A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.
The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us.
Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed.
Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike.
Atomization and alienation have taken root.
The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
We're heading to the failure of multiple systems, including food production and power, due to climate change and the increasing frequency of disastrous weather systems.
"Greed is good" has been a value promulgated by the elites for a few generations now.
Things are getting more expensive faster than wage growth, especially basics and things needed for economic upward mobility (housing, education, healthcare, etc).
Identity politics and wedge issues are dividing people who otherwise have similar interests.
Modern life is anxiety and depression inducing, creating a rise in interpersonal conflict.
Our government is no longer accountable to the people or representative of them in any real way unless you're in the top quintile of wealth/income (and that is generous).
All of these things, and many more, are ripping apart the social contract. People no longer feel invested in the wellbeing of the places in which they reside or the governmental and societal systems they are a part of. Instead, they merely endure them with resentment. This won't end well.
I think some of these things ring true but you missed a few obvious ones, most of this stuff has been going on in California which is being governed into oblivion by its leaders:
- California is getting very soft on crime recently, people now realize they can rob and steal what they want and there are zero consequences for it, this has lead to almost a complete collapse of order in most major california cities(see excessive smash and grabs($1B stolen in a few weeks in LA/SF bay area) and skyrocketing drug use(SF has more addicts than high school students) and homelessness, along with car jackings and robberies). I live in california and my family has been here for over a hundred years so I have seen its rapid deterioration in the past 3-4 years.
- Complete abandonment of any type of positive morality from the media or any leaders.
- Extreme division due to both right and left moving farther from the center.
- Sky high college costs have made things very difficult for people that are in college and those leaving the system are left with life crushing debt.
- Housing and rent are at all time highs due to excessive money printing and over generous govt. handouts the past 1-2 years.
- Jobs are available and are plentiful there are just not enough workers for the positions or qualified people for the higher earning ones, in addition alot of people were making more sitting around getting checks and enhanced unemployment than working at the lower wage positions.
- I traveled to multiple states over the last year(Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon) and this stuff is not happening everywhere, its mainly in CA and NYC and other high density urban areas.
> - I traveled to multiple states over the last year(Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon) and this stuff is not happening everywhere, its mainly in CA and NYC and other high density urban areas.
You are claiming this isn't happening in those states, but especially New Mexico and Oregon, ... it is definitely happening in those states, so I question your experience with the other ones. Out of those, maybe Utah is not having those problems? Even as an island, Hawaii has had huge problems for decades, perhaps the worst (housing affordability, homelessness, rising crime rate).
Because of mandatory minimum sentences keeping people in jail for a long time. Just because that’s a bad policy doesn’t necessarily mean that sending people to jail at all is a bad idea.
Do you somehow think that creating a containment system works in solving crime? It alienates and breeds recidivism. We can’t lock everyone up for life.
>Extreme division due to both right and left moving farther from the center
This says a lot about your position in what you imagine is the 'center'; the reality is that both sides are only moving further right. This has been happening for decades.
>the reality is that both sides are only moving further right. This has been happening for decades.
This is a false statement according to actual studies. Democrats have been moving further left at a higher rate than Republicans have been moving further right. [0] [1]
Before you say this study is outdated and therefore no longer relevant, you need to find a well regarded study that supports your original claim.
Homicide and violent crime _has_ increased nationwide, and not just in California or in cities with progressive DAs. Florida and Texas, two states that frequently compare themselves against California, saw a similar pattern where property crimes decreased in 2020, but violent crimes increased, and continued to increase in 2021.
I think some of the points in your comment may be valid, especially regarding extreme division, loss of societal trust, and growing inequality. Trust in police and in our institutions probably hit an all time low in 2020. But I think pointing purely to "progressive DAs" doesn't map to reality.
>- Housing and rent are at all time highs due to excessive money printing and over generous govt. handouts the past 1-2 years.
Actually, I think they're at all-time highs because you literally refuse to build anything except suburban hellscapes full of single-family houses made of ticky-tacky that all look just the same. I'm serious about this. California's recently-passed upzoning law is the only effective policy intervention for housing I've seen from your state in decades.
Seems like the problem in the US is there are pockets of society which have multi generational issues where the parents don’t know how to teach their kids to be successful since their lives have been a failure too. As well as an environment that normalises crime.
It seems extremely difficult to break this cycle without actually removing kids from their parents/friend groups.
Another complicating factor could be that the US has a more diverse population. Tribalism is hard to overcome, especially with a messy history of racism and oppression.
That is a really simple take on law and human behavior.
Are we really going to ignore all of our modern understanding of psychology to say "criminal bad, criminal deserve jail"?
There's the real problem about everything - making judgments and decisions about the world based on emotions, not facts. You should care what other people say, especially the people who study things scientifically. I'm sure it sounds great and judicious to your enraged lizard brain to lock someone up and throw away the key, but there's a lot more to consider than what makes you feel good.
> The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
I think we're past "nuclear family" at this point. Getting married is actively discouraged by our legal system.
True. I certainly am not. Definitely part of Atomization. Large swathes of the country, especially the religious and conservative still buy into this mythos though.
>The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
It's not a "mythos", it's a fact that children raised in nuclear families have much better outcomes than those who are not [0]. Practically every sociological study confirms this.
Black children are the least likely to be raised in nuclear families in the US, and aligned with the study, are the most likely to suffer from health and mental/emotional/sociological issues.
It's recently become some weird leftist/neo-marxist talking point to subvert the "Western proscribed nuclear family". BLM had to remove this talking point from their website after it was widely criticized [1].
We're not talking about the nuclear family in opposition to single parents or blended families. We're talking about it in opposition to extended and clan families. Which is why I explicitly mentioned extended ("broader") families and communities. Obviously having a mom and a dad is good.
>We're talking about it in opposition to extended and clan families.
Which are specifically covered in the CDC report that I listed above.
"Children living in blended (i.e.,
stepparent), cohabiting, unmarried
biological or adoptive, extended, and other families were generally
disadvantaged relative to children in nuclear families, and were, for the most part, comparable to children living in single-parent families regarding most
health status and access to care
measures."
> Which is why I explicitly mentioned extended ("broader") families and communities.
Those "broader" families and communities have unfortunately been failing Black Americans for generations.
>Come on dude, use context clues.
Come on dude, use reading comprehension. At least you admitted here for all to see that you'd rather be a virtue signaler over being a data driven adult.
Again, I was not opposing the nuclear family to families without mothers and fathers. This is a misreading of what I am saying and clearly you are just engaging in the discussion to grind your axe about single parent households in black communities.
As I said, I agree that having a mom and dad is good. It produces better outcomes than having one or neither. Go grind your axe elsewhere.
It shouldn't be either-A-or-B; there are plenty of families whose day-to-day operation is as a nuclear family, but who have regular (more than once-a-week) contact with extended relatives. I don't think that's what this is describing; an "extended" family here is where the group of people who go to sleep every night and wake up every morning in the same house are more than just mom and dad and the kids.
> are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root.
Is the root of this issue really "in" the population? Or is the population merely responding to a set of external circumstances?
I'm uneasy when someone says something like "weed out of a population." Many dark journeys have started with this idea.
> However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
From my perspective, this erosion started showing itself during Occupy Wall Street. Our entire economy was set on fire and very few, if any, people were actually held responsible for that. They were bailed out, and everyone was expected to move on.
If I had a sense that something needed to be "weeded out" of my society, I know that's where I would start.
I wonder how much of this correlates with the drop in religious participation. Religion, for better or worse, was a useful tool for stigmatizing bad behavior and incentivizing good behavior
Do we have any evidence that religion reduces bad behavior? We know some of the most religious countries (Mexico, Syria) are relatively more dangerous than more secular countries like France or China. Is there a better data source to look at here?
You would have to adjust for all external influences. Mexico and Syria are mostly dangerous because of failed USA policies (drug war, war on terror) than their internal cultures
"Approximately 13 percent of the population in Sweden experience problems in their own residential area with crime, violence or vandalism. It is one of the highest proportions in Europe."
I think it has to do with a purpose that religion served = values core to the identity of everyone in the nation.
Modern America has no common history. America has no common ethnicity, no common roots and now no common religion.
The least religious nations are often ethnically homogeneous (Sweden, Korea) or have an incredibly strong national cultural identity of what it means to belong (France, Singapore).The US had neither, and then took down the one thing that held together 80% of the US as of 2000. ie. Christianity (mostly protestant-derived)
And I'm a Hindu-by-birth Atheist immigrant. So, I don't have any vested interest in the restoration of Europe-derived Christianity within the US.
To me, the closest thing to a common american identity is a combination of the following 3:
* Protestant values of hard work, merit and family
* Colorblind-live-and-let-live immigrant melting pot
* Capitalistic enterprising nature of shooting for the moon and that anyone can be a billionaire/President.
Now, these might not be perfect, but it was the closest thing to national values that 80% could get buy in on.
However, populist politics of the last 10 years and the change in wealth distribution post 2000 has seen wholesale rejection of almost all of these values from both the populist left and the populist right. As the nation continues fracturing, the resentment towards your fellow countrymen grows to the point that you feel no civic duty towards your fellow countrymen, and maybe even take joy in looting them.
Religion unites as long as it is homogeneous. High level of religious beliefs would not help much, if they didn't unify people through a collective identity. So in this case, high levels of religious participation would not have helped, because there would still never be any agreement on a common religious identity given the degree of religious heterogeneity.
On an aside, I always find it funny when people say that countries that tolerate heterogenous identities such as the US or India are discriminatory or racist. Yeah, as if you with your 95+% cultural/religious/ethnic homogeneity have any right to speak about diversity. You can already see Europe coming apart at its seams with a small influx of culturally diverse middle-eastern refugees. The friction you see, is a result of an open system that allows each of these incompatible cultural identities to get a voice in the national discourse.
America's always been a "credo" nation, and has always been pretty explicit about what its credo is. "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
In other words: freedom, equality, justice, democracy, and self-determination.
America's relationship with religion has always been complex. The first amendment simultaneously guarantees the free practice of religion and enshrines its separation from the state; as a government, the U.S. cannot make any law that preferences a particular religion. Many of the founders were Deists, which is a religion that simultaneously accepts the existence of God but also relies upon empiricism, rationality, and individual thought to divine His will. America is also explicitly not Protestant, and the dominant religion varies a lot from place to place. I grew up in New England, which has a Puritan early history but now is populated by largely Catholic Irish & Italian immigrants. My mom's childhood friends in NYC all seemed to be Jewish. In Utah, it's mostly Mormon.
I'd argue that the main reason America is falling apart is that we've forgotten those core values of liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and self-determination. These have always existed in some tension, but right now we're not doing a particularly good job of any of them. Instead the focus is on capitalism, virtue-signalling, protection from outsiders, preferencing your in-group, forcing your particular morality on others, and many other very human but very un-American activities.
Americans have quite a bit of shared history and culture. It's quite bizarre, not to mention factually incorrect, that you would say religion [of which is supposed to be completely separate from the state so that Americans wouldn't by default be defined by their religion] is what held together 80% of the US.
And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell. That's not going to reduce tensions in that regard, that's for sure.
There is only circumstantial evidence but the story sounds plausible. If things continue like this, I'd wager that trump will return in 24
Really disappointed by this comment, totally uncalled for and extremely disrespectful, and in case you were living on the moon the lockdowns have been very hard on alot of people, see skyrocketing suicide and overdose numbers from these actions.
The lockdowns are in fact nothing to do with the virus, and instead are part of a scheme to hide the true nature of contemporary capitalism? Please ...
Oh, wait, now we're onto "it wasn't just the lockdowns. They set up the lockdowns knowing that some months later, they would inject billons of dollars into the economy in a way that would, GASP, benefit the already rich at least as much as the not-already-rich"? That's the claim now?
Look, I get it, the "bailouts" distributed huge sums of money and lots of it went to people who, viewed through the lens of some sort of moral common sense, should not have received it. That's unfortunately the price you pay for a big country with a big economy. Trying to ensure that none of it was misdirected would have ensured nobody got any at all.
That's not the (only) alternative to the paranoid style.
It's possible to believe that government (like all human institutions) can be deeply flawed and corrupt while simultaneously still doing things that in aggregate are beneficial to the whole of society.
This is a very insulting comment, and seems to have been prompted by practically nothing at all. I'd urge you to consider how your condescending attitude appears to anyone who doesn't agree with you.
I generally try not to be condescending, and seek to take seriously the opinions of people who do not agree with me. However ...
> And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell.
to even mention this "theory" as if it had any credibility whatsoever crosses a line where I'm not willing to cede good faith, sensible thinking etc., and can only react with dismissal and condescension.
