Police are so f***ing worthless and useless
They don’t pay cops to think. In fact, I don’t think they even pay cops to recover stolen bikes.
They actually screen for people who do think, and disqualify them from being police officers.
If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.
In america at least cops can’t have an IQ that’s too high or they won’t get the job. They want people smart enough to do the capitalist class’s bidding but dumb enough not to question anything.
The official reason is that if you’re too smart, the menial repetitive nature of most police work will get boring and you’ll quit. The rationale being they didn’t want to invest in training if you aren’t going to stick around.
No they don’t care. It’s why bike thieves are such assholes, there’s barely any money to be made off it at massive inconvenience for the bike owner but they do it because they know 99% no one comes after them.
i bet a bike thief could steal a bile in front of a cop and the cop would simply look the other way
Cops suck at their job, and they hate it if you explain it to them.
I can’t remember a single time in my 40-years-long life where a cop genuinely helped me in any way,
apart from writing a report (full of errors and spelling mistakes) that my insurance demanded.
And I really don’t believe they “make the streets safer” either.In the U.S., cops statistically do nothing. They don’t prevent crime, they don’t solve crimes, they’re just a publically funded security firm for local businesses to contract. It would honestly be more surprising if you had a useful interaction with the police.
Even though this is all colloquially known and accepted, don’t think of arguing to lower the police budget in any way. Gotta make sure those buffoons have their surplus army equipment so they can feel safe while they rob and oppress citizens.
My family was victimized in a home invasion that went “get therapy” badly and the cops in their defense did get us in touch with resources and gave us the report of insurance, but they also all but accused me of being a drug addict because I have scars on my arms and had a bowl in my apartment (weed is legal here). They also refused to look at the cut window screen or the footprint on the other side of the window insisting that because the front door was unlocked after the burglar left through it we must’ve left it unlocked and that’s how he entered.
We didn’t like the cops before we were victims of violent crime, but it’s much more pronounced of a dislike afterwards. I’ve heard my entire life that “when you’re victimized by criminals you’ll come to appreciate the cops” and I can’t help but laugh at that sentiment.
Hell in a different instance I got robbed by a guy, got his license plate, phone number, and confession (buying something off the internet, guy took both things and ran, then later messaged asking for sex), and want to know what I’ve never seen since? That money. Like I’m not happy with the guy, but unlike my home invader I don’t even think he needs to be kept away from society, I just wanted my fucking money back.
Got rear ended on the highway. Recorded make and model, rough driver description, and plate number with state, and direction they were heading. Told dispatcher and cops on scene everything, they couldn’t have given less of a fuck.
“We’ll keep a lookout, but really there’s nothing we can do.”
So why am I paying taxes for you welfare queens then? My insurance hotline was far more helpful at next steps and what needs to happen vs ‘shit sucks bro, here’s your case number, you gotta smash F5 on our website until the report gets uploaded. lol no, we wolnt reach out to you’
I sold a trailer to a cop once. It wasn’t related to his police activities but I needed to get rid of it and he didn’t haggle.
are you white
Same here. They show up after you get hurt, not before. They are supposed to make us safer, but we have more cops than any country in the world and we are not safer.
Like the old saying goes, “when seconds matter, the police are only minutes away”, except they’re actually more like an hour and a half away for me.
Depends on the country. Aussie cops are a lot nicer and more useful than many American cops.
I was pushing a cart full groceries home when two white guys walked right up and started looking in my shopping cart. Exactly at that moment a cop car pulled up beside us.
That’s all they had to do. It was pretty good timing.
Probably nothing would have happened either way, but still. It also occurs to me that the presence of anyone else would have likely had the same effect. Like a prof rolling up on a unicycle, or someone walking their cat, or even a lone horse. Perhaps even a bold raccoon.
Excellent point, it’s not the presence of a cop that stopped them, it’s the presence of another person.
kids stole my car
cops gave chase
they crashed the car
ran on foot
cops gave chase
they ran into an abandoned house
cops stopped outside
they walked nonchalantly out of the house
cops did not arrest as they could not be sure it was the same people
literal skyrim npc behavior.
They were chasing running people, those had to still be in the house. Probably doing laps in one of the rooms.
“I have determined by thinking really hard that the victim is responsible for the theft of their possessions. Deny all insurance claims”.
In Montreal, I was riding my bike drunk and crashed pretty badly. I broke a tooth and was bleeding out of my mouth. I got up and kept riding home when a cop stopped me who was sitting next to his car monitoring pedestrian traffic. They took out their first aid kit, gave me some gauze, asked if I needed to go to the ER, then let me be on my way.
