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My observation from the comment sections to this post-apocalyptic video is the following: People focusing on how to prevent the theft of these cars, funding pol

by dusted 5y ago

My observation from the comment sections to this post-apocalyptic video is the following: People focusing on how to prevent the theft of these cars, funding police, armed guards on trans, better security. I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather than solved. But, protecting a thing from theft, rather than removing the reason thievery is so rampant, just moves the problem to someone else.. Like putting locks and security on your home, "Now they won't break into MY home, because the guy next door has less security, so they'll go at him instead". Come on, the problem is not that it's easy to steal, the problem is that society has constructed situations for some of its citizens where they for one reason or another do it. I walked around last year, in an opera house, public building, no one in sight, empty building, unlocked doors, there were paintings on the walls, and I identified audio equipment for at least $10k, and it was not unlocked by mistake. Then it struck me, that we've done well in society when we can have this.

271828182846 5y ago
> I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather than solved. what do you mean? death penalty ... solved!
- eloisius 5y ago
  Not solved. Then instead of sneaky thieves who run away, you get armed heists willing to kill cops and civilians to avoid getting busted.
  - 271828182846 5y ago
    to stop a bad guy with a gun it takes a good guy with a gun ... more guns - solved!
coryfklein 5y ago
Option 1) Upgrade the security on the containers Option 2) Re-work society from the ground up to eliminate any incentive for burglary It is no wonder why folks are drawn more to Option 1, which is about a bajillion times more approachable, but which doesn't preclude also working on Option 2 at the same time.
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  Option 1 is also attractive because it has a ready-made business model attached. Invent more doohickeys, buy and sell more doohickeys, install said doohickeys. If it actually works almost becomes a peripheral question. Option 2 is long term, complicated, mostly requires buy in from several levels of underfunded state agencies. The private sector might pick up some crumbs. Additionally, the people who make these decisions are probably pretty happy with the way that society is configured. Package theft is just a cost of doing business where the benefits are obviously enormous.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Wow I wonder why the climate is dying. No way is the desire to take the easy way out related /s
  - coryfklein 5y ago
    What alternative strategy exactly are you suggesting that individual entities take which solves the problem? This reminds me of the rats from Meditations on Moloch [1]: > In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
    - 5y ago
jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
Fixing this is a two part issue. One, we cannot get rid of physical security, as everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. Two, the way to prevent crime from happening is to make people feel in the heart and soul that crime is morally wrong and destructive for the community around them. This is not instinctual human behavior. For those who learn this and live this, great. For those who don't, see option #1.
- kqr 5y ago
  > everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. To be clear, this is a political ideal of the Roman Empire that has influenced much of modern civlisation, it's not an inevitable state of humanity.
  - snowgrove 5y ago
    The right to protect oneself and one’s property goes at least as far back as the Code of Hammurabi. Every ancient civilization from Babylon to Tenochtitlan had some variation of this idea. It is practically the definition of civilization itself.
    - zorpner 5y ago
      The idea that an individual has "[the] right to protect oneself and one’s property" is fundamentally inconsistent with the existence of slavery throughout most of humanity's history.
      - snowgrove 5y ago
        Obviously, but that isn’t what the GP comment asserted and it isn’t the statement I replied to.
      - kqr 5y ago
        It's not, though. The Roman idea of protecting oneself and one's property extended to one's slaves (which counted as property).
kqr 5y ago
Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. Taking a leaf from Deming, we have a system, a process, a society that creates a certain, relatively stable, number of criminals per year. Trying to address specific criminal acts or specific criminals is just meddling that can backlash as easily as it can help. When you have a stable source of trouble, it makes no sense to try to fix individual occurrences. You have to address the problem at the source. We have created this system! We can create something else if we're unhappy with it.
- buran77 5y ago
  > Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. There's an old nugget that if anyone could time-travel they'd go back in time and kill Hitler. Nobody would go a few more years back to educate him. People are not educated to look at the big picture but to react in the moment. Stop the theft as it's happening. Shoot. This goes best with societies where taking a life is considered appropriate response to someone trying to steal your fishing lure, societies where your individual rights trump absolutely anything else (imagine explicitly voting to pay more taxes yourself because that will benefit the poorer part of the population). Reacting in the moment requires almost no thought out process. It's mostly autonomous, a reflex. Thinking of the bigger picture, identifying a root cause, identifying the impact of each of your options, these all take a strong enough education to override that reflex.
  - barrenko 5y ago
    It's not just education, it's shitty parenting. You'd recursively have to educate Hitler's parents, and to do that you have to educate their parents etc. ad nauseum. Pretty soon you'd blow your stack. Naive interventionism is worse than just whacking Hitler.
    - another_story 5y ago
      Do people really grow up to be their parents? Did you?
jorvi 5y ago
> Like putting locks and security on your home, "Now they won't break into MY home, because the guy next door has less security, so they'll go at him instead". This is not uniquely American. In the EU so many people by SUVs (despite the impracticality in smaller European streets) “because it’ll make sure I have the benefit in a car crash”. It is technically correct but such an extremely cold statement.
- baby 5y ago
  You mean in the US so many people drive SUV. I don’t remember seeing many in europe
- acron0 5y ago
  I've literally never heard this, after having lived in the EU for almost 40 years.
  - adriancr 5y ago
    It is a thing in Romania with larger cars like BMW X5 and so on. That's mostly because it was fairly easy to get a drivers license with bribes up until a few years after joining EU. (until the anti-corruption agency was set up) Also due to crappy roads and very aggressive drivers in larger cities. Rich people would just buy the larger car to protect children either from their stupidity or other drivers.
  - atemerev 5y ago
    I have heard this attitude in Eastern Europe and Russia. Here in Switzerland, nobody cares about the size of the car — road safety is exemplary.
- Youden 5y ago
  You'll have to be more specific than "EU" because I've never seen an American-style SUV in Western Europe. Closest I can get is a crossover SUV like a Mercedes GLA.
  - null_object 5y ago
rrdharan 5y ago
This seems like a silly and needlessly anti-American framing. There’s plenty of high profile theft in Europe - more in fact, since the security is so lax: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/europe/Picasso-and-Monets-Are-Stolen-From-Dutch-Museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/europe/Picasso-and-... European “security” has also given us gems like the Brussels and Manchester arena bombings. I don’t know why people in glass houses insist on throwing so many stones.
- Z0rr0 5y ago