"And that ... Theory about the earth not really being round but actually flat but the illuminati prefer that we think it is round because reasons ..." is in the same ballpark.
I think you need to get your knee jerk reactions under control. Just because someone says something that seems outrageous to you doesn't mean you should just jump directly to insults. Moreover, the parent comment did not endorse this theory, it merely noted that the theory "is spreading quite quickly... as far as I can tell".
If you're interested in debunking the parent comment, perhaps reading it carefully and responding to the points would work better. This could potentially open people's eyes and even make them agree with you. Instead you have opted to go for divisive insults, which likely reinforces the belief of anyone who is inclined to disagree with you.
If someone on HN posts my example quote about flat earth theory, do you think that anyone is under an obligation to calmly explain just why flat earth theory is wrong?
Of course, you could claim that flat earth theory is so disproven that there's no need to even bother, whereas "the lockdowns are to stop public unrest" theory might have something to it, so if I want to criticize it, I should explain all the evidence that says it's false.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree. From my POV, this idea is so utterly and obviously false prima facie that I'm under no more obligation to explain my dismissal of it than I would be in the flat earth case.
In the original comment you implied that the parent lacked critical thinking skills and mocked the idea that lockdowns even exist. I hope you can see how that is insulting, especially considering that in a later reply you said "The lockdowns have been hard, yes indeed". It kind of leads me to believe that you are the one arguing in bad faith here.
And I am not saying you are "obligated" to do anything. What I am saying is that by reacting the way you did, you are contributing to the hardening of beliefs and the polarization of this issue. If you want to live in a world where "utterly and obviously false" ideas continue to gain traction, then by all means keep insulting anyone who you disagree with.
I didn't mock the idea that lockdowns existed. I mocked the idea that they were of a nature that could possibly allow them to function as part of a cover up of the sort being claimed.
Lockdowns also took place in nations around the earth with entirely different economic and governmental systems to the US, so unless you're a believer in some sort of hidden global order that managed to get the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Germans and the US to all do more or less the same thing, then the existence of lockdowns seems to A LOT more to do with a virus than some cover up of contemporary capitalism.
There's a limit to how much politeness we need to extend to edge-dwelling ideas. Most people (not all, I know) on HN would include flat earth theory as stuff that doesn't require politeness (though perhaps a little sympathy ... I dunno). The question is where do you draw that line, and my POV, we already draw it far too close to people who have bad-faith reasons for proposing, publicizing and discussing a bunch of ideas.
Ok, fair enough. To be honest though, this quote that you just posted:
"Lockdowns also took place in nations around the earth with entirely different economic and governmental systems to the US, so unless you're a believer in some sort of hidden global order that managed to get the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Germans and the US to all do more or less the same thing, then the existence of lockdowns seems to A LOT more to do with a virus than some cover up of contemporary capitalism."
That makes a ton of sense and is a great argument! I wish you had replied to the original comment with this instead. I know you aren't arguing in bad faith, and I apologize for being a stickler on this.
> And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell.
Maybe you think you can mention "that ... theory" without endorsing it in any way. I say that even mentioning this completely bogus garbage in a way that doesn't say that it's completely bogus garbage is effectively endorsing it. That's just the way communication systems work, unfortunately.
I'm not implying that you believe "that ... theory". I am saying that it's essentially insane, has no credibility, and is spreading only because people mention it in this sort of "offhand" way ("oh, I didn't mean anything").
Outrageous behavior is being glorified because it drives clicks.
So many of these Alex Jones wannabe 'anti-maskers invade a store protesters', schoolboard meeting ravers get publicized because they get people fired up and drive clicks and ad revenue.
It's normalizing that the way to handle disagreement is to act out.
I'm sorry to say that this onslaught of terrible behavior isn't because people are tired of lockdowns, it's because it's great for driving ad traffic & getting $ from voters.
There’s another explanation that I find fits better: that the last ~70 years have been an extraordinary confluence of good luck and peak resource extraction that is no longer viable going forward. Scarcity was always going to become a thing again, and Covid pulled that crash forward by a decade.
There’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle now. We’re going to be paying the price for the corporate excess of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s for the next few decades in the form of climate change, disinformation, authoritarianism and the ensuing civil unrest. Thanks to the combination of the last three we will continue to be unable to muster a coherent response to any problem going forward.
Maybe we can have some good times again eventually, but the next decade or two are going to be rough.
Having the community police its members can only be done with the proper external incentives to that community. The times in history where clans or family managed their own delinquents where also times where the clan or family as a whole was called to pay for the damage.
What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.
As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.
Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.
Bingo. 'The community' ultimately does not own what's on the train. There is no communal interest in protecting the goods on the train; there may be an element of self preservation ("If the train is robbed, I can't buy the goods later!"), but there is little sense of communal preservation in a society that promotes individualism. The same thing applies to the thieves- anti-collective behavior is inevitable in a society that does not meet the needs of every individual.
> It’s not just in LA, theft and vandalism have gone way up on all the rail networks. My company is experiencing some of the worst loss numbers while in rail transit. We just announced that all transport carts will be welded shut and unwelded when it gets to the destination. Even locks aren’t enough.
Why do I feel like this would be the simplest solution to this problem, and in fact so simple it's likely to occur in the next few years...
...okay, reality check, even if the autopilots get good enough, it'll still be incredibly easy to whack a drone into the train's overhead wires if you have a big enough stick, and now they potentially have to fix the cable, or maybe a blown transformer. Right.
There are no overhead wires there. That's all Diesel-powered. Like most, or all freight tracks anyways? Maybe on the east coast, when shared with AMTRAK, or some local passenger network, if at all. Besides that, personally I wouldn't want to use any long sticks near any overhead wires. Brrrz, Brrrz, Brrrz
Reality check would be that the engines, or a 'caboose' would make an ideal drone carrier where they can reload. They'd also be the perfect beacon to follow, the same way tracks are laid out in very regular patterns. Anything which doesn't belong there?
How do you wack a flying drone? If it's in danger of hitting wires it can just fly higher? And how do you wield or even carry a 50m (150ft) or longer stick?. Do you mean shoot it down?
To be entirely honest I didn't think the scenario through. I was just thinking about the dystopian cyberpunk "that would be mad" of drones hanging around people trying to steal stuff from trains and didn't really envision what would really happen next.
Now I actually think about it (thanks), what would a drone be doing? Yelling really loudly? Getting footage of people's faces?
It's probably only a matter of time until drones end up equipped with taser units :/ (I honestly don't want to be around when they can actually shoot things...), but besides that I now realize they wouldn't really present a legitimate threat (yet). They'd just be very oversized mosquitoes.
I'd completely forgotten this is America though, where people can and do shoot at stuff they don't like and/or is annoying. That would be significantly more effective than a giant baseball bat (which would definitely look hilarious but be a lot less precise).
Noooo, that sounds awesome ;_; I really want to go build that :( (the non-napalm version)
FWIW it looks like a bunch of Russians had similar ideas 5 years ago and bolted a paintball gun to a drone (apparently with automatic targeting too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8igjcW39T4k
Do you ever think to yourself that we're gradually headed to some dystopia like in the movie Elysium? Where a growing underclass is relegated to a garbage planet while the elites escape to a satellite world? Or at least parts of our planet?
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
Yes, I think this very often. In fact, I think it is an inevitable future evolution of society. It will likely start out with the oceans - private islands and super yachts are being rapidly built and purchased by elites around the world.
If you're a pleb, like me, I think the best bet is to just hunker down, keep your head down, stay away from mentally ill types, and focus on getting very good at a useful skill. The elite will still need software engineers to build out the dystopia.
Are other cities that operate major Class I freight rail seeing the same looting issue, or is this just LA/UP "market disruption" that hasn't caught up with the rest of the country?
EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
Its hard to say with just anecdotes, but this random person says it's not just Los Angeles. Another commenter mentioned a conductor-friend out of Louisiana is seeing similar things.
I wonder if this is an evolution of the security cat & mouse game with shipping switching to have more random items people ordered directly to their home? Similar to porch-pirates being more of an issue today than 30 years ago.
>Before, if you broke into a container, you'd often find weird homogenous B2B stuff. Like a bunch of dog food.
but presumably the volume of b2c stuff being shipped over rail hasn't changed? after all, the b2c stuff has to get to customers somehow. Maybe a random assortment makes it a more attractive target due to the skinner box effect (ie. lootboxes).
If you open up a container going to a Walmart warehouse, it might be filled with massive blocks of bulky items of dubious fence value and can be difficult to dig to anything good. Even if you get something "good", having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash. And it's probably in a massive box that isn't easy to move and isn't easy to determine the contents of compared to others.
If you open up a container of UPS shipments, and you grab one random bag out of there-- there will be valuable consumer goods in it.
> having 30 pairs of Beats headphones isn't so personally useful or easy to unload for cash
Why would that be hard? eBay, craigslist, Facebook groups, and other platforms exist which can be used to facilitate the quick and easy offloading of stolen goods.
Instead of some number of Amazon packages with unknown contents going missing, cops and the recipient immediately know that $8k of headphones were stolen. It's obviously over the threshold of grand theft. Etc.
And then if anyone is poking around at secondary markets, you have a massive number of item X showing up new-in-box grey market in a zip code where a bunch of that item was stolen.
Compare to having 20 random consumer items, all stolen from different end-recipients. It's hard for any authority to know these items were stolen. It's hard to establish you stole them or were knowingly receiving stolen property. Even if they surmise that they're probably stolen, as far as they know you could have committed petty theft several times at unknown places.
I agree it's probably easier to fence individual stolen items.
OTOH, I think your argument assumes criminals are lacking creativity... and that the police care and/or have the resources to track $8K worth of headphones. If $8K of headphones are stolen, how many % of total headphones sold on eBay/CL/FB/etc. per month is that? Also, who says they have to offload all the headphones immediately? What's to prevent a "criminal network" or a single person from creating 20 different eBay accounts, each selling one pair - location: obviously not near where they were stolen from. Repeat process once per x months or just wait a few months until the heat is lower. Or perhaps pass the headphones on to a larger "criminal network" who can resell them all over the US. Also on eBay one could just say "shipping from northern California" when in fact they are located in Southern California - who will verify that? Also you could take a few pair to pawn shops... some might even take multiple pairs at once. Also someone could gift a bunch to friends/family. I'm sure there are tons of tricks criminals use to offload stolen goods.
I'm reminded of recent realisations in the evolution of whales. The great size and efficiency of whales came about due to increased ocean productivity --- more available food, though often at widely-separated distances, an efficient feeding mechansism (lunge feeding), which could onboard vast quantities of krill in a single act, and the lack of any credible predators, allowing great whales to focus their evolutionary specialisation on long-distance speed and efficiency.
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
It also reminds me of certain episodes of the The History of Rome and The History of Byzantium podcasts where they depict the collapse of complex systems when the breakdown of security occurred.
During times when Roman security was good - the economy could develop complex systems of trade, which developed coinage, mathematics, architecture, and all sorts of specialists and artisans.
When security was no longer reliable due to the influx of raiders, piracy, and hoards of barbarians, all of those complex activities ceased.
The most complex aspects of society are always the first to collapse when security disappears.
...and eventually a "fend for yourself" attitude permeates society - which becomes a feedback loop, and it's no longer the externalities that are destroying security - but internal actors.
We were lucky to have a safe and stable society for so long that we are shocked to see mass looting. Once it's gone though, it is takes generations to rebuild that.
For further parallels with Rome, I strongly advise Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, which develops the idea that empires and diseases co-evolve with one another. Another lesson from history which seems increasingly significant now.
Throughout most of history, any given culture was prone to call any surrounding culture "barbarians", or equivalent terms. The meaning was more akin to "foreigner", though there were also often connotations of ethnic or nationalistic superiority.
This was the case amongst the Romans, previously the Greeks, also Persians and other tribes and cultures of the Middle East / Western Asia. And similarly in China.
Nationalistic identity and senses of superiorty may be wholly unjustified on factual basis, and I tend to think that they are unjustified myself. They're also highly prevalent across times and cultures until quite recent times.
This is only partially accurate. The Romans and Persian, for example, did not consider the other, barbarians. Same between the Greeks/Egyptians/Carthaginians/Jews/etc...
What defined a "barbarian" group was that they we undeveloped scattered tribes - without central political power. They usually lacked written codified laws, formal political assembly, ambassadors, etc...
The Gauls, the Celts, the Germanic tribes, the Turkic tribes, etc... They all were considered "barbarians" because of their tribal community focused political structure. Few centralized buildings existed, lower literacy rates, etc...
