effort to return them. I suspect that the records may have been stolen from multiple sources given the high variation in preservation. I also feel it's probable they've been stolen for some time now because of how poorly they appear to have been treated — disintegrating covers, melted records, cracks, etc.
I don't get it.. If the records belong to the car thief, shouldn't they get them ?
If the records didn't belong to the car thief, shouldn't they be confiscated and it be announced somewhere so the rightful owner could come pick them up ?
I think it could happen if they’re not the thief’s and the thief never admitted to stealing them, and there aren’t any open missing property report for them.
Then the police can’t really confiscate them because there is no basis to do so.
"I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks."
We had 33 and 45 RPM buttons, and turning knob to fine-tune RPMs to be correct. (There was a little orange impulse light that shone on the edge of the disk which had small markings, and when they were "standing" in the impulse light, this meant the RPMs were exactly as needed.) So I played with both, unil at my age of 7, dad just unsoldered both the buttons and the knob. :D I still could play disks in reverse though. xD
(author) I suspect they tailgated in behind someone, waited for the garage to be empty, hijacked the car, then idled until someone left so they could tailgate out.
I'd honestly just hold onto them for at least a few months and periodically post on various forums and Reddit to see if the rightful owner can be found.
If anyone tries to claim them it should be fairly easy to verify if they are the rightful owner by asking them the names of at least 10-15 of them.
Also contact the police of nearby counties as well, your own county's police is probably too lazy to see if there is a theft case elsewhwere in the state.
Also dig through them to see if there are any notes, in case any of them might have been gifts, there might be some clues as to who the rightful owner is.
That sounds exaggerated to my ears; The shape these records are in suggests they were dumped on the street after having spent years in an attic… Having OP discover them and discovering vinyl in the process is surely the best thing that could have happened to them.
They're from a short film [0] I made a while ago — I made up an alternative alphabet to use in part of a scene and had it taped to the wall in another, and then I just never took it down!
It's the opposite of my life: someone stole my hundreds of vinyl records, and now I own a car. (The two are not related except insofar as my priorities have grown more responsible over the years.)
There was a Solar Powered Vinyl Tent touring the festivals in the UK last summer. A bunch of records to flick through, a player and a few deckchairs. It really was a wonderful thing.
Cute, and not the first time I've heard of this happening (car being stolen and then found with extra weird stuff inside).
> I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks.
Thanks for unlocking a weird childhood memory I had forgotten about! I was born on the dawn of tape cassettes, so vinyl had just started phasing out. Didn't stop me from using my grandparents' vinyl setup to play Splish Splash way too fast.
Maybe its me, but if the thief already knew the building the car was located it would be trivial to find out the unit the author lives in and could show up looking for his missing wax.
True, but I don't think the thief knows that the police gave them to me! Additionally, the DA said this person has a criminal history and may end up going to prison for this offense. In any case, if they did show up, they'd do so whether I have the records still or not!
Instead of "now I own..." it would be more accurate to say that the author has been tricked by the police into maintaining custody of the records, without having any ownership claim to them, and being unable to sell them or give them away because they're obviously stolen property, and being unable to dispose of them because they're obviously evidence of a crime (theft).
> I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks.
At some point I worked a lot with digital audio on low level (I built a VoIP library from scratch, among other things). You get the same effect when you play something at higher sample rate than one at which it was recorded.
Random Springsteen fact: Hungry Heart was sped up slightly so he sounds higher-pitched. I've heard a bunch of different reasons why it was done, not sure if there's a confirmation anywhere.
(author) Yeah! I didn't know what those were, but my mom was able to identify them when I FaceTimed her to show her the collection. I might eventually try to find a way to play them.
I'm confused, shouldn't a car from 2016 be immobilized? And the ignition switch needs to respond to the ECU with a payload from the RFID chip in the proper ignition key?
My landlords truck was stolen out of his driveway last year. The police found it a few weeks later, and there was a very expensive looking arc welder in it that he got to keep.
I had about 30 nice guitars stolen out from under me when I moved into what I thought was a semi-remote farmhouse. I would like to think that this happened to my thief.
This just sounds like lazy cops that did not wish to check all the items back into evidence after itemizing and tagging everything. I suggest this as I am also lazy.
One of my housemate's car was stolen and used in a bank robbery and when they recovered it there was a screwdriver in the ignition lock and there were a bunch of cigarettes and music CDs in it that belonged to the thieves. It's possible forensics for a property crime do not matter much to most police departments unless it's a much higher dollar amount involved or murder/assault.
I have lots of stuff that I have ripped from vinyl to digital because they never made the just to digital. I am not a purist, so keeping the vinyl and playing it from vinyl isn't my preference, just saving some of my favorite albums so I can keep listening to them.
