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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks.

The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up behind me and very persistently told me that I hadn't scanned something. Annoyed, I pointed on the screen where it showed I had. His eyes went wide, and he spun around, and quickly hurried away, no apology.

If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't code that intervention/confrontation as their mess-up, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still got dinged as suspicious, to cover their butts.

We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. And I have even recently seen a street person in a chain pharmacy here, simply tossing boxes of product off the shelves, into a dingy black trash bag, in the middle of the day. Somehow none of the usual employees around. Yet there's often employees moving to stand behind me at that same store, when I use their self-checkout. (Maybe my N95 mask is triggering some association with masked bandits, yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? But an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go when they have symptoms.)

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> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa?

They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.

The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.

Plus, like everybody in retail, LP’s measured performance indicator is how busy they look when management is around. The best way to do that without getting in a fight is to annoy people who don’t actually have anything to hide.

That can be seen at many levels of society. ICE also prefers to round up harmless immigrants that show up for court hearings, work in fields, wait at bus stations or deliver their children to day care rather than the "dangerous criminals" that they keep on boasting about. And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal in their view anyway, why bother?

Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.

> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...

Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It's not a crime per se to overstay a visa like say shoplifting or killing someone. It's more like there's a proceeding to determine whether you did overstay and then when there's a finding of fact they basically tell you you have to leave or they remove you from the country forcibly. It would be patently ridiculous to jail someone for overstaying or for working on a tourist visa or for any of a number of these things.

You cannot be more wrong.

Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.

I would love to understand if you truly believed that no such federal statute exists, or we’re just intentionally spreading misinformation.

That is manifestly not the same thing as overstaying a visa. Moreover, not only does it not apply if you’re already found to be in the country illegally you have to be caught in the act of entering - it was amended in 1996 to apply a civil penalty by the same act that created expedited removal (yes, it is not supposed to be in lieu of any statutory criminal penalty that _may_ be applied) and lower court judges have found against the re-entry provisions in 1326 [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/163419/miranda-du-unconstitu...

The visa is your entry document. The I-94 is your status document[0]. The visa outlines the conditions (including dates) you may enter the country. The I-94 is the record of entry/departure and dictate your required date of departure.

  >  This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.

This is a completely different conversation and scenario that what was being previously discussed. There is a pretty significant difference between illegal border crossing vs overstaying your status. The latter never performed an illegal border crossing. These people are documented.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/forms/all-forms/form-i-94-arrivaldepar...

And I believe all of this conflation of entering the country illegally with overstaying a visa or violating the restrictions on a visa having passed through a Border Control checkpoint is at the heart of a lot of what's happening right now. The whole concept of "illegal immigration" was expanded to contain this other category of person who went through Border Control properly, they have a passport from their home country with a stamp or a visa, but they are not complying with the requirements of the visa or for the entry stamp. These people are not criminals and many of them have put down roots here and would be model citizens if they had citizenship.

Because ICE is having a lot of trouble finding enough people who crossed illegally to round up and put in concentration camps, they're scouring the country for people in the other category. And in many cases the threat of visa cancellation is being used to suppress political speech. A lot of people don't know that because they don't understand that there's a way to get here legally that doesn't involve getting citizenship or a green card. I think if you've never left the country it probably doesn't occur to you that there's a whole system of checkpoints that you can use to enter the country but almost zero control after that other than your own good faith efforts. And this is true just about everywhere else in the world.

> This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry

None of which has anything to do with the matter at hand.

It. Is. Not. A. Crime. To. Overstay. A. Visa.

No. Overstaying a visa or not leaving when temporary protected status is suddenly revoked (or asylum is not granted) is not a criminal offense under US federal law.

Technically it is all about status since a visa is about entry. Like the date on your visa is the window you have to enter the country but you'd have an I-94 or some status forum that dictates the parameters of your stay. (though yeah, everyone just calls this "overstaying your visa") (IANAL but have travel abroad before and well... I was in grad school and conversations about visa and status come up a lot when the majority of students have temporary status and there's a president talking about changing the rules)

>> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...

>Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

It is not[0].

Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.

That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US legally and overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Those who made an (whether valid or not) asylum claim are legally in the United States until their asylum claim can be adjudicated.

[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...

If you had read the post you’re responding to, you would have seen that it asserts that the majority of undocumented people in the country actually were documented when they entered the country.

Also it’s poor form to copy/paste the same response over and over, even if you were reading the posts you replied to.

>Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.