These differences were very apparent when a soldier would leave from Rome or Constantinople, and then find himself conquering a Gaulic settlement where the biggest buildings were still made of wood.
Of course, as the centuries went on, these tribal communities became more and more centralize and organized until those differences disappeared.
The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;" the alleged root of the word βάρβαρος, which is an echomimetic or onomatopoeic word. In various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians, to deride other Greek tribes and states (such as Epirotes, Eleans, Macedonians, Boeotians and Aeolic-speakers) and also fellow Athenians in a pejorative and politically motivated manner.
No, I mean literally hoards of barbarians from as far away as East of the Ural mountains.
The Huns, for example, were not neighboring peoples. They were hoards of horse archers that came from, literally, a thousand miles beyond the Roman border to pillage.
Their destruction of the Roman borders is what drove other Germanic tribes to flee west, further destroying Roman stability.
Wonder how organized that looting is. Is just individuals over many months or years, or a large gang over a few weeks time.
On the one hand it’s shocking to see it in LA in US. On the other I am surprised it’s not happening more often.
In large cities, some of my acquaintances had to get PO boxes as their packages kept getting stolen. But why bother wasting time going house to house, when you can hit a whole train car at once.
It seems pretty organized on the backend distribution. [1]
"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."
To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.
"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."
So in this case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.
When I was in jail I met dozens of people who have done this. None of it was organized that I was aware of, it was just opportunistic. Some friends would get together and say "Let's go wait for a train and bust open some containers." There are literally thousands of places where it is possible to do this.
They do not. Also as the industry has moved toward Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) which allows for running trains that are much much longer than they used to be (up to 2 miles+) with much less staffing. So even if there was someone to do this (and there isn't; conductors are busy with other things), they'll have a lot of train to cover.
Excellent questions. Perhaps because the people were in jail with me and were clearly regularly getting caught and prosecuted led to any fledgling ideas of organization being disrupted?
There is almost certainly an organized crime element interacting with the individuals performing the looting. Typically, the organized elements are at the "fencing" level, where they are paying the individuals (almost certainly mostly drug addicts) small fractions of the resale value for various items in cash/drugs.
This is a standard pattern in areas with lax law enforcement, which these days is all of California, and also places like Manhattan. Political leaders in the LA, SF, Manhattan areas have bought into the Bolshevik era explanation of crime being caused by social injustice, and therefore see criminals as victims of a corrupt society rife with inequality. This kind of chaos is an inevitable result. Treating criminals like hapless victims acting out of desperation ignores the fact that many have agency, are intelligent, and make cost/benefit calculations that completely change when they know they won't get prosecuted if they are caught.
I can see that, yeah. I imagine them, after all the adrenaline dies down, sitting around the fire, swapping stories and bartering —- “two epi pens for that golf club?”. Some staring into the distance, wondering about their life choices after ending up with four
identical waffle makers.
I was wondering the same thing about seeing the aerial footage in the Twitter thread.
I don’t even know that amount of stuff could be opened, filtered for valuables, and transported within a few hours time without dozens of people and some mid-size cargo trucks.
This seems like enough organized logistic planning that a bunch of homeless people or youth gangs would not be able to pull off at this level.
It’s minimally above bike theft. Same tools. If the train goes slow enough/stops, start cracking open containers and throw as much on the ground as you can while you can.
It’s not the LAPD’s role to get involved with this, but instead this responsibility falls upon special agents dedicated to these train lines. Their HQ is in Omaha Nebraska.
In California, all peace officers have statewide authority, but generally won't be tasked with action outside of where there agency has primary responsibility, except for pursuit or formally-requested mutual aid.
Those trains must be stalled there for long periods of time. I can't imagine they're robbing moving trains, but I could be wrong as thieves often prove to be very resourceful
I don't really understand what is happening here. Why is the ground completely covered in packages? Do thieves just break into the passing train compartments and start throwing out packages?
The trains are forced to stop at this accessible location sometimes, just outside the rail yard. They don’t stop for long, so the strategy is to hop on, cut a container open, and throw as much stuff to the ground as you can before the train starts moving again. Then you hop down and look through your spoils for items of value.
Hint: look for “lithium ion battery device inside” warning labels.
So if the train cars, or the containers thee packages are kept in within the train cars, were at least so secure that they prevented access for say an hour or two, then this likely wouldn't happen?
What is this, open crates or sacks of packages, in traincars locked with a small padlock?
A battery-powered bolt cutter is pretty powerful. Containers are no bank safes because that would make them too heavy and most places are not as lawless as this.
Padlocks are easy to cut, a bigger padlock just needs a bigger tool. Some companies apparently start welding their containers shut, which raises the bar for thieves significantly (now they need a grinder and more time).
> What is this, open crates or sacks of packages, in traincars locked with a small padlock?
Yes, pretty much. Although in many cases it’s not even a padlock, just a tamper-evident seal device with a serial number matching the paperwork for that container:
So the thieves just lurk around the area, waiting for trains to come to a pause, and then break open the containers, I guess the containers are not very secure? And there's minimal patrols? It just seems like extraordinary 'easy pickings'.
Turns out it's pretty tricky to make a padlock secure against bolt cutters. Of course improving the security of the lock would soon lead to thieves cutting off the locking bars on the container instead.
It doesn't have to be the lock that's secured. What about a hinge mechanism which takes a programmable amount of time to open the container door? If it takes 10 minutes for the door to open, the lock doesn't matter as much, since the thieves have a very limited amount of time before the trains start moving again, apparently.
Those are standardized containers standardized which are made in the millions as cheap as possible. That stuff needs to work, think of all the means of transport where it is used (vessels, trains, aircraft), be accessible for inspections (customs) and so on. The costs to secure and upgrade the containers for the whole system is probably a lot higher than accepting a small percentage of stolen parcel.
That sounds like it could be quite error prone. If it's electronic, what about power failures? If mechanical, sounds like lots of intricate machined parts which will wear down over time.
Time locks have been around for more than 100 years, I'm pretty confident that if something like this was desired by the powers that be, it would have been implemented. What I'm assuming is stopping it aren't the engineering challenges, but the fact that currently it's cheaper to let the thefts happen than it is to mitigate them.
I wonder what the cost of engineering secure containers would be vs. addressing the societal problems in the USA that lead to situations like this would be.
Containers are secure in the sense that you can tell when you receive them whether someone has been inside them (and had the opportunity to change their contents). They are not secure in the sense that they prevent people from entering them.
It helps with customs, but it's a big deal for private businesses too. Before containers, you effectively had to have one trusted person's eyes on the cargo at all time -- and still people along the way lightened the load as they handled the stuff. It was almost considered part of the compensation for a longshoreman.
With tamper-evident containers, you have a trusted person watch the container being loaded and locked, and then a trusted person watch as its unloaded at its final destination, and you don't have to care what happens at every point in between.
Don't think you would want to be walking around with someone else's package. Taking just the item gives some plausible deniability and there is probably no way to find the actual package that an item was taken from at that scale.
The stakes remain unchanged, because the stakes are the packages.
Since there can't be that much profit in this activity, I think it's reasonable to assume that a lot of the people responsible are doing it just because it's easy.
It is surreal to see this in a country where the police and “justice” system is extremely trigger happy and wants to lock everyone up for any reason they can get away with.
US is a big place. That means it's possible to get a steady stream of stories of innocent people getting arrested/killed by the police, and have jurisdictions that turn a blind eye to property crime.
It is funny to see comments like these in this thread. After the events of the last few years, I guess Americans are finding out what it is like to be Indian on the internet and having to defend every piece of crazy news about the country. Note, I am not advocating for news like this to not be published, just remember that countries without even a semblance of a free press are going to report a lot fewer of these.
They're two aspects of the exact same problem. Stopping and prosecuting real crime, while preserving the rights of the innocent, is a very difficult job. When police are criticized for failure in one aspect, they respond by closing ranks and doing even less of the other aspect. Criticize the level of crime and they respond by finding some easy targets to round up and pin charges on. Criticize their overreach, and they respond with a working strike and lawless police riots.
Succumbing to individual incentives, it's easier to focus on easier-to-handle perps and conduct organized militaryesque "operations"... just like it's easier to run roughshod over the rights of the accused by assuming they're guilty and doling out extrajudicial punishment. Neither one means doing their job better.
Ultimately it's a complete failure of accountability. Accountability of police organizations to their employers, the community, to effectively do what they are deputized to do. As well as the failure to bind police under the overarching law, both civil and criminal, like everyone else. The problem is not deep set and everywhere, but rather distributed because we're only seeing the cherry picked worst examples of both sides. But we need to seriously up our systems of accountability if anybody is going to have any faith in our institutions going forward.
Soft on crime policies like restorative justice simply attract crime. No consequences means no deterrent. It’s not surprising this happens in LA -
George Gascon is the DA and he’s facing increasing support for his recall (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/liberal-beverly-hill...).
How the heck is crime attractive? Why are you not attracted to this crime? Why am I not attracted to it as I sit working from home for a tech company?
I don't think crime is attractive, it isn't something that people want to do in a developed society. There are plenty of crimes I can commits and get away with but I am not attracted to doing them.
I’ve read that the magnitude of punishment has less of a deterrent effect on crime compared to the certainty of receiving punishment at all. Softer consequences that you will probably face, as in parts of Europe, are different from harder (on paper) consequences that you will likely escape under a progressive prosecutor in the US. See the Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Baltimore DAs for examples of this.
Edit: And don’t confuse American police/law enforcement, who are often harsh to say the least, with the legal arm of the criminal justice system. In many US cities the two are often at odds, as lax prosecutors and DAs release criminals almost as soon as police apprehend them. The Washington DC Chief of Police in particular complained about this recently.
It's still a consequence of general lack of policing or soft policing. Whether this is LAPDs responsibility or not, the overall society and its view on crime like this is a huge component to this occurring. We can't have nice things if people are just going around and stealing because "hey it doesn't hurt anyone".
Are the police notoriously soft in other broken states like South Africa? I don't think so - the intensity of policing seems poorly correlated to outcomes to me.
I despair every day at America's descent into a failed state. Is no one watching?
Apparently this is under the jurisdiction of the railroad police, not LAPD. Not clear to me what jurisdiction that falls under but sounds like it might be federal.
> Responsibility for policing the railroad right of way falls on Union Pacific Police... not local agencies like LAPD
So is 'Union Pacific Police' just a security company, or do you guys in the US actually have private businesses with their own police? Because that sounds pretty dystopian
Railroads emerged at a time when the only significant national law-enforcement entity would have been the military or US Marshall's service. (There were some customs and coast guard operations, also the postal police dating to 1772, before the United States declared their independence from England.)
Railroads operated across town or city, county, and state boundaries. They had a highly distinctive geography --- the linear alignment of tracks. And multi-jurisdictional law enforcement with competing interests would have been (and remains) problematic.
So railroads provided (or contracted, often through the infamous Pinkerton Agency) their own security serivce. Many railroad police have full law-enforcement police and arrest powers.
Note that there are other businesses and operations with some similar capabilities. A ship's captain traditionally had extraordinary powers when at sea, many hotels have or had house detectives, the US Postal Service as noted has its inspector service, and US Marshalls provide security aboard aircraft, though with partial coverage. Their presence and function received heightened awareness after the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
> Railroad police are certified state law enforcement officers with investigative and arrest powers both on and off railroad property in most states. They also have interstate law enforcement authority pursuant to federal law.
> The railroad police force dates to the mid-1800s, when the number of U.S. Marshals was insufficient to police America's growing rail network. Members were called Pinkertons, named after their originator, Alan Pinkerton. Today, each Class I railroad employs Special Agents across the country to protect America’s rail network.
It's just police who are probably paid by that business. That makes sense to me for a large business like this. If anything they're not doing a good enough job here.
Thanks for that. We have railroad police here in Australia as well, however it's all state government sponsored, I just hadn't heard of private enterprise funding police before.
We have them at colleges too. Sometimes you want full time real police who can send people to jail. I guess it depends on the environment and scale of crime to determine whether it's needed. If it is, then it may make sense to have the impacted business pay for it. Otherwise the city might not be able to commit enough resources.
Recall, if you will, that the rail lines are privately owned here. So you have privately owned trains, running on privately owned tracks that are on privately owned land ... it's not entirely clear what the legal framework for government police authority to take effect here is, at least not if you're concerned about the wierdness that would result from just saying "interstate commerce, put the FBI on it".
A state run police force I am forced to pay for that has qualified immunity sounds a lot more dystopian to me than a private security firm a company hires to protect its business infrastructure.
Funny I thought usually things feel more dystopian when the government is the one exerting the force or control. In this case it’s your perception that government law enforcement is routine where as private security firms are dystopian?