I was 22 when CD first came out and didn't get a player or any CDs until I was 25. I've still got a bunch of vinyl I bought before that. What would it take to digitize those?
Obviously, I'll need a turntable. Can I simply get a turntable that has L and R line out, connect that to two of the line in inputs on my audio interface (a PreSonus AudioBox iTwo) and record L and R from the turntable as two tracks in any handy DAW (probably GarageBand), split those tracks up to match the song splits on the LP, mix corresponding L and R (with the L track panned all the way left and R track panned all the way R) and export those?
My dad bought a USB turntable which worked great with Audacity. I'm not sure which model or brand it is, but there are lots available. He didn't bother splitting the tracks as he is happy to just listen to whole albums, but that would probably be fairly easy to automate if you had a lot to do. Will that audio interface you have keep the two inputs as separate channels? Seems more likely it would mix them into one mono channel (on my similar interface the left and right outputs are the same unless you have a stereo signal coming from USB).
From what I've read, the only potential gotcha here is that you might need to add in a phono preamp in between the turntable and the audio interface. But I am very much a beginner so don't take my word for it!
I'm no purist, either. But I'll buy a box of old vinyl for a pittance now and then, just to spin them up and see what's on them. I've been well-rewarded with some real gems, like Maurice Andre's Trumpetissimo. It's so beautiful it gives me chills. I never would have expected that.
I don't soak them. The only time I've had a problem with a label is some really old ones from the forties where the ink may run.
I just wet it under the kitchen faucet, put a drop of palmolive on it, rub it in the direction of the grooves with my fingertips, rinse it, shake the drops off, lean it against something vertically to dry.
Nobody believes it's that simple, but it is. I've cleaned many hundreds of used records that way. It's just a piece of plastic.
I believe ya, was just trying to visualize how to do it without ruining the label. Too bad 33s don't have a nice place for a finger like 45s and CDs do.
Many vinyl aficionados are horrified that I use dish soap. They'll recommend some super-expensive formulation. The dish soap and a few seconds rubbing with your fingertips will take the grease, dog hair, mold, and other nasty stuff right off.
(I mean liquid dish detergent, meant for handwashing dishes. The powder stuff will scratch.)
You'll still need to pick the fuzz off of your needle now and then. I make a little brush for that by tearing the corner off a sheet of paper.
It's like that Special Magic VHS Head Cleaner Fluid. I sniffed it, and it smelled just like isopropyl alcohol. I've been refilling it with iso alky ever since, and it works great.
I use iso alky on a cotton ball to clean the scanner all the time, too.
It absolutely is IPA. The pro stuff is usually especially high-purity (99.8%+) but nothing all that special. The only special thing worth getting for tape heads, capstans, transports, and CD/DVD laser lenses is a lint-free swab with a more square head than a q-tip.
Dish soap is fine on vinyl records, but use distilled water. The "residue" is more likely to come from unfiltered tap water than soap. And let them air dry completely before re-sleeving them because they can and will grow moldy, especially if the records are put away wet with paper sleeves.
You don't need a fancy brush for cleaning the stylus, but a polyurethane gel pot is even easier to use (just dip the stylus tip in it), more thorough, and trivial to clean.
And a cartridge/stylus upgrade, which for this setup probably doesn't need to be anything more than an $80 Ortofon Red and could easily be less. AFAICT this Pioneer has a replaceable cartridge.
I think the cartridge on my turntable may have already been replaced, but I'm not sure. The previous owner said it was her ex's and that he'd serviced it when he owned it, and the current cartridge is a Grado, which I understand is a reputable brand? I've still obviously got a lot to learn about vinyl haha.
(author) Not sure, I still haven't finished cataloguing everything yet! I might make an addendum to the post once I've finished that process with a more detailed breakdown of what's included in the collection.
You might take a look at Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/) if you're wanting to catalog everything. I had a few friends with large vinyl and CD collections that use the site as their database.
That was a Big Lebowski joke - Los Angeles, stolen car, missing music.
Good luck with your collection, though I hope that somehow those records can be reunited with their rightful owner.
Maybe someone wrote something on a sleeve or left some price stickers on some of them, etc. that can be used to identify it from all the other potential claimants that just want to get the music from you for free.
Oh haha, I still haven't seen The Big Lebowski yet! I suppose I should give it a try sometime.
Re: returning to the rightful owner — I certainly plan to look through them, but so far I'm thinking that most of them came from a record shop (many have little generic price stickers still on them), of which there are dozens in LA. Additionally, since they're vintage they've probably changed hands many times, and it's also unclear how long ago they were stolen.
All that said, if by happenstance I do get an opportunity to return them to their rightful owner, I'd be happy to.
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.