6 ms·

The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere

126 points by thomasjudge 7y ago

ForHackernews 7y ago
This is some genuine late-capitalist dystopian activity: Ordering cheap plastic garbage, having it packed and shipped to low-tax jurisdictions, only to unpack it, cover up the barcodes and re-pack it to ship it again. It's like if somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?"
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  "Moderately wasteful middlemen exist" is pretty mild as far as dystopian activity goes. You can probably find equal or greater waste in the bureaucracies of any economic system you care to name.
  - madengr 7y ago
    This is how the government buys computers. The order goes to a Small Disadvantaged Business, who takes a 10% cut, with the computers being drop shipped from the manufacturer.
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      This is how a lot of government contracting works, too. The prime contractor is always some [I'll gently call it] Incentivized-Demographic-Owned company whose only job is to subcontract all their contracts out to a bigger company who actually does the work. The "IDO" company (often one person) does nothing but takes a small cut and passes the rest of the profits to the company doing the work.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        They do more than that -- the prime contractors are as ridiculous as the government is. It's a sweet deal until it isn't... a black-swan event, usually a fuckup one of the parties means that the reseller is stuck with a bankruptcy-level bag of poo. As vassals of the big company, they act as a buffer for whatever the goals of the big company are. When the big co needs to make it's quarterly goals, they'll "ship" a bunch of software to the vassal company (which is at best a piece of paper) to hit their nut. With physical equipment, the same thing happens. Most notoriously, car dealers get stuck with accepting cars they don't want in order to get cars they need. A Ford dealer won't get an extra allocation of $75k F-150 trucks unless they take a load of Ford Focuses. If you get a great deal on a specific printer or something from a reseller, this is why. On the other side of the transaction, the government sucks in terms of on-time payment. Wall St. doesn't like receivables from the customer, so the bigco will shaft the female-nativeamerican-disabled-veteran owned reseller with a Net-30 payment schedule, and they need to finance that receivable for the Net-180 paying government entity. The other issue is terms and conditions. The government will demand most-favored nation status for price and impose onerous terms. The subcontractor company accepts that risk, deals with whatever wacky terms need to be dealt with, and enters the contract -- so big company doesn't get sued for fraud when the US Department of Agriculture gets a more expensive price than the Wyoming Department of Health for a product, or when the pallet used to ship a server includes wood sourced from Brazilian hardwood.
      - Frondo 7y ago
        I can't speak to federal-level contracting, and I can't speak to much contracting outside the Pacific Northwest and parts of the east coast, but this is largely untrue. In virtually every capital construction project I've seen or been aware of, the prime is always a regional, national, or multinational company, with capacity to do a lot of the work themselves; they do sub out work, but that is the layer at which they're expected to hire a certain amount of historically underutilized companies. Usually they're given goals of 30-40% contract spend on historically underutilized companies, and they usually miss it by about 10%. This is considered a success, because in the past, they wouldn't hire such businesses at all. In the past, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses would simply never be hired for the ongoing well-paid government capital construction projects. All of this is now extensively tracked, as well, though the information is not easy to come by. I know a few people who regularly FOIA their city procurement offices to get the information, and it's there, just not publicly distributed. It's tracked at the city level, county level, and always state DOT level (though not necessarily other departments; DOTs have extra tracking requirements because of their reliance on federal funding). In deference to your story, I know several people who have an anecdote about "a woman who ran a business and added a 10% markup to contracts, passing everything through to someone else" -- the individual changes, the markup changes, but the story's the same, and the implication is always that it's a scam, the system is rife with fraud, tear it all down, etc., and that is simply untrue by the numbers. It's an anecdote to reinforce personal biases, not a reflection of the world.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    It's tragicomic that there's an entire industry that's grown up around arbitrage to make logistics less streamlined. My grandfather built skyscrapers. My father built houses. I build marginally-useful webapps. Will my son build anything? Or will his future be rearranging the detritus of robots?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      The average person building nothing is essentially eventually destined from specialization yields rising unbounded - let alone complete automation. Your grandfather's grandfather almost certainly farmed for instance.
