You don't know that. Factory workers claim Foxconn hid underage employees prior to inspection [tuaw.com]
No. Factory workers don't claim. Some chinese organisation claims they talked to factory workers making this claim. Has anyone actually seen these underage employees? What about the remote possibility that factory workers heard about reports in the USA about lots of underage workers (as reported by Daisey), then heard that none were found, and talked about their suspicion that these non-existing underage workers were hidden? What questions have exactly been asked? If the question was: "We know that there are children working at Foxconn, but none were found during the inspection. Why do you think that is? " then what answer would you expect?
I mean if there are children who were hidden away during inspections, surely they have to come out at some point and become visible? Instead of finding workers who claim that children were hidden away, what about actually finding some children?
I believe the words you're looking for is called, Indentured Servitude [wikipedia.org]. No, its not exactly slavery but it really is. The distinction is one of splitting hairs. The bottom line is that no one is forcing them into these conditions but its not much better than slavery.
Except that what you claim is total nonsense. Foxconn pays wages that are quite a bit above average. The cost of living is very low, a place in the dormitories costs per month about one day's wages, meals are not much more. People come from their village, work hard for a year and save their money, and go back to their village as rich people (compared to what anyone else in the village has).
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week. Real reporters have interviewed the employees who did feel pressured to do the overtime they didn't want. There were two explosions separated by seven months at factories polishing the aluminum for Apple products; deaths and injuries that could have been addressed by simple ventilation.
The first statement is plain incorrect. Read Apple's Supplier Responsibility report to find what Apple _actually_ said. Yes, the words 50%, suppliers, violate, 60 hour, are all there, but what Apple says is significantly different. And these reporters should urgently visit some US software companies.
And what about Intel, where a huge dust explosion happened at about the same time? Shouldn't that have been addressed by simple ventilation? But I guess that happened at a part of their factory that exclusively made chips for Apple?
You have people committing suicide - that tells you something is wrong. You have people living in crammed "dorms" and working 12 hour shifts. Are so such a heartless bastard to ignore this conditions. Apple is only saving 20% but still getting 70% to 80% markup.
What you call being a "heartless bastard" actually means trying to inform yourself about problems. If you go into a hospital, would you prefer a doctor who is unable to help you because he or she is flooding the floor in tears while you are dying, or a heartless bastard who makes crude jokes at your expense while keeping you alive and actually helping you?
The "heartless bastards" put up nets, and made people sign contracts not to make suicides. At the same time, the well-meaning people of San Francisco claim that suicide nets for the Golden Gate bridge, where the average annual confirmed number of suicides alone is three times higher than the worst year at Foxconn, are too expensive.
I think that it would be more accurate to say, that Daisey took bits and pieces of various real stories, all of them reported by actual journalists, put these details in rearranged form into a fictionalized monologue, and that became a TAL segment.
That's not what happened. First, where are the "real stories"? Second, he added in very significant ways. So instead of a few cases where someone was hired who was too young, his story that all you have to do is wait at the entrance of the Foxconn factory and you will see lots and lots of 12, 13 and 14 year old children. And instead of people being poisoned, going to hospital, recovering and going back to work, he changed it to people being poisoned and having their health permanently destroyed to the point where they couldn't even lift up a glass.
Exactly... These are people who are leaving impoverished villages and lining up at places like Foxconn, fighting tooth and nail to get a job there. Their kids will go to school and get a chance to become more than their factory-line worker parents. We have no right to do anything unless people are being forced against their will and they are not...
Fact is that a young person starting a job at Foxconn, doing lots of overtime, saving money by sleeping in a cheep dorm, can save up an awful lot of money in a years time. I'm sure working at McDonalds in the USA is nicer than working at Foxconn. If you are a young person in the USA who wants to become a lawyer, for how long would you have to work at McDonalds to save enough money to finance this? If you are a young person in China, how long would you have to work at Foxconn?
Wasn't the problem here not that what Daisey reported was false, but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with? Of course from a journalistic standpoint that is awful but it is now sweeping these problems under the rug.
