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If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink
pickens writes "A study in the Netherlands illustrates car thieves' preferences. From 2004-2008, the most commonly colored vehicle stolen was black. This may be because black vehicles look more luxurious. Following close behind black were gray/silver automobiles. Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen. A bright and uncommon color, like pink, may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, wrote, 'If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat color is not too high – or if someone actually enjoys it – then buying deterrence through an uncommon car color may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.'"
Of course, if everyone who didn't want their car stolen drove a pink car, then thieves would start stealing pink cars, and some other color would become the least popular.
Palm trees and 8
Nobody wants to be that guy on youtube arrested at the wheel of a pink Miata.
Have stuff nobody wants.
My cousin, long time ago, had an old car with an stereo radio tape without front panel and which required of an spoon to make a sort of force in order to keep the tape in the correct place. That radio was never stolen....
Pink? Pink? Well, what's wrong with pink?! Seems you've got a pink kink in your think.
Perhaps the thieves prefer to drive something hard to pick out of a crowd?
Pretty easy to find the stolen pink anything. Not as easy to find the stolen blue Civic. If you have a choice of cars (and in most cases thieves do) you'd pick something you can get away with for longer.
Would the trend be similar for phones and laptops?
Drive a stick shift :)
Of course, the crazy colour will also affect resale value, so the money you save in insurance you lose in depreciation.
Of course if you want to sell your car eventually don't make it pink.
I think any brightly colored car would have the same effect. They all say "Look at me!". That's that last thing a car thief want's, to have attention brought upon them.
For example, pink cars might garner a greater degree of derision, leading to a greater incidence of vandalism. They might be pulled over more for speeding. Their owners might be more often victims of other crimes. Mechanics might inflate prices more.
What you want to look at is the "total cost of ownership" for the car over a period of time, as a function of color.
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkWf4crJ9uI#t=2m18s :)
If you don't want viruses, run Linux!
I remember when Firefox was the safest browser out there...then suddenly it had a huge market share and was receiving more security updates monthly than IE. Apply this logic to pink cars.
[looking at a Lotus painted a garish pink] Wanna know what's a crime? Whoever defaced that work of art by painting it that color... ought to have his ass removed.
How about a cloaking device that makes the car pink when parked? Oh wait..why not make it then ;) D'oh!
The "Hello Kitty Car".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What if all pink cars are just crap? The only pink car that comes in mind is the VW Beetle, a crappy car indeed. Aside from that, most stolen cars are broken apart and the thieves sell their parts separately. I don't think it has anything to do with the car's color (and you can always paint a pink car anyway)
zero
But you'll get crappy service at the Sonic because they'll assume you're a bad tipper.
Well, according to one source 26% of the cars in Europe are black. Now the original article says that about 26% of the cars stolen in the Netherlands are black (see Figure 2).
Bravo, Mr. Obvious!
How come such an article is on /., and not even in the idle section!?
The sample size makes the claim meaningless "Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen" means nothing when the overall odds of a vehicle being stolen were around 1 in 500 as seen in the chart from the same study . Sensationalism from the statistically impaired at its best. The statistics do support black being more likely to be stolen, but not pink being some amazingly superior choice.
When I was in college, I had a halfway decent bike but vandals would remove any part not literally chained down. Lost several seats and wheels. Sometimes the vandals would find the wheels chained up and damage them instead. Othertimes they would just randomly remove screws and nuts, maybe in some half-assed attempt to steal something, but more likely just to damage the bike. Tires were regularly slashed too.
It got to the point where damage to the bike was costing me $50 to $100 every few months.
I then painted the bike pink with bright green polkadots. I painted the seat and wheels this garish pattern too and made sure that a good amount of pink overspray ended up on the tires (very nice tires, Continental real rubber). You know what? They never ever touched the bike after that. That was the smartest thing I ever did.
I don't think that it was that the pink and polkadots ruined the resale value of any stolen parts (that must've been pretty much zero to begin with), I think it was more of an abhorrently ugly color scheme making it completely undesirable to even get close to it.
Once I worked at a place, where the phones were this indescribibly ugly shade of beigish pink. Sorta like the avocado green popular in the 70's but far far worse. Betcha they chose that color because nobody would ever steal a phone that color.