- nnq 7y ago
  > somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?" ...what's pointless and wasteful about dropshiping? In an ideal case the manufacturer has no interest/skills to do online presence and stuff, and the product is shipped directly from manufacturer to client which coordinate delivery, the dropshipper only operates website and handles customer support etc. What's wasteful about that, since the same merchandise is transported the same route as it would in a direct shipping case, and the coordination around custom labeling and delivery doesn't produce any waste and is not pointless.
  - moccachino 7y ago
    You are describing a traditional online retailer. I agree there is probably nothing inherently 'wasteful' about drop-shipping, but it is just another middleman and so it 'wastes' money for the buyer/seller, but that's probably a thin argument. But of course the main wastefulness of the process is the whole system of constantly pushing people to consume tons of disposable useless crap.
- mc32 7y ago
  If anything this behavior is a throwback to “middleman minority”. It’s still very prominent in the Japanese economy[1], especially domestic, but also international. [1]https://www.citeman.com/10218-japanese-distribution-structure.html https://www.citeman.com/10218-japanese-distribution-structur...
- buboard 7y ago
  Sounds a lot how computers work
- driverdan 7y ago
  This has nothing to do with late stage capitalism. I wish people would stop using that term without understanding what it means.
  - sodafountan 7y ago
    Right, this is actually an example of capitalism working well. These women and everybody else who started pack and ship businesses were able to identity a need of the market and build businesses to meet that need and have become relatively wealthy from doing it (50 bucks an hour in rural Montana goes a long way). Late stage capitalism is more massive corporations with unlimited dollars buying up real-estate, pumping millions of dollars into advertising, and paying their employees low wages (McDonald's, Walmart, etc.) to the point where individuals can't compete and quality suffers.
pjc50 7y ago
> The end result is a bizarre, looping supply chain. Some hair conditioner might get sent from a Walmart warehouse in Grantsville, Utah, to Roundup, then from Roundup to an Amazon fulfillment center in Joliet, Illinois. Finally, Amazon sends it out to a customer. > Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon. Ah, the efficiency of capitalism. More seriously, this is a weirdly organic process. Just as anything edible will be infested with life within a short time, a huge algal bloom of businesses develops to feed off this arbitrage. It shouldn't make sense to do all this, but the endless search for ever-tinier market inefficiencies to live off somehow calls it in to being. I'm reminded of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/1408813742 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/... , a novel in which vans endlessly circulate among a series of depots carrying parts for other vans, until someone discovers that the whole thing has no underlying purpose and the scheme collapses.
- ThrowMeAwayOkay 7y ago
  "Ah, the efficiency of capitalism." Also...the Emergent Systems that rise up to gain from these efficiencies of capitalism. The companies created to help others get those efficiencies...more efficiently...
  - turk73 7y ago
    Seems more like end-state capitalism. I wish these people luck, and applaud their creativity. It's not going to last, though. Also, it doesn't scale, so if we're at the point where people are picking out teeny little arbitrage opportunities like these, then unless the process can become more automated, it has a limited upside.
  - kanaba 7y ago
    Emergences: A Talk by Danny Hillis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366
- pmjordan 7y ago
vsskanth 7y ago
This looks like a retail goods analogy for SWIFT type system for connecting different retail marketplaces to one another. I always thought the economics of drop shipping would never work but looks like it is profitable even with a processing middleman. I am curious to know what kind of inefficiency is being exploited here, because this seems to be from one online retailer to another (unlike ebay). I have a couple of guesses but I would like to know if there are others: * information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop) * product won't ship to target market through competitors website * competitor's website wont accept user's preferred mode of payment * wants a competitor's house-brand product on amazon * some kind of customs loophole
- hirundo 7y ago
