[pessimizer]

Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.

The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.

I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.

[energy123]

You don't have control over whether petty reactionaries exist. Model them as non-sentient beings if it helps you analyze it dispassionately. They're going to react to public disorder by voting in pubic safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte with or without your permission. Thus everyone should care about shoplifting, the only disagreement is whether you care about the first or second order effects of it.

[Worf]

I really liked your comment because it made me look at things a bit differently, although I didn't get new factual information. That happens rarelier than before to me nowadays. Just accepting that a certain amount of NPCs exist and dispassionately including them in the calculations.

[redwall_hp]

Also, all property crime is a drop in the bucket compared to white collar crime. The people who are super concerned about petty theft are often the ones stealing massive amounts of money from everyone else and creating the situations that lead to petty theft.

Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.

We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.

I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.