  You are confusing high profile art theft in Europe with low profile UPS theft in the US. The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens. If those citizens lived in the EU, they would have free healthcare, free education, unemployment subsidies and housing. And so they would not be forced to steal our packages.
  - snowgrove 5y ago
    >The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens. That isn’t clear to me at all. In Washington DC, for example, much of the recent increase in theft (grand theft auto especially) has been committed by unsupervised juveniles. AFAICT they do it because they’re bored, it’s easy, it’s exciting, and they generally escape punishment. Who’s to say it’s not a similar situation with these train robberies?
    - vanilla_nut 5y ago
      In Denver, we experienced a huge increase in bike theft because a massive crime ring was exporting them to Mexico and then reselling them for thousands. Sometimes crime isn’t desperation or opportunistic (though Denver still has plenty of opportunistic thefts), it can be organized too!
  - Kiro 5y ago
    It's not that simple. Look at Sweden. We have all those things and delivery companies have stopped delivering to certain areas due to their trucks being robbed. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmobon-sylvias-adress-ar-for-farlig-att-leverera-paket-till https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmobon-sylvias-adr... https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/postnord-stoppar-paketutdelning-i-gottsunda-valsatra https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/postnord-stoppar-p...
baby 5y ago
The same thing has been happening in SF with homelessness. A lot of people think they should go to prison or be displaced somewhere else. It’s like refusing to accept that there’s a root cause.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  If you're like some of my older relatives, people choose to become "beggars" because they "want something for nothing" and would rather do that than work a job and live in stable accommodation.
  - barbacoa 5y ago
    In Austin Texas when they legalized urban camping the short term effect was the homeless shelters and transitional housing programs cleared out in favor of camping in the posh downtown parks. There was a sudden increase in young rastafarian looking white kids living on the streets. When the ban was reinstated all those newcomers just melted away to wherever they came from. Didn't seem like that bad of a life while it lasted, being in the tourist areas crime was never bad enough to be afraid for your safety, you had bleeding heart church groups that would regularly come by the camps to hand out food and clothing. All the while you can sell and doing drugs in the open.
    - baby 5y ago
      > just melted away to wherever they came from out of sight out of mind
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Or you could consider that if camping in "posh downtown parks" being legal was enough to make that better than the life they already had, perhaps that is a clue to social problems that you just didn't see before because it just wasn't out on the streets in front of your eyes.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    When I was a kid I met some new friends on a camping trip. Their grandparents were rolling in a nice trailer, had nice fishing gear, etc. One day I walked over to their campsite to invite the kids to play, and accidentally overheard them talking about making the kids put on ratty clothes so they could go begging, with the kids complaining. Later in life I was a missionary, and we saw a dude in homeless attire get out of a nice Mercedes. He saw us as well and told us his story about making bank begging in front of a bank, showed us the $$$ suits stashed in his trunk, told us about his high end "compound" where he lived. Then of course there was the guy who would block the sidewalk in front of a previous workplace in SF and harass any people passing by who didn't give him money. There are many cases of people either straight up abusing the system, or acting in ways that will destroy the system. The more of this there is -- the visible, abusive begging and taking over of shared public spaces -- the less empathy people will have for the invisible homeless who aren't causing trouble and will actually benefit from help.
Bancakes 5y ago
It's the same ordeal with legal firearm ownership versus armed crime. Some people are simply crazy but not recognised as such.
mngnt 5y ago
The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily available opportunities to steal, etc). For well-off people it is easier to earn their standard by earning money by work than by stealing. Or they have more comfortable ways of stealing than haulig a paltry 10k in av equipment... I wish i could be an idealist and to believe in a world where every one is happy with what they've got. But that's a utopia. Humans will always crave to have more than each other ad will steal, loot, defraud, do anything to get there. Lock your trains well.
- Rizz 5y ago
  Is it crime or is protest? We all know Amazon will let its workers die in hurricanes, harass its workers until they commit suicide, not pay their workers a living wage, and all this while the big boss goes flying around in spaceships for fun. I'm sure a lot of the "criminals" rationalize their behavior by knowing that whatever they do it can't ever be as bad as what Amazon does, they're even doing justice by fighting back when no-one else does. I'm sure this is more about being Robin Hood than people being evil to their core.
- truckerbill 5y ago
  Crime rates go up when inequality goes up.
  - KSteffensen 5y ago
    Is crime rate proportional to inequality or poverty?
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Inequality implies poverty, so this question is pointless.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
While I understand your argument, it ignores the fact that, at scale, there is a non-insignificant chunk of society that is willing to break and bend the rules for personal gain, causing others loss, simply because that's the most direct path for them to obtain what they want. This is, at least in my opinion, exacerbated by the size and the diversity of the US population, and its variety of creeds, affluence levels, ethnic backgrounds, and others. The US is not Iceland, it's not Japan, it's not Finland. If you increase the base floor of affluence in the whole of society, yes, people stricken by poverty will no longer have to conduct this kind of activity out of desperation, but many, driven by other impulses, will simply move up to a higher class level of antisocial white collar behavior, from scamming investors to conmanship et al. still eventually necessitating the intervention of law enforcement and jail time. If you take a look at your average prison population, people incarcerated due to poverty-induced despair are only part of the picture. There are plenty of folks in there who, for one reason or another, spanning from genetics to growing up in extremely abusive environments, are not wired to succeed in society, and are in some form a menace to it, and need to be contained in a way that allows non-sociopaths to conduct normal living. I can't tell you the exact desperation-to-sociopathy ratio of criminal activity, I'm not sure those numbers exist, but my hunch, based on whatever information I've gotten my hands on over the years, is that the sociopath percentage behind this sort of activity is non-trivial and cannot be simply glossed over in the interest of standing up for folks of lesser means. Before we inject our own biases into this conversation, I would love to see the data, the stats, and understand why the culprits are doing what they're doing. Otherwise we're simply painting our existing moral and political positions onto this canvas with no way of refuting any of the stances. The trite and tedious unfalsifiable personal-responsibility-vs-oppressed-victim-of-circumstances debate that never gets anywhere.
- tapas73 5y ago
  I think it's a plus for society if some criminals go from petty theft to white collar sociapth investor conning CEO. (or more realistically salesman) Society saves on the need for physical security.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
If you think people are stealing because they have no other choice you’re sadly mistaken. I’m assuming LA is similar to SF - much of the crime is organized. Multi-million dollar operations. This is a problem because the perception is that law enforcement won’t do anything, so fuck it, why not get easy money. Working and paying taxes like some chump? Nah.
