Ahem. There are neighborhoods in the US where you leave nothing in your car because otherwise your car will become a target. It's often "the rule" in these places that you also leave the doors unlocked because that way "they" won't break your window trying to get in. They open the door, see there's nothing of value to steal and move on. In other places in the US it's (still but fading) normal to leave your car doors unlocked because "everybody knows everybody and no one would steal from each other." Code switching is knowing which of the neighborhoods you are in and how to adapt.
I totally get and respect the perspective of the parent poster, I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society. If it were, we wouldn't have disclosures and disclaimers and limits of liability for everything we do all day long.
>I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society.
Completely false, you mean Urban areas are not high trust.
I live in a place (In the US) where kids walk to school, don't lock bikes and our downtown has free umbrellas to take and give back whenever there is rain.
You can also do that in high-functioning societies. In Japan people leave their purses, phones, etc to hold their seat before ordering in a café, going to the bathroom, etc.
In Japan, there's so little crime that they make an effort to crack down on things like creepshots. The desire to tackle stuff like that is more than most countries do, where it's swept under the rug and ignored.
In America, you can proudly say you grope and molest women and it's considered presidential behavior.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The subways during rush hour are packed liked sardines - nothing like the US. Groping or not, women do not want to necessarily be squished from all sides by men.
For what it's worth, everything was in a locked truck with no visible way of seeing any items.
From what I heard from others, apparently the thieves have a device that allows them to detect electronics (I had two laptops, cellphone, and a few other devices). I'm not sure how accurate this is, but i'm not sure why my car was the only one on the street that was targeted as there were no visible signs of valuables in the car (nothing visible from windows etc.) Funny part is a few weeks later nothing was found except for my Kindle which a kind citizen found and returned to me. Apparently thieves don't like to read?
Fault doesn’t necessarily imply guilty.
People need to understand that.
“I should have known better” means while I am not guilty of what happened to me, I could have avoided it by not doing X. So, the real world is messy, and next time I will ac accordingly for my own good.
It is not smart to die or have your things subtracted just because you want to make a point of how things should be, a point that nobody will care about.
I grew up in a small city in the US and was taught early on to never leave any property in view in your car. The US also has a worse issue than other parts of the world because people often leaves guns in their cars.
Not made up at all. In large parts of the US people leave guns in their cars all the time. It ends becoming one of if not the largest source of stolen guns.
> did you feel really smart putting that totally made up "because people often leaves guns in their cars" in there?
I can’t tell if you think people obviously do leave guns in their car, and GP should know better than add the phrase in, or, that nobody does, and GP should know better.
I can tell you have seen people do both in different parts of the country.
You obviously didn't Google this, since there are states in America where the people are PROUD to show off the guns and gun racks in their trucks. Yes, they proudly display these guns. (Texas, looking at you)
Sure but in a less broken society thieves would be apprehended and theft risk would be low. Instead the police do nothing and honest people live like a school of fish trying not to stick out for fear of the nearly-authorized property theft rampant in SF.
In many parts of the world, including major cities, it would be okay to leave your belongings in a locked car.
I regularly leave my backpack with my laptops in it in the front seat of my car in the south US and nothing has ever happened in ten years of doing this.
It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.
Shared this in another comment, but my luggage was in a locked truck, nothing visible from the back windows. They broke in by smashing the windows, unlocking the door and using the latch to fold the back seats down to expose the trunk.
I imagine they see it the way I do: the SF Bay Area has thieves like this because it's part of local native culture. You get the good with the bad. Sort of like going to the elephant graveyard and being eaten by hyena pack. Sure, it's not your fault for walking around graveyard and getting eaten by hyena. But this is where hyena is. I have lost (and sometimes recovered) many items to these hyena. Ultimately, they are not people or anything. They're like hyena. You don't say it is fault of hyena. It is animal and local culture is animal lover. Why stress about it? Like many, GP decided that he leave hyena here and go elsewhere where it is people and not animal.