Lots of grey areas. But transportation and commerce affect everybody, and because there's big ticket issues at risk it becomes a political and practical priority.
You need a District Attorney willing to actively go after these kinds of suspects. In my experience the police don't really do anything about thefts unless they happen to catch the perpetrator in the act. My family had our car stolen from our driveway and they did virtually nothing to try and recover it. In fact, the only reason why we got it back was because the tweaker who stole it managed to park it in a reserved stall on private property and it was towed. The police said they swept the car for evidence, but we found multiple prescription bottles with the suspect's name on it in easy to reach places. The cops obviously missed this and refused to accept it as evidence. We did a LexisNexus search of the name on the bottle and lo-and-behold, multiple priors for armed robbery and auto theft. No charges were ever filed against the person.
So I have virtually no faith in security cameras. They do their jobs, but the DA certainly doesn't.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you about the DA, but it seems like in your specific case the problem is more that the police themselves are acting indifferently.
CCTV in an age of universal and accepted mask-wearing is pretty ineffective. I have video of people breaking into my business and stealing five figures worth of goods a few years back with specific identification of them, forwarded to the police, who have done nothing with it. Non-violent crimes (specifically property damage or theft) just aren't prosecuted, especially on the west coast.
In USA, railroad police have jurisdiction in this scenario. Uniquely, in USA, railroad police are employed by the railroad.
As evidenced by current BNSF strike, USA railroads presently have a tough relationship with their labor force.
For an underpaid and overstressed railroad cop, do they want to risk their life to try to stop this? My guess is generally no. They may even desire a cut of the proceeds.
It leaves out the important information, what does whale sushi taste like. Interesting to know, though these inconsistencies between cases, and time seem rife for popularity and crony "justice". We like group X so they get 6 months we hate group Y so 20 years for them. There is a reason I became a programmer not a lawyer. Deterministic code is easier than subjective rulings at least for me.
>these inconsistencies between cases, and time seem rife for popularity and crony "justice".
The sentencing guidelines I mentioned seems specifically designed to mitigate this issue?
>We like group X so they get 6 months we hate group Y so 20 years for them. There is a reason I became a programmer not a lawyer. Deterministic code is easier than subjective rulings at least for me.
The sentencing guidelines seem pretty deterministic to me. There's a bunch of factors. The factors add up to a certain amount of points, and the amount of points determines your sentence to within a fairly narrow band. It's certainly not the "6 months for one group and 20 years for another group" that you talk about.
Serious question: Have they not thought of mounting Mark Rober-style devices on each freight car that releases some combination of {glitter, fart spray, honey, glue, itch powder, pepper spray, ink}?
It might sound funny but I think the sheer discomfort would deter thieves in an instant, and they would be easy to identify for several days.
A device of this sort would be super useful for car thieves as well.
Amazon has already started doing their own shipping. Maybe they'll hire their own mercenaries to guard the shipments too. Eventually they'll replace the government. United States of Amazon. We won't even have to change all our monogrammed stuff.
poor ppl getting shot by underpaid security for trying to steal a box of stupid stuff which the rich kids that ordered it have already forgotten about ...
How about putting something like an electrical fence around those containers, maybe even just one or two wires, focused on the parts where they get opened. They could also signal when a container has been opened if should they get cut.
This is probably one of the most civilized ways to steal something. It hurts no one and is just a non-discriminatory tax on pretty much everyone in LA since most people order Amazon packages. I think of this like click fraud, a while ago Google decided to stop combatting it and just "let it happen" [1].
By that logic carrying a bag of nails should be a crime since you might inadvertently drop one on a public road where a UPS truck might get a flat tire and as a result not be able to deliver someone's insulin.
That's one of the main reasons why driverless lorries will never be a thing. Unless you accompany each one of them by a weaponised mini-drone, Robocop-style, that is.
What difference would a driver do? A driver is instructed to not interefere if robbed. The difference I suppose is that what would otherwise be a robbery could be a mere burglary which could have less legal risk as well as less risk of violence (In the case a driver interferes, against his instructions)
It won't be just "one" driver, it would more of them, as in the lorries are usually stopped where other lorries are also stopped (at lorry-specific parking spots, for example) and as such it would be harder for the robbers to confront an "united" (for lack of a better word) pack of drivers. Granted, robberies (and even murders [1]) still happen in those circumstances, too, but give the robbers unattended merchandise sitting by the roadside and then see what will happen.
I think the deterrence from human drivers comes probably (hopefully) more from the risk of being detected, than from the risk of being stopped. Self driving vehicles would of course lack the human element. But on the other hand - they might not need to stop for rest like human drivers do.
That's more for the driver's own safety, as the burglars could have lethal weapons.
If it were autonomous it could defend itself and its contents without risk to humans. At the very least with fart spray, pepper spray, itch powder, and the like.
But it doesn't stop us from using trains that get broken into? I doubt it is an important reason. Plus, driverless lorry can just keep on driving to their destination or a safe refueling yard.
Nah. Train robberies have been a thing since shortly after trains were invented, no matter if staff or sometimes even armed guards were present on board.
Over the past several months I have had more delivery problems with Amazon than ever. Things scheduled, out for delivery, and sometimes ten spots away on a map, just seem to disappear. I wonder if these (and similar) thefts have anything to do with it.
But if we simply take away consequence now no one has any reason not to steal, and then more people will steal. It may not deter all people but fewer people will be willing to gamble if the odds of facing consequences go up.
The alternative is to view it as inevitable and therefore don't do anything, but then those not doing it fall behind those doing it and suddenly those who weren't stealing before now feel like losers for not doing it because no one was facing any consequences and because they held back they are now worse off.
I see a lot of people talking about "packages", but UPS/Fedex/USPS don't use trains because they're too slow, right? I assume we're talking about wholesale shipping here.
Sigh - Any resourced and competent police or security force should be able to catch or deter thieves that are stealing packages from the same location. Additionally, mail theft laws which include prison as a consequence should be extended to package thefts if they don't already cover them.
So their resourcing wouldn't take into account wider societal benefits from lower crime - it'd be more about the direct costs and benefits to the business.
Perhaps America should be looking at reducing the causes of what leads people to needing to be thieves, rather than catching them and putting them into the justice system (which has many systemic issues itself)
As a technical comparison; if you have a system that is creating a bug then it seems an incorrect stopgap solution to invest in support resources to handle user complaints rather than development and QA resources to reduce the chances of users running into the bug.
I think putting people away for a longer time doesn't help much. You need to focus on probability of being caught (by which I mean at least arrested, not chased away).
A horrible way to prevent theft. Statistically a great way to create career criminals, break up families, and all the side effects that comes with (like more criminals).
I think correct way is to punish relatively harshly(few months to years depending on amount), but also remove secondary effects. Like ban employers from asking about felonies unless they are dealing with minors or for example with fraud with financial positions. Do that and the person reports automatic payment of few months of wages.
Now some of the offenders might have chance to integrate back to society...
Or are they just opportunists, even if somewhat organised, stealing simply because they know they're likely to get away with it? Not doing it not out of any real need, but just for the thrill of it, or as a 'fuck you' to authority, whether that's the police, the politicians, or big business.
When people can shoplift bagloads of merchandise without even trying to be stealthy, then casually walk out past a security guard who isn't allowed to do anything, or when they can smash a window and clean out a store under the cover of protests/unrest, it's not surprising that it escalates to more organised theft - whether it's 'flash rob' looting* of stores, or now looting train cargo.
(*As for the now-seemingly-controversial term 'looting' vs stealing/theft/robbery - to me, looting is brazenly grabbing anything/everything, out in the open, often in broad daylight and on camera, while most 'normal' forms of theft are carried out more covertly and perhaps with particular targets in mind). No amount of policing will prevent all theft, but open looting is an sign of lawlessness.
It's easier for techy types to gaff at the risk of highway robbery for a good reason.
Tech seeks to alleviate human labor via automation or semi-automation.
I think people are trying to take the same shortcuts to reduce the friction of human labor. Thievery is a foundational American ideal, romanticized in some sense.
The question most US citizens have been asking is "when do I get mine?".
This doesn't really mean anything. Non-violent crimes range from personal drug use & speeding to ponzi schemes & drunk driving.
There is a difference between theft (a victim exists and can inflict either physical or emotional damage) and something like personal light drug use (mostly victimless).
Theft not only robs a victim of their time & resource but it can also inflict emotional damage. A broken car window means you're out whatever they stole + glass (often a week or more of wages) and the emotional stress & time to fix it. These packages had recipients - the PPE is obviously important but each of these packages could have been someones anniversary gift or important medical device.
If we're talking about the moral severity of the crime itself, theft is pretty close to assault in my book and should be punished accordingly.
We can work on preventing the desperateness that leads to theft while still having strict punishment. What we shouldn't do is not address the root cause AND let such crimes go essentially unpunished.
> It seems like finding some way to prevent the thefts is better.
It seems like it should be possible to use locks which are harder to open in a short amount of time...but I suppose the cost of that would outweigh the current costs of the theft for the railroads.
It's very difficult to make a lock that is really secure. Bolt cutters and battery powered saws / grinders are very powerful, portable and effective tools to cut through metal.
Average time needed to get into a container (X) needs to be > average time train pauses (Y). This seems like it should be a solvable problem.
For example, just thinking out loud, what about some sort of container door hinge mechanism which takes five minutes (or an adjustable amount of time) to open the door?
Screw it. This notion that we should only punish violent crime, and all other crime should be ignored needs to go. Look at this chain of logic presented above.
>> Additionally, mail theft laws which include prison as a consequence should be
extended to package thefts if they don't already cover them.
>But it is a nonviolent crime. It seems like finding some way to prevent the thefts is better.
The implied conclusion here is "We're allowing it if people don't guard it like it's ft Knox."
The whole point of a legal system, the codification of crime and law enforcement is to stop things like this. To ensure that people cannot unilaterally and directly harm other people.
Which is precisely what "punishment" does. Try being less vindictive and more understanding about the root circumstances that lead someone to perform an act of desperation.
Nope. The criminal is the one who needs to realize and internalise his desperation, and move on to a better life. Everyone has needs, get in line sunshine.
Obviously theft is not a long-term solution. Being a lowlife is no way to live. There are people working the skin off their bones on two jobs just to barely live. And some entitled shmuck wants the easy way out?
Not to meander too much, but I think this is a genuinely interesting question. Is theft the 'easy way out'? I'm not so sure. It's a job like any other, requiring skill to be successful, and comes with a slew of stressors that are non-issues in legal jobs, like the risk of apprehension for starters. The higher risk may also at times yield higher reward, but I wouldn't say necessarily 'easier'. I think showing up for a generic 9-to-5 is significantly easier than robbing trains successfully.
The containers don't have big signs telling them which ones to steal for the food and which ones to ignore because they only contain TVs and covid tests.
If you are desperate, you steal anything and try to sell it to buy food and hygiene products.
I would be extremely interested in what definition of punishment you are using where punishment is defined as not being unilateral, which would mean it's some sort of bilateral punishment with consent of the punished party?
Not much within reason that you can do to stop a portable oxy torch, and the train doesn't need to be stopped, they just need to hop on and off at the right times. People hop moving trains all the time. All you're doing is shifting the numbers around in the same equation.
But I think the bigger issue is just that you're talking about retrofitting an aspect of the global transport complex. Why would the entire shipping industry change it's approach to standardized containers just to stop some thieves at a specific American spot? The cost of using special containers for this specific route would be prohibitive I imagine, and hard to manage the logistics of.
Let me introduce you to 12" hydraulic bolt cutters. They cut through the toughest bike U-locks. No lock survives them. If the lock is stronger, there are stronger hydraulic cutters. Containers tend to be protected by puck-style locks. There are specialized hydraulic tools for defeating those also. There are also, of course, blowtorches.
The only solution is armed escort for trains through slow zones.
I disagree. If you prevent this one, some people will stop, whilst others will just find something else to steal elsewhere. It's like a big game of wack-a-mole.
I'd much rather we arrest them so they can be rehabilitated or helped. Which is a separate discussion, but there have to be consequences. Sometimes it's too late to help them and we just need to stem the damage they do to society and other people that are innocent.
Fortunately, medicines shipped by specialty / remote pharmacies typically don't often go by train, as they need relatively climate controlled environments (above freezing, under a certain amount, etc).
That said, steal the shots I take for an autoimmune disorder and I'll definitely consider it an assault on my health.
In the US, stealing Epipens and selling them on the black market makes them more accessible compared to than forcing people to pay the retail price. The manufacturer can always make more - they could accept 90% losses due to theft and still sell them profitably, based on the prices they offer in other countries [0].