brobdingnagians 5y ago
There are situations that make it more likely that people will steal, but I don't think it is wise to off-load all of the responsibility to society. Some people will never steal even to save their own life, because they have principles which guide them in that direction. I think it is important to recognize that our society has less respect for property laws and is more accepting of dishonesty, theft, and general lack of honor than many previous societies. As the cultural value of integrity declines, people see no reason to refrain from theft and violence, so if a situation presents itself where it seems advantageous to them, they take it, even if it is not advantageous to society or causes great harm to someone else. It seems that empathy is lacking in our society as well.
- jedrek 5y ago
  > Some people will never steal even to save their own life, because they have principles which guide them in that direction. Are you sure there are, or do you think there are based on a Disneyesque view of morality?
  - buscoquadnary 5y ago
    I think this is kind of an example of the cyncism the parent was mentioning we can't conceive of the idea of people who places a higher import upon their honor and their good name than upon their needs. It is then further pushed along by the cynical and jaded ridiculing people of principle as suckers, and to be taken advantage of. I for one would not rob someone or still, even to save my life because my integrity is worth far more to me than that.
  - brobdingnagians 5y ago
    Yes, I'm sure of it. If anything, it is the opposite of what you would learn in Disney. There are people in the concentration camps who did not steal or who even gave away the food they had to help others, people who go on hunger strike until they die for principles, there are people who go to certain death in war on principle, lots of examples of people who would die to protect their family rather than abandon them, and there are examples of people helping others get the safety/on the helicopter harness until they themselves die (and that's where saving themselves wouldn't even be viewed negatively or break a personal belief, it's just pure unselfish helping others at the cost of your own life). Those principles, or the resilience of them, may be uncommon or even rare, but it is definitely possible to have a stronger desire to have integrity and comply with a belief system than to live.
user-the-name 5y ago
Exactly. This kind of thing does not happen in a healthy society.
C19is20 5y ago
"...and it was not unlocked by mistake.". Gah! Combination of negatives!
skinkestek 5y ago
You make it sound like this is all necessity. I don't know if this is intentional or not. If it is intentional: Go look at the porch pirate glitterbomb videos and come back and tell me that it is because of necessity (I've only seen one go off in a pawn shop, the rest were people who wanted to improve their own home it seemed.) Trying to be intellectually honest here I'll note that maybe those videos weren't uploaded because they didn't match the viewpoint he Mark wants to create. Or because he felt pity for them, but I don't think that is the full explanation. Edit: > I walked around last year, in an opera house, public building, no one in sight, empty building, unlocked doors, there were paintings on the walls, and I identified audio equipment for at least $10k, and it was not unlocked by mistake. Then it struck me, that we've done well in society when we can have this. Agree. Note however: Norway were I live used to be like that (as far as I understand), but isn't anymore (this I do know). Norway has maybe the best social security in the world. Clearly there are two things that must be in place here: - there mustn't be a need to steal to survive - stealing must also not be accepted
- galgalesh 5y ago
  > - stealing must also not be accepted It's a bit more complex than that, in my opinion. This is also about whether people respect/love society. When you feel connected to society and feel thankful for what it gives to you, you will be much less likely to exhibit antisocial behavior. In my opinion, this lack of connection to society is caused by 1. The US being a lot harder on its participants than in the Norden countries. This causes people to feel less thankful to it. 2. The division in US politics and media causes people to be disillusioned by society and feel no connection/relation to it.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Agree to a degree. What I write about above however is that even in the Nordic countries where everyone has all reason to be thankful people steal a lot.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
oh_sigh 5y ago
It's quite common on European high streets to see private security guards outside of clothing and electronic stores, whereas that is fairly rare in the states. At least, I can certainly attest to their presence in the UK, Italy, Spain and France. And I think everyone individually is trying to minimize societal ills like theft. But good luck getting enough people to agree on what is the right path forward.
- scollet 5y ago
  Yeah, we have public police in front of our stores instead.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    We do? I mean...you may see police in front of a store if their beat takes them by it, or you might see a centralized kiosk with a cop in it at a mall or something, but you don't really see security in front of every store like you do in many parts of Europe. Maybe that will change, at least in LA if smash and grabs become popularized
    - scollet 5y ago
      Anecdotally, but this is a metro thing. I've sampled 3 cities and these are big box grocers in... less affluent... high-traffic neighborhoods.
nebula8804 5y ago
What society do you live in? I want to look at you with envy while my country continues to sink.
rvieira 5y ago
My thoughts exactly. This mindset is present in so many aspects of human society. For instance, drug addiction. Up until recently, people would typically ask "how do we stop people getting access to drugs" instead of "why do people do this".
M_Holcner 5y ago
Those who did this are not victims. They're culprits. That must be very clear. Remember the imagery from recent (any) riots? E.g. the mob plundering a Walmart? Those people are not starving. They are just greedy, uncontrolled and aggressive. They did not steal food. Just expensive electronic entertainment devices. Human behaviour is very predictable. There will always be a large number of people taking whatever they can get. That's how it is. The failed communism is the proof. The only thing preventing those people from doing their crime onto society are sanctions.
- rvieira 5y ago
  They are not victims of the theft, but they can be the product of something (like all of us). If a society instills the values of "every man for himself" and that patience, hard work and helping a fellow human is for chumps, the result is also predictable when mixed with the right conditions/environment. Trying to solve a problem by focusing on sanctions (usually called "War On ____") has been proven to fail catastrophically.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >They did not steal food. Just expensive electronic entertainment devices. During the 2011 London riots, looters consistently avoided bookstores in favor of "shoes, clothes, computers, and plasma televisions". <https://news.yahoo.com/pattern-london-rioters-leaving-bookstores-untouched-171549902.html https://news.yahoo.com/pattern-london-rioters-leaving-bookst...>
avidphantasm 5y ago
We (Americans) don’t solve big problems, just like we don’t deliver justice for big crimes. The rot is deep.
- ErikCorry 5y ago
  I wonder how American it is. It's illegal to beg in Denmark. It's illegal to sleep rough in Germany. The police will absolutely bother you if they catch you at either.
asiachick 5y ago
I see two ways to interpret this (1) make sure everyone has enough and they won't steal (2) promote a culture that stealing is unacceptable regardless of your situation I don't personally believe (1) is sufficient nor will it solve the problem. Most people stealing are not "that" poor. They are not starving etc... Instead they (we) have a culture that it's acceptable to steal. Even many well to do middle and upper middle class westerners feel like it's a right of passage to steal a few things, to shoplift once in a while, etc... The places I've lived where theft is low didn't have much absolute poverty but they also had a culture of stealing is wrong almost regardless of your situation. I have no clue how to promote that culture. it seems an impossible task. I'm confident though that the majority of the issue is culture , not poverty
