A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.
The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us.
Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed.
Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike.
Atomization and alienation have taken root.
The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
We're heading to the failure of multiple systems, including food production and power, due to climate change and the increasing frequency of disastrous weather systems.
"Greed is good" has been a value promulgated by the elites for a few generations now.
Things are getting more expensive faster than wage growth, especially basics and things needed for economic upward mobility (housing, education, healthcare, etc).
Identity politics and wedge issues are dividing people who otherwise have similar interests.
Modern life is anxiety and depression inducing, creating a rise in interpersonal conflict.
Our government is no longer accountable to the people or representative of them in any real way unless you're in the top quintile of wealth/income (and that is generous).
All of these things, and many more, are ripping apart the social contract. People no longer feel invested in the wellbeing of the places in which they reside or the governmental and societal systems they are a part of. Instead, they merely endure them with resentment. This won't end well.
I think some of these things ring true but you missed a few obvious ones, most of this stuff has been going on in California which is being governed into oblivion by its leaders:
- California is getting very soft on crime recently, people now realize they can rob and steal what they want and there are zero consequences for it, this has lead to almost a complete collapse of order in most major california cities(see excessive smash and grabs($1B stolen in a few weeks in LA/SF bay area) and skyrocketing drug use(SF has more addicts than high school students) and homelessness, along with car jackings and robberies). I live in california and my family has been here for over a hundred years so I have seen its rapid deterioration in the past 3-4 years.
- Complete abandonment of any type of positive morality from the media or any leaders.
- Extreme division due to both right and left moving farther from the center.
- Sky high college costs have made things very difficult for people that are in college and those leaving the system are left with life crushing debt.
- Housing and rent are at all time highs due to excessive money printing and over generous govt. handouts the past 1-2 years.
- Jobs are available and are plentiful there are just not enough workers for the positions or qualified people for the higher earning ones, in addition alot of people were making more sitting around getting checks and enhanced unemployment than working at the lower wage positions.
- I traveled to multiple states over the last year(Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon) and this stuff is not happening everywhere, its mainly in CA and NYC and other high density urban areas.
> The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
I think we're past "nuclear family" at this point. Getting married is actively discouraged by our legal system.
>The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
It's not a "mythos", it's a fact that children raised in nuclear families have much better outcomes than those who are not [0]. Practically every sociological study confirms this.
Black children are the least likely to be raised in nuclear families in the US, and aligned with the study, are the most likely to suffer from health and mental/emotional/sociological issues.
It's recently become some weird leftist/neo-marxist talking point to subvert the "Western proscribed nuclear family". BLM had to remove this talking point from their website after it was widely criticized [1].
> are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root.
Is the root of this issue really "in" the population? Or is the population merely responding to a set of external circumstances?
I'm uneasy when someone says something like "weed out of a population." Many dark journeys have started with this idea.
> However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
From my perspective, this erosion started showing itself during Occupy Wall Street. Our entire economy was set on fire and very few, if any, people were actually held responsible for that. They were bailed out, and everyone was expected to move on.
If I had a sense that something needed to be "weeded out" of my society, I know that's where I would start.
I wonder how much of this correlates with the drop in religious participation. Religion, for better or worse, was a useful tool for stigmatizing bad behavior and incentivizing good behavior
Do we have any evidence that religion reduces bad behavior? We know some of the most religious countries (Mexico, Syria) are relatively more dangerous than more secular countries like France or China. Is there a better data source to look at here?
I think it has to do with a purpose that religion served = values core to the identity of everyone in the nation.
Modern America has no common history. America has no common ethnicity, no common roots and now no common religion.
The least religious nations are often ethnically homogeneous (Sweden, Korea) or have an incredibly strong national cultural identity of what it means to belong (France, Singapore).The US had neither, and then took down the one thing that held together 80% of the US as of 2000. ie. Christianity (mostly protestant-derived)
And I'm a Hindu-by-birth Atheist immigrant. So, I don't have any vested interest in the restoration of Europe-derived Christianity within the US.
To me, the closest thing to a common american identity is a combination of the following 3:
* Protestant values of hard work, merit and family
* Colorblind-live-and-let-live immigrant melting pot
* Capitalistic enterprising nature of shooting for the moon and that anyone can be a billionaire/President.
Now, these might not be perfect, but it was the closest thing to national values that 80% could get buy in on.