No, that was not the problem. As an example, Apple's "Supplier Responsibility" report says that Apple found a few dozen cases in total where people were employed before they were sixteen, but this was because of errors and improper age checking. So if Apple said the truth then it would be very, very unlikely that a journalist at the entrance of a Foxconn factory would spot anyone who is not sixteen yet. It would be impossible to find anyone who is 12, 13, or 14. But that is exactly what he claimed, which would make Apple liars.
Next, some people were injured through chemicals. You would think that if things are done right, workers who get injured go to hospital, get treated until they are fine, and come back fine and go back to work. And that's what Apple's report says. Daisey said he met many workers who were so ill that they couldn't even lift a glass. That is a completely different matter. If workers either didn't get treatment, or are so bad even after treatment, then the situation is hundred times worse than Apple claimed.
So there are two lies already that made Apple and Foxconn look an awful lot worse than they should.
Just like in the ink world, the original author sues the publisher. The publisher will now show in court who fed them the bogus goods, and the original author will then have to sue the bogus-er.
I believe Apple's contracts also say that they can ask for all payments back. Actually, if you sell a book for $4.99, and Apple kept $1.50, if you stole the contents of the book Apple can ask for the whole $4.99. Whether there is anyone who can be made to pay is a different question.
I think it would be quite reasonable for the real copyright holder to ask Apple in this case for the $3.49.
Throwing a phone out of the window doesn't mean intent to deprive the person permanently. The person can get out of the house, go where the window is, and pick up the phone. Furthermore, the depriving must be the intent. The intent was never depriving the person of their phone, the intent was to stop them from taking photos.
Type 2 diabetes is caused by carbohydrate intake. Stop eating carbs, and the type 2 diabetes goes away.
It doesn't. It never goes away, once you have it.
And the "stop eating carbs" is nonsense. It is not carbohydrates per se, it is carbohydrates in very easily digestable form that transform into blood sugar very quickly and require massive amounts of insulin that are the problem. Sugar obviously, but also the fluffed up wheat "bread" that they are selling (in the USA they have a product called "Wonderbread" which manages to get 100 out of 100 points on the carb evilness scale).
And diet coke doesn't help. It doesn't contain sugar, but it contains stuff that makes the body _believe_ there is sugar. So you get the same insulin rush, except that when the body finally figures out there wasn't any actual sugar, it then _wants_ sugar.
Type 2 diabetes _never_ goes away. Stopping unhealthy food stops the illness from getting worse. It also helps reducing the damage (the actual damage is done by unprocessed blood sugar. Less sugar intake = less unprocessed blood sugar = less damage). Losing weight is good because excessive wait makes it harder for the body to process blood sugar.
It's already a felony in basically every democratic city in the world to snatch whatever private property someone else owns, and tossing it away like that (out the window).
In Germany, it isn't theft, when you are not trying to enrich yourself. Next, in the case of killing a person, there are distinctions being made between pre-meditated or spontaneous cases, or whether the death of the person was intented. In this particular case, there was no intent that the paparazzi would lose their phone, the intent was to protect someone's privacy.
His presentation was wrong in a lot of ways, but none of the problems that he's raised were unfactual. The main problem with how he did this is that he's provided an excuse for people to dismiss the issues that he's raised. That's shameful, but it's important not to dismiss the message for the messenger.
Excuse me, but... First he claimed that he talked to people who was poisoned. That was proven to be a lie. Now he makes a different claim. There is not the slightest evidence that what he says is the truth this time, and coming from a proven liar I think the correct assumption is that he is lying again, until there is independent evidence that he isn't lying. But then his new claims is that people in Hongkong knew people who were poisoned. That kind of statement is usually called "hearsay" and doesn't count as evidence.
So what message exactly is there left that shouldn't be dismissed, beyond what can be found at what is at the moment the most trustworthy source - Apple's "Supplier Responsibility" report.
So the event happened - workers poisoned by n-hexane - he just didn't visit that factor and that's the big lie? Seriously.