- cousin_it 5y ago
  Yeah. Folks who say crime is caused by poverty and lack of prospects often in the same breath accuse CEOs of being crooks etc, not seeing the contradiction. There was a good bit on some Russian blog back in the day. Cops in Russia were very underpaid then, and someone floated the idea that they take bribes for that reason. The response: "A cop takes bribes because his salary is low. Ok, what should his salary be? Like a minister's? But they say nowadays that ministers also take bribes like there's no tomorrow. Maybe we should make the cop's living standard like Zeus the god of all gods and then he'll stop taking bribes?" Whether you're rich or poor, if you feel that it's ok to rob people, you'll rob people (in the way that your level affords). And if you hate the idea of robbing people, you won't.
rob74 5y ago
Good observation - my first though when reading this was "wow, didn't know this happens in the US, until now I only heard about things like this from third world countries". I mean, sure, crime happens everywhere, but you have to be pretty desperate to do things like this (relatively high risk of injury or getting caught, relatively low chance of finding something really valuable). Then I realized that unfortunately, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, many US citizens have standards of living comparable to a third world country...
- Freskis 5y ago
  If you genuinely believe that the US has standards comparable to the third world, the you've been consuming propaganda on the Internet, I guess from low-quality communities such as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit etc. These people aren't "desperate", they are opportunists. The situation is the opposite to what you say: there is low risk of getting caught and high chance of finding something valuable.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Firstly, I think it's interesting and very American-centric that people disparage this thinking and believe it is an American thing. This is very normal in large parts of the world. Go to the Philippines and security guards are regularly armed -- search the internet and the first photo has two men with pump action shotguns guarding a McDonalds. Go to Thailand and see people put up big walls around their property with spikes and broken glass and barbed wire around the top. Go to France and police regularly patrol with assault rifles (real ones, not semiautomatic painted black). Go to Mexico and people cement bars in front of their windows. Go to the Middle East, Africa, South America, the subcontinent. And what you see in these coastal California cities is a result of this thinking, that it's always something else to blame and people should feel guilty for wanting their property to be secured or offenders punished or deterred. And it's not nearly so simple as you say. Easy to steal or low consequences of stealing absolutely contributes to things being stolen. If one in every 4-5 container has been burglarized, surely there's a good argument things need to be made a bit more secure sitting around handwringing about the state of society and admonishing anybody who doesn't sympathize with the criminals certainly won't solve it, as California has demonstrated. It's not that there aren't other factors that could be improved on a societal level to reduce this kind of crime, to be clear I'm not arguing that. > I walked around last year, in an opera house, public building, no one in sight, empty building, unlocked doors, there were paintings on the walls, and I identified audio equipment for at least $10k, and it was not unlocked by mistake. Then it struck me, that we've done well in society when we can have this. Must be nice to be so privileged. You know who suffers the most from street crimes, burglaries, and that kind of thing? It's poor people. Petty criminals know the police will descend on them like a ton of bricks if they went and started robbing rich people places. Just because you might not see police everywhere does not mean it is not protected by the threat of violence and incarceration.
- diggitydog6767 5y ago
q1w2 5y ago
This is very naive. I love my kids more than I love Pacific Rail Company or Fedex. As I get older, sure we're secure, but I still worry about money for the mortgage and the kids' college fund. If there was actually ZERO chance of getting caught because there was ZERO enforcement, I would absolutely steal to make those worries go away. When I was young and single, I would not have.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Where was the opera house?
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
I'm an American. Fundamentally I think we have given up on solving social issues that are a byproduct of a country that valued jobs, those who provide jobs, and cars over stability/culture of any kind. To solve most of them, it appears A) everybody has to simultaneously change their behavior at once or B) some entity with a lot of resources will end up taking hits until culture changes. We're too deeply divided for A and class divides/corporate-civilian divides prevent anyone from stepping up and doing B. Since it's too hard we're taking the easy way out into anger, revenge, and apathy--and if you live in a bad area the solution is to make or have enough money to move. The constant mobility mostly driven by job and money chasing makes culture impossible for those who need to work and don't have significant assets--which is most people--and without a culture the tendency to not care about each other tends to win. Eventually we will run out of room in this country (we always sell out to developers) and we'll have to actually solve problems, but that's probably a good 100 years from now assuming we haven't broken up into separate countries by then.
bko 5y ago
> Come on, the problem is not that it's easy to steal, the problem is that society has constructed situations for some of its citizens where they for one reason or another do it. I assume you're talking about poor people. I don't know how much experience you have with lower socio-economic people in the US, but from my experience, most are honest hardworking and industrious. Some are immigrants without a formal education or even language skills that came to this country for opportunity. It's a little offensive to deny them basic autonomy to not steal and trash a rail-yard. The people that I came across in my life that do petty crime like this are not poor desperate people. They're usually highly anti-social borderline sociopaths. They're organized by informal networks of other people exploiting them. There's organization involved to keep lookout, know when and were to go and how to avoid getting caught. And if you get caught, there is a whole system around that as well. And since they're organized, they are fully aware of the risk-reward tradeoffs. This includes the recent trend of being soft on these kinds of crimes or looking the other way, as you're doing. Think about the skill you need to pull this off. You need to be young and physically fit, to run from police. You have to be able to keep a lot of information in your head and make snap decisions about what to open, what to keep and what to toss. You have to show up on time and plan. The people doing these heists could easily be employed as warehouse or delivery workers and make an honest, probably even more lucrative living, especially when you consider long term risk of being arrested. They choose not to. Poor people are not to blame for this savagery.
leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
I would say in large part it's because theft is acceptable in a lot of places. When people rob high end retail in CA, or when places decriminalize retail theft under $999. Sometimes people steal out of necessity, most times they steal out of convenience. Having a strong culture that treats theft as a shameful act and caring for others is what breeds the culture you describe.
Fatnino 5y ago
I taken it your machine is connected directly to the internet with no firewall and your admin password is password.