All of them. At least, new-ish cars in the Netherlands, in 2004-2008. ...you could have easily looked that up, TFA links to its sources.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Of course, if I had a pink car, I would want it to be stolen. I guess you can't win.
I can't help but feel that this should be extended into other walks of life.
How about all guns and knifes legally have to be pink.
Just takes away any hints of machoism.
Zero. There were exactly zero pink cars stolen. (The study, if you had bothered to look at it, includes all reported thefts of all cars less than 3 years old in the Netherlands from 2004-2008).
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I don't understand
Here:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262
I generally agree with you though, I'm not sure the conclusions are valid from what's given. It basically says 0.26% of black cars, the most stolen colour, get stolen, whilst 0.16% of red cars, the least stolen get stolen. Apparently there's something like 6.8 million vehicles in the Netherlands, but it's hard from the data to tell how many cars this actually translates to in practice, particularly as the graph given changes over time, and older cars will most likely be off the road. I'm sure you could figure it out by averaging the amount bought over the period and factor in an exponential decrease in those taken off the road, but it'd be more reasonable if the author had done this. The very fact he does seem to have basically left things half finished and come to a conclusion without providing better supporting evidence and clearer data does leave me a little skeptical I'll admit, the level of work done would be fine for a high school science class, but for a professor of economics? a bit of a poor show to be honest.
Regardless of the number of cars in the study or the percentage of pink cars, the percentage of pink cars stolen in the study would still be zero. Pink cars may be a statistical minority, but zero is zero is zero.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
If you're cool enough, you *CAN* have a pink car and be proud of it. Needless to say slashdot dweebs need not apply.
http://elviscadillacs.tripod.com/ElvisPinkCad.jpg
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
Making informed statements!? Researching before you reply?! What is this blasphemy?! Next thing you know you'll expect people to read the actual summary!
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
"LYNDSI", whoever that is, could have looked it up too. And perhaps written a few words about it, so that the article would have something approaching value. Strange as it may seem there is a difference between "Here is some data and here are the conclusions that I have drawn from it" and "Here are some conclusions and if you spend enough time clicking on random, completely unlabelled links to other people's work, which may or may not still be in the same state as it was when I last consulted it, then maybe you might find some data to back it up. Good luck with that".
One is good writing. The other is just wasting the reader's time.
But painting my car pink won't get me a discount on my auto insurance. Having a security device will. I'd never pay to add one to a car, but since I only buy used cars, I just hold out for one with a security system.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Back in high school, I mostly used mechanical pencils. But I kept breaking them: the metal tips snap off usually within a week of use. Maybe I press down too hard, or they just make shitty pencils where I live.
So I imported from Japan a few very well made--but obviously expensive--mechanical pencils. They have no problem taking my abuse. However, I ended up losing all of them over the course of the semester. I sometimes lend one to a classmate, but I didn't always get it back. I don't think they kept it on purpose, but they simply forgot to return it.
Next semester, I had to import another batch, but I got one in pink. And since then, I only lend out the pink one. I still have most of the pencils I bought then, including the pink one.
You might think that this strategy will only work ~50% of the time, but since I'm posting this on /. you should be able to figure out why I beat the odds.
If you insert "black" into GPs question isntead of "pink", you might realize that he is right.
The summary states that most cars stolen where black, but it does not give any information on how that relates to the number ob black cards in the test.
You need to put absolute numbers into relation to actually learn somthing.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article. For all I know the authors may address this.
In this study, we found that all 109 of the ugly, disfigured obese women were faithful to their partners.
It should also be noted that they were too fat to stand up and get out of bed, which may have been an influential factor.
I think everybody is forgetting you can not purchase one car in the color of pink. Unless you work for Mary Kay, or want to spend several thousand dollars on a custom paint job.
True, but the statistics are meaningless when a single car theft would have made them the most frequently stolen - there were 109 in the study and the average theft rate was around 0.2%. Expected value is then about 0.2 cars and hence none stolen is a function of sample size rather than thief preference.
In the academic library at which I work, we use student ID cards as stored-value cards to pay for printing in our computer labs. For people who don't have or forgot their student ID, we have some "loaner" cards that they can load money onto to pay for their printing session.
People were not returning the loaner cards after they were done using them, so I printed a new batch in bright pink. The return rate rose dramatically afterwards.
I screen printed my face on the driver's door.