That's not the big lie. The big lie is: He claimed that he talked to workers who were, long after the incident, and long after any medical treatment had finished, still suffering badly from the effects. Shaking hands. Not able even to hold a glass of water. And not one case; the way he presented it, that was the norm. As he described it, these people were in a state now where they were not capable of performing a job (what factory job would you give someone who cannot even hold a glass of water?), so their lives were destroyed.
The reality is that there were no actual reports of anyone having permanent damage, plus the majority of the workers actually had already returned back to work at the same company. So _an event_ happened, but what Daisey made you believe about the effects of the event was just not true.
"Joe killed three people in a motor accident". "That's not true, all that happened was that he damaged someone's fender". "So it really is true, he did have an accident".
Of course, it's fictionalized. That doesn't mean: "Underage workers were also only rumors. [emphasis mine]"
So even now you don't give up defending his lies? What he did wasn't fictionalized. "Fictionalized" would be something like: There were about fifty 15-year olds hired and I talked to one of them. What he said was: I went to the factory, and many of the employees that I saw entering and leaving were obviously underage.
Same with victims of improper handling of chemicals: "I met them, their hands were shaking, most couldn't even hold a glass" giving the impression of hundreds being forever unable to lead a normal life vs. "everyone has received good medical care, and the majority is back at work". That's not fictionalizing. That's intentionally giving a very wrong impression of the actual situation.
Apple's own audits show (PDF) the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers.
There is just a slight matter of scale here. Apple found evidence that several companies had hired employees when they were underage. In the year before, one company was responsible for more than half of these cases, and that company lost their contract with Apple. Since then, the number of cases has gone down. And the reason that people are employed while too young is that they apply for these jobs and someone doesn't check carefully enough. If anyone figured out they were too young, they wouldn't have been hired. That's one story.
The picture that was presented by Daisey is different. He went to factories and found lots of underage employees. I mean lots, and so young that an American journalist who is surely not too experienced judging the age of young chinese people can spot immediately that they are underage. To find them, he didn't check anyone's employment records, he just went to the entrance of the factory and looked who was entering. The picture that I get is huge numbers of 12 year olds. That's a very nasty picture, and one that would be unexcusable. If it was true.
So which one is true? What Daisey claimed is now known to be pure invention. So unless any actual evidence shows otherwise, we should now assume that Apple's story is true: A few dozen young persons hired when they were too young, about half of them actually 16 by the time Apple found out, and hired because they didn't look too young, and they came with papers that showed they were older than they actually were.
The user never decided anything. That's really half the problem: Apple created a stupid default that would have impaired significant functionality, and for the users who don't understand how to or are afraid to change browser settings, this was the only way to make that user-desired functionality actually work.
The problem is: Apple created a default that protects the privacy of its users. Google wanted functionality that could only be implemented by either a breach of the user's privacy or by getting the consent of the user, so they decided to exploit a loophole and breach the user's privacy.
It is my understanding that it does something of the latter. It submits a form in order to set a cookie so that things like the +1 button can be set. In my mind this is part and parcel of using Google's services. The code works the same regardless of the privacy settings.
The only reason to submit this form is to circumvent Safari's security settings. If the user allowed cookies to be set without user interaction, then the form is not needed. It is needed because it tricks Safari into believing that there was some user action, when there actually wasn't one.
Your argument is basically "if they check whether the door is locked and climb through the window if it is locked, but go through the front door if it's not locked, that's bad. But if they always climb through the window, then it's fine". Well, that's nonsense.
Yes, if the thief is the victim of an attack, he'll certainly be a "person of interest" but do you rally think a criminal is going to call the cops because somebody beat the shit out of him? The thief won't even call the cops if your friend broke the thief's trunk open and got his phone and gun back.
In the USA, someone actually called the police because someone robbed him and took his illegal drugs away. Police actually caught the robber, and they got two convictions.
Its been proposed numerous times in the States to add an "insurance-at-the-pump tax" per gallon. In my situation that would work out $1.70 a gallon last year (16K miles $800 insurance). In the UK where petro is $8-$9 per US gallon already, such a tax would be hardly noticeable. This would have the added incentive of punishing heavy carbon users (big cars or many miles). Then you need a government bureaucracy to administer such insurance.
