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On July 31 2023 09:44 BlackJack wrote:
When all else fails, rant about Trump or capitalism. Because you know, Trump and capitalism are most popular in San Francisco and Portland which has this problem the worst.
When all else fails, pick any argument whatsoever that you can find on the internet, and act like an absolute authority on The Problems with Portland and San Francisco, dragging arguments back to these topics seemingly at random and with no provocation.
Whatever, man. Die on the hill if you want.
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On July 31 2023 09:44 BlackJack wrote:
When all else fails, rant about Trump or capitalism. Because you know, Trump and capitalism are most popular in San Francisco and Portland which has this problem the worst.
Capitalism sure as hell is. In both cases it's social democrats and libertarians arguing over what that capitalism should look like.
That's part of the futility of the Democrat party, they're pissing uphill and trying to keep the piss off their feet by pissing harder instead of turning around.
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On July 31 2023 08:07 JimmiC wrote:
It’s driven by hopelessness and lack of opportunity.
How do you figure, what's your evidence? The same store has a dozen opportunities to start at $15/hr which becomes $20 in 6 months. The Amazon warehouse down the street is offering $2k signing bonuses.
Unemployment in this city was highest in 2008-09 (recently) and mass theft rings weren't a common way for people to make up the gap. Indeed, I've seen social scientists consistently fail to find a causal link between poverty and property theft. Instead, they often find that property crime starts *before* poverty, indicating it is the cause of the latter more often than vice-versa.
On July 31 2023 08:07 JimmiC wrote:
The reason they’re not caught and punished is not some crazy left wing ideology, left people do not want a bunch of thefts. It is because the cost of catching, prosecuting and jailing is too much. Same with low level dealing, prostitution and so on.
No again. In NYC there are ~300 individuals who have been caught in the act many times, and simply not prosecuted. The cost of enforcement is trivial compared to the lost goods. Even moreso when you account for the negative impact on communities of losing the CVS because it closes.
On July 31 2023 08:07 JimmiC wrote:
The gaslighting part is that you think this is new or a “left” problem. It could be solved by reducing income disparity and delivering equality of opportunity, which is something everyone should strive for.
It is new post 1980s. It is not "left" economically causing it, it is anti-policing/anti-law and order causing it.
On July 31 2023 08:07 JimmiC wrote:
It is also insanely frustrating for anyone who thinks the right has the morality high ground these days. Trump is a horrible human, even if you pretend he did not break all the laws that he obviously did, he has had multiple wives that he has cheated on, and paid the women he cheated with to not talk (even when his wives were pregnant). He is a known cheater and golf (I mean let’s be real everything). He is most famous for declaring bankruptcy to keep his wealth while screwing all the people who had done work for him, not to mention all the tradesman. His proven lies are in the thousands. He draft dodged and had daddy pay for school. He is the most obviously, whiny spiled rich kid. If he was the bad guy in a 80s teen movie no one would believe him because there is nothing redeemable.
It is bonkers.
Non sequitur much?
On July 31 2023 09:35 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 09:33 WombaT wrote:On July 31 2023 09:32 NewSunshine wrote:On July 31 2023 07:33 cLutZ wrote:On July 30 2023 22:44 JimmiC wrote:
Wait, do these people not have to transport it, store it and the resell it? I suspect they are not getting rich, and have the risk of jail for all the activities.
I really doubt it’s some middle class people being like I do not want to be a teacher any more, this tide pod game is where it’s at. Of course they aren't getting rich. There is only so much grey market tide pod and gillette razor buyers. But the point is that it isn't driven by desperate poverty it is driven by not enforcing the law. If we enforced the law, there are plenty of jobs for able bodied 16-30 year olds. The reason they steal tide pods instead is because those jobs require you to wake up at 8 AM and work 30+ hours a week (and its often boring and/or tiring. The horror!). I agree, the fact that we have a capitalist system that arbitrarily requires people to spend a third of their week performing labor that may or may not be contributing to society and may or may not just be contributing to corporate quotas, thus subjecting people to a 9 to 5 job that isn't fulfilling in the least, and is really just done to satisfy their corporate paymasters, is quite an objectionable proposition. That said, arguing about the scourge that is the Tide Pod black market is among the dumbest things my brain has ever been subjected to on this forum. Please stop. I personally found it illuminating, going to hand in my notice at work and shift careers to being a Tide Pod fence I know, I busted my ass to become an engineer, who knew I could've been shifting product and making bank by grabbing Tide Pods off the shelf, walking out without anybody noticing, and offloading them to a reliable contact instead? I feel like such a fucking moron.
Sure. Jokes. I guess people having to got to shady craigslist baby formula dealers instead of Walgreens is good I guess.
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Median rent in SF is $3000 per month. A $15/hour job nets you $2400 per month working 40 hours per week, before taxes are paid. But sure, hopelessness and lack of opportunity aren't real. Just gotta put more people behind bars to make the rest of the troublemakers fall in line and start pursuing The American Dream in earnest.
