Insane that we are at the level of poverty where deconstructing infrastructure makes economic sense to people. It’s insane the amount of effort and shamelessness people are willing to go through for a few hundred bucks. When you consider how high minimum wage is in LA too, it’s ridiculous they can’t find work instead of going as low as this.
It has nothing to do with poverty, and everything to do with some people prioritizing money for themselves over the externalities.
"If I make $100, and some stranger who I don't know loses $10,000...well, sucks to be that stranger, he should have paid a security guard to watch his wires" is the mindset of a whole load of people in the world.
Hell, I mean, there are people out there who will kill you for your $100 phone if they have the chance.
If the gains are high enough, lots of people who aren't poor will steal.
But if the gains are low, then there's a risk-to-reward ratio that comes into play and, generally speaking, the poorer you are, the high ratio you're willing to put up with.
Really? I'm skeptical, unless you categorize someone stealing to fuel their drug addiction, as "due to poverty." What about people who steal because it's fun or exciting and not boring, like an actual job? I had a Hispanic friend like that once--he didn't even need the money, he stole just because it gave him an adrenalin rush and because of the crowd.
> What about people who steal because it's fun or exciting and not boring, like an actual job?
Sure, there are those people too, but even then the risk-to-reward factor will come into play, it's just that those people are willing to take a higher risk not because of the monetary reward but because of the reward of the "thrill".
You'll always have several categories of people stealing.
Parent's point is that poverty will lower the threshold for some of these categories. People who wouldn't care that much about money if they had enough to get by will get into stealing, not necessarily to get rich but just to get back to a state they're comfortable with.
>some people prioritizing money for themselves over the externalities
You mean exactly like the employees, execs and shareholders of the big publicly traded companies many people here work for?
But it's evil when the homeless crackhead in your neighborhood smashes your car window for drug money, but not the Google/Microsoft exec who pushes ads with malware or addictive drugs on your kids for a career advancement and a nice house in California, that's just called innovation, where the former person is the looser and the latter the winner of our capitalist system.
Many profitable industries have been built on privatizing the profits and socializing the externalities on the environment, society, people, etc. Oil & gas, mining, motor vehicles, fast fashion, ads, gambling, food, pharma, etc. Usually on less developed countries, and it only makes the news when those externalities finally reach us here in the rich western countries.
This is the core source of disillusionment. It is wrong for both, but it is more impactful to society when corporations do this. Therefore it should be society's priority to raise the stakes of running a corporation, not hand out lazy penalties that continue to incentivize strategic negligence.
More regulation, regular enforcement of law, and more responsibility in general for the people and firms that wield the most influence will prevent many otherwise great citizens from deciding not to play the game of civilized life. IRS getting massive returns from cracking down on wealthy tax cheats is one of many good steps in this direction under the current US administration.
It's hard to value something you don't have a stake in.
Fewer and fewer people have a stake in their communities and their community's prosperity. Fewer have a stake in the housing market. Fewer have a stake in our institutions working properly. Fewer have a stake in capitalism itself. It's not surprising that these things are slowly becoming devalued. The solution may involve welcoming back more people as stakeholders in society rather than pushing them away.
I suspect you will find that in many cases, people whose brains have been hijacked by chemical dependency may experience some difficulty in behaving as a stakeholder in society. It will often not stack up favorably against feeding that dependency, no matter how much they might favor it in the abstract.
This country has always had a segment of people in chemical dependent desperation since it was founded. The question is, why are we seeing a rise in metal theft? Its not because this population suddenly emerged, nor that they suddenly realized that metal has value as scrap. Its because the prices of metals has increased which creates incentive to fence metals. Theft in this sector is enabled through fences who take this stuff without asking questions.
It's not like selling a stolen bike and pretending it's not stolen. There's just not a lot of good reasons for someone to bring into a recycler an old brass plaque from a city monument or a hundred yards of wire from a bridge. Law enforcement knows this at least and is lenient on the thieves if they help pin the fence.
There have always been thieves and the "they are only criminals because they are victims" line is nonsense. It is a risk vs reward calculation for them and it's not a surprise that the crime is more popular when you reduce the risk with minimal punishment.
And yet countries that aren't as rich as the US and are a lot softer on crime, have a lot less of it than the US. So maybe something is actually wrong in the US at a societal leve, that it has such a higher crimerate.
It's not an insane amount of effort, and a lot of people are quite shameless.
I think your conclusion is wrong because you assume "huge risk/effort -> people only do this out of poverty" when it's "almost no risk/effort -> people want a quick hundred bucks".
It's not nonsense but neither is what you said. Both things can be true. There is a high level of poverty and large wealth disparity. There is also a lack of enforcement.
When they put hidden cameras inside packages to catch porch pirates, plenty of thieves have a decent apartment, big screen TV. They’re not stealing groceries, they’re stealing things to fence.
of course it does. you steal 20 deoderant sticks, 3 jugs of laundry detergent, 6 packs of gillete razors, and a couple of 12 packs of RX Bars, and you can fence that for $60-80 in SF. You can easily do a couple of fencing runs a day. conservatively thats $2400 a month if you do 2x runs a day 5 days a week lol. Plenty of people in SF make a living like this. Every couple of months the feds catch a fencing operation selling millions of dollars of stolen items on ebay a year.
Deoderant in particular is incredibly profitable because it sells super well on ebay. Just search old spice deoderant on ebay and look at all of the obviously stolen merchandise.
It's funny though, because it kinda creates tons of jobs. the highly incompetent just steal and sell to fencers, the semi-incompetent buy stolen goods and fence them on ebay, and poor consumers get to buy slightly cheaper goods on ebay. the only people who lose are stores elling goods, and consumers who have to ask salespeople to open the locked up merchandise.
