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Notes -
Update on the Black Teens Versus Pregnant Nurse story.
This twitter thread seems like a reasonable summary. I know it's not entirely unbiased, but absent additional contradictory evidence, the story seems to basically check out like this:
Kids had checked out the ebikes for a ride, and docked them before the 45-minute "free" period ended, planning to undock them to resume riding. (This is apparently a pretty common practice?)
They're sitting on the bikes chilling, when Comrie, the pregnant nurse, approaches and asks to have one of the bikes.
The teens say no, unmoved by her appeals for consideration for her pregnancy.
She scans (checks out) a bike one of the kids is sitting on, and tries to take it.
The kerfluffle we saw on video ensues. The kids apparently filmed it with a legitimate fear that she would turn it into "gang of teens harasses pregnant white lady."
So basically, no one looks like an entirely innocent victim here. The kids were just hanging out in preparation to check out the bikes again, but since they were docked, you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting. Technically Comrie was entitled to take an available bike; the kids shouldn't have been squatting on them. They were also kind of jerks for not showing a little compassion for an obviously pregnant woman (their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx).
That said, deciding "Screw you, I'm taking your bike anyway, get off" wasn't great behavior on her part, even if legally justified. I cut her more slack because apparently she just got off a 12-hour shift, and she was pregnant.
However, even if the teens were perhaps being inconsiderate and less than gentlemanly, the narrative that's basically portrayed them as ganging up on her and trying to steal her bike appears to be inaccurate.
Interesting, my priors were very strongly on "black teens from da hood try and swindle bike from pregnant woman" when I saw the video. I freely and openly admit that I was wrong.
I guess I should update away from them and towards the opposite, sometimes that pregnant white female trying to leverage her "oppression" really is the unreasonable one there.
Huh? Even assuming everything happened as described, how is that "a pregnant white female trying to leverage her oppression" ?
She tried to claim the bike, even though the black teens were using it. The fact that it had been redocked doesn't mean the teens were done with it as any reasonable observer could see they intended to take it out again very very shortly (they were even sitting on it as a further signal that it was claimed!). The fact that the bike makers never intended the repeated 45 free minutes trick to work but didn't do anything to patch this exploit is a lapse of their judgement, not a shortfall in goodness from the black teens.
This case is no different to you leaving your stuff at an arcade machine for two minutes because you need to go get more tokens from the main desk. Even though you aren't playing a game at this exact moment, leaving your stuff is a very strong signal that you are still using the machine. If someone came and started a new game in your absence I would absolutely say they were in the wrong.
It was OK for the women to ask the teens to give up the bike as she needed it too, but the prerogative on what to do with the bike lies with the teenagers as they were using it, no different to a case where someone had asked them for the bike while they were out riding in the street. Once the teenagers had said no, the woman should have gracefully bowed out instead of snatching it from under their noses and claiming her "oppression" gave her a greater right to the bike than the people who were using it.
Then how did she get on the bike? Did she physically remove that young man from the bike? Did he get off when she checked it out?
Also you are using hostile language to describe innocuous actions. I very much doubt she did or even could "snatch" anything from a group of teenagers.
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Well their plan was very much not like this, because they were exploiting the system to NOT PAY AT ALL.
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Hard disagree. The fact that the bike temporarily locks you out from immediately re-renting it demonstrates that the bike makers deliberately attempted to prevent this exploit, they just didn't expect people to go so far as to physically guarding the bikes while they were docked. Effectively, the kids are taking up the bikes so that they can't be used, as if they were renting them, without paying for it while it's docked. The fact that a protection is possible to get around if you go to extremes that reasonable people wouldn't go to (physically intimidating and harassing cusomters away from the rentals) does not make it acceptable behavior.
Further, there are tradeoffs to behaving in this low-trust way. Because the bike makers "patching" this exploit is to make the lockout period longer. Maybe they make it so the subscribed customers only get 45 minutes once every 4 hours, to make it untenable for squatters to sit around that long. Except now that harms legitimate good-faith customers who had a 30 minute bike ride, a 2 hour meeting, and then 30 minutes back. Straining the system in an adversarial relationship with the manufacturer forces them to make increasingly draconian patches to prevent exploits.
This is more akin to a sale of some item at a store that says "50% off, limit one item per customer" and having one person guard them so nobody can get any during the time it takes for your friend to continuously grab one item, go and check out, and then come back for more until they're all gone. You don't get moral dibs if the rules are clearly trying to prevent you from doing what you're doing but failed to account for the fact that you might use physical intimidation.
They do not. Docking and re-renting immediately is allowed. So why not do that? Well, this was an e-bike, and there's an extra fee for an e-bike. Unless the e-bike is taken from a dock that doesn't have any regular bikes. So dock, wait for everyone else to take the regular bikes, then re-rent. Why wouldn't other people take the e-bikes? Because you're guarding them, of course.
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They weren't using it, they had returned it and wanted to use it again but had to wait for a timer that is built into the bike rental system to allow other users a chance at the bike.
In an arcade this is more like losing to a friend and keeping your spot because that one didn't count.
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So this is the crux of the disagreement, the fact that they weren't done with it means absolutely nothing.
The analogy is not applicable because in it you're actually paying for usage, unlike what these teens were doing.
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