Yes. The link[0] I posted with my comment cites that specific law:

   To be clear, the most common crime associated with illegal immigration is 
   likely improper entry. Under federal criminal law, it is misdemeanor for an 
   alien (i.e., a non-citizen) to:

       Enter or attempt to enter the United States at any time or place other 
       than designated by immigration officers;
       
       Elude examination or inspection by immigration officers; or
       Attempt to enter or obtain entry to the United States by willfully 
       concealing, falsifying, or misrepresenting material facts.

   The punishment under this federal law is no more than six months of 
   incarceration and up to $250 in civil penalties for each illegal entry. These
   acts of improper entry -- including the mythic "border jumping" -- are 
   criminal acts associated with illegally immigrating to the United States.
 
   Like all other criminal charges in the United States, improper entry must be 
   proven beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict.

And in fact, I said:

   Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a 
   crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.

   That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US Legally and 
   overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Where did I claim otherwise? Seriously. That's not a rhetorical question.

[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...

Repeating the same irrelevant statute doesn't make it relevant.

Illegal is not the same as criminal, but a civil violation is still illegal. Someone without lawful status is subject to detention and deportation. A person who overstayed a visa or is otherwise undocumented is, by definition, here illegally and falls under the legal term “illegal alien.”

That's as may be. But that's not what GP said.

It is not the case that "every illegal immigrant is already a criminal," which is what GP claimed.

It’s not ICE’s opinion about who is illegal, it’s congress’s. Didn’t they create the immigration laws that are on the books? I can never understand why people seem to blame the enforcement agencies for the laws they are enforcing.

But I agree with the sentiment that they are selecting the easiest targets.

ICE can make them un-illegal by granting them parole, without further action from congress. AFAIK they can even do it unilaterally, though congress could choose to check them later.

>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.

There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)

The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.

Or maybe they just don’t want any violence in their stores at all? I will avoid shopping somewhere that has regular ass whoopings way more than I would avoid shopping somewhere with regular shoplifting.

So I guess you've never frequented Waffle House ;-)

What are they supposed to do, just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely?

I’d rather shop at a store that actually prevents theft, deterring future thieves from stealing. It will be a safer place to shop with lower prices.

Are you saying you would continue shopping in a store where you regularly saw violence against people who might be thieves, on the assumption you’d never be mistaken for one?

No, I’m saying that I would prefer to shop at a store that uses shopkeeper’s privilege to detain thieves using reasonable force.

The legal limits are very clear and simply enacting violence “against people who might be thieves” is not within them.

Generally agree with the sentiment but it can put you in a very hard place.

I was accused of shoplifting by a gigantic dude who moved in to detain me as I was going into my car. Could have gotten Walmart badge or paraphernalia from anywhere (most walmarts aren't that aggressive but this one was). I could have told him to eat shit and it was clear he was willing to get violent. At that point I would have had to decide whether to draw a weapon, because he clearly would have overpowered me and put me in imminent fear of death. I handed him my receipt with one hand while preparing for the possibility to draw a weapon with the other, thankfully he seemed satisfied and turned out to be a real Walmart employee.

I decided I didn't want to ever face that decision again so I never went back

I might be misinterpreting the situation, but the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me. The whole situation is wildly outside my experience.

I live in New Zealand.

I said weapon, not gun, but theoretically if it were a gun, it wouldn't feel any different than shopping without one. Put a small watergun down your waistband and walk around for a couple days. After a couple you won't notice it, and no one else is going to notice it either. It will become utterly mundane, it similarly applies to a dagger or whatever concealable weapon one may be able to get ahold of.

> the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me

If you ever visit Texas take a look around the entrances to stores, shops, restaurants, bars etc. You should see large white signs with a "gun-buster" and a 30.0* code. or a large "51%" symbol in red. It would be incredibly rare to see a person with an open carry gun thou

30.05 is to tell people that "constitutional carry" (carry without a LTC) is not allowed on the property. A person with a License to Carry may carry on the property.

30.06 says a LTC person may not conceal carry on the property.

30.07 says a LTC person may not open carry on the property.

The 51% lets people who carry know that the establishment has a liquor/beer permit and receives 51% of income from sales of alcohol. Meaning it's a felony to bring a firearm onto the premises. The others are misdemeanor trespass

Then you may see a reminder 46.03 sign at places like schools, sporting venues etc as a reminder that weapons (not just guns) are not allowed.

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

It reminds me of "Posted"[0] signs that I've seen in lots of places in the southern US. Growing up in the Northeast, we didn't have such things[1].

[0] "Posted" is shorthand for "Private Property. No Trespassing." I get that the word "posted" means "I posted the sign. Pay attention or you might get arrested or shot." But I have no idea how the latter got shortened to the former. It's also an interesting regionalism, although not specifically related to legal codes and their taxonomy.

[1] Where I grew up we just had "No Trespassing" or "Private Property" signs.