So if you're going to play the "assault on my health" card, the guys robbing trains are literally Robin Hood saving lives.
Yeah, it introduces some problems around chain of custody, counterfeiting...but people who can afford the $300 can continue to pay the retail price.
That's real noble, but the issue I'm on about isn't the price, that's its own can of worms and something for you lot to deal with in the US.
Disruption to medicine supply is my concern here, having had supply issues affect a family member where they've had to ration out heart related medication... I'm a little tetchy about it.
This is cute and all, but generic versions are available for much less than that, goodrx and co offer steep discounts on the brand name, and Medicaid pays for it entirely with no co-pay.
If you want to continue the robin hood analogy, well, Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He wasn't selling life saving medicines that may or may not be fake (buyers won't know either way), and may have been improperly handled or stored.
He wasn't potentially killing people who just want to save a few bucks.
I'd certainly consider buying a stolen/black market/grey market EpiPen at $300 if I needed one and the alternative cost $3000. The shelf life is 13-18 months, so that's a recurring cost, and I'd like to have more than one (perhaps carry one on my person and store one safely at home). I'd look for factory-sealed, tamper-evident packaging.
I'm privileged to be able to even consider spending the $3000 (I don't have severe allergies, so haven't actually made this decision). It's not at all ridiculous that someone on a tighter budget would make the same decision if it was $30 vs $300, and might make compromises on the QA. And "just go to the ER" doesn't cut it: regardless of the cost, that could take hours, while you may only have minutes to spare in the case of anaphylactic shock. You take the injection AND go straight to the ER, it's not an either-or thing.
IANAL, but States are not "within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States"
In this context "the United States" means the federal government. States are also within the jurisdiction of the state government, and therefore not within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States.
This is the exact same reason why the US president can only pardon federal crimes.
> The term “U.S. Territory” means American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the
Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or the
U.S. Virgin Islands.
I'm trying to determine whether or not the language in Title 18 refers to "territory" in the sense of "any land that is part of the United States" (which would include the states), or "organised Territories exclusive of states". It's odd that the language is chosen but not clarified.
I'm aware that generally states have jurisdiction within their own boundaries, but that interstate commerce is an exception. Given railroads' history ... the distinction, contenxt, and intent seem needlessly vague.
Your original point remains though it's not clear to me it's the correct interpretation.
I imagine this will get sorted since Buffett both invests in Union Pacific and provides insurance. He famously doesn't get involved in the companies in which he invests, but I imagine his people could shoot over a question like, "why is this happening?"
The railroad itself is incentivized to secure its own goods. We aren't "reliant" on them to do that.
If Buffett sells his stake in UP, someone else buys it and the company continues on. They got big because they figured out how to build a profitable business. Part of that is security. None of that makes us dependent on them. We have a mutual dependence through trade. Businesses provide something we want, and we give them something they want.
I thought we all rooted here to defund the police? Should we backtrack that idea?
Edit: I seem to have broken a nerve in some people here. Sorry, for being snarky. I just think that you can't reduce funding for a gov agency but also then expect it to be resourced. Just using sterile logic to make this conclusion.
LAPD funding went _up_ 12% during and after the George Floyd protests (The highest it's ever been! The highest in the country per capita!). In fact, LASD/public schools got a cut in funding to help fund the LAPD budget. Granted, per the article, LAPD doesn't service freight rail lines, maybe because they'd say they'd be stretched too thin – and to be fair, 800+ of them are on leave for COVID, and falsely blaming it on defunding (which is corroborated by LAPD's own PR department, saying the statements put out should not have been).
> The city council voted last summer to redirect money proposed for Oakland's Police Department to social services. But this week, defund the police became refund to the police. The same city council approved two new police academies and voted to hire a professional recruiter to attract officers to its department after a wave of resignations.
If we're not talking about Los Angeles – which is what this entire article is based on – then you're opening up pandora's box.
What about Scandinavian or Western European countries, then? Maybe closer to home, what about NYC – the year the NYPD went on strike, crime went _down_ (not just a drop in arrests, but actual murders, theft, etc). and NYPD realized they'd have to voluntarily restart policing (without the desired increase in labor terms), or NYC City Council might realize they're not as necessary as they originally set out to prove.
When you fund a prison-industrial complex, you're creating a system that incentivizes incarceration, not rehabilitation. These systems don't want to solve crime – they want to set out to look for (or, some would say, create) crime. Other countries realized this, and seem to have much less actual crime as a result, while protecting things that actually matter (i.e. their major trade routes/people's lives/the general wellbeing of society). The US seems to have this idea that... if you don't have a home, or you're addicted to drugs, or you need a wellness check, you're more dangerous than a murderer or a thief (given that the former group makes up the vast majority of those incarcerated)
Oakland budget is still higher than its ever been, they just gave them less of a raise than expected last year. The money cut in 2020 was mostly due to the pandemic.
2019-2021 was 635 million allotted, 20mil less than the 665 mil project, due to the pandemic. The 2021-2023 budget is 674 million, with an additional 18 million spent on the community based programs.
The budget is ever increasing, contrary to what a lot of people like to tout.
I’m sure that article is not making the point you think it is. In fact the editor seems to have missed the point with the title as well.
> What has not been reported as much is that the number of authorized sworn officers has remained unchanged. What we voted on last Tuesday is a more aggressive push to fill 60 budgeted vacant police officer positions that we had already approved in June that are not yet filled because our academy system is failing.
The rest of the paragraph explains how certain groups are using this concept of defunding the police to stoke fear in people like you. Incredibly ironic.
Very few people want to actually defund the police. But try being a black friend of mine, who got thrown out of his car without resisting and beaten so bad he had to go to an ICU, purely because he was driving a car that “matched the description” (that didn’t even match the color) of a crime in the area, and perhaps you can begin to understand why the “other side” is frustrated…
And let me guess. You think these train robberies happen because they defunded the police in their area…?
I am well aware of the colloquial term "Defund the police" which is often met by "No, not literally defund it". But the reality is that there is a strong support to reduce resources and move towards soft-policing.
Have you been to the Bay Area? Apartment complexes and condominiums are hardened like castles while their kids play in the safe courtyards and the outside is rotting to the point of unsafe for male padestrians, let alone women and kids. These are the same people voting for these policies. Completely deranged.
Dude, I literally live in the Bay Area. And crime here is no where even close to bad as it was where I used to live in Texas. It’s all relative. Especially when politics is involved.
I see absolutely no reason to believe that raising police budgets would somehow magically fix this. It wouldn’t. We have deeper societal issues at hand.
What kinds of crime are you talking about? Loitering? Murder? Again, it’s all relative. How would increased police funding help with ANY of that…?
There are plenty of reasons to want to move out of the Bay Area. Christ, traffic on the 101 often makes me want to jump off the golden gate bridge - but I don’t see how snarky remarks about “defund the police” help one way or another without dramatically misunderstanding and oversimplifying the real causes of this city’s problems.
For me the main reason to leave is crime and general third-worldlyness. Got my car broken into several times, several parks are occupied by the homeless, Citizen app is going crazy where I live, the whole thing is not what I think of a developed nation.
The Tenderloin is practically like a South African slum. Sunnydale, Bayview/Hunter's Point and the south side of Potrero are dangerous. You have to watch yourself in the Mission, downtown, SoMa, and a few other neighborhoods.
But in Forest Hill you might as well be in Menlo Park. Pac Heights is generally safe. So is the Presidio. Even Noe Valley, right next to the Mission, is much safer. Crime doesn't like to climb.
> Have you been to the Bay Area? Apartment complexes and condominiums are hardened like castles while their kids play in the safe courtyards and the outside is rotting to the point of unsafe for male padestrians, let alone women and kids.
I don't think this is a fair description of the vast majority of the SF Bay Area. Perhaps it describes well some bits of Hayward and Oakland.
Large amounts of the SF Bay Area have crime rates well below the national median.
Police are focusing all of their efforts elsewhere. They don't care about property crime like this. Also, as pointed out elsewhere on the thread, policing the tracks is the responsibility of the railroad company, not LAPD.
The police are already ridiculously well-funded (on average, there are exceptions). Look at their budgets and start asking "where the hell does the money go?"
They don't need more money. They need to be held accountable.
The West is on a way to 2nd world status at best, comprised of 1st world enclaves / gated communities where things are in order and a wild 2nd world west.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Eh. People will disagree on what the root cause is. Just to give you an idea how easy it is to undermine this argument. What if I declare that the root cause of all this is being human. What do you do?
Thinking of bigger picture is all well and good, but the moment you mention education I cannot help, but chuckle. In the context of US, education already is.. lets call it overburdened. Maybe the solution is not to override the reflex, but to appropriately channel it.
For the record, I am just putting words together. It is late and infant does not want to sleep.
> What if I declare that the root cause of all this is being human. What do you do?
Ask you what your evidence is for that assertion given that crime rates vary so widely around the world for disparate reasons.
The prevalence and types of crimes committed really do vary widely as well (though its often hard to get a clear picture since different countries have different reporting mechanisms (or none at all)).
Hitler was significantly more educated than most modern progressives. From wikipedia:
He read newspapers and pamphlets that published the thoughts of philosophers and theoreticians such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon and Arthur Schopenhauer. Georg Ritter von Schönerer became a major influence on Hitler. He also developed an admiration for Martin Luther. During his time in Vienna, he pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten performances of Lohengrin, his favourite Wagner opera.
It is a fallacy that murderous racists are simply uninformed, that they just weren't in school on that day in the fourth grade where your teacher tells you to be nice to people. Some of the authors he was acquainted with were vocally against anti-semitism. The most dangerous monsters are highly educated people.
I take issue with every sentence you wrote. "Highly educated"? I don't think so. "Some of the authors" - you mean Nietzsche, I guess. It seems likely he didn't read Nietzsche's books, but just the bits quoted in (anti-semitic) newspapers. Check out Chamberlain and Schönerer. The first thing you notice is the strong Nazi-type flavour of their thoughts. Wagner and Luther are notorious for their extreme anti-semitism. That first wiki-sentence comes to "He read the paper". My understanding is, on the street corners and cafes of Vienna in those days were a dozen different half-nutty political groups, and Hitler took a bit from every one of them. The stuff was in the air, if you stopped to breathe it in.
Hum, could I suggest an evil alternative? Just schedule a few meetings with the people that lend money to Hitler and explain them that he will try to keep the money and will go to extreme measures to avoid returning it, including killing them or their relatives if possible. Really bad investment, don't touch this turd with a thousand foot pole. Thank me later when you still own your castle in Europe.
Result: Hitler never climb in a position to became Hitler. Nobody dies, nobody needs to enter in a war to recover the investment and you don't became a murderer. Hollywood would be devastated for sure but, apart of this...everybody wins :-)
Hitler didn't do his thing in a vacuum. There was an opportunity for him, circumstances, values of the time, the trauma to Germany what happened in the first world war and after it, competing ideologies like communism, political instability in Germany, inflation, recession etc.
So maybe the person could go back in time and discuss with the negotiators at the Versailles treaty after the first world war. Or maybe try to inject some economics education to try to prevent the hyperinflation.
You are clearly misunderstanding the tone of the conversation.
But in any case yes, Pre-WW2 Germany was "a paradise" compared with Post-WW2 Germany or with immediately post-Hitler Europe if you prefer it. (And the world is much better without cocaine fueled dictators, for sure).
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.
They don't. People grow up to be like their friends, who in turn grow up to be like the general cultural sentiments among the adults they interact with. (Source: The Nurture Assumption.)
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.
This person has no interest in treatment. They want to do drugs and take advantage of what’s provided to keep doing that.
You can’t fix that with hotels. You either need to require treatment or imprison (paired with arresting dealers).
On the more progressive end, maybe drug clinics that administer drugs to addicts for free onsite (to crash the dealer market while you’re going after them). Eventually you have to force a choice. The do drugs openly while living in a tent on the street can’t be an option.
Your thinking here is still focused on symptoms rather than causes.
Most people don't develop debilitating drug addictions without underlying problems. Even most people with drug addictions don't get to a point where they can't hold down a job or have a need to carry out crime to fund it, but of those who do it's worth considering why when e.g. a typical heroin addict can hold down a job and could have funded their addiction for ~$20/day if they had access to clean, medical grade heroin (we know the price, because e.g. the UK NHS buys medical grade heroin for use for post-operative pain management - under the generic name diamorphine).
So there's a long path there from failure to address mental health issues and other social problems, via failure to provide safe, clean supplies and early intervention for those who still get addicted to drugs, failure to regulate healthcare properly (e.g. the prescription oxy -> black market oxy -> heroin recruitment path), and failure to ensure availability of jobs, and lacking welfare options, before worrying about treatment and emergency housing is even in the picture.