But the thieves actually are people, not "wildlife". And there is no reason to tolerate this kind of quality-of-life crime. Nobody is better off for it.
One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
It’s a coastal elite view.
As for whether they’re people and not wildlife as you put it, I suspect I’m more right than you are. Some of them have almost been acquitted because after killing people while robbing them it was offered as an explanation that they are too stupid to know that killing was bad.
> Decuir and Mims were convicted last year of armed robbery, but a jury deadlocked on the first-degree murder charge, leading to this second trial… Attorneys also argued that she had a low IQ…
> One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.
In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
> How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
Theft is considered acceptable in coastal elite culture so long as it is from a multi-store chain. I haven't yet figured out how many stores transforms a chain from independent (theft-unacceptable) to corporate (theft-permitted, perhaps even encouraged). It is somewhat underspecified but at a sufficiently franchised operation, it is considered moral to steal.
> The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
In this case, the person most affected did not make a statement as to his intended outcome. This is probably because he was killed in the commission of his crime, but we have no peer-reviewed studies that have proven that so we must consider it speculation.
China was able to sustain some pretty strict zero-COVID policies much longer - all the way to late 2022.
Pain tolerance might be the wrong term. Pain tolerance implies speaks to something intrinsic about a population, while really what we're looking at is how much discomfort a population can endure before it really agitates for policy/political change, and so it's much about how a population feels, as the tools available to the government to control, manage, deflect and address the pain/discomfort.
Thanks for the response, agreed on the definition of "pain tolerance."
I do think that the US population is able to bear incredible levels of pain if it's packaged a certain way. Examples:
-20 year Global War on Terror which cost $6T+
-Healthcare costs which far outstrip other western nations, mostly paid for out of pocket, and which increase every year
-Opioid Crisis which killed more people than all our 20th century wars combined
-Lack of workplace protections, time off, etc which our peer nations enjoy
The Chinese have not dealt with any of these things, so yeah, they have more available capacity to manage new social disruptions. That said, Americans love war, so we could probably add another war without disrupting things too badly.
Chinese employees get less time off and many of them got less workplace protection.
The availability to good healthcare for many conditions in China is quite subpar compared to the US. They don't have many physicians. Their healthcare outcomes in most things are worse than those for Americans. Good example is their lung cancer morality rates.
Of course both these things are expected for a much poorer country.
"Healthcare costs which far outstrip other western nations, mostly paid for out of pocket, and which increase every year"
This is a reason Trump was elected. I already mentioned this in costs. Imagine what will happen if China takes Taiwan, inflation WILL creep into this with increased medicine costs (many pmade in China) and throughout the stack.
"Opioid Crisis which killed more people than all our 20th century wars combined"
Regional pain does not equal national pain. Ask West/East coasters and they dont know this problem as deeply as the deindustrialized Trump voting rustbelt.
"Lack of workplace protections, time off, etc which our peer nations enjoy"
Why do you think AI is being pushed so hard. This is a coming pain that I hope will finally push the US into a true leftist position.
"The Chinese have not dealt with any of these things, so yeah, they have more available capacity to manage new social disruptions. That said, Americans love war, so we could probably add another war without disrupting things too badly."
Do you have any evidence to support this assertion? Do you live in the US?
> Lack of workplace protections, time off, etc which our peer nations enjoy
Do you really think the Chinese have not dealt with bad workplace conditions? The US population may be jealous of some of their neighbors but they have significantly better working conditions than most Chinese.
From 996 from Alibaba to the swaths of cheap, manual labor used for outsourcing by, among others, the US.
Yeah, I agree there is some manipulation of the narrative in the use of pain tolerance to describe China's citizenry. It is in the CCP's interest to convince their population that pain tolerance is a virtue, rather than allow an alternative narrative that China's citizens must suffer the decisions of the autocrats because they have no ability to influence change.
No need for historical stuff, look at China today like right now.
The high population with oversupply of STEP means everything is more cutthroat there. They have 25% youth unemployment. 996 produces lots of problems but also higher pain threshold. When a new idea comes along they move at lightning speed.