Edit: expanded footnote [0].

If I'm understanding this correctly then, ultra-conservative Texas has more local regulation on open carry than ultra-progressive Washington?

The restrictions on unlicensed open carry of a loaded weapon in a vehicle alone makes the Washington regulation way more of a hassle than in in Texas, although they both have location restrictions.

The 30.0* signs are basically “no trespassing” sign that property owners (stores shops buildings etc) may elect to refuse entry to persons in various modes of carry. Most commonly will allow people to conceal carry with a license. Most places (in mid-large cities) don’t want people walking around openly carrying a gun in their place of business.

The 51% is alcohol & guns don’t go well together. Conservative Texas would probably like to do away with alcohol altogether, they still only allows beer & wine sales on Sunday and only because Sunday Football. Liquor bottles can only be bought at liquor stores (except on sunday). Unlike California where you can pick up some Johnnie & Jameson with school supplies and toilet paper before church.

Most regulations are on when and how you use the firearm. Having a LTC means you have a little more forgiveness for trespassing because the signs were hidden behind the door or plants etc. Constitutional carry will still be charged. But LTC has more penalties for misuse, such as brandishing to intimidate carries greater penalties

That this comment was downvoted (while stating that they live in NZ, a distinctly different culture from the USA), really underlines what a lunatic society those of us in the USA are in. Guns aren’t normal in most of the western world, folks.

The job of a security guard is to observe and report. Let the multi-billion dollar companies like walmart and home depot pay for actual law enforcement to be on hand when a security guard observes a suspected shoplifter. The security guard isn't paid enough or trained enough to get physical with customers.

Shopkeeper’s privilege exists as long-standing common law doctrine for a reason. No business should be forced to tolerate theft, or be forced to pay off-duty police officers to prevent it.

And no one is compelled to be a security guard; if the risks and pay don’t align, they’re free to walk away.

I had never heard of 'shopkeeper's privilege' but looked it up [1] and yes, seems to be a real thing in the United States and nowhere else, according to a quick scan of that wiki article.

More evidence to me that the US was set up to serve corporatist interests over pretty much everything (and everyone) else. Why else provide shopkeepers with some special legal status? (Which again, they don't have in any other country.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege

Don't forget people used to live in shops and castle doctrine also applies

In the 1970s I saw a security guard or 2 chase a thief out of a store then tackle and detain him right in front of me. Didn't make me hesitate to go back to the store or cause any worry that guards might tackle me.

Yes. Thievery makes everything in the store more expensive. I have no interest in shopping at a store that has thieves in it and law enforcement does nothing to stop thieves in my area.

> just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely

Has this actually happened? Or are the chain pharmacies using “shrinkage” as a scapegoat for other deficiencies? I find it incredibly hard to believe that retail theft puts an appreciable dent in profits.

I have a hard time imagining why they would close profitable stores otherwise. They’re generally not in the business of turning down profit.

The point isn't that businesses are closing profitable stores, but the stores are unprofitable for reasons other than shrinkage. You're being fed a narrative about crime. Why? Who benefits?

> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities. For instance, the CEO of Walgreens has acknowledged that perhaps retailers “cried too much last year” and overspent on security measures that failed to reflect real needs. And although the National Retail Federation said that “organized retail crime” drove nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021, the group later retracted its claim; it now no longer attaches a dollar amount to money that is lost due to retail theft. And in memorable cases, major retailers have chosen to maintain stores with much higher rates of crime, while closing others.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities...

Target closed stores under this excuse last year. One was in downtown Oakland, where I can easily believe it (large unhoused population). Multiple news stories reported that this was only a cover to close underperforming stores and not the primary reason for closures.

> There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security.

Bit of an assumption there.

There is no easy answer for this breakdown. The cat is out of the bag and these losers aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and face real consequences. Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance. Of course that doesn't stop anything and quality of life goes down.

> Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance.

Stores have plenty of incentives to engage in privacy invading surveillance even ignoring shoplifting as a factor. If a store saw zero shoplifting they'd still deploy privacy invading surveillance because it's profitable for them to do it right now and it will only be increasingly profitable for them to do it in the near future.

You will also go to jail. It’s not self-defense:

https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-walgreens-manager-co...

That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.

Why don't people from SF also get a pejorative?

Because they are here to defend themselves.

more like "try that in a small town" police will see what happened, "atta boy" and get on with other things. never even reaches the courts.

you can use a reasonable amount of force to prevent people from taking property (or if you're acting as an agent thereof) in Texas. But still you can always be taken to civil court and be at the mercy of whatever judge. I imagine in San Francisco you will almost certainly lose to the criminal who was stealing something if you use any amount of force other than to defend yourself unless you're a cop

Don't know how it is in the states but in most places in Europe using violence against a violent person is likely to end up very badly for you, even if you are a guard and have the necessary permits and training. You are not going to risk being fined or jailed to stop some criminal from shoplifting from a store that is not even yours.

