Rail Theft Soars in California

They still have every cent, they know the intermediary vendor who is laundering the money, and they'll still tell you to pound sand. All they've done is move the money from their right hand to their left and take their hefty cut in fees yet they pretend that clearly the scammers wanted those 500 limited edition seeds in some shitty Farmville ripoff and play dumb about the App developer who's very clearly in on the scam. They lose 30% to Apple and trying to convince victims that they can only accept payment in iTunes gift cards has to absolutely tank their conversion rate yet they still favor iTunes and Google Play because at the end of the day even after the huge fees they're still more likely to get more money than trying to transfer money through more traditional means.

DOJ still lets them get away with it. If they started charging entities facilitating fraud triple the fees they gained from it I'd bet Apple would start caring about it real quick.

Almost all these scams involve various forms of money laundering to/from US institutions and through US persons. Plenty of routes for enforcement here.

Many / most including fraud carried out within the US against US persons using US infrastructure (including phones etc). Plenty of opportunities to go after the "bulletproof" hosts and those who accept terminations from them (SIP -> T-Mobile etc).

Plenty of opportunities to put MUCH MUCH more pressure on countries like India which tolerate this scamming of US persons.

Beyond that, new rules, for example, if you want to terminate overseas SIP calls into the US, you have to post a bond relative to your call volume. Folks can file claims against that bond. If the bond was not posted (or not checked), then the upstream provider is on the hook. Upstream providers can deny service to entrants who will not post bond and who originate call volumes internationally.

Immediately the other person ran to the opposite corner and asked the person with the dog to wait outside the restaurant because they had been a victim of a pitbull attack. And, of course, the person with the dog pulled the service dog card.

At this point, the business owner can do nothing. Once someone says a dog is a service dog, no one can ask them to leave until after the dog causes damage, per the ADA.

The person in the restaurant with the dog immediately claimed they forgot the vest that says their dog is a service animal. This tells me the dog was definitely not a service animal, because anyone who actually needs one knows that no proof is required.

Anyway, my point is the laws in the US right now let any dog owner walk around with impunity and impose dogs on people who do not want to be around dogs. Which means I have to modify my behavior with my toddlers and leave places where any random person can bring a Rottweiler or pitbull.

Edit: In the dog situation, you can even go further and see that NY state just forced owners of less dangerous and aggressive breeds to subsidize owners of more dangerous and aggressive breeds. Why would the government need to get involved in subsidizing risks of various dog breeds?

https://www.syracuse.com/state/2022/01/new-ny-state-law-bans...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion

On the other hand, if your neighbor makes $500, while you make $450 regardless of when you wake up, you'll be extremely irritated by the unfairness. And would not notice that your employer makes $750 off each of you, while you are busy quarreling about who's more privileged.

Most of the jobs in the cities are just that - standard work routine, standard pay, little room for decisions, little growth, little personal responsibility, little chance becoming financially independent. Brought to you by low interest rates fueling endless acquisitions and consolidation of bargaining power in fewer and fewer hands.

2008 was the end of the previous economic cycle where the big players got too greedy and too dumb, made stupid decisions with big money, and were destined to crash and burn, allowing the new wave of smaller companies to take their place. But the government decided that too much was at stake, and just bailed them out.

Around 2012 people started noticing that something is wrong, which took the rather silly form of Occupy Wall Street. The corporate response to it was shifting of the focus to social justice and equity - term that was supposed to take into account historical inequalities, but is so loose and unquantifiable, that every person would see it slightly differently, creating endless opportunity for division.

So now we have an entire generation that does not aspire wealth through personal responsibility and hard work, but rather blames someone else on having an unfair advantage and is dreaming of taking it away. That's how 3rd-world countries and dictatorships function. People are busy fighting over the leftovers from the feast left by the ruling class, and feel accomplished when they manage to steal the extra bag of potatoes their neighbor was hiding under the stairs.

Louis Rossman has a lot of videos on this in New York, essentially 50,000$ a year for tiny little slumlord hovels run by people with connections. More money isn't what's needed, it's for people who actually care to be spending it instead of politicians.

The numbers are political fiction.

"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, relative to what inputs?

These increases needn't be the same. It could be that by increasing the security budget 10%, theft decreased by 90%, and prize increased by 1%, which wouldn't be high enough to create a "theft demand". It could also be that the same security budget increase did nothing on the theft rate. My point is this is not necessarily how the market works.

This is similar to the argument that taxes increase the cost of products, which increases the cost of running the government (since the government consumes free market products), which will require more taxes. This needn't be the case.

In any case, there are and have been societies with more inequality and poverty than USA where there was less crime. Obviously nobody wants those solutions in USA but the market would find its was absent regulation in this case.

This is not an issue for which society/government should pay the cost to fix it (which you seem to imply by saying the markets have no options).

What gave you the impression otherwise? Three paragraphs in, there's a person being interviewed who claims "he comes to the tracks regularly". That definitely suggest they know they're not the first people seeing it.

>If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years.

Like what?

>I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.

The article mentions: "Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County.". An increase of 160% suggests that it was not "commonplace for years".

This looting is not done by "the poor" and they are not stealing "to fill their hungry children's mouths". They are looting because it is free season, they'll either use or sell off whatever loot they get and spend the returns on whatever they fancy.

Better yet, check out "working homeless" (take [1] for example). That things like this happen in the richest, most powerful country in history is beyond belief.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel...

A person doesn’t steal 10 iPhones to use them personally.

If you steal 10 iPhones you might end up with thousands of dollars and that keeps the lights on and feeds you for awhile. If you steal a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat you eat for a week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Japan

Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.

What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.

The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.

What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs. US has some insane policies - depending on the state, but it's a large contributor to the overall figure - regarding drug-related crimes. Legalization of some drugs, like in California, helps a bit - but given an insane amount of regulation and taxation the legal business is beset by, the illegal route is still very attractive and profitable.

The other side is the proliferation of "woke" prosecutors and local managers, refusing to prosecute crimes like petty theft (in SF, theft below $900 is in essence legal), property destruction, simple assault, etc. That is compounded by extremely permissive policies towards public homelessness and establishing homeless camps on any public property, often even burdening the adjacent private property with tolerating and supporting them. All this creates a very fertile ground for certain type of crime - there's a bunch of people that aren't very connected to social norms at the best of times, but also they know they'd never suffer any consequences for robbing a store or breaking into a car, or punching someone on the street. And there's organized crime, which knows these people can be exploited as foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise of stealing high-value items and reselling them in ad-hoc markets, or online - which is never being prosecuted, because people who are supposed to stop this are ideologically bound to address "societal roots of the crime" - which never happens - instead of going for the criminals.

So yes, you can have both high incarceration rates and extremely lax prosecution for certain crimes - at the same time. Worst of the both worlds.

Wait, if the gap in wealth inequality has been doing nothing but expanding... why does the crime rate do nothing but fall? With very few, and very brief, exceptions - this is the case.

As for whether things were "worse": I consider the political and cultural damage of storming our nation's Capitol worse than just about anything you can put a bill of damage on. You can't put that kind of cultural trespass back in the box the way you can with "ordinary" protests and riots.

Read the comment carefully: the distinction is between protesters and opportunists, with the latter not being protestors. There is no evidence that protestors individually or collectively engaged in looting.

There was no such distinction during J6: the opportunists who did storm the Capitol and menace our legislative branch started as protestors, and promoted themselves to riotous behavior when the opportunity presented itself.