by dusted 5y ago

271828182846 5y ago

> I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather than solved. what do you mean? death penalty ... solved!

eloisius 5y ago
Not solved. Then instead of sneaky thieves who run away, you get armed heists willing to kill cops and civilians to avoid getting busted.
- 271828182846 5y ago
  to stop a bad guy with a gun it takes a good guy with a gun ... more guns - solved!

coryfklein 5y ago

Option 1) Upgrade the security on the containers Option 2) Re-work society from the ground up to eliminate any incentive for burglary It is no wonder why folks are drawn more to Option 1, which is about a bajillion times more approachable, but which doesn't preclude also working on Option 2 at the same time.

cookie_monsta 5y ago
Option 1 is also attractive because it has a ready-made business model attached. Invent more doohickeys, buy and sell more doohickeys, install said doohickeys. If it actually works almost becomes a peripheral question. Option 2 is long term, complicated, mostly requires buy in from several levels of underfunded state agencies. The private sector might pick up some crumbs. Additionally, the people who make these decisions are probably pretty happy with the way that society is configured. Package theft is just a cost of doing business where the benefits are obviously enormous.
netizen-936824 5y ago
Wow I wonder why the climate is dying. No way is the desire to take the easy way out related /s
- coryfklein 5y ago
  What alternative strategy exactly are you suggesting that individual entities take which solves the problem? This reminds me of the rats from Meditations on Moloch [1]: > In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - 5y ago

jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago

Fixing this is a two part issue. One, we cannot get rid of physical security, as everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. Two, the way to prevent crime from happening is to make people feel in the heart and soul that crime is morally wrong and destructive for the community around them. This is not instinctual human behavior. For those who learn this and live this, great. For those who don't, see option #1.

kqr 5y ago
> everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. To be clear, this is a political ideal of the Roman Empire that has influenced much of modern civlisation, it's not an inevitable state of humanity.
- snowgrove 5y ago
  The right to protect oneself and one’s property goes at least as far back as the Code of Hammurabi. Every ancient civilization from Babylon to Tenochtitlan had some variation of this idea. It is practically the definition of civilization itself.
  - zorpner 5y ago
    The idea that an individual has "[the] right to protect oneself and one’s property" is fundamentally inconsistent with the existence of slavery throughout most of humanity's history.
    - snowgrove 5y ago
      Obviously, but that isn’t what the GP comment asserted and it isn’t the statement I replied to.
    - kqr 5y ago
      It's not, though. The Roman idea of protecting oneself and one's property extended to one's slaves (which counted as property).

kqr 5y ago

Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. Taking a leaf from Deming, we have a system, a process, a society that creates a certain, relatively stable, number of criminals per year. Trying to address specific criminal acts or specific criminals is just meddling that can backlash as easily as it can help. When you have a stable source of trouble, it makes no sense to try to fix individual occurrences. You have to address the problem at the source. We have created this system! We can create something else if we're unhappy with it.

buran77 5y ago
> Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. There's an old nugget that if anyone could time-travel they'd go back in time and kill Hitler. Nobody would go a few more years back to educate him. People are not educated to look at the big picture but to react in the moment. Stop the theft as it's happening. Shoot. This goes best with societies where taking a life is considered appropriate response to someone trying to steal your fishing lure, societies where your individual rights trump absolutely anything else (imagine explicitly voting to pay more taxes yourself because that will benefit the poorer part of the population). Reacting in the moment requires almost no thought out process. It's mostly autonomous, a reflex. Thinking of the bigger picture, identifying a root cause, identifying the impact of each of your options, these all take a strong enough education to override that reflex.
- barrenko 5y ago
  It's not just education, it's shitty parenting. You'd recursively have to educate Hitler's parents, and to do that you have to educate their parents etc. ad nauseum. Pretty soon you'd blow your stack. Naive interventionism is worse than just whacking Hitler.
  - another_story 5y ago
    Do people really grow up to be their parents? Did you?

jorvi 5y ago

> Like putting locks and security on your home, "Now they won't break into MY home, because the guy next door has less security, so they'll go at him instead". This is not uniquely American. In the EU so many people by SUVs (despite the impracticality in smaller European streets) “because it’ll make sure I have the benefit in a car crash”. It is technically correct but such an extremely cold statement.

baby 5y ago
You mean in the US so many people drive SUV. I don’t remember seeing many in europe
acron0 5y ago
I've literally never heard this, after having lived in the EU for almost 40 years.
- adriancr 5y ago
  It is a thing in Romania with larger cars like BMW X5 and so on. That's mostly because it was fairly easy to get a drivers license with bribes up until a few years after joining EU. (until the anti-corruption agency was set up) Also due to crappy roads and very aggressive drivers in larger cities. Rich people would just buy the larger car to protect children either from their stupidity or other drivers.
- atemerev 5y ago
  I have heard this attitude in Eastern Europe and Russia. Here in Switzerland, nobody cares about the size of the car — road safety is exemplary.
Youden 5y ago
You'll have to be more specific than "EU" because I've never seen an American-style SUV in Western Europe. Closest I can get is a crossover SUV like a Mercedes GLA.
- null_object 5y ago

rrdharan 5y ago

This seems like a silly and needlessly anti-American framing. There’s plenty of high profile theft in Europe - more in fact, since the security is so lax: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/europe/Picasso-and-Monets-Are-Stolen-From-Dutch-Museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/europe/Picasso-and-... European “security” has also given us gems like the Brussels and Manchester arena bombings. I don’t know why people in glass houses insist on throwing so many stones.