Start addressing root causes and a lot of the problems later in that chain would either go away or at least be substantially diminished.
Broken families, abusive childhood environments, terrible influences and friends are among some of those root causes. Check out interviews with Skid Row residents on Youtube if you want to get a good taste of the diversity of reasons for why people end up in those situations. It will be really hard to break the cycle in the US without forcibly separating many, many children from their parents and letting the government raise them in more functioning environments.
Not necessarily, someone could have an awful childhood but with adequate mental health help and support, not fall into addiction and homelessness in adult life. Ideally, yes, we'd eliminate all causes of trauma, but we can also put a _lot_ more effort into mitigating the effects later in life, rather than (subconsciously?) chalking it up to a moral failure in the affected person.
It's aside your point, but you may be thinking of fentanyl rather than diamorphine (street name heroin) with regards to the NHS. The former is often used in NHS hospitals for intraoperative and postoperative pain relief, the latter almost never for anything.
No, I'm thinking of diamorphine. I'm not questioning that fentanyl is also used, but so is diamorphine, and the point was not that it is used a lot, but that it is used enough that we have reliable data on the cost of various doses of it.
Here are some pages covering various uses by the NHS
Most relevant to the point I made, here is a pricing page for diamorphine for the NHS[1].
Use during birth: [2]
"This is an injection of a medicine called pethidine into your thigh or buttock to relieve pain. It can also help you to relax. Sometimes, less commonly, a medicine called diamorphine is used."
Use in NHS Scotland [3]: "Unlicensed intranasal diamorphine has been used in the NHS in Scotland for the treatment of severe pain in children in the emergency setting. The availability of diamorphine hydrochloride nasal spray (Ayendi®) provides a licensed preparation."
Article on recent-ish supply problems[4] due to a problem at one of the manufacturers:
"NHS trusts forced to use ‘expensive’ pre-filled diamorphine syringes to manage ongoing supply issues
Exclusive: Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has had to source pre-filled diamorphine syringes from other NHS trusts to meet demand."
NICE advice on diamorphine use [5] lists indications and doses for acute pain, chronic pain not currently treated with a strong opioid analgesic, acute pulmonary oedema, myocardial infarction.
NHS patient information (word doc) [6] on the shortage: "Diamorphine is licensed to treat severe pain associated with surgery, heart attack or a terminal illness. It is also used for the relief of shortness of breath in severe heart conditions. In addition, a small number of people in the UK may be receiving diamorphine to manage heroin addiction."
So while I have no idea about the actual volume of use, as you can tell the NHS has suppliers, and NICE has a price list.
Well I stand corrected. I've only seen it prescribed under a home office license for treatment of addiction in a single case. Many of your examples seem to relate to paediatrics and maternity care which perhaps explains my ignorance as I work outside these areas.
Root cause prevent - my friend who got hooked ok coke & lost everything for getting caught on the job site would’ve been better off if that coke dealer had been busted before my friend bought coke. Or if my friend’s middle-class parents had disciplined him more. Or maybe if he had a more ridged sports program in college that helped athletes avoid the perils of college parties Vs cutting him.
Arresting dealers / busting drug rings is one of the few policing activities that directly leads to MORE crime.
What happens when you bust a drug ring and arrest some big players? You immediately create a power vacuum, which leads to a turf war where other players (in the gang or between gangs) start jockeying for power, spreading their mayhem across the area.
The only solution here is legalization, treatment, and general social welfare.
Arrest the dealers and administer the drug to addicts for free at clinics? I think that would be an interesting approach.
I'm not a policy expert. I used to agree with you, but I think part of the issue is trivial access to drugs (see the tenderloin). It's harder for addicts to quit when it's very easy to get the drug (whether that's via dealers or legalization) and the city helps to enable you (hotel shelters, etc.) I understand the good intent and compassion, but a lot of bad policy on the left starts with good intent and ends with unanticipated bad consequences. Cities with arguably crueler enforcement don't have these issues (San Mateo). SF attracts addicts because they know it's lax and drug access is easy. Pair that with NIMBY housing policy and it's very hard to get housed and off of drugs.
I'd argue the SF approach to this has been a failure, London Breed's recent speech on the topic is something I agree with. The equilibrium we're trapped in is bad. We need to force a choice and that choice is likely either treatment or prison.
>maybe drug clinics that administer drugs to addicts for free onsite
That is an interesting idea. All kinds of ethical issues for handing out free heroin, but why not take all the confiscated drugs, test them for safety and hand them out for free at clinics with some damage-reduction safe guards like daily per-person limits, offer rehab and mental health services, etc? Turn addicts into informants without even trying, because if they rat out dealers, the dope is free. I doubt users have the long-term awareness to see that it eventually reduce supply.
Heroin itself is much less damaging to your body than more popular drugs like tobacco or alcohol.
Making it harder for addicts to get heroin or a replacement will only increase the energy they will spend on getting it. This makes it nearly impossible to get to a better place in their life. It is mostly getting the drug that has a negative effect on holding down a job, not the drug itself.
There's a group of people that like to pretend heroin is less harmful despite all the evidence to the contrary. I'm not sure if they're users rationalizing their own use or what, but it's an odd thing I've noticed.
Alcohol is really bad for your mind. I don't think there is sufficient evidence, that heroin is worse than alcohol for your brain.
She couldn't have been a functional alcoholic for 25 year if alcohol were an illegal substance.
There are plenty of people who have a normal life on methadone or heroin if it is provided to them.
As already stated, if you are an addict, getting the substance is the highest priority. Making it harder to get just makes them use more of their resources to get them.
It depends on the definition of "worse". If cell death over time, then maybe alcohol is worse. If it's how much a recreational/entertaining dose disturbs the workings of the mind, the operation/rational/ability to live a normal life, which is the purpose of the mind, then I would say heroin is worse.
I would assume the amount of dopamine a drug releases is directly related to its ability to disrupt someones life.
When you’ve got a Head of Homeless Services who see the homeless as a part of class warfare you realize they don’t want the problem fixed. They’re fighting capitalism by making the problem bigger, not smaller.
“Why do they do it? Radical anti-system ideology. “There’s a San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness hat which says, ‘Coalition on Homelessness: On The Frontlines of Class Warfare,’” said the insider. “They feel like they’re fighting class warfare. They tell people to not take shelter.””
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to caveat this whole thing by saying that I'm not a supporter of abolishing the police in case someone thinks I want to take funding away from law enforcement.
"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."
I think it does. Option 1 solutions of the world often mitigate the visible problems like whack-a-mole. It reinforces the effectiveness of option 1. It also creates a whole system that ends up protecting itself.
Lets say you hire 100k people to start fighting thefts. The underlying problems that produces thieves are around, so they continue to steal. Option 2 supporters say "Fund social safety nets." Option 1 supporters say theft has gone down 50%, hire more crime fighters. The thief catchers say "Protect our jobs." More money goes into fighting crime and not social safety nets.
At least with regards to crime, we've been at it far too long to know what works and what doesn't. Crime reduction is far more correlated with social stability than increased law enforcement.
I think you're correct to a degree that when we choose Option 1 then it makes Option 2 less urgent.
But! Usually Option 1 is much less efficient long-term than Option 2, so – as long as we're both talking theoretically here – then theoretically the entity that is footing the bill for the 100k security force would see how freaking expensive it is and would advocate with a loud voice for Option 2 to get implemented as soon as possible.
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.
Personally I think they're all in that boat. No US representatives have impressed me
Not to mention politicians lie to get elected anyhow. They all make empty bullshit promises, so even if they did offer something impressive its doubtful any of them would or could follow through. The fact that they want to stay in power means they keep lying or misrepresenting things in order to keep the votes flowing in
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.
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".
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.
You want to know why I don't steal? It's because I don't have to. I have sufficient security of income and opportunity that it's not necessary.
I'm not bragging, though, what I'm getting at is that you're missing a huge part of why people steal - maybe even the largest part: because they feel they have to survive, or because it's okay because society is stacked against them.
This is what above was talking about when talking about fixing root causes. If you can ensure that people have shelter, food, safety, security, and belonging, you'll generally find that you don't need to _morally re-educate_ them, they won't have the impetus to steal.
I live in a 3-rd world country that has like 40 times less GDP per capita than the United States. The vast majority of our people work in the fields growing crops and are much poorer than the poorest communities in the US. Our people have to survive, like for real. By your logic, theft, crime, murders and robberies should be rampant in my country because they “have to”. But my country is much safer in that regard that the US. Because we don’t “have to”. People in need do whatever they can to find a job. Those who can’t find a job, they go to Russia and find a job there. In no way in our culture it is considered acceptable to steal even if you “have to”. People are not animals. Social good, social relationships, morals, good parenting and family values are real things.
I’m not talking about those incapable to work, of course. Funny thing is, our government gives shelter to such people, and they don’t live in the streets as well.
Imo the comment you’re replying to is a kind of progressive left-wing university faculty lounge flavor of upper middle class politics and is not representative of the vast majority of Americans (but is overrepresented online).
I’d suspect most Americans (across the political spectrum) would see these train robberies and think “these people should go to jail”, rather than moralizing about why it’s not their fault.
> I’d suspect most Americans (across the political spectrum) would see these train robberies and think “these people should go to jail”, rather than moralizing about why it’s not their fault.
Jail isn't some magical free solution to your crime problems.
Would Americans still be so eager to imprison someone if they knew that the cost to incarcerate someone is ~$36k/yr? [1]
The government defines poverty as $12k/yr for individuals [2], which is three times less than the annual cost to incarcerate someone!
Is imprisoning someone at the taxpayer cost of ~$36k/yr a sustainable model?
At what point does America have a conversation about the cost of imprisonment versus the alternatives like raising the poverty line, raising minimum wage, or implementing social programs?
You can advocate for policy that works to improve things that lead to increased crime and be strict about enforcing the law when crime occurs. While this doesn't necessarily fit cleanly into existing partisan politics, it is possible.
Excusing crime because of these other things I think is patronizing to the majority of poor people that are not criminals. It's also a luxury belief imo in that the majority of victims are ethical people in poor communities getting hurt by the criminals who mostly target them (which is why you see a lot of data in poor communities asking for increased policing).
I'd guess it's a view formed from a lack of interaction with the people committing these crimes (in addition to the victims) too. Anyone can rationalize criminal behavior and make it not their fault. I don't have much tolerance for this and don't think society should really either. Discretion exists and context does matter, but people have agency and are responsible for the choices they make.
>it's okay because society is stacked against them.
If you can't find a job in the US, you won't go to another country to find one. After all, you're already in the "best country in the world".
The streets are accepted as the home of failed people (but only if we can't see them).
Medical care is provided only to people who can pay for it. That's only fair.
Also racism was solved with Obama, so just pull yourself by your bootstrap like everyone else.
Just work multiple jobs if you can't afford rent, maybe then you'll save enough to pay for education and get a higher wage job or start your own business.
There are a lot of poor people who are not thieves.
I’ve always felt this framing condescends to them. Sure, there’s certainly more incentive to steal at the academic extremes (bread for your starving family), but people raiding trains for packages is something else.
There should be police response to this, and people doing it should get charged.
> I don’t believe USA has so many people in prison because its population _is_ more criminal than that of other countries.
I do. I’ve lived in some foreign countries and have come to realize that culture plays just as much if not more of a role in crime as material conditions. America has some toxic aspects to our culture that contribute to our population being more likely to commit crimes. We are hyper individualist, and more violent across all socioeconomic levels.
I think we agree. I wasn’t clear enough, but I wrote the underscores in “its population _is_ more criminal” to implicitly contrast it with “its population _behaves_ more criminal”. It certainly does the latter, but that doesn’t imply the former.
Simplifying things, the USA tends to think that all people who _do_ crimes _are_ criminals and, hence, should be locked up in order to decrease the amount of crime, while other countries think circumstances may have made them perform crimes, and changing circumstances may be the best way to decrease crime because it’s cheaper and/or leads to a happier population.
(In general, I think (again simplifying things), the USA prefers sending in the cavalry to save the day over doing things to prevent the need for a cavalry. You see that in infrastructure maintenance, reactions to natural disasters, and in the way it does diplomacy in the middle east, too. California is somewhat of an exception there. It invests heavily preparing for the big one)
I don’t see that claiming anything about whether to punish people who commit crimes. IMO, it argues that keeping people out of jail by making it easier for them to not perform crimes is better for everyone.