However, populist politics of the last 10 years and the change in wealth distribution post 2000 has seen wholesale rejection of almost all of these values from both the populist left and the populist right. As the nation continues fracturing, the resentment towards your fellow countrymen grows to the point that you feel no civic duty towards your fellow countrymen, and maybe even take joy in looting them.
Religion unites as long as it is homogeneous. High level of religious beliefs would not help much, if they didn't unify people through a collective identity. So in this case, high levels of religious participation would not have helped, because there would still never be any agreement on a common religious identity given the degree of religious heterogeneity.
On an aside, I always find it funny when people say that countries that tolerate heterogenous identities such as the US or India are discriminatory or racist. Yeah, as if you with your 95+% cultural/religious/ethnic homogeneity have any right to speak about diversity. You can already see Europe coming apart at its seams with a small influx of culturally diverse middle-eastern refugees. The friction you see, is a result of an open system that allows each of these incompatible cultural identities to get a voice in the national discourse.
And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell. That's not going to reduce tensions in that regard, that's for sure.
There is only circumstantial evidence but the story sounds plausible. If things continue like this, I'd wager that trump will return in 24
Outrageous behavior is being glorified because it drives clicks.
So many of these Alex Jones wannabe 'anti-maskers invade a store protesters', schoolboard meeting ravers get publicized because they get people fired up and drive clicks and ad revenue.
It's normalizing that the way to handle disagreement is to act out.
I'm sorry to say that this onslaught of terrible behavior isn't because people are tired of lockdowns, it's because it's great for driving ad traffic & getting $ from voters.
There’s another explanation that I find fits better: that the last ~70 years have been an extraordinary confluence of good luck and peak resource extraction that is no longer viable going forward. Scarcity was always going to become a thing again, and Covid pulled that crash forward by a decade.
There’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle now. We’re going to be paying the price for the corporate excess of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s for the next few decades in the form of climate change, disinformation, authoritarianism and the ensuing civil unrest. Thanks to the combination of the last three we will continue to be unable to muster a coherent response to any problem going forward.
Maybe we can have some good times again eventually, but the next decade or two are going to be rough.
Having the community police its members can only be done with the proper external incentives to that community. The times in history where clans or family managed their own delinquents where also times where the clan or family as a whole was called to pay for the damage.
What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.
As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.
Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.
Bingo. 'The community' ultimately does not own what's on the train. There is no communal interest in protecting the goods on the train; there may be an element of self preservation ("If the train is robbed, I can't buy the goods later!"), but there is little sense of communal preservation in a society that promotes individualism. The same thing applies to the thieves- anti-collective behavior is inevitable in a society that does not meet the needs of every individual.
> It’s not just in LA, theft and vandalism have gone way up on all the rail networks. My company is experiencing some of the worst loss numbers while in rail transit. We just announced that all transport carts will be welded shut and unwelded when it gets to the destination. Even locks aren’t enough.
Why do I feel like this would be the simplest solution to this problem, and in fact so simple it's likely to occur in the next few years...
...okay, reality check, even if the autopilots get good enough, it'll still be incredibly easy to whack a drone into the train's overhead wires if you have a big enough stick, and now they potentially have to fix the cable, or maybe a blown transformer. Right.
Do you ever think to yourself that we're gradually headed to some dystopia like in the movie Elysium? Where a growing underclass is relegated to a garbage planet while the elites escape to a satellite world? Or at least parts of our planet?
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
Yes, I think this very often. In fact, I think it is an inevitable future evolution of society. It will likely start out with the oceans - private islands and super yachts are being rapidly built and purchased by elites around the world.
If you're a pleb, like me, I think the best bet is to just hunker down, keep your head down, stay away from mentally ill types, and focus on getting very good at a useful skill. The elite will still need software engineers to build out the dystopia.
Are other cities that operate major Class I freight rail seeing the same looting issue, or is this just LA/UP "market disruption" that hasn't caught up with the rest of the country?
EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
Its hard to say with just anecdotes, but this random person says it's not just Los Angeles. Another commenter mentioned a conductor-friend out of Louisiana is seeing similar things.
I wonder if this is an evolution of the security cat & mouse game with shipping switching to have more random items people ordered directly to their home? Similar to porch-pirates being more of an issue today than 30 years ago.