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The losses from petty crime are not just the monetary loss from spoilage. It is also things like business confidence. Who is going to set up shop to get robbed 3 times in 30 minutes? Who is going to want to live in a city with rampant crime?
You can say that lack of opportunity is the reason there is so much larceny and theft. That doesn't change the outcome, and most Americans would say that they don't want this amount of crime whether or not they sympathise with the criminals.
Now how long is it going to take to solve the root problems? Years, perhaps decades. Does anyone want to live in such a situation for years while it slowly gets fixed? It is no wonder that tough on crime policies are getting more popular even if they aren't the best or right solution.
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On July 31 2023 13:22 Salazarz wrote:
Median rent in SF is $3000 per month. A $15/hour job nets you $2400 per month working 40 hours per week, before taxes are paid. But sure, hopelessness and lack of opportunity aren't real. Just gotta put more people behind bars to make the rest of the troublemakers fall in line and start pursuing The American Dream in earnest.
Median rent vs. low end pay isn't really making any sort of point. If median pay isn't getting you to median rent then you have a housing policy problem (which SF actually does), but that is a NIMBY and environmentalist problem in most cities. Not a minimum wage or how refusing to lock up people who are tide pod footsoldiers for multimillion dollar criminal enterprises.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that part. The refusal to prosecute low end Tide and Gillette thieves means we never get them to roll on their fences and/or bosses. Another genius plan. Why have a Wal Mart when you could have Avon Tidesdale?
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The progressive DAs I referenced literally campaigned on the promises of criminal justice reform, reducing incarceratin, giving softer sentences, etc. It's not some right-wing conspiracy. They are saying it out loud.
Alameda County D.A. directs staff to seek lower prison sentences and probation for many crimes
The notion that left-wing ideology is not the driving force behind why we have repeat offenders repeatedly getting slaps on the wrist is full on head-in-the-sand.
Most people agree with ideas of operant conditioning, reward and punishment, carrots and sticks, etc. Rewarding good behaviors and punishing bad behaviors can lead to more desirable behavior. But as soon as it ruffles the progressive agenda people will throw these common sense ideas completely out the window and start arguing "well actually the sticks don't do anything in the first place, the problem is there aren't enough carrots and there aren't enough carrots because capitalism sucks." Or... maybe... and hear me out... if you let people take shit for free they will continue to take shit for free.
"Well teachers and engineers aren't quitting their careers to become Tide Pod thieves so your premise is flawed" lol
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…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button?
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The US has by far the harshest and most punitive criminal justice system in the developed world. It's also a massive outlier in terms of incarceration rates, has higher than average recidivism rates, and higher than average crime rates. Now, I'm not going to pretend that harshness of your police system is the only (or even the main) reason for your crime issues, but it's pants over head idiotic to insist that what you need is to be even more repressive rather than as much as consider the socio-economic side of things.
You would think that when you have a higher prison population than China does -- in absolute numbers, not even per capita -- that maybe, just maybe, putting even more folks into prison isn't what you ought to be doing. But apparently that sort of thinking is just woke nonsense.
Actually I don't understand how can you seriously claim that people are 'simply allowed to take shit for free' and that's why they are doing it. You have close to two million people imprisoned right now. Like, nearly 1% of your entire adult population is sitting in cells, with another half a million guarding them -- and you think those numbers should be higher???
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Norway28553 Posts
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both.
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On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both.
Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later.
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On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both.
Frequently the "crime" is "addressing the structural underlying reasons" as seen in the Nixon example:
+ Show Spoiler +“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
It goes all the way back to the origins of police as slave catchers where the crime was not being a slave.
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On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both.
Because prosecution is an essential element of that structural, underlying reason. It helps perpetuate crime, it creates criminals. That's why the act of prosecuting needs to be changed, too. Not removed, but severely overhauled. VERY severely overhauled.
It's a massive undertaking comparable to that of stopping global warming. People need to wake up and realize that the incarceration rates are actually too high, and that this is because of a combination of easily a dozen or so factors ranging from police, courts and prisons to housing, social security and unseen discrimination.
People don't understand that right now. They think criminals are just criminals. We can post a hundred examples one after the other proving that many people facing incarceration don't belong there, and yet people like BJ will keep denying that this is the real problem and instead keep pointing to a change in shoplifting methods and prevalence in only a few specific locations. And his solution is still to incarcerate more people. Then you have clutz who keeps falsely claiming that individuals aren't being prosecuted or incarcerated, even after we've proven that wrong. And it just keeps going, we keep going in circles forever and ever. Denial denial denial. Blame shifting for eternity. And all of this denial and blame is also an essential part that perpetuates the system - because it's people who perpetuate the system, it doesn't perpetuate itself.
