So I ended up cooking for like five hours today. It was really satisfying, and now I'll be eatin' pretty for at least a week. Currently residing in my fridge is
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Me and Robin (well, me, I don't think Robin quite understood what I was getting at) thought about trying to make an SUV-tipping internet comic, chronicling our SUV-tipping adventures. You could do some interesting camera tricks to make it look like the SUV was fighting back, and stuff.
That would be an interesting development--as the SUV-tipping league evolves, I'm sure SUV owners would take more and more drastic action to protect their vehicles. Car alarms are all well and good, but what if your car is already tipped by the time you get to it? People would add extra legs, like spiders, to act as stabilizers. You could rig the doors to fly open and knock tippers flying--a car that fights back. They could have blinding lights housed in the side mirrors (like those annoying blinker arrows). You could install autopilot on the car, so it can make its escape whether someone's driving it or not. This would, of course, slow down the tippers, as they would have to ascertain what protective measures each particular car was equipped with, break into the car, and dismantle the devices before proceeding with the tipping.
I don't think that having a lot of gizmos to assist with the actual tipping would be allowed. Then you'd have a bunch of teams with techno-nerds, which would unfairly exclude those from a non-technological background. I think that rocking the SUV back and forth like a soda machine would be the preferred league method. Measures would, of course, have to be taken to ensure that the SUV doesn't crush the team as it tips--such an accident would result in a deduction of points. I have no objections to the techno-wizards using their gizmos to dismantle the car's security devices, however.
Would teams be allowed to sabotage each other? Each team could have a defensive string whose job it is to find competing teams who are in the process of tipping an SUV and drive them off. You get bonus points if you complete a "steal."
No, there were no options for stealing a tip. As a turf sport, clear boundaries had to exist in order to prevent direct inter-team confrontations. Turf could be changed, gained, or lost depending on the result of the previous season - often times such turf negotiation took place at the same time as the rookie draft picks were being decided. Discontent with being traded for turf, many star players chose to become free agents.
Having tip-assist accessories were allowed because it was in the spirit of the sport to tip as many SUVs as possible within given time spans. This gave well-funded teams an advantage, to be sure, but also burdened them with heavy --not to mention implicating-- equipment. Other teams opted not to use any equipment in order to maintain stealth.
With the advent of professional guidelines many SUV owners began to take countermeasures. Expensive car options became available, such as self-deflating-tires and shock-deactivation. But other owners would take the cheap route by purchasing hamsters or other small animals to live inside the car. This brought PETA into the picture, and from then on professional teams were required to register their tippings in order to be held accountable for any injury caused to animals (or sleeping people). Scandal arose around the Chicago Pizza Tossers, who put the blame on a local amateur team for their own unregistered dangerous tippings. Luckily, concern for the safety of possible living being inside the SUVs took hold among the professional community; further guidelines were drafted to encourage teams to remove live animals (or people) from the vehicles for extra points, provided that the rescuees were properly registered with a local referee.
It was only then, within a few months of these changes, opposing-team-saboteurs began to provide defensive measures. Peaceful measures were used, such as police tip-offs, car alarms, and bribery. The Miami Flippers pushed their way to the top of the standings in 2007 by causing their opponents hundreds of penalty points when they stealthily planted mini-aquariums in vehicles on their opponents' turf. This tactic crippled groups who had depended on heat-sensitive vision to check their targets. After two years, however, PETA again stepped in to stop the use of this tactic, which was being employed by the Santa Fe Dry Heaves to the detriment of various reptiles.
In 2010, with the death of Roger Tompkins (a two-time championship MVP and SUV-Tipping figurehead) in a taser-sabotage incident, defensive maneuvers on opponents turf were officially banned by all leagues. Many teams were upset, and several teams took lawsuits against Tompkin's pacemaker manufacturer. However, the change was in the original spirit of the sport. Rather than spend their time and efforts trying to slow other teams down, defensive units returned to operating locally in order to ensure their team's safety and speed. In fact, several teams that had previously been hostile to one another (in an disturbingly escalating fashion) soon found ways to cooperate and help one another climb in the standings. In 2012 the captains of the East LA Rumblers and the West LA Big Waves were awarded a nobel prize for their cooperation in tipping an entire Ford dealership located on their turf border.
While some had thought that SUV-tipping was just a fad, it was clear that it was here to stay.