Z0rr0 5y ago
You are confusing high profile art theft in Europe with low profile UPS theft in the US. The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens. If those citizens lived in the EU, they would have free healthcare, free education, unemployment subsidies and housing. And so they would not be forced to steal our packages.
- snowgrove 5y ago
  >The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens. That isn’t clear to me at all. In Washington DC, for example, much of the recent increase in theft (grand theft auto especially) has been committed by unsupervised juveniles. AFAICT they do it because they’re bored, it’s easy, it’s exciting, and they generally escape punishment. Who’s to say it’s not a similar situation with these train robberies?
  - vanilla_nut 5y ago
    In Denver, we experienced a huge increase in bike theft because a massive crime ring was exporting them to Mexico and then reselling them for thousands. Sometimes crime isn’t desperation or opportunistic (though Denver still has plenty of opportunistic thefts), it can be organized too!
- Kiro 5y ago
  It's not that simple. Look at Sweden. We have all those things and delivery companies have stopped delivering to certain areas due to their trucks being robbed. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmobon-sylvias-adress-ar-for-farlig-att-leverera-paket-till https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmobon-sylvias-adr... https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/postnord-stoppar-paketutdelning-i-gottsunda-valsatra https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/postnord-stoppar-p...

baby 5y ago

The same thing has been happening in SF with homelessness. A lot of people think they should go to prison or be displaced somewhere else. It’s like refusing to accept that there’s a root cause.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
If you're like some of my older relatives, people choose to become "beggars" because they "want something for nothing" and would rather do that than work a job and live in stable accommodation.
- barbacoa 5y ago
  In Austin Texas when they legalized urban camping the short term effect was the homeless shelters and transitional housing programs cleared out in favor of camping in the posh downtown parks. There was a sudden increase in young rastafarian looking white kids living on the streets. When the ban was reinstated all those newcomers just melted away to wherever they came from. Didn't seem like that bad of a life while it lasted, being in the tourist areas crime was never bad enough to be afraid for your safety, you had bleeding heart church groups that would regularly come by the camps to hand out food and clothing. All the while you can sell and doing drugs in the open.
  - baby 5y ago
    > just melted away to wherever they came from out of sight out of mind
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Or you could consider that if camping in "posh downtown parks" being legal was enough to make that better than the life they already had, perhaps that is a clue to social problems that you just didn't see before because it just wasn't out on the streets in front of your eyes.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  When I was a kid I met some new friends on a camping trip. Their grandparents were rolling in a nice trailer, had nice fishing gear, etc. One day I walked over to their campsite to invite the kids to play, and accidentally overheard them talking about making the kids put on ratty clothes so they could go begging, with the kids complaining. Later in life I was a missionary, and we saw a dude in homeless attire get out of a nice Mercedes. He saw us as well and told us his story about making bank begging in front of a bank, showed us the $$$ suits stashed in his trunk, told us about his high end "compound" where he lived. Then of course there was the guy who would block the sidewalk in front of a previous workplace in SF and harass any people passing by who didn't give him money. There are many cases of people either straight up abusing the system, or acting in ways that will destroy the system. The more of this there is -- the visible, abusive begging and taking over of shared public spaces -- the less empathy people will have for the invisible homeless who aren't causing trouble and will actually benefit from help.

Bancakes 5y ago

It's the same ordeal with legal firearm ownership versus armed crime. Some people are simply crazy but not recognised as such.

mngnt 5y ago

The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily available opportunities to steal, etc). For well-off people it is easier to earn their standard by earning money by work than by stealing. Or they have more comfortable ways of stealing than haulig a paltry 10k in av equipment... I wish i could be an idealist and to believe in a world where every one is happy with what they've got. But that's a utopia. Humans will always crave to have more than each other ad will steal, loot, defraud, do anything to get there. Lock your trains well.

Rizz 5y ago
Is it crime or is protest? We all know Amazon will let its workers die in hurricanes, harass its workers until they commit suicide, not pay their workers a living wage, and all this while the big boss goes flying around in spaceships for fun. I'm sure a lot of the "criminals" rationalize their behavior by knowing that whatever they do it can't ever be as bad as what Amazon does, they're even doing justice by fighting back when no-one else does. I'm sure this is more about being Robin Hood than people being evil to their core.
truckerbill 5y ago
Crime rates go up when inequality goes up.
- KSteffensen 5y ago
  Is crime rate proportional to inequality or poverty?
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Inequality implies poverty, so this question is pointless.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago

While I understand your argument, it ignores the fact that, at scale, there is a non-insignificant chunk of society that is willing to break and bend the rules for personal gain, causing others loss, simply because that's the most direct path for them to obtain what they want. This is, at least in my opinion, exacerbated by the size and the diversity of the US population, and its variety of creeds, affluence levels, ethnic backgrounds, and others. The US is not Iceland, it's not Japan, it's not Finland. If you increase the base floor of affluence in the whole of society, yes, people stricken by poverty will no longer have to conduct this kind of activity out of desperation, but many, driven by other impulses, will simply move up to a higher class level of antisocial white collar behavior, from scamming investors to conmanship et al. still eventually necessitating the intervention of law enforcement and jail time. If you take a look at your average prison population, people incarcerated due to poverty-induced despair are only part of the picture. There are plenty of folks in there who, for one reason or another, spanning from genetics to growing up in extremely abusive environments, are not wired to succeed in society, and are in some form a menace to it, and need to be contained in a way that allows non-sociopaths to conduct normal living. I can't tell you the exact desperation-to-sociopathy ratio of criminal activity, I'm not sure those numbers exist, but my hunch, based on whatever information I've gotten my hands on over the years, is that the sociopath percentage behind this sort of activity is non-trivial and cannot be simply glossed over in the interest of standing up for folks of lesser means. Before we inject our own biases into this conversation, I would love to see the data, the stats, and understand why the culprits are doing what they're doing. Otherwise we're simply painting our existing moral and political positions onto this canvas with no way of refuting any of the stances. The trite and tedious unfalsifiable personal-responsibility-vs-oppressed-victim-of-circumstances debate that never gets anywhere.

tapas73 5y ago
I think it's a plus for society if some criminals go from petty theft to white collar sociapth investor conning CEO. (or more realistically salesman) Society saves on the need for physical security.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

If you think people are stealing because they have no other choice you’re sadly mistaken. I’m assuming LA is similar to SF - much of the crime is organized. Multi-million dollar operations. This is a problem because the perception is that law enforcement won’t do anything, so fuck it, why not get easy money. Working and paying taxes like some chump? Nah.