Even if it does, I didn’t see that comment when I wrote mine. HN currently shows my comment as 10 hours old, the one you mention as 9, so I also think I couldn’t have seen it.
Comment numbers also support that observation (29932220 < 29932479)
What you're saying is, if the crooks have their basic necessities fulfilled, they would become politicians and CEO's instead of thieves?
Only half joking. You're right that you can fix 90% of crimes your way. But there is a group of people that, for some reason, just want to see the world burn or feel the power to make others miserable. We need to deal with them somehow.
Respect for society, or lack thereof, happens at all levels. People partying and cheating their way through college, or running billion dollar ponzi schemes, aren't doing so because they have to survive, but the root cause is the same.
What do you propose should happen if someone breaks into your house with a baseball bat? Call the police and wait for them to arrive? Speak politely to the intruder?
I'm not saying everyone has the right to bomb Times Square. But I am saying that the "individual", which some people are asserting to be a taboo idea, can use force to have a chance at preserving their life within their private residence.
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.
But unless I've misunderstood Graeber, the idea entered modern jurisprudence and took its recogniseable form from the Roman Empire. In other words, it either looked considerably different in civilisations like Babylon and Tenochtitian, or there's a historic gap of weaker property enforcement between those civilisations and ours.
Likewise in pre-Columbian Mexico, as per the Florentine Codex:
“It was a crime to light a fire in the woods without permission, to cut down trees, to move boundary-markers, to take game from another man’s hunting trap and to steal crops from the fields. All these were crimes that could be punished by death.”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything.
People take the easier option. You choose "lock your trains well" despite knowing the answer will be "crack those locks well" because it was the easy answer. The view is simple. Eventually the train will be a rolling mountain of steel protected by an army. Your fishing lure will cost an arm and a leg because protection costs are up. And the thieves will just be relegated to do slave work (the work that shouldn't exist in those conditions but society was too busy locking the train well to bother protecting its most vulnerable members) or starve because those are the only options on the table.
These types of crimes are generally opportunistic. Opportunistic crimes are committed by people who literally don't think of any future, they don't see any risk, only the chance of a reward. Prison is not on their mind. Similar types of crime would be most house burglaries where entrance is easy, pick pocketing and street mugging.
For house burglary the way to deter opportunistic criminals is to harden down the house just a little bit. Lock doors, close windows.
Often drugs is the driving factor. I notice that out of 207 comments in this thread, only 4 including this one mention drugs.
But think about that, in your average day, how many opportunities did you have to steal or otherwise break the law. I'm guessing, A LOT, and how many did you take advantage of? (I speculate, none, because your standard of living is such that it's not an attractive option to you).
> When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything.
That assumes thieves are rational actors capable of assessing risks at least somewhat accurately. Often times (the vast majority of times, even) they are not.
It's also worth bringing up that certain American subcultures glorify criminals. The criminal lifestyle is seen as glamorous by a large number of people, while honest labor is just dull, whether it pays enough or not.
<<It's also worth bringing up that certain American subcultures glorify criminals. The criminal lifestyle is seen as glamorous by a large number of people, while honest labor is just dull, whether it pays enough or not.
It probably is not the main driver, but it is hard to discount it as a factor. Another interesting archetype is one man going solo against a corrupt system ( usually guns are involved ). You could reasonably argue that US populace is conditioned for it and then people are all surprised when people actually act out on those early imprints.
I think this is a fundamental attribution error... You're saying the person _is_ a thief, whereas I would say the person is _committing_ thievery. In the first case, it's the persons nature and no change in incentives would dissuade them. In the second, if you change the incentives so that thievery is less attractive (with its inherent risks) than just working for a good wage, the behavior would vanish.
_People committing thievery_ more often than not aren’t rational actors capable of assessing risks at least somewhat accurately. There, exact same argument with a term you prefer.
He was commenting on the risk decisions of farmers throughout history. It would be sensible for people to put all their effort into growing surplus of one crop for sale, but then they would be at greater risk of starving under crop failure.
People's choices are affected by their (percevied) risk calculus.
Hard disagree. The majority probably >95% of _People committing thievery_ will have assessed the risk to reward before doing it otherwise what would be the point? even if just for momentary excitement.
They just have very little to lose if they get caught. The problem is so many people are being pushed out of decent society in terms of rewards for work and wealth increase. you even have people who expect to go to prison at some point in their life simply because of the circumstances for their birth.
> When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything.
Except when these thefts are de-facto decriminalized in Califronia, and police is either defunded or directed not to fight these crimes, the "risk of getting caught" is effectively zero.
That means that unless you start handing out iPhones for free in local malls, the thefts will continue.
Let's stop pretending these thieves are "starving". Starving people don't pull up to a Gucci or Louis Vuitton in a Porsche and casually steal a luxury handbag for their girlfriend.
If all work is slavery to you, how about the people who produced all these iPhones and LV bags?
We're dealing here with people who are happy to steal the products of other people's work, instead of doing any work themselves.
there has been no meaningful defunding of police in any major metropolitan area in california and no directive to not pursue property crime. police have not pursued property crime for decades. you are regurgitating authoritarian propaganda with no evidence.
No matter how diligent cops are, they cannot do anything about these crimes within the law. Passing such Propositions then blaming cops for rising crime is sinister.
> It recategorized some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, rather than felonies, as they had previously been categorized.
It’s still a crime. Police’s job is to respond to crime. Can you imagine if you were tasked with a job and then just stopped doing it because your thought your boss needed to take it more seriously? Any place I worked you’d get fired.
Especially if you started lying to everyone that your boss made it a rule that the problem can’t be dealt with when in reality you just think the consequences aren’t high enough
> No matter how diligent cops are, they cannot do anything about these crimes within the law
They could patrol the streets and respond to the crime. The court system and prosecutors office decides if it needs to escalate from there. This is the LAPD however so they’re probably too busy forming gangs and engaging in crime themselves
a century of propaganda has led everyone to think that the police spend a lot of effort 'solving' crimes, but a cursory look at clearance statistics will reveal otherwise.
to the extent that police are an effective anti-crime tool, it primarily stems from their physical presence (racially profiled harassment) as a deterrent. outside of homicides & some PR-useful drug enforcement, police departments spend most of their time discouraging people from filing police reports after actual crimes, harassing poor people, and meeting traffic citation quotas
did you see the amount of packages that had been opened and littered all over?? I'd say that the risk of getting caught there was extremely low and that desperation had little to do with it and it was more opportunistic.
You might not realise it but you've recreated a famous bit from the news satire "Brass Eye" - a news presenter shows some crime statistics and follows it up with the words "So much for recorded crimes, but crimes we know nothing about are going up as well" and displays this graphic:
Was discussing this with some friends recently. The general agreement was social media has exacerbated inequality. It was always there to a varying degree - but there's a big difference between seeing a movie star or musician flexing expensive clothes and shoes on MTV or in a magazine to seeing Johnny Average who went to your school flexing them on Instagram. One is attainable and "why don't I have this", the other you don't worry about.
Furthermore we seem to have such an easy money culture right now - if you get caught in a crypto or NFT or memestock or whatever bubble on FB or Twitter, 'everyone' is rich with no effort (and they can teach you how for 99$ a month!) - why shouldn't you be rich without working?!
The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators."
The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators."
First of all, the drop in crime in New York occurred simultaneously with the corresponding process in the entire United States. In another study, Harcourt notes that the drop in crime rates in New York coincided with the end of the crack drug epidemic. Christina Sterbenz adds that this trend has been fueled by declining unemployment (during the 1990s, its rate fell by 40%).
Criminologist Ralph Taylor is sure that socio-economic is a significant factor that affects the crime rate. Returning to the experiment with two cars - in the Bronx initially there was a low level of welfare, and in wealthy Palo Alto, a researcher must intervene in the experiment to provoke vandalism.
The theory of broken windows has also failed to pass the test of a massive social experiment. In 1994, the US government introduced the Moving to Opportunity program, which relocated 4,800 impoverished families to prime locations. The program was implemented in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Baltimore. Three quarters of the resettled households were on the brink of poverty, and two thirds of the participants were African American.
According to the theory, in the new environment the level of their involvement in offenses should have, but this did not happen, since the move did not improve their financial situation, but emphasized the social gap with their neighbors.
I think the opposite of this (reducing enforcement should not increase crime) has been proven false by Californias Prop 47 [1]. So, I imagine the starting point, where enforcement is then increased, is very important.
Since poverty is (at least typically) defined relative to some average those two things are not as disconnected as you may think.
But in general I'd expect crime to be a "least worst option" choice and I seem to remember research to that effect. Although I wouldn't be able to find that now again, so take it with an appropriate amount of salt.
No, they are orthogonal. A society split between middle class workers and billionaires still has inequality without poverty. A society of 100% poverty has no inequality.
"Two commonly used measures are:
people in relative low income – living in households with income below 60% of the median in that year;
people in absolute low income – living in households with income below 60% of (inflation-adjusted) median income in some base year, usually 2010/11."
This is however a bureaucratic definition of poverty that I don't accept as capturing the everyday meaning, but I thought it might be of interest to mention. I remember being under the poverty line and thinking "this doesn't count. I don't accept that I'm living in poverty." Knowing these technical uses made me regard official-sounding news and reports about 'poverty' quite differently.
(The bottom of the article talks about a group giving a more lay-compatible definition "The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) proposed a new based on the extent to which someone’s resources meet their needs. This accounts for differences among households such as costs of childcare and disability, savings and access to assets." which seems more meaningful if you're interested about absolute standards of living).
That's good to know. I had similar feelings about wealth. At one point my wife and I were in the bottom 10% or lower, because of our student debt. Yeah when we graduated medical and dental school we had pretty negative net worth. But... does it really make sense to claim we had no wealth? Or that someone who made 20k a year with no debt should trade places with us? I think wealth and inequality studies are important, and if they don't address this issue they are misleading, even meaningless statistics.
That is basically a longform way of saying "people will steal if their personal economics makes stealing rational". While extremely true it doesn't give a toehold into the problem to decide what to do next.
The question here is really what specific policies and cultural forces are shaping the economic realities that these people are living in. If nothing else, we should ask why someone isn't having great success hiring a few thick-knuckled train robbers away from their life of crime and running a very profitable security business.
> Humans will always crave to have more than each other ad will steal, loot, defraud, do anything to get there.
Yes and currently society has many many ways for the privileged to get even more than others than they already have, in ways that are legally accepted even if they’re morally reprehensible. And as long as we don’t change that and make the playing field more even, I don’t think judging petty theft so harshly makes any sense at all.
A scathing new report finds that hundreds of major corporations in the United States are repeat wage-theft offenders — committing the violations and then paying the subsequent fines as part of the cost of doing business.
It's pretty well-established empirically, over long periods and multiple countries, that this is mostly about income inequality. Not about overall wealth, not about new gadgets. Want to reduce theft and (juvenile) violent crime? Than reduce income inequality.
I've seen how tricky participating in society with a cheap android phone can get. Your memory runs out all the time when you try to have apps critical for everyday life, and your privacy is sold to highest bidder. Everything takes more time and is less reliable.
Until we as a society can honestly look at what reasonable amount of well being in information societies looks like, it's tricky to tell those with less what is reasonable to expect of quality of life.
Yes, mimetic desire is a real power too. Is that really what's at play here?
Who has the right to draw the line between basic well being and an utopia?
I've been using cheap (~150 Euros) chinese Android phones for years now. I have not experienced memory running out (my current one has some 256 GB, I think), and privacy selling is a problem caused by apps, not by the hardware - you'd be surprised the amount of info your average iOS app sells.
This Android vs. iOS thing is not about technical capabilities, it's about elitism - and elitism always breeds jealousy, and thus thievery. Lao Tse knew this in 500 BC: "By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing."
As a long time user of both, it seems to me there's a fair amount of elitism on android side too - it's just more branded towards technocratic ableism. I.e. "I can use a device that's difficult to use, so I have competence".
Used iphones are verifiable to be reliable, so there is a good aftermarket for them, as opposed to Android phones. At that point the elitism argument falls conpletely apart.
Actually, I'll take some of this back. I don't really want to label either one as elitism. Human identity bulding is a natural mechanism.
The point I want to make is that it can and will happen related to phones regardless of the brand. Some people are proud of actual propertiea of the product, others will focus more on the image or ideological aspects.
There's nothing wrong with this as such: humans are good at attaching their identities/personalities to all kinds of external things. This tendency also drives healthy psychological growth and learning when it's in check.
Well, that's the lower end for smartphones these days, and the one I am using has 4GiB of RAM, the same amount the iPhone 13 has. Again, this is not about technical specifications, it's about faux elitism and the problems that come with it.