  > * information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop) From the article: > Amazon has made buying stuff so frictionless and habitual, delivery so fast — and for Prime members, free — that many shoppers don’t bother checking prices anywhere else. I do cross shop for most things. I usually check Ebay, Newegg, etc. But the majority of the time I end up buying from Amazon due to straight up better prices, or only slightly higher prices plus more convenience. I think there are enough of us that do that to keep Amazon's prices competitive.
- chkaloon 7y ago
  Those are all great guesses, and I bet all of them come into play. I wonder how many externalities aren't being accounted for yet in the process, like the new landfill Roundup will need to construct to handle all the excess packaging being disposed of.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I think a lot about how tech companies talk about being green, when underneath them is devices that go in the trash after two years because they aren't supported anymore or the amount of packaging and shipping and fuel waste that happens to provide you a perfect one-day shipping experience. I wonder how different Amazon and the like would seem from an oil company in terms of environmental impact, when all is taken into account.
JackFr 7y ago
Whenever I read 'drop ship', I think of the noun from "Starship Troopers".
- kevinlou 7y ago
  It is disappointing, isn't it? That such a cool term has been co-opted to mean "forwarding some stuff to another person."
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Unless that stuff being forwarded is a Morita rifle, of course.
authoritarian 7y ago
I've had one instance with amazon where they clearly drop shipped the product and didn't even take it out of the box. I purchased a single hang-on-back aquarium filter which came in an absolutely massive amazon box, containing another hugely oversized walmart box, containing an unlabeled/unbranded box which was still too large, and then finally the aquarium filter in it's own box and packaging. It almost seemed like it had been shipped from some supplier, to walmart, to amazon, and they just kept sticking the package in a larger box. The amount of waste for a single small filter was absurd
- rob74 7y ago
  The alternative would be to throw away the two extra packages, which would reduce the waste a bit, but would still be absurd if you think about it...
  - authoritarian 7y ago
    Yes, I suppose either way the waste is being created, I'm just not always confronted with it at that level
  - dec0dedab0de 7y ago
    No, the alternative would be to put a new shipping label on the original package.
    - 5555624 7y ago
      Which they do. I received an office/break room trashcan, from Amazon, in its Walmart box.
- bryanmgreen 7y ago
  All so that each one can have their own branding. Ugh. Just put a huge sticker on top instead.
pmjordan 7y ago
Entirely tangential to the main thrust of the article, but this threw me: a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.” Wait, WHAT? Can anyone with more knowledge about the Old West explain what crime these bystanders would have been committing? Am I interpreting this correctly that these "bystanders" had nothing to do with or to gain from the theft of the cattle but were thought to be in the vicinity and didn't prevent it?
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  The implicit assumption you’re making here is that there was a court, trial, or even evidence. “Frontier justice” doesn’t always care about those things. Sometimes the “crime” is that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe with the “wrong“ skin color... This part of history contains a lot of ugliness. It’s also part of the present. Extrajudicial killings are still very much a thing in the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes contains some leads for this specific history, I’d guess.
  - pmjordan 7y ago
    Thanks for the link. I guess I was aware of the general lawlessness of that part of the world at the time, but the part about "cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”" seemed like a reference to some specific, well-known rule with which I was not familiar.
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      Ah. So, I am not super educated on this history, but I am the product of at least three generations of beef cattle farming. My understanding is that this phrase is true, and I think it makes some intuitive sense: if your community is based around herding cattle, stealing cattle is literally stealing the your livelihood. Furthermore, there's an "outsider" aspect to this kind of crime; it's not like there's farm A, and farm B, and farmer B steals some of A's cattle and now they have more. It's someone sneaking in from out of town, stealing your stuff, and leaving. In general, people are more likely to be lenient to their neighbors than to strangers. I believe, if memory serves, there's a sort of racial/settler component to this as well. It ties into the whole "cowboys and indians" thing. Goes along with the whole "insider" vs "outsider" dichotomy.