I think we're been reading two entirely different futuristic projections.
Though tipping is a turf sport, if teams are not allowed to interact at all, gradually the sport would lose its excitement--I mean, sooner or later, if you're not interupted by the cops or the owners, physics will take over and the SUV will go over. Big screamin' deal. But if the opposing teams are allowed to infringe on other teams's territory (sort of like capture the flag), it introduces a new element. There would have to be rules, of course. You're not allowed to hit opposing team members with bats to get them to abandon the SUV, or otherwise cause them physical harm. I'm thinking more along the lines of creating a diversion, or attracting attention, so the other team can't do their tipping in peace. Double agents are always a danger, of course. People who are dissatisfied with the team they're on, and provide a rival team with information in return for a promised berth on the team next season. Then there's the people who pretend to be double agents but aren't, feeding the defensive teams false information. Stealing SUVs would, of course, also be illegal--people who are skilled at hotwiring are not allowed to invade enemy territory and steal an SUV, driving it back to home territory.
I still object on purist's grounds to using tools to assist in tipping. It's cheating. Using old fashioned elbow-grease was good enough for founding father and tipping icon Craig Johanssen, and dammit, it's good enough for the rest of the world. Besides, what happens when it inevitably becomes an Olympic sport? Are you seriously going to pit Japan's super-technology-happy national squad against a team like the Kenyans, who don't have the budget for that sort of thing? There needs to be equipment standards if there's going to be any sort of fairness. (The Olympic commission would, of course, plant specially marked SUVs that are eligible for tipping throughout the host city, so that large numbers of SUVs could be tipped without inciting the local law enforcement's or property owner's ire; and also to ensure that each team has an equal chance when it comes to finding SUVs to tip. Such precautions would not be present in local competition.
What happens when SUV owners form armed security patrols to protect their property?
I never said that teams weren't allowed to interact. But they aren't allowed to interact directly - doing so would be a blatant risk to human life. Defensive units would be allowed to, as I noted earlier, inform the police of their opponent's plans or locations. Spying and double agent usage is a good tactic, but it's fairly easy to tell a spy because they won't participate directly in the actual tipping because it would be a rule infringement. That is, you can't tip SUVs outside your own turf.
But stealing SUVs and taking them to your turf would be completely legal. It wouldn't be done much, given the heightened risks of jail time or running into an armed security patrol. About those: tip at your own risk. Use surveillance before approaching what appears to be an abandoned vehicle. The professionals don't get their salary for being stupid oafs. Most of them don't, anyway.
Assist tools would be allowed. This is not a game, where kids are rocking cars back and for the fun of it. This is a sport - a sport with a mission. Sure, the players get some fun out of it, but when it comes down to crunch time they do what they have to do. Purists would still have the annual SUV Tipping World Championships (solo tipping and team-of-five events) to see whose muscles and techniques were the strongest and most efficient.
The Olympic SUV Tipping Competition would take place in the host country, and turf would be decided randomly (like the pairings for any other Olympic sport). No SUVs would be "planted," and it would be a true test to succeed because law enforcement officials and SUV owners would have had years to prepare themselves. Tip assists would be allowed, but there would be restrictions: no explosive devices or firearms may be used, no independently operating tip-robots can be deployed, and no combustion engines may be employed. Olympic standards follow for drug testing, of course. What's all this talk about no tip assists... as if the Olympics are all on equal footing? The last time that I checked, America's population (in proportion to the rest of the world) is quite out of balance with the number of Olympic medals it wins (in proportion to the rest of the world). Even if you took away assist tools then you'd have another case of an American "Dream Team" on your hands. Besides, the TV coverage would be much more exciting, to see how different countries approached the noble task of discouraging SUV usage.
We're disagreeing on the fundamental nature of the turf rules, a question I'll have to address at a later time.
Calling the police as a defensive tactic, though a good short-term strategy, would be counter-productive in the long run. As the sport gains popularity, the police would spend more and more time on real or false SUV-tipping leads. People would criticize them for spending so much time on car calls and not enough time on violent crime issues. The police would respond by creating a task force that is dedicated strictly to the protection of vulnerable SUVs, a task force that would of course come under fire for stopping roving groups of four or more, searching and questioning them. Such groups would complain to be the victims of recreational profiling. Sooner or later concerned SUV owners would bring the question to the state legislature, outlawing all tipping leagues, a move that would anger the South Park Bovine Tippers and the Food Service Personnel for a Larger Gratuity PAC. New and possibly dangerous ways of protecting your SUV would be legalized.
