[ObnoxiousProxy]

Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a pre-condition of systems collapse because it slowly unravels a lawful society. Laws that are not enforced are useless, and behaviour like this would eventually permeate into mainstream culture. After all, why should I pay if others can steal without consequences? Not to mention the negative socioeconomic impacts others have already pointed out of forcing store closures or driving up costs which eventually just feed the loop.

Whether or not one is sympathetic towards the people practicing this, the key issue that is becoming apparent is increasing apathy towards basic civilizational social contracts. This will be bad for everyone in the long term.

[kennywinker]

I think you might have it backwards. Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse. No matter how normalized, if there’s even a rare chance of consequences most people who can afford to pay will pay. That these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.

[dpkirchner]

> Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse.

That this is not the obvious conclusion is alarming. We've been talking about the costs of poor social safety nets and high income inequality for decades.

[seanmcdirmid]

> I think you might have it backwards. Petty theft doesn’t cause systems collapse - it’s the result of systems collapse.

It is probably a positive feedback loop: some system collapse causes some petty theft, which causes more system collapse, which causes more petty theft...

> hat these crimes might be increasing (stats that prove that and aren’t junk are “hard to come by”) is evidence not of the theives not holding up their end of the social contract - but of employers, businesses, and governments not holding their end up.

Why not both? Much of the shoplifting in my area is for drug money (at least the blatant kind you get to see up front). Now, one could claim employers are wrong for not letting someone addicted to fent work, but maybe not. Definitely how they got to that point is some fault of society, however.

[sershe]

"most people who can afford to pay will pay."

That is basically irrelevant; example - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...

It's by far not the most people who drive this. Non-enforcement of rules gives the worst individuals free reign. Enforcement works on the margins, and in this case the margins is basically all that matters, at least UNTIL the collapse.

[threatofrain]

With ML we might have efficient ways of detecting enforceable scenarios, but I wonder if the tradeoff of cameras everywhere and a turnstile when entering a grocery market will be worth it.

Soon we might see conglomerations of businesses pooling their data together for global customer credibility scores.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Exactly this. Crime is the symptom, not the cause.

[Nifty3929]

"Laws that are not enforced are useless" - Worse than useless because it's a license for the justice system to discriminate. "We don't normally enforce this law, but we're enforcing it against YOU right now."

[thrill]

Also worse than useless because those who normally follow the law begin to build immense frustration and loss of desire to make their own good choices.

[raincom]

It is called "prosecutorial discretion" used by prosecutors to favor the powerful, wealthy, connected folks. Right now, this discretion is extended to favor ordinary folks belonging to right categories.

[fjfaase]

I think these processes are also driven by the fact that more and more people are living at or below the poverty level (due to an evert getting bigger gap between the rich and the poor) and reduction in social-economical mobility. The 'American dream' is no longer a reality in the USA. When large parts of socity live at the bare minimum and have no hope for improving their situation except through crime, it is to be expected that crime rates will increase.

[seneca]

> I think these processes are also driven by the fact that more and more people are living at or below the poverty level

Not true in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...

At 11.5% only two years since 1990 have been lower, 2019 and 2000.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

There was an education thread the other day. No one much said it explicitly, we all danced around it... but it was mentioned that some states aren't bothering to teach math anymore, because some "groups" always failed. It was supposed to be some social justice thing.

I'm no racist. None of the children who were failing were incapable of understanding algebra. But there is a toxic culture that interferes with them wanting to learn it and behaving in ways that allow them to learn it.

It is asinine to say that they have no hope of improving their situation, when the same people are sabotaging themselves from childhood on up.

Sabotage piles up. When those retail stores inevitably flee those regions, there will be even fewer legitimate jobs to go around. There will be so-called "food deserts". And then that too will be blamed on late-stage capitalism and so forth.

[dragonwriter]

> Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a pre-condition of systems collapse because it slowly unravels a lawful society

Truthfully, the proliferation of crimes like this is a symptom of systems collapse because it evidences the unravelling of a lawful society (or, at least, the pre-existing social order, which may not have been generally “lawful”.)

[brigadier132]

Just imagine how much more abundance we would have if we didn't need to build all these security measures to deter bad actors. We are all paying more because of these thieves.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, that would definitely translate into abundance for all and not an extra 2% return to the owners.

[kennywinker]

The shareholders who contribute nothing of value and yet still require more and more wealth be extracted from retailers? Yeah, we’re definitely all paying more because of those thieves.

[mcphage]

> imagine how much more abundance we would have if we didn't need to build all these security measures to deter bad actors

This article has plenty of information about the fact that companies aren't building in security measures because they don't want to pay.

Or to put it another way: think about how much better shopping experiences we'd all have if stores weren't constantly understaffed. But they are, and so shopping sucks and shoplifters proliferate.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

Think about how much easier it would be if teenagers didn't fuck.

But teenagers do fuck, so we must deal with the reality of the human condition.

[charonn0]

>After all, why should I pay if others can steal without consequences?

I've had this exact thought while waiting to pay for my purchases and watching people carry armloads of stolen items out the front door.