126 points by thomasjudge 7y ago

This is some genuine late-capitalist dystopian activity: Ordering cheap plastic garbage, having it packed and shipped to low-tax jurisdictions, only to unpack it, cover up the barcodes and re-pack it to ship it again. It's like if somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?"

TulliusCicero 7y ago
"Moderately wasteful middlemen exist" is pretty mild as far as dystopian activity goes. You can probably find equal or greater waste in the bureaucracies of any economic system you care to name.
- madengr 7y ago
  This is how the government buys computers. The order goes to a Small Disadvantaged Business, who takes a 10% cut, with the computers being drop shipped from the manufacturer.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    This is how a lot of government contracting works, too. The prime contractor is always some [I'll gently call it] Incentivized-Demographic-Owned company whose only job is to subcontract all their contracts out to a bigger company who actually does the work. The "IDO" company (often one person) does nothing but takes a small cut and passes the rest of the profits to the company doing the work.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      They do more than that -- the prime contractors are as ridiculous as the government is. It's a sweet deal until it isn't... a black-swan event, usually a fuckup one of the parties means that the reseller is stuck with a bankruptcy-level bag of poo. As vassals of the big company, they act as a buffer for whatever the goals of the big company are. When the big co needs to make it's quarterly goals, they'll "ship" a bunch of software to the vassal company (which is at best a piece of paper) to hit their nut. With physical equipment, the same thing happens. Most notoriously, car dealers get stuck with accepting cars they don't want in order to get cars they need. A Ford dealer won't get an extra allocation of $75k F-150 trucks unless they take a load of Ford Focuses. If you get a great deal on a specific printer or something from a reseller, this is why. On the other side of the transaction, the government sucks in terms of on-time payment. Wall St. doesn't like receivables from the customer, so the bigco will shaft the female-nativeamerican-disabled-veteran owned reseller with a Net-30 payment schedule, and they need to finance that receivable for the Net-180 paying government entity. The other issue is terms and conditions. The government will demand most-favored nation status for price and impose onerous terms. The subcontractor company accepts that risk, deals with whatever wacky terms need to be dealt with, and enters the contract -- so big company doesn't get sued for fraud when the US Department of Agriculture gets a more expensive price than the Wyoming Department of Health for a product, or when the pallet used to ship a server includes wood sourced from Brazilian hardwood.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      I can't speak to federal-level contracting, and I can't speak to much contracting outside the Pacific Northwest and parts of the east coast, but this is largely untrue. In virtually every capital construction project I've seen or been aware of, the prime is always a regional, national, or multinational company, with capacity to do a lot of the work themselves; they do sub out work, but that is the layer at which they're expected to hire a certain amount of historically underutilized companies. Usually they're given goals of 30-40% contract spend on historically underutilized companies, and they usually miss it by about 10%. This is considered a success, because in the past, they wouldn't hire such businesses at all. In the past, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses would simply never be hired for the ongoing well-paid government capital construction projects. All of this is now extensively tracked, as well, though the information is not easy to come by. I know a few people who regularly FOIA their city procurement offices to get the information, and it's there, just not publicly distributed. It's tracked at the city level, county level, and always state DOT level (though not necessarily other departments; DOTs have extra tracking requirements because of their reliance on federal funding). In deference to your story, I know several people who have an anecdote about "a woman who ran a business and added a 10% markup to contracts, passing everything through to someone else" -- the individual changes, the markup changes, but the story's the same, and the implication is always that it's a scam, the system is rife with fraud, tear it all down, etc., and that is simply untrue by the numbers. It's an anecdote to reinforce personal biases, not a reflection of the world.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  It's tragicomic that there's an entire industry that's grown up around arbitrage to make logistics less streamlined. My grandfather built skyscrapers. My father built houses. I build marginally-useful webapps. Will my son build anything? Or will his future be rearranging the detritus of robots?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    The average person building nothing is essentially eventually destined from specialization yields rising unbounded - let alone complete automation. Your grandfather's grandfather almost certainly farmed for instance.
nnq 7y ago
> somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?" ...what's pointless and wasteful about dropshiping? In an ideal case the manufacturer has no interest/skills to do online presence and stuff, and the product is shipped directly from manufacturer to client which coordinate delivery, the dropshipper only operates website and handles customer support etc. What's wasteful about that, since the same merchandise is transported the same route as it would in a direct shipping case, and the coordination around custom labeling and delivery doesn't produce any waste and is not pointless.
- moccachino 7y ago
  You are describing a traditional online retailer. I agree there is probably nothing inherently 'wasteful' about drop-shipping, but it is just another middleman and so it 'wastes' money for the buyer/seller, but that's probably a thin argument. But of course the main wastefulness of the process is the whole system of constantly pushing people to consume tons of disposable useless crap.
mc32 7y ago
If anything this behavior is a throwback to “middleman minority”. It’s still very prominent in the Japanese economy[1], especially domestic, but also international. [1]https://www.citeman.com/10218-japanese-distribution-structure.html https://www.citeman.com/10218-japanese-distribution-structur...
buboard 7y ago
Sounds a lot how computers work
driverdan 7y ago
This has nothing to do with late stage capitalism. I wish people would stop using that term without understanding what it means.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  Right, this is actually an example of capitalism working well. These women and everybody else who started pack and ship businesses were able to identity a need of the market and build businesses to meet that need and have become relatively wealthy from doing it (50 bucks an hour in rural Montana goes a long way). Late stage capitalism is more massive corporations with unlimited dollars buying up real-estate, pumping millions of dollars into advertising, and paying their employees low wages (McDonald's, Walmart, etc.) to the point where individuals can't compete and quality suffers.