That would work for some people, but we had some guy in Britain complaining that he got a quote for £24,000 for one year's insurance - a clear sign that the insurance company did not want to insure him because he was just too dangerous. So what would you do with some boy racer / blind coffin dodger / blind coffin dodging boy racer who has accident after accident?
As a bicyclist, I would love to see this system set up here in the U.S. Too many uninsured drivers have been hitting bicyclists. In fact, I have had dreams of even a better system. Have an electronic lock in all vehicles that would automatically disable the vehicle if it's insurance policy lapses. This can be easily done with the current cellular/wimax/WIFI technology.
Germany uses a low-tech system: Any car dealer who sells you a new car will only sell it if you have proof that it is insured (you can get 14 day cover from any insurance and then have 14 days time to shop around for the best offer). If you sell a used car, you pay for insurance until the buyer insures the car, which means you make bloody well sure they insured the car. If you do something that makes your insurance company cancel your insurance, like not paying after their second warning, they'll send one letter to you and one to the police that you are not insured.
You can't own a car with foreign plates when you are a resident in the UK except for a short time. And if the police sees right hand drive with foreign plates I suspect they will be very, very suspicious.
Since the problem is 2 million British residents driving without insurance, non-residents with foreign cars are a minor problem. They can also be checked quite easily when entering the country.
if your going to be a police state then by all means do it right.
What do you mean by "police state"? If some f***ing idiot thinks he or she can drive around with an uninsured car, which hasn't been tested for roadworthiness (because you can't get an MOT without insurance), leaving everyone else to pay for the damage to cause, then most people in Britain would want their cars to be taken away and destroyed.
Even drug lords cannot afford the new insane iPad prices.
The actual lesson is: Criminals are bloody stupid. If I had $35 million worth of drugs in a place, I would avoid doing anything that could get the police into my place. Like stealing an iPad. Or even picking one up that someone left on the train or bus.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know that. Factory workers claim Foxconn hid underage employees prior to inspection [tuaw.com]
No. Factory workers don't claim. Some chinese organisation claims they talked to factory workers making this claim. Has anyone actually seen these underage employees? What about the remote possibility that factory workers heard about reports in the USA about lots of underage workers (as reported by Daisey), then heard that none were found, and talked about their suspicion that these non-existing underage workers were hidden? What questions have exactly been asked? If the question was: "We know that there are children working at Foxconn, but none were found during the inspection. Why do you think that is? " then what answer would you expect?
I mean if there are children who were hidden away during inspections, surely they have to come out at some point and become visible? Instead of finding workers who claim that children were hidden away, what about actually finding some children?
I believe the words you're looking for is called, Indentured Servitude [wikipedia.org]. No, its not exactly slavery but it really is. The distinction is one of splitting hairs. The bottom line is that no one is forcing them into these conditions but its not much better than slavery.
Except that what you claim is total nonsense. Foxconn pays wages that are quite a bit above average. The cost of living is very low, a place in the dormitories costs per month about one day's wages, meals are not much more. People come from their village, work hard for a year and save their money, and go back to their village as rich people (compared to what anyone else in the village has).
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week. Real reporters have interviewed the employees who did feel pressured to do the overtime they didn't want. There were two explosions separated by seven months at factories polishing the aluminum for Apple products; deaths and injuries that could have been addressed by simple ventilation.
The first statement is plain incorrect. Read Apple's Supplier Responsibility report to find what Apple _actually_ said. Yes, the words 50%, suppliers, violate, 60 hour, are all there, but what Apple says is significantly different. And these reporters should urgently visit some US software companies.
And what about Intel, where a huge dust explosion happened at about the same time? Shouldn't that have been addressed by simple ventilation? But I guess that happened at a part of their factory that exclusively made chips for Apple?
You have people committing suicide - that tells you something is wrong. You have people living in crammed "dorms" and working 12 hour shifts. Are so such a heartless bastard to ignore this conditions. Apple is only saving 20% but still getting 70% to 80% markup.