The near-side passenger door has a cartoon dialogue bubble: "My pedophile step-father keeps stealing my keys for his hunting trips"
In late-breaking news, statisticians find that 8.2% of car thefts occur in June.
rj
I've always thought that more people would quit smoking, if cigarettes were pink...
Two baby seats (twins) plus one child seat seems to have solved the car theft problem for me. These days the only lock I bother with on the car is the one that stops the little blighters from opening the doors from the inside.
If someone stole the stereo and the collection of children's song CDs from the car, I'd consider that a blessing. Well, apart from Lazytown, which sounds similar enough to Scooter that I might miss it.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Repaint before selling.
I would think the bigger problem might be that you draw more attention from law enforcement. I've heard that red cars get more speeding tickets than other colors. I wonder what the statistics are for pink or yellow.
It has always blown my mind that some people (even females) shy away from anything pink. Sure, society has associated pink with femininity, but somehow people view these as being inextricably linked.
Around here anyway, A male possessing anything the color pink (with the explicit exception of a bottle of Pepto Bismal) automatically suggests to people that he is one of those "evil sicko" homosexuals.
Pink is a perfectly cromulent color! Get over it people!
Did you really just put this disclaimer in a reply to the post ending with "I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics"?...
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's kind of the point.
How many cars where in the test?
How many cars where stolen?
If we assume that 1% of the cars where stolen, then the fact that no pink car was stolen doesn't mean anything. One percent of 109 is 1, and zero stolen cards instead of 1 should be well within the margin of error.
If we are talking about 20% stolen cars, then it would be noteworthy: Statistically 22 cars should have been stolen, and that difference would actually mean something.
Why bother looking at the statistics? It's common knowledge that 78% of statistics are made up anyway.
what I thought was an obvious possible explanation: people with pink cars tend to be the types that wear $400 shirts, have trophy wives or twenty boyfriends, and tend to have fairly good security, along with the habit of parking their cars in safe places.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
As far as I can tell the only 100% secure browser is the one that doesn't allow ANY browsing (or for that matter any use) at all. Security on a browser is like locks on a door, a thief can always get in if you allow him enough time to work on it. The time may be very long but eventually he will prevail.
The keywords being "reported thefts". Do you really want to confess that you owned a pink car? Even in the Netherlands you'd be arrested by the fashion police.
From TFA:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262
It's resale value, not the fear of getting caught
Is it only resale value that drives the preference of thieves for cars in common exterior colours or does the probability of apprehension also play a role?
The recent history of car theft gives us some idea. Red is obviously a bright colour that attracts attention - including that of the police.
Red is also a colour that has fallen out of fashion since the turn of the century (Figure 1).
In the beginning of the 1990s around 25% of all new cars were red, now the number is close to 5%.
The decline of red doesn't only go for the Netherlands, but is a worldwide trend according data from DuPont.
If thieves are primarily interested in resale value and do not care much about being spotted in a bright coloured car, then we should see higher rates of theft for red cars in the 1990s.
That is exactly what we find. Figure 3 shows that, just with the colour silver/grey, the popularity of red in new car sales is tightly linked with the prevalence of red among stolen cars.
This suggests that car thieves do not seem to be particularly worried about being picked out from traffic by police.
Figure 3. Popularity of colour in new car sales vs. theft risk by colour, the Netherlands
http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/Vollaardfig3.png
Source: CBS/RDW
Conclusion
Differences in theft rates between cars in common and uncommon colour suggest that resale value is on the mind of car thieves.
We find evidence that it is indeed the resale value rather than the fear of getting caught that is driving this difference.
If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat colour is not too high - or if someone actually enjoys it - then buying deterrence through an uncommon car colour may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually, that's not necessarily true. Looking at the theft rates for all the non-standard colors (everything besides black, silver, and blue), it looks like a 0.1% theft rate is common. This means that if there are fewer than 1000 cars in the study, having no pink cars stolen could be expected without representing a thief's real aversion to pink (since it's impossible to steal half a car).
Your grasp of statistics is poor. Consider the effect if there were only a SINGLE pink car in a study. Then when you say 0 pink cars were stolen, your study is no better than me saying my car has never been stolen. Now imagine what would have happened if the single guy with a pink car happened to have his car towed for illegally parking and didn't realized what had happened till after the article was published. Now you have 100% of pink cars being stolen. Sample size is ALWAYS important, regardless of the percentage.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
My Neon has an amazing security system. By virtue of being a stock Neon, what thief would ever steal it?
