[agentwiggles]

The package thief videos are great from the engineering perspective, but always make me feel kind of bad. One of the things I find most distressing in that series is the kids who show up in the videos, participating in theft at the behest of their parents. Some of the conversations between those kids and their parents are extremely sad.

And look - steal a package off a porch, you deserve the ultimately harmless annoyance for sure. But even with that in mind, there's something kind of cruel about the level of effort that's put into the package traps. Once you've found a target that no one will defend, it's just fine to douse them in fart spray and glitter. People cheer because, well, fuck thieves, right?

I get it - I really do. But ultimately, it's fun at the expense of other humans and those videos have always left me feeling a bit gross.

[dmonitor]

If they were booby trapped and maimed the theft that'd be one thing. Public embarrassment is a fine punishment though.

[agentwiggles]

I agree that it's ultimately harmless, and well-deserved, for the thief in question. I find it sad that there are often children involved, but if any good comes of that, it may be that some kids will learn a lifelong lesson about the results of the behavior their parents are encouraging.

Still, as I said - it's the level of effort put into the punishment machines, and the extraction of entertainment value from the punishments, that gives me the odd feeling that something about these videos might cross a moral line.

To each their own, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from watching and enjoying the videos. For me personally, they give me more heartache than joy, so I stick to his other videos - despite the rampant exploitation of innocent squirrels ;)

[lloydatkinson]

I don't feel gross at all. They are stealing.

[tacitusarc]

I felt that way until I was the victim multiple thefts. Traps like these can act as deterrents.

[agentwiggles]

If there's any good that's coming from these videos and traps, I would hope that it's teaching the children involved a valuable lesson about the results of being a shitheel thief.

However, I am somewhat skeptical that this is the case. The odds of encountering a stunningly well engineered annoyance device when stealing are still pretty low, and while thieves aren't known for their competence with statistics, I think that logic is fairly low-hanging fruit.

With sadness, I have to imagine that for every case of a kid or thief being converted to the path of goodness by these boxes, there are just as many who will angrily continue what they're doing as a "fuck you" to those who would impose punishment on them - which seems to be a large part of the ethos that drives these kinds of thefts in the first place.

[Brian_K_White]

Those poor kids are victims of their parents. No one else.