What is the role of a security guard if not to wield violence? Their equipment implies a capability for violence. Are they unable to perform their job legally in Europe?

If you want to risk hurting someone whilst restraining him… Otherwise, it’s not worth it. What equipment are you talking about anyway, the nightstick? In my language it is formally called the “defensa”, implying that it can’t be used to attack someone.

Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.

Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.

They are there to intervene when there is violence against a person, not property.

There's a reason local rent-a-cops here hire almost exclusively seniors: they're _not_ going to go chasing someone down, they're just going to follow instructions, go for their walk around the site every 30 minutes and generally not cause trouble when they get bored.

observe and report. That's it.

Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with. A violent person will probably get it out of their system quickly. If you fight them, though, that creates a feedback loop that won't stop until someone is injured or dead. Just let people express themselves and everyone will be fine.

This mindset is what perpetually allows the violent to abuse the weak. What a violent person needs is a boot in the mouth. Or as many as necessary until he understands that’s not the way to behave. We are talking about people who generally have a low level of intelligence and do not understand anything else.

Does that mean the boot-weirder is also a violent person in need of a boot to the mouth?

Or is it not “real” violence if it’s justified? In which case, pretty much all violent people will tell you they are justified.

Which means it reduces to “it’s ok for me to be violent because I’m righteous, unlike those thugs”

At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.

"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."

That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.

Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.

I don't think you'd feel at home here.

Maybe there was something to the high-trust society we once had.

Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.

And how did we 'forsake' it?

When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.

When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.

Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.

I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.

> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.

I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.

Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.

I think it’s the news.

Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.

But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.

This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.

People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.

Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.

The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.

For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.

All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.

I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.

The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.

Your theory of urban/rural bifurcation is overly reductive. My city had a population of about 40,000 in the 70s (when guns were left in racks in the backs of trucks in the high school parking lot)—it's about twice that today. (I did however just return from visiting my wife's hometown in northern Idaho, which has a population of about 500, and indeed I did not feel the need to lock my car, despite keeping a firearm inside of it.)

I don't care to propose any solutions here, especially around such politically-volatile topics, because I believe the actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did are worth acknowledging and investigating first.

40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.

Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.

Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.

In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.

I assure you there's quite the difference between a city (that even has “City” it its name!) of 80,000, and a town of 500. It's easy to see conflating the two as “high density population dweller ignorance” for anyone who has lived in or near all three (500, 80,000, 1M+).

I mean yea, I'm from bumfuk nowhere farmland where there was nothing close. Of course that meant a lot in the late 70s where you might get 3 channels on the TV. We were very disconnected from the world back then.

That's no longer true. Everyone has a cellphone pretty much everywhere. You don't think of hoodlum stuff while bored, you watch a livestream of it and think "I could do that too".

We live in a much different world now.

> actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did

Well go on then. Let's hear your theory out loud.

Feel free to assume whatever you'd like and ascribe whatever implicit outgroup labels you'd like as well.

There's definitely a rural element to it. I left probably $10,000 worth of construction equipment out for the stealing for 2 years while building my house in the country. Just totally unmonitored vacant property, surrounded by poor people in trailers who badly could have used the money if they cared to steal it. Of course neighbors would never think to steal it because burning your name in a small town is the same thing as banishment or starving to death because you'll never get another job / lover / friend / help.

It would have been gone in 15 minutes at my house in the city.

In a rural area, there’s only a handful of people who would notice the opportunity. Odds are pretty good that they won’t take it, because most people aren’t thieves. In the city, thousands of people will spot the opportunity and odds are good that a few of them are thieves.

The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.

50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.

This said, there is something that has change.

24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.

I'm going guess that at some point between the 70s and in 00s a lot of children were murdered in schools by people with guns.

The high trust society is "gone" in many segments of society, but I don't see that we've made a decision to forsake it. Forsaking implies renouncing or turning away from it intentionally.

I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.

(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)

If a hit and run hadn't been involved they wouldn't have gotten caught.

It's something I've thought about. It's not totally clear from the police reports. I've read them through several times and the offender had hit about seven stores that day tearing off Rogaine en masse, and the cops seemed to be on their trail already. The hit-n-run certainly would have put a flame up their ass.

Someone has never worked retail. They know they can get away with it because pretty much any corporate store has a policy that employees can't try to stop them. An employee at a local REI was fired for trying to stop one of the daily thefts they were having.

Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.

Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.

IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

self-checkout at a grocery store is so maddening. There are enough edge cases (discounted items, multiples, lack of barcodes, special deals) to make it painful if you have anything more than a few staples. And I'm sure it's also part of the disgusting push to barcode & box produce which is a negative for everyone but the suppliers & stores.

>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss

I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.

I was at a Whole Foods last year and was tired from driving for about 6hrs straight. I scanned one item, set up a paper bag on the right, and then mindlessly bagged every other item in my cart without scanning. I paid probably $3-4 on a $60 purchase.

As soon as I got to the hotel and figured it out, I went back to correct the mistake--but imagine getting harassed or taken to the back for a careless error? I'm sure that happens more often than I hear about.

(PS I am genuinely surprised their weight sensor, that flags an attendant, didn't go off. That thing usually trips if you breathe on it funny.)

Given that Prime now displays itemized orders purchased at Whole Foods, imagine getting your Amazon account flagged/banned for your mistake...

Depending on jurisdiction, they record everything and do nothing until you pass a felony amount. Then, they respond.

Target is well known in doing exactly this. A lot of shoplifters stay away from target past a 1 time hit.

The last time I forgot to scan something hiding the back of my cart I caught the mistake as I was leaving and ran to another self-checkout to scan the item. The one employee they had watching over at least 7 self checkout stations thanked me personally because apparently if the cameras caught the error the overworked employee would have been responsible and might have lost her job.

It’s not a universal replacement for a clerk, but it can be very useful.

I can be through the whole process at CVS (with some random item like a birthday card) in about 30 seconds.

It's funny that you mention CVS. I went to use the human checkout at CVS last time I was there because the line for self-checkout was so long, only to be told "in order to check out at this register, you need to have a CVS extra-care card".

I no longer shop at CVS.

lol

You really have to be able to judge to self checkout ability of the people in line. Some will get stuck for 5 min before a clerk comes to do it for them.

I also refuse to go into a CVS. They are trash. It's a shame there as so many more of them than walgreens.

The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.

I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.

> A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.

I've been to like 4 different Dollar Generals in the last year. Every single one of them had the self checkout turned off.

This is a crazy take imo. Grocery stores are way better with self checkout. No more lines, and Im legitimately faster than the cashiers ever were.

Less relevant, but reminds me of my all-time favorite grocery store LP encounter, near MIT. The chain was running this big promotion with lots of tear-open prize tickets that are either coupons or game board pieces, so I had been visiting often, to buy ramen noodles (one ticket per package!) and I had a small stack of coupons in my wallet. I was checking my coupons for this visit in the middle of a center aisle, and was returning my wallet to my back pocket, when this nice middle-aged probably church-going woman store employee walked up, looked at me, and the "oh!" expression on her face said she was very surprised that I was stealing. She hurried off. When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in, by sprawling across both the lane and the conveyor. The young checkout woman says to him, annoyed, "Not you again." The guy strikes up a conversation with me. "That's a nice backpack. ... If I had a backpack like that, people would think I was stealing something." It was an ordinary cheap bare-bones store-branded backpack. He's getting close to illegally detaining me, which would go extremely badly for him. To de-escalate, I do my best folksy code-switching, and pretend not to know what's going on. My hyperobservant mode also kicked in: there was abnormal maneuvers of multiple people from the other side of the checkouts. One young guy coming up with the others, my eyes dark to him, he sees I see him, and for some reason gets a look like he's noping the f right out of whatever is going down, and he spins 180 and quickly walks away. Eventually, this friendly and sensible person, who I took to be the manager on duty, comes up on the other side of the checkout, and we have a friendly conversation about the ticket promotion. I think she immediately realized that I was a good-natured MIT type, not a shoplifter. And I would guess she thought the LP guy was a clown who risks getting the store sued someday.

Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?

It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.

Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.

> I was repeatedly told to target black women

not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.

I should have specified that I worked LP in the early 2000's but I doubt much has changed, since bigotry and racism do not seem to ever go away, especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution.

Lasted a mere 6 months at that job before I decided I could no longer turn a blind eye, since by then it had become clear to me that the problem was not isolated to just a few LP associates.

My observations (Canada, bigger city): The LP people you see (ie in "uniform") are often visible minorities, often women. They're positioned to remind you "we're watching!" not pursue any action. At best they'll call emergency services (a health event as common as theft). The covert LP people seem to be big, white, young males - the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around. Their game seems to typically be stop the known thieves, recover stuff and kick them out of the store. Physical confrontations are limited because of liability and only rarely do they call the cops. I'd expect the experience is different in the US or other environments.

