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> "The stores are insured bro, why do you care if people steal from them? It's not your problem maaan." This is why I care. Criminals degrade society and we
by MichaelCollins 4y ago
> "The stores are insured bro, why do you care if people steal from them? It's not your problem maaan."
This is why I care. Criminals degrade society and we all suffer for their greed.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoThat’s one perspective. Another is that the truly greedy thing is to construct a society such that some people can’t afford basic necessities, and that inflicts far more suffering than people stealing what they need to live.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sokoloff 4y agoThe struggle to survive is the starting condition in nature. That society doesn’t completely eradicate it (but only makes great strides in that direction) is not an indictment of society.
- mongol 4y agoI did not consider it like this before but it is so true. Society is not a given, and it is not a perfect fabric in which evil people tore holes. Instead it is woven by everyone that acts in it.
- gopher_space 4y agoSociety has the choice of eradicating it and simply chooses not to do so.
- partiallypro 4y agoThis is simply not true. Solving hunger and poverty is EXTREMELY difficult. The US could use more social programs to help resolve it, but solving it outright is basically impossible.
- DenisM 4y agoSome societies do better than others though. It’s perfectly reasonable to set the bar at least that high.
- josephcsible 4y agoSome societies do better than others at stopping crime too. Can we set our bar to match Singapore in that respect?
- jakelazaroff 4y agoI actually wrote another comment in this thread about Singapore [1]. The subway there was particularly interesting to me. While the New York media has used subway deaths to drum up support for police, Singapore has entirely solved the root problem in a non-carceral way by investing in infrastructure. Plenty of other countries have done the same, actually. The knee-jerk response of adding more cops actually makes society worse for all of us. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737563
- josephcsible 4y agoSure, infrastructure can stop people from being pushed onto the tracks. How did they solve shoplifting though?
- MichaelCollins 4y agoYou know Singapore unabashedly beats the shit out of thieves, right?
- SnowHill9902 4y agoJeez
- mozman 4y agoIt’s simple. Get a job and stop blaming the system and asking for handouts. Petty shoplifters should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoShoplifting is actually one of the least harmful forms of theft, in terms of dollars stolen. Wage theft costs orders of magnitude more. A few years ago, money stolen by police via civil forfeiture surpassed the amount stolen by burglars. Yet the form of theft I hear the most about, by far, is shoplifting. Why do you think that is?
- josephcsible 4y agoWhy don't we use the terms "rent theft" or "loan theft" when people don't pay their rent or loan payments, since we use the term "wage theft" when companies don't pay their wages? In all of those cases, isn't it just not giving someone what you owe, rather than taking something away from someone?
- jakelazaroff 4y agoShoplifting is also simply refusing to pay what you owe (the price of the merchandise).
- josephcsible 4y agoNo, that would be like if you bought something with "net 30" terms and then didn't pay. With shoplifting, you're just taking someone else's stuff.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoYou're constructing a strawman fantasy word where by people only do anti-social things because they need to live, thereby painting them as heoric, Robin Hood type figures. Here on planet earth however, some people are just anti-social and understand nothing except force. No amount of education or counselling or whatever else will change that.
- rtpg 4y agoYes, people steal shit from stores and do a bunch of work shipping stuff through FBA because they are anti-social \s You think fencing happens because of anti-social behavior? Fencing _is_ work! The simplest explanation for why people steal and resell stuff is money. You do a thing, and at the end you have money in your pocket that you didn't do before. Not complicated!
- LAC-Tech 4y agoA lot of things can require a lot of work and still be anti-social. I'm sure serial murderers work very hard.
- rtpg 4y agoThere's a reason there aren't that many serial murderers, and why we don't orient society around catching those at the expense of everything.
- sokoloff 4y agoTake the act of stealing and project it onto the {anti, neutral, pro}-social dimension. It’s clearly not pro-social; I think it’s easy to argue that it’s not neutral either.
