Originally Posted by
indyfabz
I don't you understand how the mind of your average bike thief works. You also portray yourself as someone who fears there is a thief lurking behind every lamp post.
If you don't understand the average bike thief, then you presumably have little basis for speculating about how to deter him/her. You can can comfortably fall back to "this is the way I've always done it", but that ignores the fact that things change.
One of the places where I go a few times a week; I've lost count of how many bikes have been stolen from a rack just outside the front door. I know someone who had a bike stolen, came back the next week with a beater-bike, and that was stolen. She lost two bikes from the same place, one week apart.
To borrow from George Orwell:
How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.
There may not be a thief lurking behind every lamp post, but there may well be a thief lurking behind the lamp post where I'm parked; if you didn't consider this possibility, you'd never even use a bike lock.