> the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around

Hah, I was in JC Penney and I grabbed a handkerchief for a suit, and I packed it into my fist, to do a magic trick type thing. Went to find my fiancee, felt someone behind me. Except I looked back, and he hurriedly asked a sales associate some benign question about where to find X. I kept walking to my fiancee, who was looking at jewelry, and when I got there he ducked behind the counter, as if he worked there, and was poking at the register and talking to another sales associate. I pulled the handkerchief out of my closed fist, did some lame "ta da" thing to my fiancee, and dude looks disappointed and walks off, no longer pretending to be either an employee or customer.

> what's the hangup about naming these companies?

Without snark I think we're on a site where being anti-corporate could hurt someones stock investments, naming companies is seen as rude.

> Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?

1. Social media today has strong mob behavior, which is one of the reasons I often default to not naming when you want to talk about a more general problem. In this case, it would probably be OK, but I defaulted to not. Think of it like a blame-free post-mortem for the org to learn from.

2. I don't want to invite more grief from elements the stores and their bureaucratic mechanisms, if the mention of them online percolates up to corporate. The-coverup-is-worse-than-the-crime is a commonplace thing in corporate hierarchies, and if we're talking about a potentially dim/petty/underhanded person with access to power (e.g., the high-tech systems including features like facerec and maintaining profiles of ordinary people, and some data shared between companies) that could be a whole lot of grief for you. You can possibly eventually find out what happened, and sue, but the harm to you will be done, so better to just stay off the radar of sketchy employees of stores you frequent.

I get this and tend to not name names either, but at the same time I also think the mob like behavior is a symptom of the rampant abuse. What's the old MLK Jr quote? So honestly I've been asking myself if not naming names is actually the best strategy here. I tend to also be willing to give benefit of the doubt. But it is clear that people are taking advantage of this behavior as well. So I guess the question is which failure mode is worse: corporations being caught in the cross-fire or corporations taking advantage of good nature? (There's definitely more complexity than this one question)

> When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in

Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?

It’s common sense to avoid putting things in your pocket in stores. What’s with the creepy write up about this? You sound like you were going to spaz out and attack multiple people if this escalated. Why not simply open your backpack and show them what’s inside? A lot of MIT types look like they haven’t been outside in months , school shooter types , so I don’t get that analogy either.

The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda “new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.

The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.

We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!

Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.

> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).

The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.

Good point.

It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long.

Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work.

In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.

Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.

There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.

Well, if you're actually paying for delivery. What's happening these days seems to be more of an offloading of that expense onto the deliverypeople. It "works" until a working vehicle becomes too expensive. Then, if you're lucky, you're paying the same amount to get your item in a week, when your house hits their algorithmically-generated route. Alternatively, deliveries could actually be priced marginally above cost (instead of below), and a lot of people can't afford it anymore. Good thing those retailers are still open. /s

These exist in retail space now, but you can't go there. DashMarts are full-service general stores that delivery drivers stop at to pick up orders. It's like a ghost kitchen but for Dollar General. If they'd open up a "civilian" window then I'd visit every day.

The Best Buy near me is halfway there. They split their previous retail location in half. One half is still a walk-in retail store experience, but much smaller than before and more focused on being a showroom for the more expensive things and only a handful of accessories actually around on the floor. The other half is pretty much a warehouse. Outside, one set of doors is now dedicated to curbside pickup from the warehouse side. In between the doors to the showroom area and the curbside, it's a big set of automated lockers to pick up orders 24/7.

At a lot of the stores that offer it, the curbside pickup is hopping. Tons of associates constantly wheeling out cartloads of merchandise to an ever-rotating group of cars. More and more people opt for the curbside experience it seems, which is pretty much the full-service experience just more asynchronously. I do it from time to time, but typically not for grocery items as I usually don't like the experience of substitutions or the app saying they have something when they really don't.

> have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years.

Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.

https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...

> spontaneous looting

Go outside and touch grass

I mean, who even steals anymore? These people are so out of touch.

Any LP system will have false positive and false negative. If we can have a perfect LP system without false signals, I think self-checkout systems would have been more wide spread by now.

I was accused of not paying for certain items at a grocery store recently, and I explained that I bought those at another store. The LP person didn’t even ask to check the receipt from the other store. I proceeded with packing my groceries and went home.

I wonder if we can recognize that store people would want to reconfirm if we have correctly paid for the things we thought we bought, and we just answer them. No need to assume ill intent.

Wage theft is the largest form of theft in retail, out numbering shoplifting by a good margin.

Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money

These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both?

However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.

I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.

>Maybe we should have max enforcement in both?

You can't, resources are limited.

>Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded.

I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...

>You can't, resources are limited.

Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

>Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...

No shoplifting enforcement is done through the courts and most importantly, the police. There is a huge difference here.

Courts incur costs between fees and lawyers, and even filing a report with the dept of labor (the typical recourse most people take at first) means you have to wait while you aren't being compensated for that time. Given wage theft in the majority of cases impacts people who can't often afford to go without those lost wages, this is a tough situation to be in, and even if you go through the labor department with a complaint, manage to get it reviewed in a timely manner (it typically takes months before hearing anything), you may still end up in court anyway depending on a number of factors.

You could sue for the lost wages directly, but again, this becomes an issue of cost, getting the case heard and tried in a timely manner etc. This could drag on for months to years, depending.

On the other hand, if a store sees someone shoplifting, they can and do call the police, and they can and will arrest someone for shoplifting. Its dealt with close to or during the incident occurring. Thats a really big difference in the feedback loop.

Imagine now, that you could call the police when you have a verifiable instance of wage theft, and the person(s) responsible was arrested and you given upfront restitution pending trial. That would be the equivalent of how we treat shoplifting vs wage theft. The differences are not minor, and I imagine they're intentional on behalf of lobbying from business groups.

If business owners or their subordinates were being arrested for wage theft I imagine things would change quickly, but there's such a lag time between actual accountability and the instance of it happening - and even when found guilty they simply pay the back wages plus penalties in the best case scenario, and thats if it gets to the point of either a lawsuit or arbitration on behalf of the labor department - that they have done the calculation that paying incorrect compensation (the most common form of wage theft) is overall costing them less than paying out labor disputes, as with anything that has hefty process attached to it without guaranteed results, it discourages the most vulnerable from engaging with that system even though they would benefit most.

They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.

>They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.

Nowhere in my post did I remotely claim equivalence. In actual fact, I was pointing out that they are very different crimes, with different enforcement. Trying to strawman something I didn't actually remotely say is grossly disingenuous.

Whataboutism is grotesque. For any crime, there are always the bores doing the "yeah, but what about worse crime". It's useless noise.

I want both crimes absolutely crushed. If someone is a shoplifting fan because they think wage theft justifes it, they're a garbage person.

>Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

Wildly naive and incorrect. Wage theft enforcement is limited by access to government labor rights protection resources and legal counsel, and usually just the first. Even simply filing a claim against shoplifting losses, let alone pursuing criminal prosecution, requires getting law enforcement involved. In all cases, you're waiting on authorities to involve themselves and sign off on outcomes. Time and resources put towards one incident are being kept from being applied to another.

>but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

That's not the actual data.

The NRF are a notoriously poor and biased source to rely on for this subject.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/07/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-...

Some time ago I had a mild case of cerebral palsy, enough to slightly distort my facial features. And sure enough that made the AI flag me frequently for 'grocery frisking' by suspicious personnel in the supermarket where I am regular customer for years. That means nothing anymore. The supermarket is a factory, and you are a shopping trolley, a wallet, and a potential thief.

I'm assuming you mean Bells Palsy, not Cerebral Palsy.

I haven't heard of a short-term Cerebral Palsy, but then again I'm not an expert.

You are correct, it was Bells Palsy, thanks for correcting me.

Yeah, none of it really works anymore. I'm at the point where my desired approach is, "Give everything away and people be f*cking adults about only taking what's needed, and good stewards of what's taken." It's obvious that all of the socioeconomic guardrails do exactly zero, because downstream of "rich people doing whatever the f*ck they want" is "poor people also doing whatever the f*ck they want, just more desperately". Let there be chaos for a moment, and when everyone realizes that shortages and waste suck, we'll self-organize a better protocol. But these thousand bandages over the festering wound of a culture with a completely disordered relationship to goods can't keep it all together but for so long.

The vast majority of people believe what the government tells them, and the government tells that that Covid is no longer happening and you have nothing to worry, everyone has returned to work, and masking is now only something that criminals use to hide their identity.

We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.

When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).

The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.

Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).

This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.

> at one upscale grocery chain > a chain pharmacy

so you're complaining, but also defending the position of the companies and intentionally refusing to name them.

its like you dont know you're in a class war here, and you'll be sick of these increasingly authoritarian practices until you fight back.

In my teenage years I worked at a k-mart that hired a Loss Prevention guy sometime after they hired me.

The LP guy caught a few non-employee shoplifters, but there kept being more loss until eventually an employee - one who had been there a long time - stole something on camera. It turned out to be the employee who had installed all of the cameras, but apparently he just got brazen/sloppy.

After that he got arrested and I never saw him again, and a few months later the LP guy moved on because the store's losses had dropped to more acceptable levels.

A couple of years later, the store closed down.

Any idea (besides the mask) why they picked you? Are you part of a visible minorty group?

