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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Apparently it’s common for people in SA to have a prison style cell door to their sleeping quarters in case of home invasion. I can’t imagine the effect on the psyche that it must have to lock yourself into your bed every night, knowing your surrounded by people who want you to painfully die.

I’m surprised we still haven’t invented tech that makes home invasion impossible. Like, how do we not have auto-turrets that can shoot intruders? Or various other traps that can maim or disable? Or is it just the cruel government once again making this impossible and the tech already exists?

Hard to imagine never being able to leave your window open at night.

A situation like that wouldn't have unguarded windows. They'd be tiny or have ghetto bars.

A lot of places in SA were built decades before the security situation got this bad, so you get a lot of "standard suburban house surrounded by razor wire and spike walls"

Definitely ghettobars on everything though

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Talk security theater. A blanket defeats that sort of razor fencing. But I suppose they have motion sensors, cameras and a neighborhood armed security team.

Fences aren't meant to stop people, they're meant to mark "the gate people who belong there walk through" and "the barrier people get shot for climbing over with blankets".

All of my security is behind an initial screening layer that wouldn't stop anyone, but anyone who does come through it sets off alarms rather than "someone coming down driveway" notifications.

The windows can be left open but they must be barred I imagine

At least in the US, the courts have sadly made booby traps illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney

I agree with the court on this one, there specific language was that using deadly force to defend a vacant property is unreasonable, which seems like the correct judgement to me.

I heard about this. There are plausible ways to make booby traps that are disguised as something else I’m sure though

The wealthy in urban and suburban areas already do live in compounds with armed private security on automatic call (and not mall cops, we're talking neighborhood swat teams). That's a better solution than booby traps as long as you can rely on the security force.

There's a lot South Africans on off-grid solar forums, because they need full coverage camera setups to stay powered when the grid's out (or attackers cut it). Often hundreds of watts of IP cams wired to PoE injectors and a PC running blue iris.
I've said before that cameras are the most important thing after a gun and a basic fence. If you don't have advance notice you're dead.

The south african private security industry is larger than the military and police force combined, if I remember correctly.

Its not really better than booby traps for security. Its better than getting drug out of your house by the cops then raped for eternity in prison because your booby traps were successful.

In other words, such things are illegal.

I really don't think it is. Booby traps, steel doors, fences, land mines, etc. are just delaying tools. Unless they're covered by fire they're hardly an obstacle at all.
If your booby traps are diy you get your head blown off because of a bad Linux update on the PC running KillDriver1.07.5(final)b(7).bin.
If your booby traps are standard models the robbers know the auto-turret only tracks 23.5 degrees vertical so there's a blind spot between your roof and the tree by your perimeter wall etc. etc. These guys are already using Ali-express broad-spectrum jammers to take out non-hardwired security systems, they're not just drunken nogs with rocks.

You need 4 things in a security system: identify, delay, fix, eliminate. Booby traps only do the 2nd or 4th of those.
If your front door land mine goes off, how do you know it got all of them? What do you do now? Even if you're sure the bird bath zyklon sprayers got the stragglers, you still need a team to sweep and confirm.

With a response team attackers know they could be surrounded and counter-attacked at any second. They're not advancing slowly and carefully against a passive system, taking 10 to disarm traps. They're in a race against time to get something done before they lose the initiative.

Drones are an alternate active response that people should be looking into. Tethered drone with a grenade is going to be the cheapest flexible response tool available.

You act like criminals are Seal team 6 going after Bin Laden. In reality they are low intelligence cowards looking for easy opportunities to make a quick score. They dont have the time or patience to think about a 23.5 degree vertical. If one of them steps on a bear trap going up to your front door they don't redouble their efforts and look all around for bear traps, they run away like scared dogs. Even better, if your bear trap wakes you up, now you are the sniper.

A security system against these sorts of people doesnt need "identify, delay, fix, eliminate" it needs "scare, delay, notify". If a drop trap breaks one guy's leg, activates a bedside alarm that wakes you up, and gives you a minute to actually wake up, it has more than done the job.

Robbers aren’t that brave. If they think there’s a solid chance one of them dies in any given invasion, they simply won’t do it.

Booby traps used to be very common in South Africa. Now they're pretty strictly outlawed (by SA standards of law enforcement) after enough cases of guys getting into their car, forgetting to press the right button, and decapitating themselves with their own shotgun trap.

My favorite South African security quirk was that some tricked out sports cars have an undercarriage mounted flame-thrower to deter carjackers. It’s like something out of Mad Max film.

It's essentially the 1994 video game Quarantine, if anyone remembers that.

That game had so much character it's mysterious to me why it never got a remake.

As Ross Scott's video about it suggests, it's quite tedious, not to mention glitchy.

Any prominent cases make it in the news?

Those automatic paintball turrets you can find on YouTube aren't inherently limited to using paintball guns, and the software used to identify friend/foe has been production-ready for a long time.

The tech exists. (Semi-)automatically killing/maming people really isn't that hard. It's different levels of illegal, depending on locality, but the real problem is false positives.

Most people just don't want to live in a mine field, no matter how many fancy hightech safeties there are.

I mean facial recognition tech has been around for awhile. There’s got to be a way to capitalize on AI and other advances to make your home a fortress

Paging Nassim Taleb. We've got a naive empiricist on our hands.

I just think necessity is the mother of invention, and there are few things more necessary than security

Most people are more likely to be smoked by their booby traps than to have them successfully repel a home invasion.

Sure, but there's always false positives, the only question is how low the rate is.

And your kids are going to live with you for 18 years, so you need quite a lot of 0s to make reasonably sure the turret isn't going to blow their heads off by accident.

It's a difficult problem. Maybe one brings over a friend. Maybe they wear silly monster masks.

Probably more than 18 years- in ultra-security-conscious environments being around friendly military age males is a high priority.

I am not trusting AI to recognize my face 100% of the time.

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