What you call being a "heartless bastard" actually means trying to inform yourself about problems. If you go into a hospital, would you prefer a doctor who is unable to help you because he or she is flooding the floor in tears while you are dying, or a heartless bastard who makes crude jokes at your expense while keeping you alive and actually helping you?
The "heartless bastards" put up nets, and made people sign contracts not to make suicides. At the same time, the well-meaning people of San Francisco claim that suicide nets for the Golden Gate bridge, where the average annual confirmed number of suicides alone is three times higher than the worst year at Foxconn, are too expensive.
You do realize there have been other reports about the appalling conditions that were not based on Daisy.
Then tell us.
I think that it would be more accurate to say, that Daisey took bits and pieces of various real stories, all of them reported by actual journalists, put these details in rearranged form into a fictionalized monologue, and that became a TAL segment.
That's not what happened. First, where are the "real stories"? Second, he added in very significant ways. So instead of a few cases where someone was hired who was too young, his story that all you have to do is wait at the entrance of the Foxconn factory and you will see lots and lots of 12, 13 and 14 year old children. And instead of people being poisoned, going to hospital, recovering and going back to work, he changed it to people being poisoned and having their health permanently destroyed to the point where they couldn't even lift up a glass.
Exactly... These are people who are leaving impoverished villages and lining up at places like Foxconn, fighting tooth and nail to get a job there. Their kids will go to school and get a chance to become more than their factory-line worker parents. We have no right to do anything unless people are being forced against their will and they are not...
Fact is that a young person starting a job at Foxconn, doing lots of overtime, saving money by sleeping in a cheep dorm, can save up an awful lot of money in a years time. I'm sure working at McDonalds in the USA is nicer than working at Foxconn. If you are a young person in the USA who wants to become a lawyer, for how long would you have to work at McDonalds to save enough money to finance this? If you are a young person in China, how long would you have to work at Foxconn?
Wasn't the problem here not that what Daisey reported was false, but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with? Of course from a journalistic standpoint that is awful but it is now sweeping these problems under the rug.
No, that was not the problem. As an example, Apple's "Supplier Responsibility" report says that Apple found a few dozen cases in total where people were employed before they were sixteen, but this was because of errors and improper age checking. So if Apple said the truth then it would be very, very unlikely that a journalist at the entrance of a Foxconn factory would spot anyone who is not sixteen yet. It would be impossible to find anyone who is 12, 13, or 14. But that is exactly what he claimed, which would make Apple liars.
Next, some people were injured through chemicals. You would think that if things are done right, workers who get injured go to hospital, get treated until they are fine, and come back fine and go back to work. And that's what Apple's report says. Daisey said he met many workers who were so ill that they couldn't even lift a glass. That is a completely different matter. If workers either didn't get treatment, or are so bad even after treatment, then the situation is hundred times worse than Apple claimed.
So there are two lies already that made Apple and Foxconn look an awful lot worse than they should.
Just like in the ink world, the original author sues the publisher. The publisher will now show in court who fed them the bogus goods, and the original author will then have to sue the bogus-er.
I believe Apple's contracts also say that they can ask for all payments back. Actually, if you sell a book for $4.99, and Apple kept $1.50, if you stole the contents of the book Apple can ask for the whole $4.99. Whether there is anyone who can be made to pay is a different question.
I think it would be quite reasonable for the real copyright holder to ask Apple in this case for the $3.49.
Throwing a phone out of the window doesn't mean intent to deprive the person permanently. The person can get out of the house, go where the window is, and pick up the phone. Furthermore, the depriving must be the intent. The intent was never depriving the person of their phone, the intent was to stop them from taking photos.
Type 2 diabetes is caused by carbohydrate intake. Stop eating carbs, and the type 2 diabetes goes away.
It doesn't. It never goes away, once you have it.
And the "stop eating carbs" is nonsense. It is not carbohydrates per se, it is carbohydrates in very easily digestable form that transform into blood sugar very quickly and require massive amounts of insulin that are the problem. Sugar obviously, but also the fluffed up wheat "bread" that they are selling (in the USA they have a product called "Wonderbread" which manages to get 100 out of 100 points on the carb evilness scale).