- rtpg 4y agoMaybe I misread the original point of the post, but I read it as "the anti-social component is the motivator". Of course it's ... not good! Stealing is generally pretty bad, all things considered! But this idea that there are some deep psychological flaws that cause this behavior does not, I believe, represent a primary motivator for a significant portion of these acts.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoWhat makes you think people are stealing what they need to live? That can sometimes be true, but is often not true at all. Either way there's no way in which theft, often from people or companies that have no hand in inequality, does not make things worse for everyone else. It screws over other poor people who don't steal because everyone else will be paying for the insurance and restocking of stolen property...
- tdehnel 4y agoOh knock it off with this crap. The article is about organized retail theft. If you work for a criminal enterprise you should work a legal job and pay for things like everyone else.
- syliconadder 4y ago"like everyone else". This would be a small fraction of people though. The whole of human enterprise is built on stolen loot: the forests razed without permissions and the lands dus and animals chased without anyone's consent. We are conditioned to behave as we own this planet, why is it unfair to consider that between people too this behavior wouldn't show?
- refurb 4y agoThis ignores reality. At least in SF most of the auto break ins and shoplifting is organized crime. These people could get a job, they just don’t want to be a “sucker” and work 9 to 5 like some chump.
- bityard 4y agoAh, the old "two wrongs make a right" defense
- thewebcount 4y agoIsn’t there a difference between “I think your conclusion is wrong, here’s another possible scenario where this could happen,” and “I think your conclusion is wrong, and here’s a legitimate scenario that I totally agree with that could explain why this happens”? They didn’t say it was right, just that there are other motivations for why people do these things.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoI’m not saying that two wrongs make a right. I’m saying that you can easily view the situation such that the “other side” is actually in the wrong.
- ReptileMan 4y agoDo you have any sources that determine what part of the organized shoplifters are Jean Valjeans ?
- partiallypro 4y ago> Another is that the truly greedy thing is to construct a society such that some people can’t afford basic necessities, and that inflicts far more suffering than people stealing what they need to live. Your argument would be more sound if the people stealing were stealing for themselves instead of selling them on a marketplace at slightly below retail with a 100% margin. Their theft hurts the jobs and customers (some shops have outright closed) and it also still has the end customer paying basically the same amount.
- ars 4y agoIf that were actually true someone could hold up a sign in front of CVS or whatever saying "please buy me a stick of deodorant", and I can guarantee you someone will. They can go to a soup kitchen, or a church, or a food panty and ask for basic necessities. Americans are very generous, especially conservative ones, who lead the world in charity and generosity. There is no excuse to steal when you can just ask.
- lupire 4y agoPaying the subscription fee for Sunday social club is not charity nor generosity. Opposing social welfare is along standing political plank for conservative voters, because they don't want welfare for people not in their club.
- ars 4y ago> Paying the subscription fee for Sunday social club is not charity nor generosity. Did you reply to the wrong person? > because they don't want welfare for people not in their club. Hu? If you meant to reply to me, I have no idea what you are talking about. Churches (I assume that what you mean - what is a "Sunday social club"?) don't require a subscription fee to be given charity. Are you just trying to be annoying or something?
- hellfish 4y ago> to construct a society Did anyone in particular construct this society, or was it just given? You can't judge society at large by the same ethical standard that you judge an individual
- Aerroon 4y agoWhat are these "basic necessities"? To me it seems like it's an ever-increasing list of things that were largely created in the modern era. A person from a few hundred years would hardly consider deodorant a basic necessity. We consider them basic necessities, because we're used to them, but all these new inventions had to be made by somebody. The profit motive seems to be quite good at incentivizing people to do just that. If we discourage that then the basic necessities of tomorrow might not get invented. Society doesn't conspire to cause poverty, nature already inflicted that upon us.
- flandish 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mattigames 4y agoBut society first needs to be in a degraded state for most criminals to exist, as most only meet their basic needs through criminal means, such as food, shelter, health and education.