The game.
When my boys were growing up, they were constantly stealing my underwear. I made them do their own laundry but they didn't get to that chore as often as they should have so they felt free, despite my protests, to dip into my underwear drawer. Nothing worked until I died my shorts pink.
My girlfriend thought it was funny but I was just happy to be able to rely on having a clean stash of underwear.
have it stolen than color it pink.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Please mod parent up.
Well, if you really want to be pedantic (and this is /., so who doesn't?), the 95% upper confidence interval of 0 events out of 109 is 2.7%. This does not compare favorably to the average risk of car theft of ~0.25%. I'd need more data to calculate the confidence intervals for risk of theft for black or average cars, but it's likely to be much tighter than +/- 2.5% given the total number of car sold.
So the only think you can say from this study is that there's insufficient data to determine whether pink cars are more or less at risk than cars of another color.
Well, according to one source 26% of the cars in Europe are black. Now the original article says that about 26% of the cars stolen in the Netherlands are black (see Figure 2).
Bravo, Mr. Obvious!
So, Netherlands is actually the whole of Europe and ALL cars there (Europe, Netherlands, England, Prussia - same thing) are stolen?
Or is it just all the black cars?
Is that what you are trying to say?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
when i smoked i would always bring my pink lighter to work.
i can't remember a time when my lighter was stolen and forgotten.
if it was pink, it was always returned.
smokers out there know how rare that is.
i went thru many pink lighters from brand new to empty
even the most unique lighters (i tried brown, duct tape, spraypainted) were stolen at some point
Good move, I did the same, bought a silver MTbike, then covered it with red/brown rusty spray, patches of manky tape and never cleaned it. Theives away! the dutch are masters of this art of course, everyone there has 2 bikes, one they can (and do ) leave out on the street all the time, that is a rideable (pink?) rust bucket and one that is black, shiny, and stays indoors and is only ridden on the weekend. Cover-judging manipulation for fun, and profit.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
The summary itself says there were only 109 pink cars in the study, so it is impossible to say with any accuracy how many per 1000 were stolen.They would have to have more than 1000 in the study, and preferably more like 100,000.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
And I really hate it when others start prattling about errors with statistics when they don't know when to take an adequate sample.
In the linked 'study', we find that the highest risk category is for black cars, with a theft risk of approximately 0.25% during the length of the study. We also learn that the number of pink vehicles included in the study is just 109.
If car thieves had an identical preference for pink cars and black cars (don't ask me why), then in a sample this size, there's still only about a 25% chance that any of the pink cars would be stolen over the study period. The sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. It could be that car thieves desperately want to take pink cars, but are having too much trouble finding them.
The data used in this study are insufficient to show that pink cars are less likely to be stolen than the other less-common colors; they aren't even a big enough sample to show that pink cars are safer than the most-stolen colors.
~Idarubicin
rj
You might think that this strategy will only work ~50% of the time, but since I'm posting this on /. you should be able to figure out why I beat the odds.
At least not anymore. Maybe in the olden days. Your slashdot ID on the other hand...
When you combine those two, there is quite a chance that most of the females you meet lack the necessary depth to take your pink pencil.
And by that I don't mean anything... you know... sexual - I'm just saying that they are mostly two-dimensional.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... it's, um, light red!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
With a mean probability of 0.1% of theft (at least it looks close to it in the charts, I do not have the study numbers), a sample size of 109 cars may be too small.
To put an analogy, think that a medical researcher goes to a city of 10.000 people and finds that there are 10 cancer patients, and when he goes to the village with 100 people then claims that there is some kind of cancer cure in that village because there are no cancer patients in it.... Hardly significative at all..
Why can't
$400 will get you taxi-quality paint job. You'll get a single stage (non-clearcoat), not very durable layer of paint over everything. You'll be lucky if they don't paint over the tires and windows.
A repaint like that will hurt the resale value of most cars rather than help it. It's only slightly better than mismatched body panels and heavy rust.
A presentable paint job costs about $2000, and that doesn't include door frames, trunk interior and engine compartment.
You don't go around driving in a stolen car if your plan was to sell it.
You move it to the predetermined chop-shop or dealer taking the shortest path with as few of police patrols or cameras as possible.