I'm reminded of recent realisations in the evolution of whales. The great size and efficiency of whales came about due to increased ocean productivity --- more available food, though often at widely-separated distances, an efficient feeding mechansism (lunge feeding), which could onboard vast quantities of krill in a single act, and the lack of any credible predators, allowing great whales to focus their evolutionary specialisation on long-distance speed and efficiency.
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
It also reminds me of certain episodes of the The History of Rome and The History of Byzantium podcasts where they depict the collapse of complex systems when the breakdown of security occurred.
During times when Roman security was good - the economy could develop complex systems of trade, which developed coinage, mathematics, architecture, and all sorts of specialists and artisans.
When security was no longer reliable due to the influx of raiders, piracy, and hoards of barbarians, all of those complex activities ceased.
The most complex aspects of society are always the first to collapse when security disappears.
...and eventually a "fend for yourself" attitude permeates society - which becomes a feedback loop, and it's no longer the externalities that are destroying security - but internal actors.
We were lucky to have a safe and stable society for so long that we are shocked to see mass looting. Once it's gone though, it is takes generations to rebuild that.
For further parallels with Rome, I strongly advise Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, which develops the idea that empires and diseases co-evolve with one another. Another lesson from history which seems increasingly significant now.
Wonder how organized that looting is. Is just individuals over many months or years, or a large gang over a few weeks time.
On the one hand it’s shocking to see it in LA in US. On the other I am surprised it’s not happening more often.
In large cities, some of my acquaintances had to get PO boxes as their packages kept getting stolen. But why bother wasting time going house to house, when you can hit a whole train car at once.
It seems pretty organized on the backend distribution. [1]
"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."
To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.
"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."
So in this case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.
When I was in jail I met dozens of people who have done this. None of it was organized that I was aware of, it was just opportunistic. Some friends would get together and say "Let's go wait for a train and bust open some containers." There are literally thousands of places where it is possible to do this.
There is almost certainly an organized crime element interacting with the individuals performing the looting. Typically, the organized elements are at the "fencing" level, where they are paying the individuals (almost certainly mostly drug addicts) small fractions of the resale value for various items in cash/drugs.
This is a standard pattern in areas with lax law enforcement, which these days is all of California, and also places like Manhattan. Political leaders in the LA, SF, Manhattan areas have bought into the Bolshevik era explanation of crime being caused by social injustice, and therefore see criminals as victims of a corrupt society rife with inequality. This kind of chaos is an inevitable result. Treating criminals like hapless victims acting out of desperation ignores the fact that many have agency, are intelligent, and make cost/benefit calculations that completely change when they know they won't get prosecuted if they are caught.
I can see that, yeah. I imagine them, after all the adrenaline dies down, sitting around the fire, swapping stories and bartering —- “two epi pens for that golf club?”. Some staring into the distance, wondering about their life choices after ending up with four
identical waffle makers.
I was wondering the same thing about seeing the aerial footage in the Twitter thread.
I don’t even know that amount of stuff could be opened, filtered for valuables, and transported within a few hours time without dozens of people and some mid-size cargo trucks.
This seems like enough organized logistic planning that a bunch of homeless people or youth gangs would not be able to pull off at this level.
It’s minimally above bike theft. Same tools. If the train goes slow enough/stops, start cracking open containers and throw as much on the ground as you can while you can.
It’s not the LAPD’s role to get involved with this, but instead this responsibility falls upon special agents dedicated to these train lines. Their HQ is in Omaha Nebraska.
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A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.
The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us.
Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed.
Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike.
Atomization and alienation have taken root.
The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
We're heading to the failure of multiple systems, including food production and power, due to climate change and the increasing frequency of disastrous weather systems.
"Greed is good" has been a value promulgated by the elites for a few generations now.
Things are getting more expensive faster than wage growth, especially basics and things needed for economic upward mobility (housing, education, healthcare, etc).
Identity politics and wedge issues are dividing people who otherwise have similar interests.
Modern life is anxiety and depression inducing, creating a rise in interpersonal conflict.
Our government is no longer accountable to the people or representative of them in any real way unless you're in the top quintile of wealth/income (and that is generous).
All of these things, and many more, are ripping apart the social contract. People no longer feel invested in the wellbeing of the places in which they reside or the governmental and societal systems they are a part of. Instead, they merely endure them with resentment. This won't end well.