The whole thing needs to be changed, every single aspect that leads to crime has to be changed. Public perception needs to be changed. The lies people tell others and themselves need to be dismantled and exposed.
One of the most important things that needs changing is all the fingerpointing to criminals.
They're always at fault. They're always the bad ones. If only we didn't have so many criminals, incarceration rates would go down.
That's an elementary school level take. It's so simplistic and yet so prevalent among people.
Few people can accept the idea that maybe a lot of these criminals never had to become criminals if they had been treated right to begin with, both out on the streets and in their homes, and inside the court system. Just everywhere.
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On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because the US, for some unfathomable reason, decided that they should be separate elected positions so you can have a DA who wants to be softer on crime and help people not have to turn to crime in the first place while the actual legislative branch that would have to implement social programs to stop people from having to turn to crime can have entirely different agenda's.
Its hard to do a top to bottom reform that actually has a snowballs chance in hell of succeeding when it takes to many different groups who all fight for their own re-election.
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On July 31 2023 14:34 ChristianS wrote:
…most people agree the operant conditioning exists, but that a lot of implementations of it are cruel and inhumane. Sure, you *can* beat your dog/kid/wife when they do something you don’t like, and narrowly speaking it probably will reduce occurrence of the behavior in question. But, uh, there’s some side effects, probably worse ones than whatever they’re doing to annoy you.
You spend so much time complaining about head-empty “woke” liberals, yet your whole theory of criminal justice boils down to “just punish them until they stop, it’s called operant conditioning”? How does that make you any better than some college Tumblr girl to whining about the world based on some half-baked theories about how things should be that would have been dismissed as childish in high school?
Of course it’s not a conspiracy theory that progressives want to reduce sentencing guidelines. Criminal sentences for most crimes are way too punitive. We lock people up way more often and for way longer than most countries, and all we have to show for it is massive prison populations without any clear reduction in crime. Maybe human cognition is more complicated than trying to get a dog to salivate or a rat to push a button?
Actually you're the first person in 4 pages of back and forth to acknowledge that punishing people for bad behavior will reduce the behavior in question. So alas we can move on.
Do I think we can have a crime-free utopia if we just keep increasing the penalties for all crimes until nobody commits crime and we hang people for jaywalking? No, obviously not. I think any punishment has diminishing returns that will get to a point it is counter-productive if too severe. My contention is that when you have 327 people in NYC getting arrested 6,000 times in one year then you're obviously being too lenient. Only in woke circles is this even a controversial opinion.
If your community is having a problem with certain crimes you should consider it the time to crackdown to prevent those crimes instead of allowing it to fester and worsen like an infected wound.
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On July 31 2023 16:32 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later.
Here's another vicious cycle:
Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go.
The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now.
+ Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
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Your suggestion is the beating your dog/kid analogy ChristianS used. It does correct behavior, but for all the wrong reasons.
Crackdowns don't address the root problems. War on drugs and alcohol prohibition doesn't really ring any bells?
On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:Here's another vicious cycle: + Show Spoiler +Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
This is a quote about the most notorious neighborhood, 2 years ago. Kind of a cherry pick, no? SF is a large city...
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On July 31 2023 18:19 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2023 16:32 Salazarz wrote:On July 31 2023 16:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't understand why there's a conflict between 'prosecute people for committing crimes' and 'address the structural, underlying reasons for why people commit crimes'? You can do both. Because putting more people into prison has the unfortunate effect of having more people commit crimes further down the line so you end up in a vicious cycle of putting more and more people into prison and never really changing anything. Figure out how to make sure people have other options than joining a gang after having done time, then you can maybe start considering handing out more jail sentences for minor offenses if you haven't solved that issue by then; otherwise your yesterday's tide pod thieves are simply going to come back as gang bangers and drug dealers few years later. Here's another vicious cycle: Rampant shoplifting causes businesses to close down and people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile rampant car break-ins and open-air drug markets cause tourists and other locals to not want to travel into the city to spend their money. The closed down businesses and fewer tourists causes less foot traffic for the remaining businesses and they find it difficult to stay profitable. Ultimately they have to close down as well, again laying off more people and again making the situation more dire for the remaining businesses. Now fewer people are employed which means more poverty and more idle hands which leads to more crime. Around and around we go. The only difference between our two "vicious cycles" is mine is not hypothetical. That's what's happening right now. + Show Spoiler +
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive w/ law enforcement…and less tolerant of all the bullshit."
-Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed (Shit, she's MAGA too?!)
Ok so lets incarcerate the worst criminals and ideally not ask at all where they came from to begin with and why they decided to commit these crimes. Next wave of these sorts of criminals we do the same thing again and ideally not ask any questions again. We do this for eternity, never asking for the true cause, just put a band-aid on everything. Lets keep kicking the can down the road.
Who cares if this means people are suffering needlessly.
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