Stealing it "for a job" is something completely different.
There, the criminal wants an older, common and inconspicuous model - i.e. an invisible car.
But if you want to sell it - you want to steal a new, popular luxury car.
And again... color is the indicator of the car's popularity (hence, the resale price) - criminals already plan not to be seen by the police for those 20 minutes or so they spend with the car.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Car thieves steal models that they can sell, whole or as parts. A 5 year old common car is most likely to be stolen, since people will want its parts. I recall a time when 1990's Honda CIVICs were a popular target.
Furthermore, a common car model raises no concern. Everybody is driving around in a car like that. A rare model, or a strange color, marks the car & the thief. Pink is a clear target.
It's not that pink is an "undesirable" color, it's just that it's pink. Even car thieves know better than to piss off a Mary Kay rep. Mary Kay is one mean bitch!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I highly doubt the case. The pink cars are always a repaint. Theives know that pink is not a color that is sold off a car lot. But, paint a Porsche, Lexus, Bugatti, etc pink, and the car will still be stolen.
My grandmother wanted her dream car so my granddad bought her a 1961 Olds Starfire with the high-performance engine, which at the time was one of the classiest domestic cars that existed. She got it in bright pink. She loved it. Five years later when they went to trade it in on a newer car, the salesman said it was in perfect shape, low mileage, and over the Blue Book value, but because of the color he'd only give her $1000 less than the Blue Book value, which was roughly a 50% price cut. She was incredibly offended, so they declined to trade it in, and tried to sell it on their own. They advertised it for a year and ended up selling it for even less than the salesman had offered, to a guy who said he was going to get it repainted.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My baby loves me for my pink Cadillac. For my pink Hyundai Matrix, not so much.
if you dont want your house robbed, rip off the siding and make it look like a hobo shack. if you dont want your guitar stolen, slam it into a brick wall a few times as hard as you can. if you dont want your pet stolen, put out its eyes with cigarette butts, break its legs, shave its fur off and spray paint it black. then of course, if you dont want your car stolen, paint it pink with polka dots and silver racing stripes. all great ideas of course, since anything that keeps you from being robbed is worth the trade-off, right!
A trojan /usr/bin/ls is a risk to /home. After all, if you try to list your data, that trojan could infect your data or corrupt it.
However, if /home is hosed for ANY reason, you need to get it back from backup.
If /usr/bin/backup is protected, you can safely restore your backup. If /usr/bin/backup is unknown then you have to restore EVERYTHING. And any backups are suspect too.
So, tell me, how does protecting /usr become pointless?
Painting a car pink is not the same as damaging your property. Maybe to you it is, but maybe there are other people out there who would like a pink car. I know I wouldn't mind having a purple one.
Carjackers aren't going to want to be driving a hot car around when it happens to be painted hot pink, covered in artwork, or shaped like a giant shoe. The reason is simple: if you're going to steal a car, you don't want the stolen car to be easily identified. A black car is much easier to hide than a pink one.
I'll bet that there were zero paisley or mauve cars stolen as well
haven't done this on a car, but I'll definitely recommend it for luggage.
Have nice cover since I'm always travelling with my wife.
Also got plaid luggage tags.
When luggage gets misrouted, all you have to say is pink with plaid tags and it gets back to you 10X faster than it would otherwise.
But ...It's pink.
This same technique can be used to prevent piracy. The only problem is you have to license the patent from K-Fed.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Ever seen a pink Mercedes or BMW?
Methodology FAIL.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I bet Red is the most likely to be pulled over and ticketed for speeding.
Is that you?
Most stolen cars end up being disassembled and the parts fenced - especially collision-prone external body panels used by crooked body shops. So why steal a car that would require the most lucrative parts be repainted to a common color?
What a waste of a story on /., we need more technology more, science more IT, not more stupidity.
Revoke that publisher's license to post stories please.
1) If I steal a pink BMW car, I will repaint it before selling it on the black market .00001% of the car population with pink cars, your stats will be off the mark, really...
2) If you have a pink car, chances are you do not know class, so chances are you will not find any real classy cars totally pink, so not worth stealing.
3) If you really that into pink, you would go to a pink car convention, where of the 1 million pink cars, a few might get stolen, but going into a small area where there are
I think with the level of stupidity of this article, it must have been just to see how many people were stupid enough to reply, of course I was, so don't be like me and just avoid this page altogether!
