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Comment by google234123 | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will translate into less petty crime- most theft now goes unpunished. I want to live in a society where bikes aren't stolen

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If you want less petty crime, bring back social safety nets. Pay people better.

I'm dead serious.

- Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.

> I'm dead serious.

Well duh. Anyone with half a brain knows that the root causes of crime lie in poverty, systemic exclusion, and the erosion of social safety nets, rather than in inherent criminality or a lack of "moral character."

For individuals left without access to stable, decently paid jobs or a viable social safety net, black markets—eg the drug trade or sex work—become the "employers of last resort".

To truly reduce youth offending and petty crime, the formula is simple: jobs, jobs, and jobs. Most people would gladly choose a stable, decent-paying job over participation in the illicit economy if given the opportunity.

If this had been true then USSR would have been crime free.

You say that, but when you empirically look at the people doing crimes you more often find that they're not exactly starving in the streets.

Surely you realize that police states exist to protect the ones on top, and have no incentive to give a shit about the ones on the bottom.

A better economy would help more than surveiling every single persons every moves and all of their communications.

I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.

1984 was not an instruction manual.

Doubtful, it's never really deemed worth LEOs time to pursue bike thieves.

Then we need to make it work their time by bringing back broken windows policing.

Or solve the problem by addressing the root causes of crime like other societies do. The American prison industrial complex is not a cure for a sick society. It's a profitable black hole that encourages recidivism at the expense of tax payers.

There is a reasonable middle ground between tossing everyone in the hole and letting petty crime run rampant.

Yes and we are way too far over the line for tossing people into the hole currently.

Maybe the U.S. could stop normalizing and modelling blatant criminality as a first step, in lieu of mass warrantless surveillance. Just yesterday, the U.S. president was giving what could be generously construed as a speech, in which he said of U.S. naval activities around the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re taking the cargo. We’re taking the oil. We’re like pirates.”

Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.

The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.

I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.

Also, all property crime is a drop in the bucket compared to white collar crime. The people who are super concerned about petty theft are often the ones stealing massive amounts of money from everyone else and creating the situations that lead to petty theft.

Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.

We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.

I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.

You don't have control over whether petty reactionaries exist. Model them as non-sentient beings if it helps you analyze it dispassionately. They're going to react to public disorder by voting in pubic safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte with or without your permission. Thus everyone should care about shoplifting, the only disagreement is whether you care about the first or second order effects of it.

I really liked your comment because it made me look at things a bit differently, although I didn't get new factual information. That happens rarelier than before to me nowadays. Just accepting that a certain amount of NPCs exist and dispassionately including them in the calculations.

Wait until you get targeted politically.

If it's a choice between stealing a bike and homelessness, I'll steal a bike. So the problem is the threat of homelessness. Right?

> If it's a choice between stealing a bike and homelessness

This is a vanishingly-rare hypothetical in America. (Stealing food? Sure. A bike? No.)

But still a hypothetical, unlike rampant desperation and wealth inequality in America.

You're free to move to Singapore/South Korea/Japan whenever you want. Your USD (assuming you are one) will go far there, and if you are lucky enough to be white you will get treated like a king/queen there.

As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.

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