UK fuel theft

Been in Boston, flight from NY, then changed to a bus to Amherst University where I was invited for some event. Back in the late seventies...

Same here, the bus to Leeuwarden makes a big detour to visit several small places. Possibly if you get off earlier you can get to the city center faster by walking. Using the bike I take a much shorter route.

I once had a job at Schiphol airport (near Amsterdam here). But I owned a house all the way in the north of the country. After 3 hours driving there and back everyday I rented a room close to the airport...

Was just a 6 month contract via some agency. But very interesting! All about design of the systems there. Needed special security clearance.

I have worked in Santa Monica while staying in downtown LA. Bus every day. Not bad at all.

Here, the busses only handle the "main drags" -- almost literally straight across town. If you are luck enough that your "off axis" travel corresponds with another such "main drag", then you can make some progress in that direction, as well.

Bus service for school children (paid for by the school system) is similarly sparse. There is *one* stop in our subdivision servicing a few HUNDRED homes (not all of which have school-age children -- but, it seems like it would be relatively easy to add a stop coming in and another going out without unduly burdening the bus driver!)

In my colleague's case, one bus took him across town East-to-West and another took him South from that point of "debarkation".

But, nowhere near far enough to save him the mile walk from that last stop.

Further complicating his trip was his desire to carry his laundry with him -- to use the (free) washer and dryer available "at work".

[Thus saving money that he could then spend on liquor. <frown>]

It may be a plant trellis thing. Don't know. This is a very quirky place.

I have to duck to avoid flying objects.

Outside my house:

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

One good thing about being an electronic designer is that you can find a job most anywhere, usually with paid travel for an interview and moving expenses if you get the job.

You don't need an advanced degree, and the work is usually interesting.

I don't think there is that sort of demand for coders nowadays.

There seem to be semi-rural tech islands too, if you don't like cities. Like Grass Valley in the Sierra foothills.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Yes that is new to me!

Sometimes the neighbors chicken runs free and picks around in my garden...

Only apples here on the trees in the street....

And I have grapes in the back-garden.

And

Do those attack people?

Those are a bit smaller than wolves says duckduckgo.com / says my Chromium browser: Search Assist Coyotes are generally smaller than wolves, weighing between 20-50 pounds, while wolves can weigh between 70-150 pounds. Additionally, coyotes have a more slender build and longer ears compared to the broader, more powerful appearance of wolves.

Many cats here...

It is cool that you can just ask a question in the browser and get usually a good answer, AI !

Generally not. People worry about children but I don't know of an attack.

But they do eat cats. Between cars and dogs and coyotes and maybe hawks, outdoor cats don't last long here.

On street near here had two signs on fences

CAUTION COYOTES and MISSING CAT

I met a coyote on a trail in the canyon. Beautiful animal. It stared at me for a while and got bored and walked away. I've seen women do that too.

Coyotes, and the occasional mountain lion, commute across the Golden Gate Bridge. Mountain lions do kill people.

There is a big debate about wolves moving back into California.

AI:

how many coyotes in san francisco

An estimated 100 to 125 coyotes currently live in San Francisco, with the population remaining stable over the last decade. They inhabit the city's green spaces and golf courses in small family packs, each controlling a territory of roughly 2.5 square miles

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Yes, I never got a 'no' after an interview. Had multiple options for jobs several times. Go to an agency and work the next day. Lifestyle matters .. been moving all over the world, back to the Netherlands need some money for a hotel go to an agency and work start travelling again after 6 month (the maximum you are allowed to work via an agency here) then either get a fixed contract or 'flee' fly all over the globe. Take any work to have food and shelter... Adventures most people can only dream about My next-door neighbor here never left his village... or the country. He is retired too.

I had a choice several times... If you do your work right then the agency will have something for you.

I dunno I write in C, asm, Unix shell scripts asm for several micros. But these days it is all about 'high level' mysterious stuff it seems, languages that I do not even WANT to learn as I usually can do in a few lines of C or asm and kilobytes of memory that guys with that bloat need gigabytes for ;-)

Here there is Eindhoven and Philips...

for Philips twice. In the service center and writing technical documentation in English for military satellite stuff (had a secretary to fix my spelling errors :-) ) I declined a third time for an other project as it required me to move to Eindhoven, while I lived in Amsterdam. There is more to it...

