I just don't see any correlation with 'severity' of jail sentences and the total lack of thinking that petty criminals exhibit.
they are not known for forward-thinking; you can make the jail sentence 10x and that is simply NOT a deterrent. the tough-on-crime stuff HAS NOT BEEN WORKING. we put more people in jail than any other country and that has not helped us be safer. not at all. we can jail 2x as many people and our 'safety' would not change. there are other things at play, its a very complex problem and not linked to just a few variables.
increased police presence has some effect but not a big one. and fines and jail time don't matter to criminals.
fix the inequity (which is a HARD problem but has a bigger payback) and we fix most of the other ills we are suffering. when you feel you have zero chance in life, you just don't CARE about rules and laws. but we don't want to fix that; that would be leveling the playing field and sorry to say, the R's will NEVER EVER allow that. they'll die first.
According to the actual crime stats (only through 2018 though) property crime rates don't appear to have changed from 2014 to 2018.
California Crime Rates 1960-2018
One thing that has been shown is stiffer penalties don't have much effect on crime rates. Crime rates started declining in the US for a still unknown reason around 1993. There was a big push on afterwards to increase penalties based on old statistics, but crime rates started declining on their own.
Yes indeed, although the thought of letting the South continue slavery to rid myself of trumpers is more than I can stomach. Would the Southern states return to slavery today if given independence ? Just having to ask the question says everything.
Slavery probably would have started to die out as a practice by 1900. Even by 1860 mechanization was starting to make big plantations with large numbers of slaves uneconomical. Additionally the South may have collapsed economically some time after separation and come back to the Union with its tail between its legs.
A lot of the pushback about southern culture we see today is bravado that happened after the Civil War. The losers in a war can get deeper entrenched in their ideals instead of accepting they lost the argument and change. Individuals can be much the same way. The more someone proves their point is ridiculous, the more they dig in their heels (though not everyone is this way, most people are).
Because all we know is the culture of the South from losing the Civil War, we don't know for sure what would have happened if they had been allowed to leave and suffer the consequences of trying to build their own country without the resources the entire US had.
and when I used to park at work, back when there WAS such a thing (wow, I miss 2019, as sucky as it was) I knew they had security guards at least walking around. that's mostly what it takes.
supermarkets really need that. a few times I saw a model 3 broken into, with the usual triangle glass all over the ground. if they stores paid for just a few guys to stand around - big guys, like you describe - that would fix it - AND give jobs to those that probably need them. win/win all around!
nah, that's crazy talk. it will never work (lol).
I saw a British comedian who did an experiment with cardboard cutouts of people. He rented a stall in a Saturday market and put out bottles of water with an honor system payment. He did a control with just the water and a cash box for an hour and then added different cutouts of different people for an hour each and they saw how many bottles of water were gone and how much they brought in. A cardboard cutout of a cop did fairly well, I think some British celebrities did a bit better, if I remember right the most honest hour was when there was a cardboard cutout of his mother there (taken in the 70s).
Other studies have shown that just posters with eyes can reduce theft. Basically if people feel like they are being watched, they tend to be more honest.
such as?
and to as large an extent, as what we see today?
take abortion (oh boy). you are either for women's rights or you are not. how can that be a 'compromise'? it can't. you stand on one side or the other.
so, go live where they believe as you do. that's how countries WORK!
you wanna speak only french? there are places for that, lol. you want to have the state tell you what religion you should have? there are countries that do exactly that. you want to buy booze on sundays? some states have it some don't.
we already are city-states. we just are not broken-up by belief system, and I argue, after slamming our heads against the wall for so long, perhaps its not a solvable problem and we should try something else?
perhaps start to divide up locally. people can't move across country but they can move across town. so, booze on sundays over there, none over here. everyone has a choice, as it should be.
there's no point forcing others to follow your beliefs when they are so deeply embedded. that just does not work and causes so much friction.
just let people be what they are. each electron seeks its own orbital. I don't like your 2P and I'm staying in S-land. nature likes it that way
Colin Woodward has written some good books on the cultures that make up the United States and how they differ. His latest, released a few weeks ago, looks at how various people tried to stitch together a national identity for the US in the 1800s. I just started the book, but it looks like he's also going to examine how it's unraveled in recent years. I know from his other writing that is an issue near and dear to his heart in recent years.
He has a very good take on why the cultures in this country fight one another and I think it should be required reading. Americans talk past each other quite a bit these days. (And we don't have good modeling for it from the highest levels either.)
I'm late to the party here, but have been finding KN95 masks at frys.com. I bought a couple of boxes for my field engineers.
I did some shopping this afternoon and was headed down a main street to pick up dinner before headed home. I drove past a car wash that had a sign on the curb saying "N95 masks: $2.50 each". I thought of this thread...
While waiting for my food for take out I was musing about what is going to happen if it turns out that nobody gets long term immunity after having COVID, or what if just a significant percentage of the population don't get long term immunity (like we see with the flu). If immunity is permanent for some people and only a few months for others, a vaccine is not going to feasible. If nobody gets long term immunity (more than a couple of months) there is no scenario where a vaccine would ever happen.
Then what happens to our culture? If the 20% who end up hospitalized stays constant and the rest of the population gets mild cases, then for 80% of the population, it's like cold and flu, annoying and will hospitalize some people and kill some of those people, but it will drop into the period nuisance disease category. For the 20% who are higher risk, unfortunately they have the choice to live in permanent isolation and paranoia, or just keep getting it, running up massive hospital bills, and eventually it will kill them. 20% of the world's population just gone.
From an impact on the world environment perspective, that's a good thing for the Earth, but a massively big burden on the poor individuals who go through it either personally or watch another person they love go through it. On human culture this could have an impact on the scale of the Black Death on Europe.
On the other hand if the vast majority get very long term or even permanent immunity from having even a mild case once, but a relative few people can get reinfected multiple times, this might work itself out eventually as the bulk of the population will have had it and will be immune so the virus may die out due to a lack of hosts, or at least die back to a minimal background noise level.
The aggravating thing is with what we know today, the above scenarios have equal probabilities with several others I didn't mention. The future is a huge question mark.