But if I followed this advice, wouldn't there be rumors that I'm... ding a ling a ling! Helloooo! What a delicious quiche! I drive a pink Miata! I use a thalad fork, la di da! I wash my face!
The study shows that the theft risk of black was disproportionate to its popularity (Silver/grey was most popular in recent years).
The study also shows that there are darned few pink cars on the road, period. Which means that the margin of error here is huge. You get one pink car stolen, and it becomes wildly disproportionate to the number of pink cars on the road.
So he's right. Someone's being a little cutesy. The fact is there probably aren't enough pink cars on the road to tell if that "zero" is reliable.
But it is fun to claim that car thieves are avoiding pink, and perhaps choosing black because it's easier to lose the cops in a black car.
The study is good statistics, TFA is a cutesy blog piece. Her argument is fail. Unpopular cars are not unsellable, because it's trivial to repaint them. Additionally, a lot of car theft goes to chop shops, where they don't give a crap about the panel colors.
Her only valid point is about the black cars being easier to drive away with, and it isn't actually supported by the study, only suggested as a theory that could be tested.
--
Toro
I used to be quite anti-pink, but I've often been making the choice to get the item in that colour, when I have a choice. I'm female, so there's nothing passe about it for me.
When choosing between a silver Canon digital camera, or a pink one, I choose pink because it'd be easier to identify as mine, and people might think twice about stealing it.
My last cell phone wasn't pink, but when I had to choose between black, silver, and red, I chose red. My most current cell phone is only available in black, and I find I lose it in the apartment a lot more often.
My bike will probably need a paint job next year, and I'll do it in pink. Maybe even with Hello Kitty stickers (which I am not a fan of).
I remember seeing an interview somewhere or other with an American gun-nut. The gun-nut's point was that he didn't have all kinds of guns because they were cool or neat - He had them for 'protection.' That's why he needed to conceal-carry and had one under his bed and under his car seat and under his jacket etc.
The interviewer then said something to the effect of "So since your concealed guns are for protection only, you'd be fine if all guns were required to be powder-coated bright pink?" The spluttering response from the gun-nut was very amusing.
Correct me if my probability is wrong here, but If only 0.26 of black cars get stolen (about 1 out of every 400) and we assumed that pink cars get stolen just as often as black cars, then the odds that zero black cars get stolen is (0.9976 ^ 109) - 0.769. So there's basically only about a 23% chance that at least one black car would get stolen according to those numbers given a sample size of 109. Clearly this isn't a big enough sample size to assume that your car wouldn't get stolen simply because it's pink .That 23% chance goes even lower if you give the same odds as red (at 0.16 - only a 16% chance at least one red is stolen).
I still think that the odds of a pink car getting stolen would be less than 0.26 or 0.16 though - I can't remember the last time I saw a pink car, if ever. Why steal something that stands out?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Viz: http://www.advicegoddess.com/features/archives/2005/09/the-pink-ramble-1.html
Corrected Headline: If You Don't Want Your Pink Car Stolen, Move To The Netherlands.
...You keep thinking that.
In case you want to try something else next time:
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol11/?pg=76&u1=texterity#pg76
it's impossible to steal a bluish-yellow car!
A pink car will not only deter thieves. Trust me, if you have a pink car, it's the only pink thing you'll be seeing.
or else!
Keep underachieving Mary Kay cosmetic representatives away from your pink cars! This is the only demographic where a pink car is a both positive status symbol and a sign of prestige. Obviously Mary Kay doesn't market in the Netherlands or all of those pink cars would be stolen by reps that want to look successful. I, however am not afraid of Mary Kay's minions, and recently considered an optioned-out Mary Kay pink 2001 Cadillac DTS with 12,000km and V8 engine as the asking price was only $2500.00. Talk about depreciation!
"Love Pink? Car Thieves Don’t", "If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink"
I'm sorry, but the actual article states that "Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen."
The source shows the most popular car to be stolen is black with a chance of ~0.22-0.25%...The median looks to be about 0.1%...
Now...if just ONE of those cars were stolen, the rate would be "~0.9%", in which case the tagline would have read: Pink cars get stolen almost 9 times more often than most other cars."