I feel like that wouldn’t happen in the US. I was still very drunk.
And Montreal cops don’t have that great a reputation, at least from what I’ve heard.
Only interaction I had with one was when they were handing out pamphlets about hiding your (white) headphone cords on the metro. I guess people were stealing iphones
Yeah, it probably would. They would be interested in just how and why you got a bloody face. And even US cops carry basic medical supplies like a band-aid.
US cops aren’t the best, but they can and do help with such things.
In many states it’s legal to ride a bicycle while drunk, so they probably would. In my state it counts as a DUI so they might arrest you.
Here’s a PDF of the rules per state:
https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/bui_full_chart.pdf
out in these streets. cops make the streets more dangerous by far
This is an innate skill in the days of the internet for anytime you are looking for just the right moment in a video of any kind. 🤔
Some sorting algorithms shorten this process by only scanning the last 10%.
Well if you’re looking for a moment witch consequences on the video.
Drag has been in exactly this same situation. Stupid pigs.
Also binary search isn’t a sorting algorithm. It’s a search algorithm. It only works on a data set that has already been sorted.
Could you not say that the data set has already been sorted by time?
Drag is implying that. You could also say that the frames are sorted by bike present and not. Assuming the bike isn’t returned before the end of the tape.
Thank you.
It’s not that the cops don’t know how to search a video, they simply don’t want to, because theft of property from you, a working-class nobody, is nothing to them.
It can also be both.
(Source: I have talked to cops before)
And why should we trust you about that, you cop talker
Actab
What’s the t in that for?
I was just jokingly saying all cop talkers are bad lol
Aha, I thought it was for talk but couldn’t fit it :)
And also that - depending on the format of the video and software involved - doing a “binary search” might not be that simple
With my own NVR system, it takes great quality video and I can pull files of it, but the actual interface is pretty janky to say the least, and accessing stuff like the fisheye cameras only really works well within the vendor’s app.
As a rule, do not talk to cops. If you need to talk to cops, you either don’t, or go through a lawyer.
I’m not in the US. We don’t have the same lunatics you do. They’re just slightly demented here.
Neither am I but ours are so paranoid they will still wear stab vests under their hoodies when doing plain clothes patrols even if the majority don’t carry a gun.
I’m a quality director and I did this the other day to identify the exact range of bad laminate in a number of film rolls!
Not a meme
My dad once told me that he had to find the fuse that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 fuses in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next fuse off, and do that quite a lot of times.
In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃
If he can flick it off then it’s a circuit breaker, not a fuse. Fuses have to be pulled, and it’s a real PITA.
Thanks, I changed it. I wasn’t sure, what the correct English word is…
I would have never guessed that you’re not a native English speaker from your writing. Neat!
A fuse and a circuit breaker perform the same function, but a fuse blows out and has to be replaced, whereas a circuit breaker can just be flipped back on. Fuses haven’t been used in household wiring for a long time now, but they’re still used in cars, and for portable things like Christmas lights.
Binary search only works if the fuses were correctly sorted in the same order as the houses though.
I don’t think that’s true, it’s more of a set problem. If you pull half the fuses, and the thing is still on, then you’ve ruled out that half. Then you pull half the remaining fuses, and if it turns off it was one of the new half you pulled. Then you put another half back in, ect .
Ah, I didn’t think of it that way. That indeed would work.
You know, after posting that comment, I really doubted myself, if it really is binary search, because Wikipedia also tells me it needs to be a sorted array.
But yeah, I think that’s only relevant, if your method of checking whether it’s in one half or the other uses
and<. As far as I can tell, so long as you can individually identify the fuses, a.k.a. they’re countable, then you can apply binary search.If when you divide your set in two, you can reliably tell which of the two subsets definitely has what you’re looking for, then it’s binary search.
I think the old school method was to plug in a stereo and turn the volume up. When you couldn’t hear it then you got the right breaker.
I hook a cheap webcam up to a USB battery pack and load it up on my phone. Then I plug in a light and point the camera at that. It makes it a single trip and doesn’t bother the neighbors.
My friend has some upcoming electrical work in his house, can you explain how to use binary search in this instance so I can tell him?
Turn off half the breakers. See if you still have power where you need to go. That will tell you which half it’s on. Turn off half of those breakers, repeat.
Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.
For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.
So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.
So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.
Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.
Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.
Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.
We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 8 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 7 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.
Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra two or three searches to narrow it down.
Oh, well, you switch off half the fuses, then you go check the wire.
Let’s say the wire still has power on it, so now you know that none of the fuses in that half affected it (which you can turn back on now).Then you do the same thing again with the other half of the fuses, i.e. you switch off half of the fuses in that half and go check the wire.
Now, let’s say the wire is dead, so now you know that the fuse you want is in this quarter.So, then you flick off half of the fuses in that quarter and check the wire again, and so on.
With every step, you eliminate half of the remaining fuses, so for 60 fuses, you need at most 6 steps (which is the logarithm for base 2 of 60).
Once you figure out which one it is, label it! I labeled all the breakers in my panel when I moved in to my house, as half of the existing labels were wrong (no idea why).
That’s the case with virtually every breaker box.
Why are so many mislabeled though? It’s not like the loads are being changed every day. I had two breakers labeled “dishwasher” and neither of them were the dishwasher!
I had two breakers labeled “dishwasher”
Electrical work is one of those things that’s not difficult to do as long as you don’t mind it being some level of wrong but relatively hard to do 100% to code right without training. With most of the wrong ways, the project still works, but it’s dangerous and/or hard to maintain. Professional work is expensive, so you end up with a LOT of handyman work that’s poorly labeled, poorly run, poorly designed or some combination of the three.
My best guess would be that at some point, running the dishwasher tripped the breaker. They had space so they added a breaker below it and moved the line to the new breaker. Then it still tripped, so they moved the line at the dishwasher circuit that was already close by.
Either the original line has a fault in it (old aluminum lines can have junction issues over time) or the dishwasher had a short in it, and they either replaced the dishwasher, or the new line they chose didn’t fail.
I keep a spreadsheet with every outlet/light in every room on it and their corresponding breakers. Much easier since breakers often span multiple rooms, sometimes only powering one or two fixtures in each.
Ah, obvious now, thank you. For some reason
myhis brain couldn’t get to actually turning off half the breakers in one goBinary search requires splitting the search space into two halves, then asking “is it in that half?”
Normally the “is it in that half?” check involves a numerical comparison: test value versus target value. “higher or lower” here gets you to “is it in that half?”
So finding the midpoint seems like a core part of the process, but really that’s just a shortcut in the case of comparable values, that helps you split into two and check membership.
I admit I couldn’t think of that either: just alter half the items and check for effect.
I had a bike stolen from a convenience store once. I talked the clerk into letting me review the footage. I found the guy stealing the bike on tape, along with the licence plate of the car that dropped him off. Through a bunch of sleuthing I found out his name and exactly where he lived. I called the cops with all of this information and evidence and told them I want to press charges. Then basically said “lol, fuck off”. So I kept trying to find out where the bike was. It was an expensive bike and I wanted it back. While looking for the bike I found out the thief had sold it for money that he spent on meth, and then got caught with the meth, so he was actually in jail. I called the cops back and told them I have one of their inmates on video stealing my bike, I have the license plate number of his collaborator, and I have witnesses. I want to press charges, and they already have the guy in custody. Again, their answer was basically “lol, get fucked. We don’t help people”. Fuck the police.
Wait couldn’t you have filed a lawsuit? I mean yeah, the cops didn’t do their job (I guess they could be sued for that too). But you would need proof in text form so just ask them again in a mail or letter. If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed
Against who? A meth addict bike thief definitely doesn’t have any money. Do you mean against the police? Possibly? Idk. I lived in a conservative town where the Chief of Police was basically idolized. I definitely didn’t want to paint a target on my own head. This was 20 years ago, so if I had other options, they’re gone now.
Defund the police, shit on the thin blue line. This is always an option.
ACAB
If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed
Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.
The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.
The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.
Ahm, I think you want to reread the Source. Its even worse with several women getting raped and tortured for 14 hours because of lazy police.
Ah you’re right. I was thinking of Lozito v. The City of New York. Same ruling; different circumstances.
And fucking upsetting. The US is really a policestate.
ACAB
Pigs are threatened by anyone that’s even slightly intelligent
My bike was stolen, and I live in a small enough town that the cops actually did go through the footage to find the thief.
He called back 15 minutes later for more details and mentioned he was 15 minutes into the footage.
It sounds dumb, but if the footage was on tape and not easily seekable, then I can see that happening.
It should still at least have a fast-forward option. You go at the highest speed possible until the bike disappears. Then you rewind at a slower speed until it shows up again. Then you can play the tape from there.
git bisectlol