And diet coke doesn't help. It doesn't contain sugar, but it contains stuff that makes the body _believe_ there is sugar. So you get the same insulin rush, except that when the body finally figures out there wasn't any actual sugar, it then _wants_ sugar.
Type 2 diabetes _never_ goes away. Stopping unhealthy food stops the illness from getting worse. It also helps reducing the damage (the actual damage is done by unprocessed blood sugar. Less sugar intake = less unprocessed blood sugar = less damage). Losing weight is good because excessive wait makes it harder for the body to process blood sugar.
It's already a felony in basically every democratic city in the world to snatch whatever private property someone else owns, and tossing it away like that (out the window).
In Germany, it isn't theft, when you are not trying to enrich yourself. Next, in the case of killing a person, there are distinctions being made between pre-meditated or spontaneous cases, or whether the death of the person was intented. In this particular case, there was no intent that the paparazzi would lose their phone, the intent was to protect someone's privacy.
His presentation was wrong in a lot of ways, but none of the problems that he's raised were unfactual. The main problem with how he did this is that he's provided an excuse for people to dismiss the issues that he's raised. That's shameful, but it's important not to dismiss the message for the messenger.
Excuse me, but... First he claimed that he talked to people who was poisoned. That was proven to be a lie. Now he makes a different claim. There is not the slightest evidence that what he says is the truth this time, and coming from a proven liar I think the correct assumption is that he is lying again, until there is independent evidence that he isn't lying. But then his new claims is that people in Hongkong knew people who were poisoned. That kind of statement is usually called "hearsay" and doesn't count as evidence.
So what message exactly is there left that shouldn't be dismissed, beyond what can be found at what is at the moment the most trustworthy source - Apple's "Supplier Responsibility" report.
So the event happened - workers poisoned by n-hexane - he just didn't visit that factor and that's the big lie? Seriously.
That's not the big lie. The big lie is: He claimed that he talked to workers who were, long after the incident, and long after any medical treatment had finished, still suffering badly from the effects. Shaking hands. Not able even to hold a glass of water. And not one case; the way he presented it, that was the norm. As he described it, these people were in a state now where they were not capable of performing a job (what factory job would you give someone who cannot even hold a glass of water?), so their lives were destroyed.
The reality is that there were no actual reports of anyone having permanent damage, plus the majority of the workers actually had already returned back to work at the same company. So _an event_ happened, but what Daisey made you believe about the effects of the event was just not true.
"Joe killed three people in a motor accident". "That's not true, all that happened was that he damaged someone's fender". "So it really is true, he did have an accident".
Of course, it's fictionalized. That doesn't mean: "Underage workers were also only rumors. [emphasis mine]"
So even now you don't give up defending his lies? What he did wasn't fictionalized. "Fictionalized" would be something like: There were about fifty 15-year olds hired and I talked to one of them. What he said was: I went to the factory, and many of the employees that I saw entering and leaving were obviously underage.
Same with victims of improper handling of chemicals: "I met them, their hands were shaking, most couldn't even hold a glass" giving the impression of hundreds being forever unable to lead a normal life vs. "everyone has received good medical care, and the majority is back at work". That's not fictionalizing. That's intentionally giving a very wrong impression of the actual situation.
Apple's own audits show (PDF) the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers.
There is just a slight matter of scale here. Apple found evidence that several companies had hired employees when they were underage. In the year before, one company was responsible for more than half of these cases, and that company lost their contract with Apple. Since then, the number of cases has gone down. And the reason that people are employed while too young is that they apply for these jobs and someone doesn't check carefully enough. If anyone figured out they were too young, they wouldn't have been hired. That's one story.
The picture that was presented by Daisey is different. He went to factories and found lots of underage employees. I mean lots, and so young that an American journalist who is surely not too experienced judging the age of young chinese people can spot immediately that they are underage. To find them, he didn't check anyone's employment records, he just went to the entrance of the factory and looked who was entering. The picture that I get is huge numbers of 12 year olds. That's a very nasty picture, and one that would be unexcusable. If it was true.
So which one is true? What Daisey claimed is now known to be pure invention. So unless any actual evidence shows otherwise, we should now assume that Apple's story is true: A few dozen young persons hired when they were too young, about half of them actually 16 by the time Apple found out, and hired because they didn't look too young, and they came with papers that showed they were older than they actually were.
The user never decided anything. That's really half the problem: Apple created a stupid default that would have impaired significant functionality, and for the users who don't understand how to or are afraid to change browser settings, this was the only way to make that user-desired functionality actually work.
The problem is: Apple created a default that protects the privacy of its users. Google wanted functionality that could only be implemented by either a breach of the user's privacy or by getting the consent of the user, so they decided to exploit a loophole and breach the user's privacy.
It is my understanding that it does something of the latter. It submits a form in order to set a cookie so that things like the +1 button can be set. In my mind this is part and parcel of using Google's services. The code works the same regardless of the privacy settings.
The only reason to submit this form is to circumvent Safari's security settings. If the user allowed cookies to be set without user interaction, then the form is not needed. It is needed because it tricks Safari into believing that there was some user action, when there actually wasn't one.
Your argument is basically "if they check whether the door is locked and climb through the window if it is locked, but go through the front door if it's not locked, that's bad. But if they always climb through the window, then it's fine". Well, that's nonsense.
This guy had is house searched, even though he just found the phone laying there.
Well, he didn't just find the phone. You don't get arrested for finding a phone. You can get arrested for picking it up and keeping it.
Yes, if the thief is the victim of an attack, he'll certainly be a "person of interest" but do you rally think a criminal is going to call the cops because somebody beat the shit out of him? The thief won't even call the cops if your friend broke the thief's trunk open and got his phone and gun back.
In the USA, someone actually called the police because someone robbed him and took his illegal drugs away. Police actually caught the robber, and they got two convictions.
Its been proposed numerous times in the States to add an "insurance-at-the-pump tax" per gallon. In my situation that would work out $1.70 a gallon last year (16K miles $800 insurance). In the UK where petro is $8-$9 per US gallon already, such a tax would be hardly noticeable. This would have the added incentive of punishing heavy carbon users (big cars or many miles). Then you need a government bureaucracy to administer such insurance.
That would work for some people, but we had some guy in Britain complaining that he got a quote for £24,000 for one year's insurance - a clear sign that the insurance company did not want to insure him because he was just too dangerous. So what would you do with some boy racer / blind coffin dodger / blind coffin dodging boy racer who has accident after accident?
As a bicyclist, I would love to see this system set up here in the U.S. Too many uninsured drivers have been hitting bicyclists. In fact, I have had dreams of even a better system. Have an electronic lock in all vehicles that would automatically disable the vehicle if it's insurance policy lapses. This can be easily done with the current cellular/wimax/WIFI technology.
Germany uses a low-tech system: Any car dealer who sells you a new car will only sell it if you have proof that it is insured (you can get 14 day cover from any insurance and then have 14 days time to shop around for the best offer). If you sell a used car, you pay for insurance until the buyer insures the car, which means you make bloody well sure they insured the car. If you do something that makes your insurance company cancel your insurance, like not paying after their second warning, they'll send one letter to you and one to the police that you are not insured.
And what about vehicles with foreign plates?
You can't own a car with foreign plates when you are a resident in the UK except for a short time. And if the police sees right hand drive with foreign plates I suspect they will be very, very suspicious.
Since the problem is 2 million British residents driving without insurance, non-residents with foreign cars are a minor problem. They can also be checked quite easily when entering the country.
if your going to be a police state then by all means do it right.
What do you mean by "police state"? If some f***ing idiot thinks he or she can drive around with an uninsured car, which hasn't been tested for roadworthiness (because you can't get an MOT without insurance), leaving everyone else to pay for the damage to cause, then most people in Britain would want their cars to be taken away and destroyed.
Even drug lords cannot afford the new insane iPad prices.
The actual lesson is: Criminals are bloody stupid. If I had $35 million worth of drugs in a place, I would avoid doing anything that could get the police into my place. Like stealing an iPad. Or even picking one up that someone left on the train or bus.