In short, SUV tipping works best when the tippers act in a truly vigilante style and don't involve any outside groups. They don't need the visibility. There would, of course, be rules about causing bodily harm to opposing tipping teams (codes of conduct that you wouldn't necessarily be able to expect from policemen).
My concern about tip-assist tools and machinery is that, eventually, the sport would become about the tools and not about creativity or method. People have a nasty habit of becoming dependent on their machines. Such a sport would not be as fun to watch or participate in, because machines have already shown themselves to be quite adept at tipping, tilting, demolishing, moving, and lifting. I'm not interested in what a machine can do. I'm interested in what the people can do. If such tools are going to be allowed, they have to be tightly regulated as to what kinds of things they can do and how much damage they cause to the car. Ideally, I would like to see the assist devices remain just that--assist devices, rather than have them evolve so much that the humans become the assist devices.
Similarly, I think that in the Olympics, SUVs would have to be planted sooner or later. Prospective host cities are going to be reluctent to host a competition that places a large amount of the personal property in their city at risk. Similarly, many places simply don't have that many SUVs to tip--like many cities in Europe, where the streets are narrower and people are more environmentally conscious than they are here in the States. In order to have a decent competition, a certain number of outside SUVs would have to be brought in, though this runs the risk of making the competition seem staged and increases the chances of corruption and bribery.
We're disagreeing on the fundamental nature of the turf rules, a question I'll have to address at a later time.
Calling the police as a defensive tactic, though a good short-term strategy, would be counter-productive in the long run. As the sport gains popularity, the police would spend more and more time on real or false SUV-tipping leads. People would criticize them for spending so much time on car calls and not enough time on violent crime issues. The police would respond by creating a task force that is dedicated strictly to the protection of vulnerable SUVs, a task force that would of course come under fire for stopping roving groups of four or more, searching and questioning them. Such groups would complain to be the victims of recreational profiling. Sooner or later concerned SUV owners would bring the question to the state legislature, outlawing all tipping leagues, a move that would anger the South Park Bovine Tippers and the Food Service Personnel for a Larger Gratuity PAC. New and possibly dangerous ways of protecting your SUV would be legalized, as well, raising the ire of SUV tipping protection leagues, who argue that you should not risk life and limb when you go out on the tip (SUV owners will counter that buying the car of their choice should not make them a target for crime, and the debate will rage back and forth in civil liberties courts for decades).
In short, SUV tipping works best when the tippers act in a truly vigilante style and don't involve any outside groups. They don't need the visibility. There would, of course, be rules about causing bodily harm to opposing tipping teams (codes of conduct that you wouldn't necessarily be able to expect from policemen).
My concern about tip-assist tools and machinery is that, eventually, the sport would become about the tools and not about creativity or method. People have a nasty habit of becoming dependent on their machines. Such a sport would not be as fun to watch or participate in, because machines have already shown themselves to be quite adept at tipping, tilting, demolishing, moving, and lifting. I'm not interested in what a machine can do. I'm interested in what the people can do. If such tools are going to be allowed, they have to be tightly regulated as to what kinds of things they can do and how much damage they cause to the car. Ideally, I would like to see the assist devices remain just that--assist devices, rather than have them take over the sport until the humans become the assist devices.
Similarly, I think that in the Olympics, SUVs would have to be planted sooner or later. Prospective host cities are going to be reluctent to host a competition that places a large amount of the personal property in their city at risk. Similarly, many places simply don't have that many SUVs to tip--like many cities in Europe, where the streets are narrower and people are more environmentally conscious than they are here in the States. In order to have a decent competition, a certain number of outside SUVs would have to be brought in, though this runs the risk of making the competition seem staged and increases the chances of corruption and bribery.
You're correct about the public backlash against police for spending too much time on car-vandalism cases, and correct about the fact that they would follow the public's advice to spend more time on violent crime cases. But you're in incorrect in thinking that they would waste valuable resources on a task force. Given the meager jail time and fines dispensed on convicted tippers, the energy and risk involved in pursuing organized teams would make such task forces a waste of effort. The police would begin to treat teams like the mob - with a reserved dislike. Law enforcement would tolerate teams that maintained a 0-casualty rate, and some states (California, Washington, Oregon, among others) would go one step further in providing teams with a police chaperon. This individual would travel with the team in much the way a war reporter would travel with troops, but with the express purpose of ensuring public safety.
Expecting individuals to follow "codes of conduct" in the heat of a defensive maneuver is like expecting soldiers to follow the Geneva Convention while in the heat of battle. Great in theory, but it breaks down in actual practice. As such, it is up to the teams to obey the rules of the league regarding interaction with other teams. No physical contact is allowed at all, and you may not participate in tips outside your own turf.
Dangerous Defensive Devices (DDDs) would be outlawed almost as soon as they had been legalized, after a large set of tipping and non-tipping casualties. In some of the ensuing arrests and litigations, damage done by DDDs was in considered a premeditated assault by the SUV owner, and hefty jail terms were doled out.
Tipping leagues would be re-legalized after several sessions in front of the Supreme Court, during which time it became clear that leagues were the only way to enforce conduct rules. Defenders of tipping leagues successfully demonstrated that leagues didn't promote SUV tipping so much as make sure it was done in a safe and organized manner.
The sport would be, as it always had been, about overturning SUVs. The assist tools are a part of the method, and teams could be quite creative and inventive. Very few teams are going to go out and buy a Caterpillar or a front-end loader, because it is too slow and too visible; when they get caught by police and their equipment is confiscated they're going to lose a considerable amount of money. Regulation of tools would exist in a spectrum of strictness from amateur leagues upward, culminating in the Olympic standards (as described previously). But, while many of these rules would prevent certain types of vehicle damage, they would exist to prevent human casualties that are associated with such damage.
The Olympics would never see vehicle planting. The Olympics take place in countries that can support them, and such countries are generally industrialized nations. Planting SUVs would lead, as you note, to corruption and bribery. Scant targets would be an obstacle that teams would have to overcome. During the third Summer Games, when prospective SUV counts were extremely low, a mechanic-intensive South Korean team slipped through several loopholes by stripping some cars of their bumpers and roll cages and installing them onto large vehicles in order to change the classification of the vehicles into SUVs. This worked because the Olympics had not created a Brand List of True SUVs (BLTS), as most professional leagues had done by that point, but instead defined an SUV as a certain set of vehicle characteristics. Even though other teams tried to emulate the South Korean tactics, they had fielded too few mechanics and did not have the same level of preparation and experience with vehicle alteration. South Korea took the gold medal with uncanny ease.
Let's try to remember that there is a lot more to the Olympic games than the SUV Tipping Competition, and the honor of being a host nation (nation, not city) would overshadow the damage to some local personal property (if anything, it would merely cause certain car insurance premiums to rise temporarily).
You say "decent competition" as if the Olympics exist only to entertain the viewers...
Lord help me if I ever have to get in a debate with you over something political or philosophical.
However--Police forces have, at various points throughout history, shown themselves to be remarkably adept at spending ridiculous amounts of money and manpower on essentially "trendy" issues. The primary reason for this is, insofar as they are funded by taxpayers and are a profession unofficially monitored by the press and citizens who want to make sure they're getting their money's worth, they are vulnerable to the wants and needs of the taxpayers, even if such a move is more to save face than to really keep towns safer. Thus, if the Highlands Ranch general populace demands more stringent protection of their vehicles, the police force would feel great pressure to provide it. And I fail to see how police officers are more likely to follow their codes of conduct than the league members are.
I'm not going to disagree with you about wasted taxpayer dollars, nor am I going to touch the topic of police brutality.
But I will say that there is a reason why the police will refrain from creating anti-tipping task-forces. The reason, aside from wasting spending time or effort, is that cops love the sport. Their kids watch it on TV, their spouses place bets on playoff results, and, with decreased SUV purchases, the annual death tolls due to 'rollovers' (of the moving, accidental kind) began down for the first time in history.
Sports teams bring a certain reputation, status, and honor to their host cities. As such, the police would be pressured just as much by the SUV owners to get tough on tipping as they would be by the rest of the 'general populace' to give tippers more leeway.
So... 5500 characters is apparently too many for a single comment.soromonAugust 31 2004, 18:42:06 UTC
See how confused you are: "Such a sport would not be as fun to watch" "They don't need the visibility"
On one hand you advocate visibility, and on the other you discourage it.
Visibility is a good thing, because it boosts fan support, corporate sponsorship, and generally gives the sport a cheery outlook. It's not a dark, evil, sneaky sport, even though some stealth tactics can be employed to good effect. But just as important are elements of speed, strength, and timing. There's nothing like having active surveillance on a busy street, and waiting for the idiot who always parks in the middle of the street outside the deli. You see him turn his hazard lights on as he goes into the store, and within instants you have your glass-cutter opening a hole in the driver's window and your defensive team moving pedestrians away from the drop zone. Your cutter has his arm inside the car and has turned the car off by the time your spotter has checked the car for living creatures, and your two strongmen have the car on its roof in three rocks. All this under 14 seconds. Your ground team even has a chance to high-five the cheering crowd and hand out some brochures, business cards, and stickers before moving to the next location to get set up. Not only have you performed a valuable public service (by removing an illegally-parked vehicle from a congested street), but your surveillance team sends the live video feed to your corporate sponsor (Quaker Oats), who immediately credits your team's account for wearing their designer overalls.
That would be an interesting development--as the SUV-tipping league evolves, I'm sure SUV owners would take more and more drastic action to protect their vehicles. Car alarms are all well and good, but what if your car is already tipped by the time you get to it? People would add extra legs, like spiders, to act as stabilizers. You could rig the doors to fly open and knock tippers flying--a car that fights back. They could have blinding lights housed in the side mirrors (like those annoying blinker arrows). You could install autopilot on the car, so it can make its escape whether someone's driving it or not. This would, of course, slow down the tippers, as they would have to ascertain what protective measures each particular car was equipped with, break into the car, and dismantle the devices before proceeding with the tipping.
I don't think that having a lot of gizmos to assist with the actual tipping would be allowed. Then you'd have a bunch of teams with techno-nerds, which would unfairly exclude those from a non-technological background. I think that rocking the SUV back and forth like a soda machine would be the preferred league method. Measures would, of course, have to be taken to ensure that the SUV doesn't crush the team as it tips--such an accident would result in a deduction of points. I have no objections to the techno-wizards using their gizmos to dismantle the car's security devices, however.
Would teams be allowed to sabotage each other? Each team could have a defensive string whose job it is to find competing teams who are in the process of tipping an SUV and drive them off. You get bonus points if you complete a "steal."
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Having tip-assist accessories were allowed because it was in the spirit of the sport to tip as many SUVs as possible within given time spans. This gave well-funded teams an advantage, to be sure, but also burdened them with heavy --not to mention implicating-- equipment. Other teams opted not to use any equipment in order to maintain stealth.
With the advent of professional guidelines many SUV owners began to take countermeasures. Expensive car options became available, such as self-deflating-tires and shock-deactivation. But other owners would take the cheap route by purchasing hamsters or other small animals to live inside the car. This brought PETA into the picture, and from then on professional teams were required to register their tippings in order to be held accountable for any injury caused to animals (or sleeping people). Scandal arose around the Chicago Pizza Tossers, who put the blame on a local amateur team for their own unregistered dangerous tippings. Luckily, concern for the safety of possible living being inside the SUVs took hold among the professional community; further guidelines were drafted to encourage teams to remove live animals (or people) from the vehicles for extra points, provided that the rescuees were properly registered with a local referee.
It was only then, within a few months of these changes, opposing-team-saboteurs began to provide defensive measures. Peaceful measures were used, such as police tip-offs, car alarms, and bribery. The Miami Flippers pushed their way to the top of the standings in 2007 by causing their opponents hundreds of penalty points when they stealthily planted mini-aquariums in vehicles on their opponents' turf. This tactic crippled groups who had depended on heat-sensitive vision to check their targets. After two years, however, PETA again stepped in to stop the use of this tactic, which was being employed by the Santa Fe Dry Heaves to the detriment of various reptiles.
In 2010, with the death of Roger Tompkins (a two-time championship MVP and SUV-Tipping figurehead) in a taser-sabotage incident, defensive maneuvers on opponents turf were officially banned by all leagues. Many teams were upset, and several teams took lawsuits against Tompkin's pacemaker manufacturer. However, the change was in the original spirit of the sport. Rather than spend their time and efforts trying to slow other teams down, defensive units returned to operating locally in order to ensure their team's safety and speed. In fact, several teams that had previously been hostile to one another (in an disturbingly escalating fashion) soon found ways to cooperate and help one another climb in the standings. In 2012 the captains of the East LA Rumblers and the West LA Big Waves were awarded a nobel prize for their cooperation in tipping an entire Ford dealership located on their turf border.