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |--------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | |[. . .] No idea how paying with your | |phone works as this seems supremely stupid, IMO.]" | |--------------------------------------------------------------|

Stupidly, not all debit or credit cards need a Personal-Identification Number.

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |--------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | | | |Police departments have stopped treating these sorts of thefts| |as "criminal" and now expect the owner/operator to pursue the | |offender civilly. So, there is incentive to prevent them | |from happening in the first place. | | | |[. . .]" | |--------------------------------------------------------------|

Cf. Doctoress Carolyn Ruth Phinney ("cp") wrote on September 22nd,

2002 to the SciFraud LISTSERV (Discussion of Fraud in Science): |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Al, | |You are quite right. I live in Orinda, California, which has one of the lowest crime | |rates in the country, despite being next door to Berkeley, Oakland and close to SF. My| |neighbor has repeatedly vandalized several neighbors. The police always write it up as| |civil. He threatened to burn down my house. That was apparently civil as well. I | |know well why the crime rate here is so low! | | | |cp | | | |[Professor Al C. Higgins] snipped-for-privacy@nycap.rr.[. . .] wrote: | | | |> More Political Science | |> | |> Here's the suggestion that Mr. Ashcroft's Department of Justice may be | |> trying to influence the presentation of data concerning crime in the United | |> States. It is, after all, simple patriotism to put one's best country forward and, | |> according to some, that is in keeping with the intention of the Patriot Act of | |> 2001. | |> | |> There is something quite disturbing about this report. | |> | |> ++++++++++ | |> | |> \Butterfield, Fox. "Some Experts Fear Political Influence on | |> Crime Data Agencies," New York Times, 22 September, p. | |> 33.\" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

(S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"On 7/21/2026 8:48 AM, Martin Brown wrote: | |[. . .] | |> It is theft of kerosene from domestic tanks that has become a problem in the UK | |> as the cost of the stuff has rocketed up along with diesel. | | | |You mean, theft from "consumers" (vs. suppliers)? | | | |When we burned heating oil, the tank was usually in the basement | |with a fill tube (and vent) extending up above ground. Theft | |would require removing the access cap (easy) and pumping/siphoning | |the fuel out -- likely in full view of neighbors, etc. | | | |Far more likely to have your vehicle stolen off your property | |as that's a quick transaction. | | | |[. . .]" | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

An oil tank for a house's central heating in the British Isles is in a house's back garden (or perhaps what you call a "back yard"), as such a house does not have a basement.

Behind a house there is not a street - just undeveloped land. Thieves come behind a house during a night when the only other persons behind a house are teenagers who want to fool around.

So theft from a consumer's oil tank is easy and common. (S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

Round here we have crossbreeds called coyowolves. They seem to have bred with domestic dogs as well.

There was a night surveillance video that showed a big pack of them in Central Park, and here in the ‘burbs we hear them howling quite often.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

As to 'cats' I usually put some food out for the birds, crows mostly a cat went for it, birds screeming alarms, I got a cup of water and the cat got wet, and left...

In the UK magnetic stripe is now unused and not present on the newest cards. Older cards do still get skimmed for magstripe and PIN though and then used in the USA overnight before the owner notices.

Tap to pay is I think limited to £100 max transaction in the UK. (was £50 pre-Covid but was upped to avoid using cash in supermarkets)

Card inserted Chip & PIN is the default for larger transactions.

Cheques are almost never used (except by Luddites).

Some very sophisticated UK chip & PIN card frauds have occurred at a few petrol stations - the data path inside the card machine is not fully secure and there have been rogue service engineers "fixing" them.

They are very similar. The ASDA one should have all the cars facing the right way it is nominally a one way system. I see some of yours are not.

Gotta love the fake saguaro's - they are very funny. Growing cacti & succulents is one of my hobbies. The "palm tree" disguise looks awful by comparison.

UK 5G ones typically look like oversized Dalek ray guns. A few are badly disguised as "trees" in sensitive locations.

I had one for about 15 years got it past size of a pair of tennis balls before moving overseas meant it had to go. I have a couple of faster growing cereus species that are about 2m tall and flowering in the UK.

Newer cards no longer have embossed numbers/name and everything human readable has moved to the *back* of the card -- perhaps so it can be imaged completely? (silly as that is where the security code is located)

Ah. Do the card companies not notice that anomaly? I made a purchase in a store and went back and made another. The first transaction "originated" here. The second, the sales person used a different "terminal" that was (virtually) located in another state, many thousands of miles from here.