brobdingnagians 5y ago

There are situations that make it more likely that people will steal, but I don't think it is wise to off-load all of the responsibility to society. Some people will never steal even to save their own life, because they have principles which guide them in that direction. I think it is important to recognize that our society has less respect for property laws and is more accepting of dishonesty, theft, and general lack of honor than many previous societies. As the cultural value of integrity declines, people see no reason to refrain from theft and violence, so if a situation presents itself where it seems advantageous to them, they take it, even if it is not advantageous to society or causes great harm to someone else. It seems that empathy is lacking in our society as well.

jedrek 5y ago
> Some people will never steal even to save their own life, because they have principles which guide them in that direction. Are you sure there are, or do you think there are based on a Disneyesque view of morality?
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  I think this is kind of an example of the cyncism the parent was mentioning we can't conceive of the idea of people who places a higher import upon their honor and their good name than upon their needs. It is then further pushed along by the cynical and jaded ridiculing people of principle as suckers, and to be taken advantage of. I for one would not rob someone or still, even to save my life because my integrity is worth far more to me than that.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  Yes, I'm sure of it. If anything, it is the opposite of what you would learn in Disney. There are people in the concentration camps who did not steal or who even gave away the food they had to help others, people who go on hunger strike until they die for principles, there are people who go to certain death in war on principle, lots of examples of people who would die to protect their family rather than abandon them, and there are examples of people helping others get the safety/on the helicopter harness until they themselves die (and that's where saving themselves wouldn't even be viewed negatively or break a personal belief, it's just pure unselfish helping others at the cost of your own life). Those principles, or the resilience of them, may be uncommon or even rare, but it is definitely possible to have a stronger desire to have integrity and comply with a belief system than to live.

user-the-name 5y ago

Exactly. This kind of thing does not happen in a healthy society.

C19is20 5y ago

"...and it was not unlocked by mistake.". Gah! Combination of negatives!

skinkestek 5y ago

You make it sound like this is all necessity. I don't know if this is intentional or not. If it is intentional: Go look at the porch pirate glitterbomb videos and come back and tell me that it is because of necessity (I've only seen one go off in a pawn shop, the rest were people who wanted to improve their own home it seemed.) Trying to be intellectually honest here I'll note that maybe those videos weren't uploaded because they didn't match the viewpoint he Mark wants to create. Or because he felt pity for them, but I don't think that is the full explanation. Edit: > I walked around last year, in an opera house, public building, no one in sight, empty building, unlocked doors, there were paintings on the walls, and I identified audio equipment for at least $10k, and it was not unlocked by mistake. Then it struck me, that we've done well in society when we can have this. Agree. Note however: Norway were I live used to be like that (as far as I understand), but isn't anymore (this I do know). Norway has maybe the best social security in the world. Clearly there are two things that must be in place here: - there mustn't be a need to steal to survive - stealing must also not be accepted

galgalesh 5y ago
> - stealing must also not be accepted It's a bit more complex than that, in my opinion. This is also about whether people respect/love society. When you feel connected to society and feel thankful for what it gives to you, you will be much less likely to exhibit antisocial behavior. In my opinion, this lack of connection to society is caused by 1. The US being a lot harder on its participants than in the Norden countries. This causes people to feel less thankful to it. 2. The division in US politics and media causes people to be disillusioned by society and feel no connection/relation to it.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Agree to a degree. What I write about above however is that even in the Nordic countries where everyone has all reason to be thankful people steal a lot.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago

It's quite common on European high streets to see private security guards outside of clothing and electronic stores, whereas that is fairly rare in the states. At least, I can certainly attest to their presence in the UK, Italy, Spain and France. And I think everyone individually is trying to minimize societal ills like theft. But good luck getting enough people to agree on what is the right path forward.

scollet 5y ago
Yeah, we have public police in front of our stores instead.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  We do? I mean...you may see police in front of a store if their beat takes them by it, or you might see a centralized kiosk with a cop in it at a mall or something, but you don't really see security in front of every store like you do in many parts of Europe. Maybe that will change, at least in LA if smash and grabs become popularized
  - scollet 5y ago
    Anecdotally, but this is a metro thing. I've sampled 3 cities and these are big box grocers in... less affluent... high-traffic neighborhoods.

nebula8804 5y ago

What society do you live in? I want to look at you with envy while my country continues to sink.

rvieira 5y ago

My thoughts exactly. This mindset is present in so many aspects of human society. For instance, drug addiction. Up until recently, people would typically ask "how do we stop people getting access to drugs" instead of "why do people do this".

M_Holcner 5y ago

Those who did this are not victims. They're culprits. That must be very clear. Remember the imagery from recent (any) riots? E.g. the mob plundering a Walmart? Those people are not starving. They are just greedy, uncontrolled and aggressive. They did not steal food. Just expensive electronic entertainment devices. Human behaviour is very predictable. There will always be a large number of people taking whatever they can get. That's how it is. The failed communism is the proof. The only thing preventing those people from doing their crime onto society are sanctions.

rvieira 5y ago
They are not victims of the theft, but they can be the product of something (like all of us). If a society instills the values of "every man for himself" and that patience, hard work and helping a fellow human is for chumps, the result is also predictable when mixed with the right conditions/environment. Trying to solve a problem by focusing on sanctions (usually called "War On ____") has been proven to fail catastrophically.
TMWNN 5y ago
>They did not steal food. Just expensive electronic entertainment devices. During the 2011 London riots, looters consistently avoided bookstores in favor of "shoes, clothes, computers, and plasma televisions". <https://news.yahoo.com/pattern-london-rioters-leaving-bookstores-untouched-171549902.html https://news.yahoo.com/pattern-london-rioters-leaving-bookst...>

avidphantasm 5y ago

We (Americans) don’t solve big problems, just like we don’t deliver justice for big crimes. The rot is deep.