While some had thought that SUV-tipping was just a fad, it was clear that it was here to stay.
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Though tipping is a turf sport, if teams are not allowed to interact at all, gradually the sport would lose its excitement--I mean, sooner or later, if you're not interupted by the cops or the owners, physics will take over and the SUV will go over. Big screamin' deal. But if the opposing teams are allowed to infringe on other teams's territory (sort of like capture the flag), it introduces a new element. There would have to be rules, of course. You're not allowed to hit opposing team members with bats to get them to abandon the SUV, or otherwise cause them physical harm. I'm thinking more along the lines of creating a diversion, or attracting attention, so the other team can't do their tipping in peace. Double agents are always a danger, of course. People who are dissatisfied with the team they're on, and provide a rival team with information in return for a promised berth on the team next season. Then there's the people who pretend to be double agents but aren't, feeding the defensive teams false information. Stealing SUVs would, of course, also be illegal--people who are skilled at hotwiring are not allowed to invade enemy territory and steal an SUV, driving it back to home territory.
I still object on purist's grounds to using tools to assist in tipping. It's cheating. Using old fashioned elbow-grease was good enough for founding father and tipping icon Craig Johanssen, and dammit, it's good enough for the rest of the world. Besides, what happens when it inevitably becomes an Olympic sport? Are you seriously going to pit Japan's super-technology-happy national squad against a team like the Kenyans, who don't have the budget for that sort of thing? There needs to be equipment standards if there's going to be any sort of fairness. (The Olympic commission would, of course, plant specially marked SUVs that are eligible for tipping throughout the host city, so that large numbers of SUVs could be tipped without inciting the local law enforcement's or property owner's ire; and also to ensure that each team has an equal chance when it comes to finding SUVs to tip. Such precautions would not be present in local competition.
What happens when SUV owners form armed security patrols to protect their property?
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But stealing SUVs and taking them to your turf would be completely legal. It wouldn't be done much, given the heightened risks of jail time or running into an armed security patrol. About those: tip at your own risk. Use surveillance before approaching what appears to be an abandoned vehicle. The professionals don't get their salary for being stupid oafs. Most of them don't, anyway.
Assist tools would be allowed. This is not a game, where kids are rocking cars back and for the fun of it. This is a sport - a sport with a mission. Sure, the players get some fun out of it, but when it comes down to crunch time they do what they have to do. Purists would still have the annual SUV Tipping World Championships (solo tipping and team-of-five events) to see whose muscles and techniques were the strongest and most efficient.
The Olympic SUV Tipping Competition would take place in the host country, and turf would be decided randomly (like the pairings for any other Olympic sport). No SUVs would be "planted," and it would be a true test to succeed because law enforcement officials and SUV owners would have had years to prepare themselves. Tip assists would be allowed, but there would be restrictions: no explosive devices or firearms may be used, no independently operating tip-robots can be deployed, and no combustion engines may be employed. Olympic standards follow for drug testing, of course. What's all this talk about no tip assists... as if the Olympics are all on equal footing? The last time that I checked, America's population (in proportion to the rest of the world) is quite out of balance with the number of Olympic medals it wins (in proportion to the rest of the world). Even if you took away assist tools then you'd have another case of an American "Dream Team" on your hands. Besides, the TV coverage would be much more exciting, to see how different countries approached the noble task of discouraging SUV usage.
Because that's what it's all about.
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Calling the police as a defensive tactic, though a good short-term strategy, would be counter-productive in the long run. As the sport gains popularity, the police would spend more and more time on real or false SUV-tipping leads. People would criticize them for spending so much time on car calls and not enough time on violent crime issues. The police would respond by creating a task force that is dedicated strictly to the protection of vulnerable SUVs, a task force that would of course come under fire for stopping roving groups of four or more, searching and questioning them. Such groups would complain to be the victims of recreational profiling. Sooner or later concerned SUV owners would bring the question to the state legislature, outlawing all tipping leagues, a move that would anger the South Park Bovine Tippers and the Food Service Personnel for a Larger Gratuity PAC. New and possibly dangerous ways of protecting your SUV would be legalized.