- California is getting very soft on crime recently, people now realize they can rob and steal what they want and there are zero consequences for it, this has lead to almost a complete collapse of order in most major california cities(see excessive smash and grabs($1B stolen in a few weeks in LA/SF bay area) and skyrocketing drug use(SF has more addicts than high school students) and homelessness, along with car jackings and robberies). I live in california and my family has been here for over a hundred years so I have seen its rapid deterioration in the past 3-4 years.
- Complete abandonment of any type of positive morality from the media or any leaders.
- Extreme division due to both right and left moving farther from the center.
- Sky high college costs have made things very difficult for people that are in college and those leaving the system are left with life crushing debt.
- Housing and rent are at all time highs due to excessive money printing and over generous govt. handouts the past 1-2 years.
- Jobs are available and are plentiful there are just not enough workers for the positions or qualified people for the higher earning ones, in addition alot of people were making more sitting around getting checks and enhanced unemployment than working at the lower wage positions.
- I traveled to multiple states over the last year(Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon) and this stuff is not happening everywhere, its mainly in CA and NYC and other high density urban areas.
1. Some guy chased a woman in his car and she ran to a fire station. He crashed into the fire station and fought firefighters. Released 0 bail.
2. Violent criminal with a long past let out of jail to attend funeral and hasn’t returned.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have constant 0 bail for young carjackers who steal peoples cars for joy rides.
It’s madness. I don’t care what anyone says about “punishment doesn’t deter crime”. That’s against human nature and total horseshit.
I think we're past "nuclear family" at this point. Getting married is actively discouraged by our legal system.
It's not a "mythos", it's a fact that children raised in nuclear families have much better outcomes than those who are not [0]. Practically every sociological study confirms this.
Black children are the least likely to be raised in nuclear families in the US, and aligned with the study, are the most likely to suffer from health and mental/emotional/sociological issues.
It's recently become some weird leftist/neo-marxist talking point to subvert the "Western proscribed nuclear family". BLM had to remove this talking point from their website after it was widely criticized [1].
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_246.pdf
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/black-lives-matter-removes-language-1...
Isn’t that just a restatement if the rather mundane concept of compound interest?
If savings account A has $100 and account B has $1mil, does it go without saying that account B will grow far faster?
I never understood why compound interest should be seen as a negative. What is the counter proposal?
Dead Comment
Is the root of this issue really "in" the population? Or is the population merely responding to a set of external circumstances?
I'm uneasy when someone says something like "weed out of a population." Many dark journeys have started with this idea.
> However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
From my perspective, this erosion started showing itself during Occupy Wall Street. Our entire economy was set on fire and very few, if any, people were actually held responsible for that. They were bailed out, and everyone was expected to move on.
If I had a sense that something needed to be "weeded out" of my society, I know that's where I would start.
Sweden is one of the least religious countries in Europe, and one of the safest.
Modern America has no common history. America has no common ethnicity, no common roots and now no common religion. The least religious nations are often ethnically homogeneous (Sweden, Korea) or have an incredibly strong national cultural identity of what it means to belong (France, Singapore).The US had neither, and then took down the one thing that held together 80% of the US as of 2000. ie. Christianity (mostly protestant-derived)
And I'm a Hindu-by-birth Atheist immigrant. So, I don't have any vested interest in the restoration of Europe-derived Christianity within the US.
To me, the closest thing to a common american identity is a combination of the following 3:
* Protestant values of hard work, merit and family
* Colorblind-live-and-let-live immigrant melting pot
* Capitalistic enterprising nature of shooting for the moon and that anyone can be a billionaire/President.
Now, these might not be perfect, but it was the closest thing to national values that 80% could get buy in on.
However, populist politics of the last 10 years and the change in wealth distribution post 2000 has seen wholesale rejection of almost all of these values from both the populist left and the populist right. As the nation continues fracturing, the resentment towards your fellow countrymen grows to the point that you feel no civic duty towards your fellow countrymen, and maybe even take joy in looting them.
Religion unites as long as it is homogeneous. High level of religious beliefs would not help much, if they didn't unify people through a collective identity. So in this case, high levels of religious participation would not have helped, because there would still never be any agreement on a common religious identity given the degree of religious heterogeneity.