I'm not arguing the statistical approach that the study took, I'm just bewildered at the stupidity of a tag-line both on the story covering it and the slashdot post.
TFA links to two DIFFERENT articles talking about two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT things.
FFS the title of the yahoo article they linked to is "America's Most Popular Car Colors".
And the study uses its own data.
Which points out quite clearly that: A) Silver/gray cars are more popular and B) More black cars were stolen DESPITE there being more silver/gray cars.
Also, color bars showing the percentage of cars stolen - those are not percentages of THE SUM OF ALL CARS STOLEN.
If they were, when you add them all up you would get 100. And there are 10 colors there - ALL OF THEM with percentages above 10%.
It is right there in the title of the graph - "Theft risk by colour (%), cars up to three years old, 2004-2008, the Netherlands".
The graph show the odds that the particular car would be stolen, based on its color. NOT its availability (i.e. number of cars sold).
So, when the chances are for black cars to be stolen at "about 26%" - that just means one in four of ALL BLACK CARS sold was stolen.
It does NOT mean that 26% of ALL STOLEN CARS were black - despite "about 26%" of all SOLD CARS being black.
It is a subset of a subset of the set.
NOT two subsets of the same set magically connected together, or "not so magically adjusted to match".
Nor is the total number of cars of each color relevant - which can be seen by looking at blue, gray and red cars.
Blue and gray cars both have 1 in 5 chances to get stolen - despite there being 3 times more of the gray cars out there.
And reds are being stolen less than any of the "other" colors, despite there being at least twice as many red cars than there is of any particular "other" color.
Again, it is the theft risk by color, not theft risk by quantity.
"1 in 4" cars remains "1 in 4" regardless if we are talking about 4 or 4000 cars.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I drove for 4-5 years a pink car. It was a type of car likely to be stolen, in an area where cars are being stolen quite frequently, in a visible, big parking area, where practically no one was watching if there's a car being stolen.
Car was easy to steal type, many cars like that even a ice cream stick was enough of a key, on top of that the trunk couldn't be locked so you could get inside from there, and if that's not enough i frequently forgot to lock the doors. It was never stolen, or attempted even.
Not only that, but all the girls were curious about it always ;) It drew eyes like a magnet everytime i drove it around, and girls came talking to me at times just because how the car looked, yet the car had about nothing special in it's looks other than being pink.
Best color for a car, ever.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
In NYC, my car was broken into about 3-4 times. I accomplished the same goal by just putting two pairs of underwear in obvious places on my car. One in the front & one in the back.
Never had a theft problem ever again.
The best part is, if you want to go on a date, you can just stash the underwear, whereas the pink car....
If my 335i was pink, I'd probably leave the keys in it hoping it was stolen anyway... And yes, it's black.. Time to worry? Well I'm not concerned, as I got these capacitors and filled the trunk with em... Something like 35 farads... Hmmm wonder if that explains why I always see these bum looking guys sleeping right by my car when I leave in the morning...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Why, in any given year, are cars available in so few colours? It seems we go through phases when all the manufacturers have decided that this year is black, silver and earth tones. 5 years from now bright blue and green are in. I once had a civic that was dark chocolate. Haven't seen that colour in years. If you want a car that is pumpkin orange or school bus yellow you either have to special order it, or get it repainted at Maaco.
Sure I can see that a given company doesn't want to deal with 100 different colours of paint, but I'd expect more variation between companies.
Our current Subaru is a cadet blue. I've seen one other from Japan this colour. So currently it's the bottom end of the popularity curve. I sure love being able to spot it in a parking lot.
Kia, I think it was, one year offered a car with a harlequin paint job. Hood was green. Front quarter panels were yellow. Front doors were blue. Rear doors were red. I thought it looked cool.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
It'd be cool to correlate stolen car color with gender. I guess the vast majority of car thieves are male--would they prefer another outlandish color that's a bit more....manly?
GeekDad, TED speaker, Wipeout loser, author of Brain Trust
Fair enough. The sample size is small. There were zero hovercars stolen, also, and I'll offer that if I saw a hovercar in a parking lot, hell, I'd probably try to steal it. My post was a response to the AC who thought that what we really needed were absolute numbers, and, having RTFA, provided them.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
1. Color-changing paint. When the engine's off, the car turns pink.
2. A remote security device which not only locks the doors and activates the alarms, but disguises the car as a Yugo.