Faced with massive demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd, the Los Angeles City Council took a dramatic and symbolic step last year, cutting $150 million from the Police Department’s budget and promising to put that money into other social services.
From looking at the budgets from 2014[1], it's increasing. Also the "$150 million" cut figure is the difference between the council approved budget and the mayor's proposed budget, not the difference from the previous year.
In billions of dollars:
2014-2015: $1.338
2015-2016: $1.438
2016-2017: $1.485
2017-2018: $1.578
2018-2019: $1.609
2019-2020: $1.733
2020-2021: $1.721
2021-2022: $1.760
The city also took on $47 million in overtime debt in the year that the budget was cut [2]
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.
"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."
This is based on the (imho) wrong assumption that people prefer stealing over working when it's easier. But this is not true, people prefer to work but they need to live and their children need to live. You should remove the necessity to steal by building a social infrastructure that helps struggling people.
The case for this is nicely details in "Human Kind" by Rutger Bregman [0].
(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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is too entrenched to change.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's a pro, but now the blast radius of your malfeasance is also larger. Instead of stealing a couple of Amazon packages a day, you can now deprive tens of thousands of people out of their life savings, you can deprive thousands of a medication they might need, you're now able to corrupt law enforcement and officials without any moral qualms and so on.
"Safer" in the short term for the criminal and law enforcement, but overall much more damaging to society and the rule of law.
Positions of power are already taken by people on socio-path (pun intended). So for society nothing changes.
Salesmen already lie. There are already a lot of scammer ceos. People can deal with those by ignoring them. What people can not ignore is gun/knife in their face and a death of a loved one.
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:
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I've never seen an American-style SUV in Western Europe
I was actually thinking about these SUVs this morning, as their were two Cadillac Escalades [0] parked on my block in central Stockholm as I walked my kid to school. The town is *full* of these types of vehicles (there are even full-size Hummers driving around).
The "EU" can't be characterized in this uniform way - the different countries are totally unlike each other in so many respects. Because Sweden is part of Scandinavia, people often think there's a cycling culture here for instance - but that's also totally untrue. The same is true of our gun-crime - with criminal gangs frequently shooting each other on the streets: such a thing was virtually unknown to me throughout the time I lived in central London.
The true picture is way more nuanced than the Europe vs USA binary that people like to imagine.
I guess it's always a question of perspective. Coming from Germany, there definitely is _more_ of a cycling culture in Sweden than in Germany. The cycling infrastructure is better and better maintained (snow plowing, etc.). Of course that is also a generalization, as the differences can be big within a country as well. (My frame of reference for Sweden is mostly Uppsala)
But the noticeable presence of SUV and even Pickup models I usually associate with the US in Sweden also surprised me. Those are rare in Germany.
In London at least they're often referred to as "Chelsea tractors" (Chelsea being one of the wealthiest parts of London)., and you're entirely correct according to this article[1].
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.
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:
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.
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.
Actually relevant comment but before people say "oh, so it's just this scummy company overblowing things" - PostNord is the de facto postal service in Sweden and owned by the Swedish state.
However, they are also notoriously bad so the joke is spot on.
>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?
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!
"The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens."
I don't think that's true. I think they are being robbed because it's easy to do so, with a low risk for any consequences. Similarly as to why shoplifting in LA is up.
Start shooting at the thieves and see how fast the train robbery trend reverses.
>I think they are being robbed because it's easy to do so, with a low risk for any consequences. Similarly as to why shoplifting in LA is up.
Ok, then why aren't you robbing or shoplifting if it's so easy and risk-free? Is it because you have too much to lose if you get caught?
My whole point is that if people have a minimal standard of living, the fear of losing it will prevent them from committing crimes much more effectively than some nut shooting at them
> Is it because you have too much to lose if you get caught?
Absolutely not, risking a first time shoplifting charge is well within my risk tolerance.
I'm not doing it because
1. I find crimes against person or property vile
2. It's not worth it. All things considered, it's probably a pretty abysmal hourly rate.
> My whole point is that if people have a minimal standard of living, the fear of losing it will prevent them from committing crimes much more effectively
I agree, however I don't see how it is my fault or why would I have to pay for someone else's minimal standard of living.
Teaching a man how to fish vs giving the man a fish.
Pretty sure you'd draw that line somewhere. Perhaps it wouldn't be a train, but I can assure you with absolute certainty that there would be a point where you would value your lawfully possessed property over an attacker's life.
Anyway, we kind of went off track (no pun intended), but my initial point was that since you can rob these trains with basically no reprecussions, would it still be true if there was a chance that you might get shot in the process? I'd think not.
Because they prioritize preventing the damage to society over their own personal gain. The point is that the decision to commit a crime boils down to putting the individual benefits over the harm being inflicted on others, which is why it is naive to say this kind of theft only happens because people’s needs aren’t met. Not only does this imply that all poor people are committing crimes (how could they not, when their needs aren’t met!), but it also implies that crimes aren’t committed among the non-impoverished population, both of which are clearly false.
I would expect this kind of pictures from a third world country...
How come no one is incentivized to fix this - protect the trains, prevent this loss of property? Who pays for the stolen goods? I presume it would be the retailers, is it just a drop in the ocean for them?
In some more dystopian movies there were trains crossing vast areas of postapocalyptic hellscape protected by soldiers with machine guns and flamethrowers. In these pictures, the "responsible" just gave up. I find that simiarly dystopic.
This kind of blantent theft wouldn't happen in a third world country. The contents of the train would be much more meaningful to the sender and recipients and they'd raise hell with the shipping company over the loss, which would cause the shipping company to hire an army of underpaid security guards as deterrents (if you've spent most of your life in an economy with minimum wage/universal education, you haven't fully experienced the way the global south can point an army of people at the most trivial problems). In US, much of the value of these containers could be restored to the shipper or recipient with shipping insurance or credit card chargebacks. Additionally, higher GDP means these packages (even the medical ones) are just too small an expense to the recipients to rile them up. I have a hard time believing developing country shipping companies can insurance their operations and remain as profitable as US companies can
Once the trains insurance company/fund (or UPS? Amazons?) starts to take a hit, they will respond swiftly with a solution somehow. It'll probably take a few more months of this to hit their bottom line.
I'm pretty sure Buffett's company, which invests in both Union Pacific and insurance, is incentivized to resolve this.
This photojournalist probably just helped him make a bunch of money by identifying a prime location for an ongoing problem. The fact that we saw it before UP did doesn't mean they aren't incentivized to stop it. It's obviously bad business if their deliveries are missing packages.
I just can't imagine that the train operator isn't aware of this. Why is it allowed to go on for days / weeks, or even months? If they know where it happens, what's the holdup? Just waiting there in a hiding spot until the perpetrators come and start looting, arrest them, rinse and repeat.
> If they know where it happens, what's the holdup?
As long as sum(value of goods lost) < sum(priced-in value of goods lost/damaged)+sum(expected cost of health/liability/life insurance rate hikes after robbers maim or kill staff), nothing will be done, it would simply be more expensive and risky.
>A May SEC filing revealed Berkshire owned 10.5 million shares of Union Pacific unp and nearly 6.4 million shares of Norfolk Southern nsc.
>Berkshire omitted those investments from a quarterly summary of its stock holdings filed earlier this month because the SEC allowed the company to keep them confidential, so it's not clear how much Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern stock Berkshire currently owns.
I think protecting the train line is just one small aspect of this, what sticks out to me is how desperate people are. They're robbing trains in downtown L.A. now. You can see the skyscrapers.
That's the real dystopia here. Not that they need more armed guards.
It's so hard to have this discussion with people that live in California but a lot of the scenes in SF and LA are literally out of developing, corrupt countries.
I think people just don't want to admit how bad it has gotten because then they have to face their fears and take some action to change their future.
Homelessness, crime, theft, lack of security, mentally ill people in droves on the street, "do not go areas" like the tenderloin in SF and skid row in LA... These are not exaggerations, these are real, growing problems.
At some point, you won't be able to ignore it and all the money in the world that we earned won't help us.
SF city government provides housing for about half of the city's homeless people. The homeless and mentally ill people in SF come from all over USA. You see them SF, but I don't think SF shares much of the blame for their suffering. American voters are to blame, mostly Americans who voted for Republicans who reduced government spending on social services.
Yes, I still know people who blame the Republicans who ran the state in the 70s for the homeless problem. That was 50 years ago, but it still makes a good narrative.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Protecting these specific network of rails falls under the jurisdiction of the special agents of the UP, and not the LAPD which has experienced increased funding through the years. The UP police are headquartered in Omaha Nebraska.
I'm surprised to hear that as I've spoken with extremely wealthy people ($5M+ homes) to people renting a room (That have lived in CA almost their entire life)and a common narrative I hear is "Oh California is the best, there's no other place like it so these problems aren't really that important".
People will lament on Nextdoor, Reddit, Facebook, forums, but in the end, the people I spoke with, won't leave the state or make drastic changes.
I think it's to clean out the major cities so they can be snapped up for cheap later on by the people funding those DAs. Look at how Trump made all his money. He bought cheap New York real estate in the 70s during a similar crime wave before it got cleaned back up.
I agree with what you’re observing, but I’d attach slightly different terms to it: I think what we seeing is the failure of the ‘American dream’ (roughly, equality of opportunity combined with self-sufficiency) and the failure of American society and the overall system to compensate.
Inasmuch as any political system can be seen as an experiment, the American experiment is failing badly - and given the ingrained political culture and expectations of most of America (noting that typical Democrat policy is verging on right-wing when judged by most standards) it’s not clear how they’ll be able to find a solution.
The result is rampant and widening inequality, and growing extremism within politics and without. I’m genuinely concerned that the scene is set for a really extreme leader (consider Trump as a modest and thankfully ineffective trial run for what might be) and/or a class war.
> But still a lot of Republicans seem to believe US is not able to organize fair elections.
This is not as true as you are being led to believe. The media in general looks for extreme opinions to make news, so they'll find the rare person who believes this, and then write as if it's a majority belief.
I experienced this first hand - I watched a journalist interview tons of people, most had centrist opinions, then the finally found the person with the extreme opinion - and that was what aired that night (I specially made a point of watching).
The partisan divide is real, but what's not obvious is that it's being created by media who is desperate for attention, because that's how they get paid. They'll tell Democrats look at those horrible Republicans, and post stories of Republicans behaving badly, then the media on the other side will do it too (not as much - most media outlets are liberal leaning).
Democrats don't seem to realize they are being manipulated by stories featuring the worst that media can find, and they think that it's representative of people as a whole, so they'll start saying really nasty things - which is just more fodder for media to publish.
I wish they would make it illegal to post a minority opinion without clearly saying that it's a minority.
Is a majority of a minority allowed under your scheme?
After all, a substantial majority of Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was "stolen"; Republicans are a minority of Americans. Can the media in your wish-world report on this?
> After all, a substantial majority of Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was "stolen"
And your basis for this "fact" is? The media? Do you actually talk to average Republicans, or only the ones who like media exposure?
Out here in the real world only a minority of Republicans believe this, but it's a vocal minority, who love the media exposure. You are a victim of exactly what I'm advocating against.
Moderate Republicans greatly outnumber the extreme ones, but the extreme ones are getting all the attention.
Since I cannot talk to a large number of Republicans (or Democrats), I prefer to let opinion polls do that for me. Reuters/Ipsos would not appear to have a particular axe to grind on this issue, and as of May of 2021, they had the number at about 53% (they also document their methodology and questions etc.) A more recent poll by the Univ of Mass in Dec 2021 puts the number at 71%.
If you're going to cast "all media" as untrustworthy, then you're doomed to only know the world through your own senses. Yes, there are concerns about the accuracy of polling, for a number of reasons that include partisan response to polling in general. But I'm not prepared to say something like "well, the Republicans I know ...", because there's no possible way for my personal experience of any group (Republicans or not) is sufficient for me to draw any conclusions.
I would have thought that the combination of UMass and Ipsos was reasonably neutral enough that more or less anyone could agree on the claim "a majority of Republicans believe that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election". Apparently not ....
This is visually shocking, but the sheer amount of money taken from workers by wage theft eclipses this issue completely. Theft is normalized at all levels of American society.
I’m not trying to justify any of it, just pointing out that theft is a completely accepted part of culture in the US. Don’t get me started on civil forfeiture…
It only became shocking to people with power and wealth when poor people started doing it.
Fixing decades of neglected infrastructure, education, and social services is going to cost way more than treating people decently would’ve costed. I won’t be surprised if the solutions entirely ignore the mass suffering that is responsible for events like this and only address the losses realized by the people with the power to make change.
A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.