On an aside, I always find it funny when people say that countries that tolerate heterogenous identities such as the US or India are discriminatory or racist. Yeah, as if you with your 95+% cultural/religious/ethnic homogeneity have any right to speak about diversity. You can already see Europe coming apart at its seams with a small influx of culturally diverse middle-eastern refugees. The friction you see, is a result of an open system that allows each of these incompatible cultural identities to get a voice in the national discourse.
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There is only circumstantial evidence but the story sounds plausible. If things continue like this, I'd wager that trump will return in 24
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
So many of these Alex Jones wannabe 'anti-maskers invade a store protesters', schoolboard meeting ravers get publicized because they get people fired up and drive clicks and ad revenue.
It's normalizing that the way to handle disagreement is to act out.
I'm sorry to say that this onslaught of terrible behavior isn't because people are tired of lockdowns, it's because it's great for driving ad traffic & getting $ from voters.
There’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle now. We’re going to be paying the price for the corporate excess of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s for the next few decades in the form of climate change, disinformation, authoritarianism and the ensuing civil unrest. Thanks to the combination of the last three we will continue to be unable to muster a coherent response to any problem going forward.
Maybe we can have some good times again eventually, but the next decade or two are going to be rough.
What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.
As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.
Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.
> It’s not just in LA, theft and vandalism have gone way up on all the rail networks. My company is experiencing some of the worst loss numbers while in rail transit. We just announced that all transport carts will be welded shut and unwelded when it gets to the destination. Even locks aren’t enough.
Same tools, bigger rewards.
Of course, we did nothing when it was just bikes being stolen because it was just hippy car-free bike riders impacted.
...okay, reality check, even if the autopilots get good enough, it'll still be incredibly easy to whack a drone into the train's overhead wires if you have a big enough stick, and now they potentially have to fix the cable, or maybe a blown transformer. Right.
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
Deleted Comment
If you're a pleb, like me, I think the best bet is to just hunker down, keep your head down, stay away from mentally ill types, and focus on getting very good at a useful skill. The elite will still need software engineers to build out the dystopia.
EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s2sjxj/los_angeles_th...
I wonder if this is an evolution of the security cat & mouse game with shipping switching to have more random items people ordered directly to their home? Similar to porch-pirates being more of an issue today than 30 years ago.
Before, if you broke into a container, you'd often find weird homogenous B2B stuff. Like a bunch of dog food.
See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-blue-whal...
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/johnschreiber/status/148177072227...
During times when Roman security was good - the economy could develop complex systems of trade, which developed coinage, mathematics, architecture, and all sorts of specialists and artisans.
When security was no longer reliable due to the influx of raiders, piracy, and hoards of barbarians, all of those complex activities ceased.
The most complex aspects of society are always the first to collapse when security disappears.
...and eventually a "fend for yourself" attitude permeates society - which becomes a feedback loop, and it's no longer the externalities that are destroying security - but internal actors.
We were lucky to have a safe and stable society for so long that we are shocked to see mass looting. Once it's gone though, it is takes generations to rebuild that.
For further parallels with Rome, I strongly advise Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, which develops the idea that empires and diseases co-evolve with one another. Another lesson from history which seems increasingly significant now.
you mean the citizens of neighbouring states (mainly nowadays france and germany) that refused to be colonized/enslaved?
On the one hand it’s shocking to see it in LA in US. On the other I am surprised it’s not happening more often.
In large cities, some of my acquaintances had to get PO boxes as their packages kept getting stolen. But why bother wasting time going house to house, when you can hit a whole train car at once.
"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."
To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.
"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."
So in this case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.
[1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...
This is a standard pattern in areas with lax law enforcement, which these days is all of California, and also places like Manhattan. Political leaders in the LA, SF, Manhattan areas have bought into the Bolshevik era explanation of crime being caused by social injustice, and therefore see criminals as victims of a corrupt society rife with inequality. This kind of chaos is an inevitable result. Treating criminals like hapless victims acting out of desperation ignores the fact that many have agency, are intelligent, and make cost/benefit calculations that completely change when they know they won't get prosecuted if they are caught.
I don’t even know that amount of stuff could be opened, filtered for valuables, and transported within a few hours time without dozens of people and some mid-size cargo trucks.
This seems like enough organized logistic planning that a bunch of homeless people or youth gangs would not be able to pull off at this level.
Then sift through it for the next hours.
Or is it a case of “well, someone else could deal with it, so we’re out”?