ErikCorry 5y ago
I wonder how American it is. It's illegal to beg in Denmark. It's illegal to sleep rough in Germany. The police will absolutely bother you if they catch you at either.

asiachick 5y ago

I see two ways to interpret this (1) make sure everyone has enough and they won't steal (2) promote a culture that stealing is unacceptable regardless of your situation I don't personally believe (1) is sufficient nor will it solve the problem. Most people stealing are not "that" poor. They are not starving etc... Instead they (we) have a culture that it's acceptable to steal. Even many well to do middle and upper middle class westerners feel like it's a right of passage to steal a few things, to shoplift once in a while, etc... The places I've lived where theft is low didn't have much absolute poverty but they also had a culture of stealing is wrong almost regardless of your situation. I have no clue how to promote that culture. it seems an impossible task. I'm confident though that the majority of the issue is culture , not poverty

cousin_it 5y ago
Yeah. Folks who say crime is caused by poverty and lack of prospects often in the same breath accuse CEOs of being crooks etc, not seeing the contradiction. There was a good bit on some Russian blog back in the day. Cops in Russia were very underpaid then, and someone floated the idea that they take bribes for that reason. The response: "A cop takes bribes because his salary is low. Ok, what should his salary be? Like a minister's? But they say nowadays that ministers also take bribes like there's no tomorrow. Maybe we should make the cop's living standard like Zeus the god of all gods and then he'll stop taking bribes?" Whether you're rich or poor, if you feel that it's ok to rob people, you'll rob people (in the way that your level affords). And if you hate the idea of robbing people, you won't.

rob74 5y ago

Good observation - my first though when reading this was "wow, didn't know this happens in the US, until now I only heard about things like this from third world countries". I mean, sure, crime happens everywhere, but you have to be pretty desperate to do things like this (relatively high risk of injury or getting caught, relatively low chance of finding something really valuable). Then I realized that unfortunately, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, many US citizens have standards of living comparable to a third world country...

Freskis 5y ago
If you genuinely believe that the US has standards comparable to the third world, the you've been consuming propaganda on the Internet, I guess from low-quality communities such as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit etc. These people aren't "desperate", they are opportunists. The situation is the opposite to what you say: there is low risk of getting caught and high chance of finding something valuable.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Firstly, I think it's interesting and very American-centric that people disparage this thinking and believe it is an American thing. This is very normal in large parts of the world. Go to the Philippines and security guards are regularly armed -- search the internet and the first photo has two men with pump action shotguns guarding a McDonalds. Go to Thailand and see people put up big walls around their property with spikes and broken glass and barbed wire around the top. Go to France and police regularly patrol with assault rifles (real ones, not semiautomatic painted black). Go to Mexico and people cement bars in front of their windows. Go to the Middle East, Africa, South America, the subcontinent. And what you see in these coastal California cities is a result of this thinking, that it's always something else to blame and people should feel guilty for wanting their property to be secured or offenders punished or deterred. And it's not nearly so simple as you say. Easy to steal or low consequences of stealing absolutely contributes to things being stolen. If one in every 4-5 container has been burglarized, surely there's a good argument things need to be made a bit more secure sitting around handwringing about the state of society and admonishing anybody who doesn't sympathize with the criminals certainly won't solve it, as California has demonstrated. It's not that there aren't other factors that could be improved on a societal level to reduce this kind of crime, to be clear I'm not arguing that. > I walked around last year, in an opera house, public building, no one in sight, empty building, unlocked doors, there were paintings on the walls, and I identified audio equipment for at least $10k, and it was not unlocked by mistake. Then it struck me, that we've done well in society when we can have this. Must be nice to be so privileged. You know who suffers the most from street crimes, burglaries, and that kind of thing? It's poor people. Petty criminals know the police will descend on them like a ton of bricks if they went and started robbing rich people places. Just because you might not see police everywhere does not mean it is not protected by the threat of violence and incarceration.

diggitydog6767 5y ago

q1w2 5y ago

This is very naive. I love my kids more than I love Pacific Rail Company or Fedex. As I get older, sure we're secure, but I still worry about money for the mortgage and the kids' college fund. If there was actually ZERO chance of getting caught because there was ZERO enforcement, I would absolutely steal to make those worries go away. When I was young and single, I would not have.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Where was the opera house?

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

I'm an American. Fundamentally I think we have given up on solving social issues that are a byproduct of a country that valued jobs, those who provide jobs, and cars over stability/culture of any kind. To solve most of them, it appears A) everybody has to simultaneously change their behavior at once or B) some entity with a lot of resources will end up taking hits until culture changes. We're too deeply divided for A and class divides/corporate-civilian divides prevent anyone from stepping up and doing B. Since it's too hard we're taking the easy way out into anger, revenge, and apathy--and if you live in a bad area the solution is to make or have enough money to move. The constant mobility mostly driven by job and money chasing makes culture impossible for those who need to work and don't have significant assets--which is most people--and without a culture the tendency to not care about each other tends to win. Eventually we will run out of room in this country (we always sell out to developers) and we'll have to actually solve problems, but that's probably a good 100 years from now assuming we haven't broken up into separate countries by then.

bko 5y ago

> Come on, the problem is not that it's easy to steal, the problem is that society has constructed situations for some of its citizens where they for one reason or another do it. I assume you're talking about poor people. I don't know how much experience you have with lower socio-economic people in the US, but from my experience, most are honest hardworking and industrious. Some are immigrants without a formal education or even language skills that came to this country for opportunity. It's a little offensive to deny them basic autonomy to not steal and trash a rail-yard. The people that I came across in my life that do petty crime like this are not poor desperate people. They're usually highly anti-social borderline sociopaths. They're organized by informal networks of other people exploiting them. There's organization involved to keep lookout, know when and were to go and how to avoid getting caught. And if you get caught, there is a whole system around that as well. And since they're organized, they are fully aware of the risk-reward tradeoffs. This includes the recent trend of being soft on these kinds of crimes or looking the other way, as you're doing. Think about the skill you need to pull this off. You need to be young and physically fit, to run from police. You have to be able to keep a lot of information in your head and make snap decisions about what to open, what to keep and what to toss. You have to show up on time and plan. The people doing these heists could easily be employed as warehouse or delivery workers and make an honest, probably even more lucrative living, especially when you consider long term risk of being arrested. They choose not to. Poor people are not to blame for this savagery.

leeroyjenkins11 5y ago

I would say in large part it's because theft is acceptable in a lot of places. When people rob high end retail in CA, or when places decriminalize retail theft under $999. Sometimes people steal out of necessity, most times they steal out of convenience. Having a strong culture that treats theft as a shameful act and caring for others is what breeds the culture you describe.

Fatnino 5y ago

I taken it your machine is connected directly to the internet with no firewall and your admin password is password.