pjc50 7y ago

> The end result is a bizarre, looping supply chain. Some hair conditioner might get sent from a Walmart warehouse in Grantsville, Utah, to Roundup, then from Roundup to an Amazon fulfillment center in Joliet, Illinois. Finally, Amazon sends it out to a customer. > Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon. Ah, the efficiency of capitalism. More seriously, this is a weirdly organic process. Just as anything edible will be infested with life within a short time, a huge algal bloom of businesses develops to feed off this arbitrage. It shouldn't make sense to do all this, but the endless search for ever-tinier market inefficiencies to live off somehow calls it in to being. I'm reminded of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/1408813742 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/... , a novel in which vans endlessly circulate among a series of depots carrying parts for other vans, until someone discovers that the whole thing has no underlying purpose and the scheme collapses.

ThrowMeAwayOkay 7y ago
"Ah, the efficiency of capitalism." Also...the Emergent Systems that rise up to gain from these efficiencies of capitalism. The companies created to help others get those efficiencies...more efficiently...
- turk73 7y ago
  Seems more like end-state capitalism. I wish these people luck, and applaud their creativity. It's not going to last, though. Also, it doesn't scale, so if we're at the point where people are picking out teeny little arbitrage opportunities like these, then unless the process can become more automated, it has a limited upside.
- kanaba 7y ago
  Emergences: A Talk by Danny Hillis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366
pmjordan 7y ago

vsskanth 7y ago

This looks like a retail goods analogy for SWIFT type system for connecting different retail marketplaces to one another. I always thought the economics of drop shipping would never work but looks like it is profitable even with a processing middleman. I am curious to know what kind of inefficiency is being exploited here, because this seems to be from one online retailer to another (unlike ebay). I have a couple of guesses but I would like to know if there are others: * information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop) * product won't ship to target market through competitors website * competitor's website wont accept user's preferred mode of payment * wants a competitor's house-brand product on amazon * some kind of customs loophole