The credit card company denied that purchase. I went home, fuming about the episode -- to find SWMBO on the phone with the credit card company -- who had called "me" to inquire as to this "suspicious transaction". (only a few hundred dollars but I think that's one of the strategies scammers use to avoid detection?)

At least $100 is OK as I do that every few days without incident.

I think the sellers prefer tap as it moves folks along quicker. Nothing more annoying than watching "granny" fumbling with a card and complaining that "it doesn't work" (you've inserted it incorrectly).

Also, many of the chip readers wear out -- particularly at high volume retailers. E.g., Walmart doesn't support tap to pay and folks are always trying to coax their readers to accept their cards ("Please reinsert or select an alternate payment method" "Really? Why do you think some OTHER card is going to work BETTER???")

I see them used at grocery stores from time to time. They even fill in the payee and amount with a check printer for the customer (to speed things along) -- just sign.

Here, it is all "bolt on" skimmers as they can be made really insignificant in size, shape, etc.

I don't know the "best practices" for servicing the machines. For gaming devices (in legal establishments), a machine is not opened unless two people (employees) are present -- I guess they figure two people could never *conspire* to defraud their employer?

Cashboxes are almost always physically secured -- even dating back to the days of pinball machines.

And, coinage observation is more thorough; with pinball machines, you could lay a sheet of paper atop the coinbox (which is secured to the cabinet) and come back an hour later and skim the accumulated coins off of it, replacing it for the next group of customers to "refill".

[Any industry that deals with cash usually has spent a fair bit of effort being scrutinized -- by "red" and "blue" teams! It's a delightful problem space! :> ]

In ages past, stations allowed traffic from both directions. This would tend to position the tanks on the pump-side of the vehicle.

Now, if you pull up on the "wrong" side of a pump, you have to carry the hose *over* your vehicle to reach the tank.

I mean, why the effort? You've got telephone poles nearby that are already an eyesore. Why not paint the damn thing red&white

-striped like a candy cane?? Or, add blue for a barber pole effect (and make it SPIN!!!)

Or, make it look like a telephone pole devoid of *wires*!

Yes. There have been some that were incorrectly executed; the fronds affixed upside down.

They seem to be inconsistent in their deployments, here. Often sited atop established edifices likely with an arrangement with their current owner.

By contrast: <https://www.google.com/maps/@32.2722526,-110.8392449,66m>shows how little is required to support one (look in the roadside bushes for the kit) Gotta be fun working on the antennae standing in a cherry picker above those high tension lines!

Many folks meticulously watch the night flowering specimens on their properties and invite folks by on the nights they are expected to bloom. Of course, the horticultural groups go out of their way:

It's amusing to watch a bunch of people standing around in the dark staring at a plant, expectantly!

Sad that most cacti have such short blooming periods. We have some hedgehogs that produce an abundant array of (identical) blossoms. Interesting because of the waxy texture of the petals. This being a close approximation to our variety:

though we have many more lobes.

doesn't matter why the price goes up, it makes people look for alternatives

Actually, Trump is probably thinking "frack baby, frack". Most of the current US oil is got by fracking, and that does make it more expensive than Middle Eastern oil. Jacking up the price of oil does make switching to renewably generated electricity even more attractive, but that's slow process - and China is making 90% of the solar cells and quite a lot of the wind turbines. Trump's derisory attention span means that he isn't thinking about the switch to renewables at all, not that he knows enough to see the point of doing that, any more than John Larkin does.

Exactly this happened to me a few weeks ago at a Home Depot in the Boston area. The rejected card worked everywhere else. A different card (which also works pretty much everywhere) did work.

This reader was reading the card electrically, not by tapping. The magnetic stripe didn't work. The atttendants offered no theory.

Joe

The best thing about fracking is making gobs of natural gas.

You should love ng. It's mostly hydrogen and it burns a lot cleaner than wood or coal.

China mostly burns coal. It's both the world's biggest producer and the world's biggest importer. Lots from Australia.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We feed birds every morning, crows and ravens and jays and tiny juncos. It's on a high deck so cats can't interfere. Now we have a bunch of newly-hatched scrub jays, which learn to fly pretty fast.

If we're late, the crows park on the railing and squawk.

After extensive experiment I've found that by far they prefer Cheetos.

That's Neverless, the little one. Nevermore is the size of a turkey. They are funny.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics