[yetanotherasian]

It's not just SF. Was in the Venice/Santa Monica area recently, every restaurant had a prominent sign "Restrooms for customers only. No Exceptions"

My impression is the USA is falling apart. Every year people get more rude, more selfish, break more laws, are less courteous, there is more crime. I'm not sure I believe the "crime is going down" stats. (hope that doesn't make me stupid)

The problem as I see it is people stop reporting crimes because they know the police will do nothing about it. I've had my car broken into 5 times. I don't think I reported it more than once. Further, some places like California, have declared they won't prosecute property crime under a certain amount so again, even less reporting. So, the numbers appear to be going down but in reality they seem to be going up (That's certainly my personal perception but maybe I'm being influenced by sensational news and personal experience. I definitely see objectively going up in traffic violations. People don't seem to give a fuck anymore. They just do whatever they want)

I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law. Maybe it's the bankers getting off from the financial crisis. Maybe it's the police being perceived as part of the problem. All I know is more and more I think I should go back to a 1st world country because this one no longer feels like one.

[gamblor956]

Further, some places like California, have declared they won't prosecute property crime under a certain amount

Most U.S. states don't prosecute property crime as a felony under a certain amount. In fact, more than half of the U.S. states use $1000 or more as the threshold for treating theft as a felony. At $950, CA actually has a lower threshold than more than half of the U.S. states.

so again, even less reporting.

It's crazy that you took the overturned policy of a single D.A. in a single city and FUD'd that into the policy of an entire state of 40 million people. That D.A. was kicked out of office the following election, and his successor did not maintain that policy. He tried again in L.A., and his staff not only refused to go along, they actually sued him over it and won.

I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law.

Not spreading FUD would go along way.

[johnnyanmac]

>Not spreading FUD would go along way.

doesn't fix his car's windows for the 6th time, though.

It's not anything special. San Fransico is one of the top 5 largest cities in the US, maybe even in the world. So while crime may be average or even below average, it is going to feel worse because you will see more instances of it. Because there are more people.

[lolinder]

It sounds to me like California is falling apart, not the USA—your experience doesn't match mine at all.

Where I'm at, decreased crime rates are very obvious. Our restrooms are all open, our grocery stores barely have any staff monitoring the self checkouts, and we barely think about locking our doors. People are as friendly as ever.

[RobRivera]

>My impression is the USA is falling apart

In a theead about public toilets you move within 3 sentences to a vague thesis that the US is 'falling apart' without any metrics to a definition of what that looks like, a framework that is simpke, vague, generalized with very little quantitative datapoints that I cannot help but simply disregard the rest of what you have to say as anything more than hearsay amateur opinions.

If you want to make a comparison between a pair of nation, state your specific metric and bring numbers. Ive had plenty of rude encounters in south america and europe

[pb7]

Have to agree with this assessment of that comment. Of all things to complain about, Americans are not rude on average. Really quite nice, possibly even overbearing at times. Tells me GP hasn’t travelled outside of the US and if they had, sat at resorts the whole time.

[johnnyanmac]

>Of all things to complain about, Americans are not rude on average.

on median, no. But the extremities make me think that he US falls below the arithmetic mean in urban areas. If you have 200 polite people and one person with a knife being swung around, guess what impression you get of that area?

We don't calculate "rudeness" in a mathematically logical way.

[justnotworthit]

You'll get a kick out of this comedic rant: https://nitter.net/AmericaWeek/status/1694415737790898349

You can jump to 1:30.

[ryandrake]

Nice. I'm not a huge fan of Taibbi anymore, but that segment rings true, especially about needing a plan B for mundane things. Basic, mundane things that you used to be able to just do and count on working, like sending an important document in the mail, or hiring someone to install flooring, or ordering food for delivery, or making a doctor's appointment, now have a reasonably high chance of just not working. And it's always due to human incompetence. Businesses don't pay enough -> they don't hire competent workers who care -> nobody knows what they are doing and everyone screws everything up.

[mecha_ghidorah]

It isn't just that businesses aren't paying enough (though I am sure that contributes) is that increasingly we are beholden to large entities and systems to which individuals are just fucking gnats and beneath the notice of.

As an example I've had issues where I've ordered groceries delivered online and had the driver tell us that they won't deliver to us because there isn't parking at our apartment, and I've left the apartment ten minutes later and seen their delivery truck parked literally a one minute walk up the block. We called and complained, and we got a voucher we can use to get some amount off of our next order. Sure. Ok. But now we are still without our groceries.

The thing is the person we were complaining to was front desk call center staff for a large supermarket chain. They have absolutely no ability to do anything to help us in a meaningful way. They do not have permission to tell the delivery driver to cross the fucking street, or to talk to the deliverer's manager, or anything like that. They literally cannot actually solve my problem.

Same with making a doctors appointment. It's now done by software, which helps things scale but when it goes wrong none of the people you personally are interacting with are likely to be able to fix themselves.

This is still ultimately the result of business squeezing every red cent they can out of every link in the chain, which leaves things brittle as hell/designed to work at scale but not necessarily be able to accommodate things even slightly out of the ordinary.

[bsder]

By the way, SF replaced their "soft on crime" DA. And the crime has gotten worse.

Where is your correlation now?

Or, maybe, just maybe, complex problems have complex causes and complex solutions.

[lolinder]

If the DA is known to not charge crime, then people will not report crimes that occur because they believe it to be a waste of time. In the year after a special election to replace a DA for being too soft, I expect the crime rate to go up as people test if the new DA will actually take it seriously this time.

If it stays up for several years then I would see a problem, but all I'm seeing right now is the expected result of a forced regime change.

[syndicatedjelly]

Whatever city or state you’ve chosen to live in seems to be falling apart. Move