[xp84]

Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.

I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.

[bandofthehawk]

In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night. Our society has failed these people in many ways.

[coryrc]

Russian(?) scientists during the siege of... Leningrad? starved to death while surrounded by seed potatoes.

The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.

[hyperhello]

I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.

[bandofthehawk]

Lack of healthcare, limited job opportunities, growing income inequality, are just a few reasons off the top of my head.

[bigbuppo]

Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.

[peddling-brink]

And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?

Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.

[zdragnar]

Look at sibling comments on copper theft in Scandinavian countries.

The idea that humans only commit crime out of necessity and wouldn't do it if they could just get a 9-5 job is extremely naive.

[stickfigure]

Some people just want drugs.

[paleotrope]

Drugs. It's usually drugs.

[esikich]

Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.

[TurdF3rguson]

This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.

The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.

[esikich]

This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.

[gonight]

As someone who grew up on food stamps, I'd fully believe the mean and median income on hackernews are six figure numbers.

[georgemcbay]

> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.

A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.

There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.

[vitalyan1234]

I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion. 9 times out of 10 they're junkie lowlives who would amount to nothing with all the opportunity in the world.

wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?

[Terr_]

> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others

Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.

Is that blameworthy?

[esikich]

Yes.

[arjie]

Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.

[freeopinion]

Incarcerating people is not free.

And the more people you incarcerate the more you normalize incarceration and it loses its power of dissuasion.

Surely it is worthwhile to encourage other ideas. We might have to experiment with a lot of ideas to find some game changers.

[esikich]

If this is sarcasm, fine.

If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.

What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."

The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.

If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.

[hyperhello]

My general rule for posting sarcasm is to phrase it seriously first and see if it's something I still want to post.

[esikich]

How did it go for this one?

[cucumber3732842]

These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.

[vostrocity]

A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.

[dylan604]

I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.

[appreciatorBus]

Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.

Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.

Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.

Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.

[xp84]

This is why Islamic countries have more severe punishments for thieves. At worst, they never commit a third offense.

[odiroot]

Don't ever read about the Red Army marching west (and plundering) through Europe. You'll get a heart attack.

[pjc50]

Or as mentioned upthread, a Henry Moore statue was stolen for scrap.

[themafia]

They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.

[JuniperMesos]

No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.

[themafia]

That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.

Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.

The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.

[mslt]

I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.

[jdross]

The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.

[Blackthorn]

Compassionate care does not exist for people like this.

[alphager]

*in the US

[Blackthorn]

Which, notably, is the place where this happened and therefore the place we're discussing.

[laughing_man]

The villains are those of us who tolerate this kind of behavior in the name of compassion.

[TurdF3rguson]

You shouldn't tolerate the behavior, but announcing disgust for people who are struggling is just not helpful.

[laughing_man]

Lots of people who are struggling don't become thieves.

[TurdF3rguson]

Right, like I said don't tolerate the behavior, but that doesn't mean every thief is an irredeemable piece of shit who doesn't deserve help or empathy.

There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.

[xp84]

> not a homicidal...

Even murderers also get the same assumption, from the same liberal voices, that it's really due to their lack of opportunity.

> but that doesn't mean every thief...

Sure maybe, but I think a lot of the blowback that people who advocate for this more compassionate view of criminals are starting to see, is because it seems that they won't admit that any thief is an irredeemable POS, which reads as gaslighting to everyone (poor or not, even including other criminals) who has spent time around actual criminals.

By doing things like California's Prop 47, which had the very real result of making it virtually impossible for most thieves to ever go to prison (at least the ones who can do math), we've codified into law that all thieves are just nice people who apparently had some kind of "misunderstanding" about property.

So when someone has their work truck burgled or their business robbed for the 6th time, and the police won't even come because it was an "under $950" misdemeanor, they would rather see all theft dealt with harshly than keep the status quo.