Story of the two thousand stolen Playdate handhelds
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It was stolen. They don't know who did it. FedEx is terrible.
These days you have to beg them to take their proprietary prototype hardware back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgeEHdAmJDg
But retail is a whole different beast.
if no one else is seeking justice, I will at least poke the blind woman a bit.
Apple and Uber know driver who the order was given to and the police are involved but they also haven’t been able to do anything? Just seems odd.
I’ve had trade ins go missing and after a short investigation Apple has always credited me.
It is nicer for the shipper to decide the value and pay the corresponding price for that. Because you need to know the replacement value of that lost item. This is dependent on all kinds of factors.
In this case the shipper is the company behind the Playdate, so it seems weird to me they wouldn't insure their own stock. But maybe there's a good reason why this isn't done?
If insurance costs you more than lost shipments, it stops making sense to pay for insurance. If insurance costs less than lost shipments, it stops making sense for the insurer to offer you insurance at that rate.
Insurance works when the loss is disruptive to your cashflow. If I can't afford to absorb that loss right now, it may be worth finding an insurer that can. If I can afford to absorb that cost, it's almost always better to leave my money working for me, than working for the insurer.
If you're shipping in volume, self-insurance almost always works out better. You can bet amazon don't insure their shipments to you. If they take the potential cost of insurance, stick it in a pot, and dip into it when there's a shipping issue - that pot should never run dry. If that pot runs dry, it means insurers are operating at a loss, and they're not going to stay in business long.
Larger companies can develop a higher risk tolerance in-house and eliminate the middle hand, and that’ll let them siphon the excess to their shareholders rather than the insurance company.
Basically a lot of global logistics runs on trust.
If a driver is delivering a pallet to the FooCorp warehouse, he doesn't get given a copy of the FooCorp org chart, or get an example signature to compare against the signature they're given, or get given a map or a secret password or anything like that.
He just pulls up to the building that says FooCorp on it, says "got a delivery for FooCorp", they let him in and he accepts any name and signature from whoever is near the door.
Obviously. But if there is 400 grand on the line, you'd think someone would actually check(when the claim is made). The receiver would say "you have a signature from person X. Person X doesn't actually work here". Fedex then says "ok, prove it" - and then the receiver does, in whatever way is legally acceptable.
Edit: in fact, let me add a bit more - if the shipment was delivered to the right address just signed by someone who didn't actually work there then sure, I think FedEx would be in the clear. But they delivered the parcel to the wrong place - the fact that it was signed for by someone is almost irrelevant, it's the same as having no signature at all.
As far as FedEx is concerned, though? They were not contracted to get any specific name or signature. They were contracted to deliver to a certain address. The GPS says the driver went to the right address, to within the accuracy of a GPS trace. The driver got a name and signature at that time. The driver marked the delivery as successful in their computer.
Maybe they call up the driver and say "Did you deliver to the wrong address?" and the driver says "I don't think so, but I make a lot of deliveries so I can't say for sure."
Sure, in reality the pallet was dropped off in the parking lot across the road from Ship Fusion, instead of at Ship Fusion. But FedEx's records say everything is in order.
To be clear I'm not saying this is good, I'm just saying it's normal.
I think what happened here is that the FedEx driver was in such a hurry to drop off that he saw a bunch of people apparently outside Shipfusion, stopped and said 'Hey, delivery for you', rather than going and finding the proper entrance to the loading dock. And to be fair, that's the corner with the company logo on it - looking at Google Streetview I can't see a logo at the back of the building where the loading dock is!
And to be even more fair to the driver, they are often given utterly unrealistic amounts of time to drive to the next drop, or to complete the drop. They can only complete their rounds by cutting corners.
[1] I'm not sure how they check the number, because they accept the ID number of anyone in the family and even the full time cleaner of the building. They type it and the app takes a second to show a green check. I guess it's a fuzzy list to prevent obvious scams.
It's kind of overwhelming when you stop and really think about it.
I'm just saying it's totally normal for the names and signatures to go unchecked when the goods are handed over.
The driver can't validate someone is a real employee before handing over the delivery. There's no mechanism for that.
Now they do, so I just placed an order 15 mins ago and my partner just received a call from the bank to verify that it wasn't a fraudulent transaction.
She just asked me - what is this "play date" you just sent $300 to? Oh dear. :D
- Why is your partner getting the call from the bank when you placed the order? - If it's a shared account, why would you not forewarn your partner about this transaction? If I'm about to buy pay for something big from our joint account, I sure as hell let my partner know about it ahead of time. - If none of the above applies, then a simple "it's a portable gaming console that I've been yearning after for ages that I finally ordered earlier today", and 9/10 times that should settle the matter.
If anything, the overscrutinizing on an innocent story feels more reddit-esque to me.
I put it as simple as this: what is the maximum harm I have for believing this story vs just chucking and moving on? I see zero risk so trying to join this odd callout fake culture is more disruptive than leaving it be.
Maybe those construction workers will steal again. But also maybe they realized how easily they were found out, how hard it actually is to offload stolen goods, and decide it’s not worth the hassle to steal again.
Not sure if it helps anyone else, but for me it made the story a lot easier to grasp.
I wrote most of it by hand, using an LLM just for a rough outline which I then manually rewrote line by line, streamlined, removed hallucinations, double-checked all quotes, reordered and added images and links.
Oh I don't disagree in the slightest, after all it's basically an interview full of personal experiences and anecdotes.
But HN already has a problem with people commenting without reading the article, even if that article is relatively short. With an hour-long podcast episode or a transcript stuffed with filler words and partial sentences it's even worse.
> I'm afraid LLM version is too short and while technically correct definitely feels like dry list of random facts from transcription
Well, the LLM summary was a lot more thrilling and entertaining than my version. Sadly, it was also wrong and full of hallucinations.
Still unclear on how the delivery managed to get put (or taken) to the wrong side of the road at a construction site. Fedex mistake? Trickery by thief? Misdirection by thief that took them from loading-dock?
Its pretty easy to imagine construction workers just signing for everything that arrives, and only afterwards figuring out that the address is wrong.
> Thanks so much for listening, and please don’t steal our Playdates. Because we will find you.
> Thanks so much for alledgedly listening
> please don’t alledgedly steal our Playdates.
> please don’t steal our alledged Playdates.
> Because we will alledgedly find you.
I’ve had them “deliver” a bunch of PCs to a dumpster. Or drop off a laptop to a garbage can in a Manhattan office. How do I know? The courier took a picture to document the delivery.
We got video of one FedEx guy kicking retail Apple Computer boxes off the back of his big rig (destroyed 2x iMacs).
Our UPS drivers are consistently cheerful, helpful and considerate with the packages they carry.
The contrast grows dramatically if you ever suffer some misfortune that requires a phone call into corporate. FedEx is reliably crabby, unhelpful and actively belligerent.
These two companies are a perfect illustration of what happens when you make it obvious to your staff how you feel about them.
When FedEx was falling behind by not having ground service, they bought another network (RPS iirc) and built out a network of contracted providers. In my area, it was the companies that did newspaper delivery. Some of them are ok, most of them suck. I think the residential delivery is all contracted, but business services are FedEx badged people in some scenarios.
Admittedly I can skim read quite well though.