>an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go

Did I just step into a time portal to 2022? Have you... been in a coma for the past several years? haha

Peak COVID never ended. It's more important now than ever to stay vaccinated, maintain social distance, and mask up.

COVID is down from its peak, as I understand. It's just very much not gone, and by no means less nasty. We had the opportunity to wipe it out with a short, synchronised global lockdown, and we squandered it, and now it's like plague.

We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.

The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."

True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?

The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.

New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.

It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.

What it requires is authoritarianism. It requires to do things that are wildly unpopular. I'm happy every time wildly unpopular things fail. It does not matter to me that those who want to implement authoritarianism think they are right. Even if they are, we have to have agency.

Equality among races was wildly unpopular across the entire western hemisphere for a while there.

Forcing business owners to allow people of all races into your business was both unpopular and cited as an example of authoritarianism.

An American example: MLK never had popular support during his life. His approval rating around the time of his assassination was in the 30s or so. It would not be unfair to say that in the places that mattered most, he was wildly unpopular.

Doing the right thing is frequently unpopular at the time that you do it. There is a balance, but if you give everyone agency, you have to figure out how to keep the assholes from using their agency to infringe on another's agency.

Australia managed to keep COVID out for nearly two years, before they ran out of resources. Stop all non-local travel, identify where it's spread to, establish a buffer zone, wait to see if we drew our buffer zone large enough… two weeks later, and most of the world can be business as usual (minus globe-hopping); two months later, and COVID-19 is as dead as smallpox… assuming everything went right. Realistically, it might take four or five months for everyone infected to recover (or die): but it's a lot easier to enforce a quarantine when there are a hundred cases in the whole world.

This would be expensive, but as expensive as what we did was? Surely not! So, other regions providing funding and resources to the regions taking on the burden would be a strictly rational move.

You might say "oh, but people didn't know about the spread!"… but that's a ridiculous claim. The Less Wrong crowd tracked it in near-real-time from open source intelligence, and governments had access to more intelligence than that. The number of governments giving nonsensical advice, like "masks don't work because the respiratory disease is not spread via aerosols", and "replace your soap with dilute alcohol", lampshades a broad coordination problem. (We're not much past the "sweet-smelling herbs will protect from the plague" advice of yore, it seems.)

The things we needed to do were done – but for ridiculous political reasons, nearly everyone waited until after the disease had reached their regions to close their borders: internationally and intranationally, at every level! (The algorithm in Pandemic II's easy mode was more sensible than that.) So much of that effort, that psychological torment, was wasted. Even if the whole world had taken Australia's approach, we still would've brought the disease to manageable levels within a year. But there wasn't the political will… and so it goes. I think we're less prepared for the next novel disease outbreak, now.

A short global lockdown? China pursued the zero COVID policy for two years. Even highly restrictive measures weren't enough to stem it.

COVID is no longer a novel virus and its deadliness has vastly decreased. Yes it is by any reasonable understanding of the phrase, COVID is "less nasty". At its peak, 20,000 people were dying each week due to COVID in the US. Presently that figure sits around 200.

Its immediate deadliness has decreased, but it still causes cardiopulmonary and brain damage, and effects are cumulative with repeated exposure, and now it's endemic and frequently asymptomatic. Differently nasty, but not less nasty.

From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.

COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.

How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.

Not more: sooner (and, as clearly stated in my previous comment, less). By the time most countries were doing lockdowns, it was to prevent their local health systems from completely collapsing, not to contain and eliminate the disease in any real sense.

I think the comparison to plague is accurate, since quarantine and social distancing were effective in reducing mortality during the Black Death, as were plague vaccines.

sarcasm detector broken

In a town of big-name universities, where people are constantly coming and going from all around the world, and the reality of students living and socializing heavily, in cramped conditions, often with little sleep... Covid still seems to be "in the air".

Most people no longer wear masks in stores here, but there are some. And some employees do as well. Including the person at/near the customer service desk of the grocery I mentioned, I think the last 2 times I was in there.

meh if you don't have kids and really want to experience highly contagious viris then take a stroll through a day care. You'll be feeling symptoms before you get back to your car.

Wearing a mask when in a building of sick people remains a good idea

My wife is diabetic, which means she is at higher risk from covid. My parents are old.

I have a duty to my family to protect them, and if that means wearing a mask to reduce my risk of getting covid, then their safety overrules my own comfort.

I have a duty to protect my fellow citizens. Some of them are also vulnerable to covid, though I don't know them personally.

The scientific proof of association between school (esp school start) and the spread of disease goes back over 100 years. I see no reason it would be different for covid, perhaps even stronger for covid where many college age people would be asymptomatic or low symtpoms.

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