- ben_w 4y agoTo say "most" criminals thusly, presupposes that all societies are in degraded states, regardless of the actual causes of criminality.
- mattigames 4y ago"Most" in the absolute terms, not in the relative (e.g. percentual) way you may be interpreting my comment. And anyway there is always going to be criminals, but its not remotely the same thing when your national average thief steals one thing per year vs one thing per day.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Eleison23 4y agoSociety has been persistently degraded since time immemorial, because of the presence of organized crime. The only thing that's changed since Prohibition is the genetic makeup of the gangstas who are in charge. #BlackLivesMatter came about because the police have been--somewhat unwillingly--waging open warfare against gangbangers for decades in the inner city. The gangbangers all have guns and the cops have heavy weaponry that sometimes protects them and oftentimes blows away a few low-ranked gangbangers who might've just completed initiation, or weren't even affiliated but just hanging out at a party. So what #BLM and #DefundthePolice people are saying is, enough is enough with this open warfare, you're killing children and innocent people, the cops are too powerful. But gangs offer societal structure: they offer belonging, they offer community, they offer encouragement and brotherhood. They offer economic opportunity. They offer lifelong careerism. That flavor of opportunity can't be had in a public school or a legitimate job. So gangs aren't going away; gangs are part of the fabric of society because they're providing tangible benefits for many members and non-members alike. But how will they disarm themselves? How will they offer truces to the cops and reconcile, swords into plowshares? If gangs don't go away then they need to be pacified or the open gang warfare will continue to get cops involved, and the gangs will continue to shoplift and fence and operate all sorts of low-level criminal enterprise with impunity. So what to fix? Save the family - save the world.
- somesortofthing 4y agoIf you want law enforcement to deal with petty crimes, you're going to have to contend with the externalities of cops operating anywhere. How many bystanders and innocent people reported by paranoid suburbanites are you willing to see injured or killed to protect that deodorant shelf?
- draw_down 4y ago
- atian 4y agoCalifornia did something really interesting by removing that complexity completely.
- somesortofthing 4y agoAnd dozens of people have been spared serious injuries or mysterious "deaths in custody" as a result. Maybe you'd prefer some deodorant to that, but I don't.
- Gigachad 4y agoCar culture has done this. The destruction of regular meeting places that get you to know and trust your neighbours. Now everyone you see is an untrusted stranger.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago>Now everyone you see is an untrusted stranger. People have been complaining about this since the advent of cities.
- uejfiweun 4y agoI think cars are only a symptom of the real issue, which is that the scale of modern society is just too big for our brains to comprehend or handle. I don't think getting rid of cars would necessarily help one cope with the fact that 99.9999% of people you see are untrusted strangers.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoThat sounds a little like you think criminals aren't a necessary symptom of "living in a scarcity society" itself...? As long as it's easier to take something than it is to pay for something, there will be people who take, and there will be groups that organize around taking. Pretending that crime is some kind of quirk that you can get rid of if only [fill in reasons here], and that the grey and black markets wouldn't exist if only we didn't have crime, implies a lack of understanding when it comes to socioeconomics. Unless you know how to get us to a post-scarcity world of course, in which case: please make that happen. We're all tired.
- chucksmash 4y agoI used to be able to go buy a stick of deodorant without waiting five minutes for somebody to come over with a key and get it for me. That economics has a just-so story to explain why this is exactly what I should expect doesn't change the fact that I didn't used to have to do this, and now I do have to do this.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoOh no, inconvenience! Welcome to everyone who needs to buy some rubbing alcohol. You can live with it just fine.
- philwelch 4y ago> As long as it's easier to take something than it is to pay for something, there will be people who take, and there will be groups that organize around taking. One of the basic functions of the state is to make it difficult for people to steal things.
- mattigames 4y agoUp to a point, if the money spend into making it difficult is clearly lacking in root problems that are causing people to become criminals in the first place then other forms of governments will quickly become attractive and the likelihood to create civil unrest.