In short, SUV tipping works best when the tippers act in a truly vigilante style and don't involve any outside groups. They don't need the visibility. There would, of course, be rules about causing bodily harm to opposing tipping teams (codes of conduct that you wouldn't necessarily be able to expect from policemen).
My concern about tip-assist tools and machinery is that, eventually, the sport would become about the tools and not about creativity or method. People have a nasty habit of becoming dependent on their machines. Such a sport would not be as fun to watch or participate in, because machines have already shown themselves to be quite adept at tipping, tilting, demolishing, moving, and lifting. I'm not interested in what a machine can do. I'm interested in what the people can do. If such tools are going to be allowed, they have to be tightly regulated as to what kinds of things they can do and how much damage they cause to the car. Ideally, I would like to see the assist devices remain just that--assist devices, rather than have them evolve so much that the humans become the assist devices.
Similarly, I think that in the Olympics, SUVs would have to be planted sooner or later. Prospective host cities are going to be reluctent to host a competition that places a large amount of the personal property in their city at risk. Similarly, many places simply don't have that many SUVs to tip--like many cities in Europe, where the streets are narrower and people are more environmentally conscious than they are here in the States. In order to have a decent competition, a certain number of outside SUVs would have to be brought in, though this runs the risk of making the competition seem staged and increases the chances of corruption and bribery.
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Calling the police as a defensive tactic, though a good short-term strategy, would be counter-productive in the long run. As the sport gains popularity, the police would spend more and more time on real or false SUV-tipping leads. People would criticize them for spending so much time on car calls and not enough time on violent crime issues. The police would respond by creating a task force that is dedicated strictly to the protection of vulnerable SUVs, a task force that would of course come under fire for stopping roving groups of four or more, searching and questioning them. Such groups would complain to be the victims of recreational profiling. Sooner or later concerned SUV owners would bring the question to the state legislature, outlawing all tipping leagues, a move that would anger the South Park Bovine Tippers and the Food Service Personnel for a Larger Gratuity PAC. New and possibly dangerous ways of protecting your SUV would be legalized, as well, raising the ire of SUV tipping protection leagues, who argue that you should not risk life and limb when you go out on the tip (SUV owners will counter that buying the car of their choice should not make them a target for crime, and the debate will rage back and forth in civil liberties courts for decades).
In short, SUV tipping works best when the tippers act in a truly vigilante style and don't involve any outside groups. They don't need the visibility. There would, of course, be rules about causing bodily harm to opposing tipping teams (codes of conduct that you wouldn't necessarily be able to expect from policemen).
My concern about tip-assist tools and machinery is that, eventually, the sport would become about the tools and not about creativity or method. People have a nasty habit of becoming dependent on their machines. Such a sport would not be as fun to watch or participate in, because machines have already shown themselves to be quite adept at tipping, tilting, demolishing, moving, and lifting. I'm not interested in what a machine can do. I'm interested in what the people can do. If such tools are going to be allowed, they have to be tightly regulated as to what kinds of things they can do and how much damage they cause to the car. Ideally, I would like to see the assist devices remain just that--assist devices, rather than have them take over the sport until the humans become the assist devices.
Similarly, I think that in the Olympics, SUVs would have to be planted sooner or later. Prospective host cities are going to be reluctent to host a competition that places a large amount of the personal property in their city at risk. Similarly, many places simply don't have that many SUVs to tip--like many cities in Europe, where the streets are narrower and people are more environmentally conscious than they are here in the States. In order to have a decent competition, a certain number of outside SUVs would have to be brought in, though this runs the risk of making the competition seem staged and increases the chances of corruption and bribery.
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Expecting individuals to follow "codes of conduct" in the heat of a defensive maneuver is like expecting soldiers to follow the Geneva Convention while in the heat of battle. Great in theory, but it breaks down in actual practice. As such, it is up to the teams to obey the rules of the league regarding interaction with other teams. No physical contact is allowed at all, and you may not participate in tips outside your own turf.
Dangerous Defensive Devices (DDDs) would be outlawed almost as soon as they had been legalized, after a large set of tipping and non-tipping casualties. In some of the ensuing arrests and litigations, damage done by DDDs was in considered a premeditated assault by the SUV owner, and hefty jail terms were doled out.
