<story><title>Car-sharing service HiGear shuts down due to theft of 4 cars worth $400,000</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/01/luxury-car-sharing-service-higear-shuts-down-due-to-theft/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jackowayed</author><text>I felt worse for these guys until I read to the end of the letter and found out about the &quot;HiGear girls&quot;. It&apos;s not quite as bad as I thought because they don&apos;t seem to &quot;rent out&quot; these models like they do cars; I guess it was just a publicity thing. But still, having revealing pictures and even stats (measurements) of the women is pretty much the definition of objectification.&lt;p&gt;FOLLOWUP (responding to comments):
I&apos;m not concerned about the women in the pictures. They freely chose it, and made enough money to make it worth it to them.&lt;p&gt;But things that reinforce the societal ideal that women&apos;s value comes from being conventionally attractive is much more deeply damaging than most people realize. It leads to the body image issues that the &lt;i&gt;majority&lt;/i&gt; of young women grapple with. Anything that makes it seem like numbers define how attractive you are is especially bad, because it makes it harder for people to accept their own non-ideal bodies as beautiful. It encourages young women to spend vast amounts of their free time learning about and working on being attractive rather than, say, tinkering with computers. To some extent, it leads to income inequality between men and women (Girls grow up with the message that pleasing men, by being attractive among other ways, is good, so they tend to up more passive in many situations. This makes them less willing to negotiate for salary, less willing to go out of their way to take credit for their work, etc. It also leads to other bad things like being less willing to say no to sex.)&lt;p&gt;I like seeing racy pictures of girls as much as the next guy, but displays of women like this, especially right next to and in the same format as rental listings, encourages societal ideals that are at the root of most of the gender-related problems in our society.</text></comment>
<story><title>Car-sharing service HiGear shuts down due to theft of 4 cars worth $400,000</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/01/luxury-car-sharing-service-higear-shuts-down-due-to-theft/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>po</author><text>How can Techcrunch say &quot;the group stole four cars totaling $400,000&quot; and then immediately print a letter from the company saying &quot;The total value of these cars was around $300,000&quot;? Even though in this case it&apos;s ok if you read the letter, it is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I shouldn&apos;t rely on Techcrunch&apos;s reporting. It&apos;s really not a big deal but how did that happen? Why are the numbers different?</text></comment>