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Comment by farmaway | Hacker News Reader

Milwaukee vlogger's experience hanging out with car-stealing "Kia Boys:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbTrLyqL_nw

Over 10,000 cars were stolen in Milwaukee in 2021. That's one stolen auto for every 60 Milwaukee residents, young and old.

South Korea's full of vulnerable Kia and Hyundai vehicles, yet doesn't have this problem of teenage serial car thieves. American social dysfunction is a big part of the equation that results in the numbers above.

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Perhaps there is no market for stolen cars in South Korea. Perhaps South Korea has an immobilizer law like many other industrialized nations. Perhaps more cars are parked in secure areas in South Korea, and cars in Milwaukee are parked on streets or driveways. Perhaps there is more CCTV and other surveillance in South Korea that makes it impossible to escape with a stolen car.

Not saying it's not a social issue, but there's a lot of other factors as well.

>Perhaps South Korea has an immobilizer law like many other industrialized nations.

Do they? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't find an answer.

Here in my city, at least, virtually none of the stolen Kias/Hyundais were being sold. They were being stolen by middle schoolers for joy rides. Throughout the summer of 2022, groups of kids as young as 13 were stealing a different car each day, abandoning the ride of the day when it was out of gas (or damaged to the point of being inoperable).

It was pure crime of opportunity.

South Korea is a much smaller country with a national healthcare system, strict weapons laws and CCTV everywhere

> Over 10,000 cars were stolen in Milwaukee in 2021

A third of them weren't Kias OR Hyundais

> American social dysfunction

All your stats are about Milwaukee, not America at large

Thanks for sharing this video. It's hard to reconcile how these kids live and speak about their lives vs my own thinking. It seems to be a very nihilistic philosophy.

It is a very nihilistic philosophy. Unfortunately that philosophy is spreading, but it's also had an undercurrent there all along. There are a lot of people in the US that culturally do not have the same morals or system of ethics as the rest of the society, and they act out in ways which would appall the average person. This has been able to be mostly kept under wraps in the US because these subcultures, while shared across cities, on each local level are restricted to a small geographical area. With the rise of social media and the Internet, it has made the world a smaller place, allowing rapid communication between people with shared ideals and interests, and this is true for both positive interests and negative interests for society.

Car theft isn't even the half of it. Wait until you find out about the growth of card skimming in the inner city driven by social media. There are /many/ /many/ anti-social behaviors that are culturally rewarded within certain subcultures in the US. To even get to the point you have such a nihilistic world view, you have to have grown up in an environment without any serious positive role models, minimal to no hope for the future, and no realistic pathway in life to leave behind the circumstances you find yourself in. There are generations of people who have been bathed in this nihilism, and it's created a negative outcome for society on generational scale that's spreading.

Sad but true. This philosophy isn't exclusive to one race or demographic, either. Poor white kids fall into criminal subcultures just like anyone else when there seems to be no hope and no way out. Juggalo gangs are one example of this. It's no coincidence that they have a big following in economic wastelands like Detroit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggalo#Juggalo_gangs

Is that true? I know the European-market cars all have an immobilizer due to regulation. I can't find evidence whether the South Korean market cars do or do not.

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