[jasonjayr]

> After all, why should I pay if others can steal without consequences?

I think that cuts to the heart of the basis of morality.

Do we need the threat of consequences in the afterlife, if there are no immediate consequences to the self? Are we allowed to do whatever we want now, if we can absolve ourselves of consequences in the afterlife?

And if you don't believe in an afterlife, Do we recognize that these actions can hurt others? Do we have empathy for those that were hurt and try to make them whole? Do we more strictly punish those that abuse that empathy? How about people who simply don't feel any empathy for others, how is that dealt with?

I don't have any good answers for these questions.

[pc86]

> if there are no immediate consequences to the self

Fixing this is the answer, isn't it? Make sure there are consequences. Watch any video of people riding bikes into a CVS and filling trash bags with goods. The employees are scared to do anything. Not only do they not try to stop them, many times they're actively preventing customers from trying to stop them. A minority of the time one of the other customers, who has probably seen this bullshit way too many times, tries to do something.

How about a law saying "if you are an employee of a store charged with loss prevention, security, or anything like that, you have qualified immunity when trying to stop an active theft?" The idea that I can run into a store and start stealing things, then turn around and sue the security guard AND the corporate store for punching me in the face while I'm doing it is ludicrous.

We already have laws that if someone is killed in the commission of a crime you're committing, it's the same as if you killed them. It's not unheard of to say that if you're committing a crime, the laws of liability change.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I don't think anyone noticed themselves, nor has anyone listened when I've mentioned it previously, so I'll repeat:

Sometime decades ago, the police just stopped policing.

I don't have all the details. We can infer and speculate a bit that it didn't happen at the same time everywhere, all at once. But it can't have been much later than the 1980s or early 1990s, or I would have noticed.

The only thing that the police do with any earnestness or initiative are drug busts, and this is plainly because when they do drug busts they get to keep the proceeds whether that is cash or fast cars (that get new squad car paint jobs). They do the other things (local) politicians want, which is some ticket quota revenue collection once in awhile. They continue to begrudgingly take stolen car reports, because if more than a few voters complained they weren't doing that, eventually some politician somewhere would lose an election or be forced from office.

But there are no repercussions for refraining from any other sort of police work. Those scenes in The Wire where they're trying to convince rape victims not to report it (in that scenario, so their stats would look better)... not just narrative device. When we hear about them not going after a school shooter killing kids in classrooms, and we're straining our brains to explain it and the only thing that comes to mind is cowardice? Well, I've got a simpler, though no less bizarre explanation... it just wasn't in their job description.

This isn't accidental or temporary or bad management. You have Police Chiefs going on Twitter and chastising the public for believing that they should be able to park cars and not have their windows smashed and contents stolen. It is a matter of policy that they no longer do policing. This is backed up by case law that makes it official that they have no duty to the public to protect them from any crime.

Most of all though, you have a public that is somehow willfully ignorant of it, thinks that maybe they're just doing a bad job but doing the job, and if they're patient new people will be hired and maybe they'll start doing it moderately well again. It's baffling.

[trinsic2]

> Most of all though, you have a public that is somehow willfully ignorant of it, thinks that maybe they're just doing a bad job but doing the job, and if they're patient new people will be hired and maybe they'll start doing it moderately well again. It's baffling.

Cognitive dissonance. I think this is a symptom of a slow western civilzation collapse

[drewcoo]

What you're claiming, minor infractions leading to major ones, is called "broken windows theory."

It sounded convincing until someone actually researched it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/27/how-year-o...

[bugglebeetle]

Sure, but that is a consequence of allowing police forces to devolve into extortionate gangs, with no responsibility for responding to crimes and plenty of latitude to commit their own, with impunity.

Some of the largest protests in US history were in opposition to this state of affairs and they were met with violent repression and police being rewarded with even larger budgets WITHOUT the requirement that they actually enforce laws.

[trinsic2]

I agree. I wonder what the conditions are that is causing this downfall of society?

[reidjs]

Agree that it's bad people steal, but disagree that petty theft will slowly cause the collapse of our modern lawful society.

[pc86]

It shifts the Overton window on what behavior is acceptable, and like the GP said it creates a feedback loop where stores close, prices increase, more people are forced to steal, etc etc. It's pretty widely accepted that lawlessness, even at the "petty" end of the spectrum, is a precursor to larger deterioration of society and whatever civilization/empire you're talking about specifically.

[Paul-Craft]

Well, I agree with this, but only because I believe the petty theft is a sign of in-progress collapse, rather than a cause of future collapse.

I suspect you disagree with me on that. What sort of evidence would you accept that would convince you of my position?

[brucecrust]

I saw a generic bottle of mayo go for $8.99. I say steal more. The commodification of food is an evil in and of itself; our society is based on profit over people. Let this shit collapse. This is a symptom of economic systems failing people. The problem doesn't lie solely on individuals.

[ip26]

Commodification is the opposite of profit. Every businessperson looking to make more money tries to get OUT of the commodity business.

[baggy_trough]

You wouldn't enjoy what would come next.