Oversupply of companies in every industry. For example: China mandated companies start producing EVs. Next thing you know there are 100+ car companies in China. All creating jobs that local areas depends on. Now the EV incentives are gone and it has led to extreme price war and everyone fighting for survival in the jungle. What do you think those surviving companies will be like once the weak have been killed off? Imagine them coming after American companies who are fat and bloated and may not know whats coming for them (the employees certainly don't).
This ability to push harder than anyone else is already paying dividends. In 2024, China added 429 GW of new power capacity, more than one-third of the entire US grid. Thats many more factories producing weapons, data centers crunching AI, and lower energy costs enabling more new opportunities.
Now take these people and put them on a war footing? They will out manufacture, out speed and with the amount of STEM they have possibly out wit the US.
For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth. That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris. Then it was defined in terms of wavelengths of krypton light. Finally, it was redefined in relation to the speed of light.
But each time the metre was redefined, the new definition was within the error bounds of the previous definition and the instruments that could be used within the previous definition - this ensured that backwards compatibility was retained. That's how we end up with these weird-looking numbers; it's not for fun and games.
Meanwhile, backwards compatibility was absolutely broken many times in traditional and imperial measurement systems. Heck, we have a break even in recent history: The survey foot has been discontinued in terms of the international foot, but they differ by 2 parts per million. That might not sound like much, but if you're measuring a whole continent, then being wrong by 2 ppm over 3000 km means having a discrepancy of 6 m, which is more than enough to fit an extra house in.
> For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth.
That’s incorrect. It’s “one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre). Different fraction, and much better defined (different circles of longitude may have different lengths)
> That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris.
I can’t find a reference, but I think it at least partially was a matter of practicality, not of accuracy. It’s not simple to measure that 10,000 km distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_an...: The arc measurement of Delambre and Méchain was a geodetic survey carried out by Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain in 1792–1798 to measure an arc section of the Paris meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. This arc measurement served as the basis for the original definition of the metre.)
More on the backward compatibility of the metre, this video released 7 hours ago explains it nicely: https://youtu.be/PWbfVcDcfFw?t=1039 Joseph Newton - "Cursed Units 3: The British Empire Strikes Back".
Other parts of the video highlight the insanity of inconsistent and shifting definitions of imperial units such as the mile, gallon, fluid ounce, pound-force/pound-mass, etc. It's one big damning essay against pre-metric units.
Handily enough the speed of light is about a foot per nanosecond, give or take. A nanosecond doesn't sound like much, unless you start to work out, for example, how many bits are inside your 40Gbps USB-C cable at the moment (they do travel at less than the speed of light).
>no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon
NASA did this using customary units
>I've been missing it my entire life since
Surely you've learned by now that you're missing childhood, not an actual thing about the US? I'm asking this as someone who does think this era was peak Americana, but for totally different reasons than you present, and having not been alive then myself.
I think you’ll find that threats of violence (which is what your comment is) need to be much more unhinged to be effective deterrents. Remember you’re warning off barbarians (eg us Americans or the Russians), not civilized folk.
Yes and the seeds have already been planted by the current US administration taking various financial stakes in public companies as a condition of corporate welfare.
I don't see this as a good analogy, because the financial crisis bailout appeared to save the companies from shuttering, which is not what happened under the current admin.
Those were just repaying the loans, having a stake in a company is completely different. It's not hard to push that further and in more creative ways too.
Even better, this is a policy that has been done by multiple Presidents. All you need know is an executive willing to do it as it's clearly in the President's power to dictate commerce if they can force the federal government to take equity in various companies at any time (even better if said company relies on US welfare to exist).
Huge difference between taking an equity stake in a failing company and nationalizing a successful company. Either way, those seeds were planted well before this admin, though this admin can be seen to have watered/tended them.
One of those differences being "Hey, we want to buy some shares at market price, will you sell them to us?" vs "We're taking over your company, and if you don't like it, talk to the men with the guns".
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