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Like Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union when people stole power lines. Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when eve
by burnt-resistor 1y ago
Like Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union when people stole power lines.
Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when every crook is out to steal catalytic converters from cars at people's homes, that's pretty bad.
Macroeconomic and microeconomic cannibalism are further signs of a trend towards decay and decline. Oh and school shootings and mass shootings. And a lack of functional, universal healthcare. It will take far more, like the garbage not being picked up, for major reforms, but it will also take a charismatic leader really on the side of the ordinary people for that to manifest. Another "FDR".
- greesil 1y agoOr just have a police state. Problem solved.
- mycall 1y agoDoesn't work, it just makes corruption more probable.
- chillingeffect 1y agoLaws dont say what can't happen. They say what the people who are allowed to break laws are allowed to do. It's called norm asymmetry.
- gdbsjjdn 1y agoImpossible to tell if this is satire
- hedora 1y agoRepeat until true: No metal has been stolen due to inflated pricing, job creation and factory construction are at all time highs, and downtown Chicago is a mixture of killing fields and charnel pits.
- greesil 1y agoYou could just ask :) Nobody can take a fascism joke these days. For some reason.
- tomrod 1y agoWhat's the going rate for bribes/fees/"tips" these days?
- victorbjorklund 1y agoOh yea. Nothing is ever stolen or defrauded in russia.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y ago>”Or just have a police state. Problem solved.” The you can send the copper thieves to work in the copper mines. That’s killing two birds with one stone right there!
- jopsen 1y agoDeploy the national guard to protect Californian highway guardrails! :)
- hedora 1y agoApparently the tariffs are at least partially to blame. According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive. I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series). FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule, and also set the stage for the scientific and economic advances in the post war period (including the moon landing, internet, etc, etc).
- andrepd 1y agoIt's a book, the TV series is an adaptation. Also, I'm an FDR fanboy but I still think it's rather a stretch to pretend he single handedly won WWII (or even that he single handedly defeated the great depression).
- hedora 1y agoIt’s possible an “average” president could have done OK, but I’m comparing to his predecessors. It’s hard to see how the isolationist macroeconomic geniuses that created the Great Depression would have built a war machine that could have won the war. I doubt they would have wanted to. It’s more likely that, like the Bush family, they were supporting Hitler behind the scenes during the war. That crowd’s running the US today. We need another FDR.
- mystraline 1y agoFDR was an appeasement to the business community in opposition to IWW, socialists, and communists. Not too much later, is when you get 'National Day' or Labor day, as opposition to international workers day, or May 1. FDR was just a moderate capitalist. But still a capitalist. Money/power gets more money/power.
- tormeh 1y ago[flagged]
- gcanyon 1y agoPower line theft was my first thought as well. I was just at the FDR library and one thing that stood out was how uncertain/experimental he was: we think of FDR's work as "public works, new deal, social security, WWII" but per the library he came in basically saying, "this is a hard problem and what we've been doing hasn't worked. so we'll try other things, and some of them will work, some won't. we'll do more of the former and less of the latter over time and get better at fixing this."