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Apparently 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 attract

by hedora 1y ago

Apparently 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 ago
It'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 ago
  It’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 ago
    FDR 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]
      - bongodongobob 1y ago
        An actual centrist looks a bit like Bernie Sanders. A centrist in the US is a moderate republican that "is fiscally conservative but socially liberal". Ends up looking a bit like a libertarian, so I kinda get it.
        DaSHacka 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 1y ago
        Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - sellmesoap 1y ago
        [flagged]
        slater 1y ago
        Much like the German Democratic Republic was democratic, and the DPRK is democratic, too.
        sellmesoap 1y ago
rKarpinski 1y ago
> (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) The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better. > FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated. May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.
- komali2 1y ago
  Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me. But also they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil - isn't that what triggered the invasion in the first place?
  - vintermann 1y ago
    Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.
  - baud147258 1y ago
    > they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil Didn't they were receiving oil (and other raw materials) from the URSS beforehand? edit: found a figure on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic_relations_(1934%E2%80%931941)#Soviet_provision_of_raw_materials_and_other_help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic... I don't know if that'd cover the war needs in oil of Germany, but once they had started a war with the soviet, they had no choice but to try to get to the Caucasus for the oil.
WalterBright 1y ago
> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. American industrial power saved the planet from Nazism and Japanese imperial rule. US industry supplied all the Allies (including the Soviet Union) with large quantities of everything needed to fight with, on a global scale. That had nothing to do with the New Deal. The Depression ended with the flood of foreign money pouring into the US to buy armaments.
- yuliyp 1y ago
  > The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. This is categorically wrong: the WW2 GDP boom started in 1939, by which point we'd already been out of the great depression (1936 was the first year that Real GDP was above the previous peak of 1929). Regardless, that point is only 6 years after the New Deal took effect, meaning a delay of 10 years would require reversing the flow of time. Source: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=GDPCA https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=GDPCA (I can't figure out how to hotlink to a specific time range so you'll have to plug it in yourself).
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn. "It is a measure of the severity of the preceding contraction that, despite such sharp rises, money income was 17 per cent lower in 1937 than at the preceding peak eight years earlier and real income was only 3 per cent higher. Since population had grown nearly 6 per cent in the interim, per capita output was actually lower at the cyclical peak in 1937 than at the preceding cyclical peak. There are only two earlier examples in the recorded annual figures, 1895 and 1910, when per capita output was less than it was at the preceding cyclical peaks in 1892 and 1907, respectively. Furthermore, the contraction that followed the 1937 peak, though not especially long, was unusually deep and proceeded at an extremely rapid rate, the only occasion in our record when one deep depression followed immediately on the heels of another." pg 493
sleepybrett 1y ago
The copper theft has been going on since well before the tariffs. For a time it was hard to find a ev charger that still had a cable in seattle, this was like pandemic era. The problem is that we have extreme wealth inequality, such that it makes sense for people to go through the trouble of stealing fucking scrap metal.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money. You have a lot of countries objectively poorer than the conditions in where cats are routinely stolen in the US that don't devolve into utter lawlessness.
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.
    - 1y ago
burnt-resistor 1y ago
> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive. Yep. Is partially why I don't live in Austin anymore, because the police there are actively underfunded, short by ~250, and the police left do have really don't care about reducing violent crime and DGAF about property crime. > 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). The opposite is a Trump and becoming more like Mexico or Brazil where corruption is endemic, the masses in favelas, the government DGAF about ordinary people because it's all about enriching the already rich, and the middle class live in fortresses and are constantly worried about going out in public to be robbed by roving gangs.

by hedora 1y ago

andrepd 1y ago

It'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 ago
It’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 ago
  FDR 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]
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      An actual centrist looks a bit like Bernie Sanders. A centrist in the US is a moderate republican that "is fiscally conservative but socially liberal". Ends up looking a bit like a libertarian, so I kinda get it.
      - DaSHacka 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 1y ago
        Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - sellmesoap 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - slater 1y ago
        Much like the German Democratic Republic was democratic, and the DPRK is democratic, too.
        sellmesoap 1y ago

rKarpinski 1y ago

> (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) The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better. > FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.

burnt-resistor 1y ago
The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated. May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.
komali2 1y ago
Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me. But also they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil - isn't that what triggered the invasion in the first place?
- vintermann 1y ago
  Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.
- baud147258 1y ago
  > they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil Didn't they were receiving oil (and other raw materials) from the URSS beforehand? edit: found a figure on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic_relations_(1934%E2%80%931941)#Soviet_provision_of_raw_materials_and_other_help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic... I don't know if that'd cover the war needs in oil of Germany, but once they had started a war with the soviet, they had no choice but to try to get to the Caucasus for the oil.

WalterBright 1y ago

> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. American industrial power saved the planet from Nazism and Japanese imperial rule. US industry supplied all the Allies (including the Soviet Union) with large quantities of everything needed to fight with, on a global scale. That had nothing to do with the New Deal. The Depression ended with the flood of foreign money pouring into the US to buy armaments.

yuliyp 1y ago
> The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. This is categorically wrong: the WW2 GDP boom started in 1939, by which point we'd already been out of the great depression (1936 was the first year that Real GDP was above the previous peak of 1929). Regardless, that point is only 6 years after the New Deal took effect, meaning a delay of 10 years would require reversing the flow of time. Source: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=GDPCA https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=GDPCA (I can't figure out how to hotlink to a specific time range so you'll have to plug it in yourself).
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn. "It is a measure of the severity of the preceding contraction that, despite such sharp rises, money income was 17 per cent lower in 1937 than at the preceding peak eight years earlier and real income was only 3 per cent higher. Since population had grown nearly 6 per cent in the interim, per capita output was actually lower at the cyclical peak in 1937 than at the preceding cyclical peak. There are only two earlier examples in the recorded annual figures, 1895 and 1910, when per capita output was less than it was at the preceding cyclical peaks in 1892 and 1907, respectively. Furthermore, the contraction that followed the 1937 peak, though not especially long, was unusually deep and proceeded at an extremely rapid rate, the only occasion in our record when one deep depression followed immediately on the heels of another." pg 493

sleepybrett 1y ago

The copper theft has been going on since well before the tariffs. For a time it was hard to find a ev charger that still had a cable in seattle, this was like pandemic era. The problem is that we have extreme wealth inequality, such that it makes sense for people to go through the trouble of stealing fucking scrap metal.

mschuster91 1y ago
IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money. You have a lot of countries objectively poorer than the conditions in where cats are routinely stolen in the US that don't devolve into utter lawlessness.
Telemakhos 1y ago
If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.
  - 1y ago

burnt-resistor 1y ago

> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive. Yep. Is partially why I don't live in Austin anymore, because the police there are actively underfunded, short by ~250, and the police left do have really don't care about reducing violent crime and DGAF about property crime. > 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). The opposite is a Trump and becoming more like Mexico or Brazil where corruption is endemic, the masses in favelas, the government DGAF about ordinary people because it's all about enriching the already rich, and the middle class live in fortresses and are constantly worried about going out in public to be robbed by roving gangs.