Tipping leagues would be re-legalized after several sessions in front of the Supreme Court, during which time it became clear that leagues were the only way to enforce conduct rules. Defenders of tipping leagues successfully demonstrated that leagues didn't promote SUV tipping so much as make sure it was done in a safe and organized manner.
The sport would be, as it always had been, about overturning SUVs. The assist tools are a part of the method, and teams could be quite creative and inventive. Very few teams are going to go out and buy a Caterpillar or a front-end loader, because it is too slow and too visible; when they get caught by police and their equipment is confiscated they're going to lose a considerable amount of money. Regulation of tools would exist in a spectrum of strictness from amateur leagues upward, culminating in the Olympic standards (as described previously). But, while many of these rules would prevent certain types of vehicle damage, they would exist to prevent human casualties that are associated with such damage.
The Olympics would never see vehicle planting. The Olympics take place in countries that can support them, and such countries are generally industrialized nations. Planting SUVs would lead, as you note, to corruption and bribery. Scant targets would be an obstacle that teams would have to overcome. During the third Summer Games, when prospective SUV counts were extremely low, a mechanic-intensive South Korean team slipped through several loopholes by stripping some cars of their bumpers and roll cages and installing them onto large vehicles in order to change the classification of the vehicles into SUVs. This worked because the Olympics had not created a Brand List of True SUVs (BLTS), as most professional leagues had done by that point, but instead defined an SUV as a certain set of vehicle characteristics. Even though other teams tried to emulate the South Korean tactics, they had fielded too few mechanics and did not have the same level of preparation and experience with vehicle alteration. South Korea took the gold medal with uncanny ease.
Let's try to remember that there is a lot more to the Olympic games than the SUV Tipping Competition, and the honor of being a host nation (nation, not city) would overshadow the damage to some local personal property (if anything, it would merely cause certain car insurance premiums to rise temporarily).
You say "decent competition" as if the Olympics exist only to entertain the viewers...
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Lord help me if I ever have to get in a debate with you over something political or philosophical.
However--Police forces have, at various points throughout history, shown themselves to be remarkably adept at spending ridiculous amounts of money and manpower on essentially "trendy" issues. The primary reason for this is, insofar as they are funded by taxpayers and are a profession unofficially monitored by the press and citizens who want to make sure they're getting their money's worth, they are vulnerable to the wants and needs of the taxpayers, even if such a move is more to save face than to really keep towns safer. Thus, if the Highlands Ranch general populace demands more stringent protection of their vehicles, the police force would feel great pressure to provide it. And I fail to see how police officers are more likely to follow their codes of conduct than the league members are.
But I'm a dirty anarchist.
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But I will say that there is a reason why the police will refrain from creating anti-tipping task-forces. The reason, aside from wasting spending time or effort, is that cops love the sport. Their kids watch it on TV, their spouses place bets on playoff results, and, with decreased SUV purchases, the annual death tolls due to 'rollovers' (of the moving, accidental kind) began down for the first time in history.
Sports teams bring a certain reputation, status, and honor to their host cities. As such, the police would be pressured just as much by the SUV owners to get tough on tipping as they would be by the rest of the 'general populace' to give tippers more leeway.
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"Such a sport would not be as fun to watch" "They don't need the visibility"
On one hand you advocate visibility, and on the other you discourage it.
Visibility is a good thing, because it boosts fan support, corporate sponsorship, and generally gives the sport a cheery outlook. It's not a dark, evil, sneaky sport, even though some stealth tactics can be employed to good effect. But just as important are elements of speed, strength, and timing. There's nothing like having active surveillance on a busy street, and waiting for the idiot who always parks in the middle of the street outside the deli. You see him turn his hazard lights on as he goes into the store, and within instants you have your glass-cutter opening a hole in the driver's window and your defensive team moving pedestrians away from the drop zone. Your cutter has his arm inside the car and has turned the car off by the time your spotter has checked the car for living creatures, and your two strongmen have the car on its roof in three rocks. All this under 14 seconds. Your ground team even has a chance to high-five the cheering crowd and hand out some brochures, business cards, and stickers before moving to the next location to get set up. Not only have you performed a valuable public service (by removing an illegally-parked vehicle from a congested street), but your surveillance team sends the live video feed to your corporate sponsor (Quaker Oats), who immediately credits your team's account for wearing their designer overalls.
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