hirundo 7y ago
> * information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop) From the article: > Amazon has made buying stuff so frictionless and habitual, delivery so fast — and for Prime members, free — that many shoppers don’t bother checking prices anywhere else. I do cross shop for most things. I usually check Ebay, Newegg, etc. But the majority of the time I end up buying from Amazon due to straight up better prices, or only slightly higher prices plus more convenience. I think there are enough of us that do that to keep Amazon's prices competitive.
chkaloon 7y ago
Those are all great guesses, and I bet all of them come into play. I wonder how many externalities aren't being accounted for yet in the process, like the new landfill Roundup will need to construct to handle all the excess packaging being disposed of.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I think a lot about how tech companies talk about being green, when underneath them is devices that go in the trash after two years because they aren't supported anymore or the amount of packaging and shipping and fuel waste that happens to provide you a perfect one-day shipping experience. I wonder how different Amazon and the like would seem from an oil company in terms of environmental impact, when all is taken into account.

JackFr 7y ago

Whenever I read 'drop ship', I think of the noun from "Starship Troopers".

kevinlou 7y ago
It is disappointing, isn't it? That such a cool term has been co-opted to mean "forwarding some stuff to another person."
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Unless that stuff being forwarded is a Morita rifle, of course.

authoritarian 7y ago

I've had one instance with amazon where they clearly drop shipped the product and didn't even take it out of the box. I purchased a single hang-on-back aquarium filter which came in an absolutely massive amazon box, containing another hugely oversized walmart box, containing an unlabeled/unbranded box which was still too large, and then finally the aquarium filter in it's own box and packaging. It almost seemed like it had been shipped from some supplier, to walmart, to amazon, and they just kept sticking the package in a larger box. The amount of waste for a single small filter was absurd

rob74 7y ago
The alternative would be to throw away the two extra packages, which would reduce the waste a bit, but would still be absurd if you think about it...
- authoritarian 7y ago
  Yes, I suppose either way the waste is being created, I'm just not always confronted with it at that level
- dec0dedab0de 7y ago
  No, the alternative would be to put a new shipping label on the original package.
  - 5555624 7y ago
    Which they do. I received an office/break room trashcan, from Amazon, in its Walmart box.
bryanmgreen 7y ago
All so that each one can have their own branding. Ugh. Just put a huge sticker on top instead.

pmjordan 7y ago

Entirely tangential to the main thrust of the article, but this threw me: a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.” Wait, WHAT? Can anyone with more knowledge about the Old West explain what crime these bystanders would have been committing? Am I interpreting this correctly that these "bystanders" had nothing to do with or to gain from the theft of the cattle but were thought to be in the vicinity and didn't prevent it?

steveklabnik 7y ago
The implicit assumption you’re making here is that there was a court, trial, or even evidence. “Frontier justice” doesn’t always care about those things. Sometimes the “crime” is that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe with the “wrong“ skin color... This part of history contains a lot of ugliness. It’s also part of the present. Extrajudicial killings are still very much a thing in the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes contains some leads for this specific history, I’d guess.
- pmjordan 7y ago
  Thanks for the link. I guess I was aware of the general lawlessness of that part of the world at the time, but the part about "cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”" seemed like a reference to some specific, well-known rule with which I was not familiar.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    Ah. So, I am not super educated on this history, but I am the product of at least three generations of beef cattle farming. My understanding is that this phrase is true, and I think it makes some intuitive sense: if your community is based around herding cattle, stealing cattle is literally stealing the your livelihood. Furthermore, there's an "outsider" aspect to this kind of crime; it's not like there's farm A, and farm B, and farmer B steals some of A's cattle and now they have more. It's someone sneaking in from out of town, stealing your stuff, and leaving. In general, people are more likely to be lenient to their neighbors than to strangers. I believe, if memory serves, there's a sort of racial/settler component to this as well. It ties into the whole "cowboys and indians" thing. Goes along with the whole "insider" vs "outsider" dichotomy.