If you want less petty crime, bring back social safety nets. Pay people better.
I'm dead serious.
-
Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.
Well duh. Anyone with half a brain knows that the root causes of crime lie in poverty, systemic exclusion, and the erosion of social safety nets, rather than in inherent criminality or a lack of "moral character."
For individuals left without access to stable, decently paid jobs or a viable social safety net, black markets—eg the drug trade or sex work—become the "employers of last resort".
To truly reduce youth offending and petty crime, the formula is simple: jobs, jobs, and jobs. Most people would gladly choose a stable, decent-paying job over participation in the illicit economy if given the opportunity.
A better economy would help more than surveiling every single persons every moves and all of their communications.
I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.
Or solve the problem by addressing the root causes of crime like other societies do. The American prison industrial complex is not a cure for a sick society. It's a profitable black hole that encourages recidivism at the expense of tax payers.
Maybe the U.S. could stop normalizing and modelling blatant criminality as a first step, in lieu of mass warrantless surveillance. Just yesterday, the U.S. president was giving what could be generously construed as a speech, in which he said of U.S. naval activities around the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re taking the cargo. We’re taking the oil. We’re like pirates.”
Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.
The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.
I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.
You don't have control over whether petty reactionaries exist. Model them as non-sentient beings if it helps you analyze it dispassionately. They're going to react to public disorder by voting in pubic safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte with or without your permission. Thus everyone should care about shoplifting, the only disagreement is whether you care about the first or second order effects of it.
I really liked your comment because it made me look at things a bit differently, although I didn't get new factual information. That happens rarelier than before to me nowadays. Just accepting that a certain amount of NPCs exist and dispassionately including them in the calculations.
Also, all property crime is a drop in the bucket compared to white collar crime. The people who are super concerned about petty theft are often the ones stealing massive amounts of money from everyone else and creating the situations that lead to petty theft.
Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.
We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.
I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.
You're free to move to Singapore/South Korea/Japan whenever you want. Your USD (assuming you are one) will go far there, and if you are lucky enough to be white you will get treated like a king/queen there.
As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.
We do have actual video of that one radome in Bahrain getting directly struck (from multiple angles). It's possible it was a satellite communication antenna and not a radar.
But the still images shown with before/after are AI generated. (the surrounding buildings are completely different in the before/after image).
Yes. Their repeated warnings that Iran would no longer tolerate the kind of back-and-forth blame shifting that think-tank policy papers openly described years ago as a strategy to keep Iran off sides, and that any attack by Israel would be considered an attack by the USA too and that American assets that surrounded Iran would be attacked; since under all the clownish “who? Meeee?”act gaslighting and stupid pathological lies, everyone knows they are one and the same.
It’s like dealing with psychopathic toddlers who think people aren’t smart enough to know they are lying when they deny killing the family pet even though their hands are covered in blood and you just watched them mid act of slaughtering the family pet.
The coat asymmetry with drones is crazy, they are stupid cheap to deploy on a nation state level. I feel like it’s going to be years until we fully learn the lessons from the Ukraine Russia war.
Isn't this something where there is clear and easy to obtain aggregate data. What is the average tax burden for someone in Wi vs Tx instead of comparing a single data point from each? I have a feeling it's going to contradict you
Exactly, that's why counting job postings is a terrible proxy for gauging market conditions. Companies may hire anywhere from 0 to 100s of people through the same JD.
reply