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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
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Notes -
The big difference is that it diminishes pretty sharply as you start earning your own income. This has some perverse outcomes - e.g. I know part time workers on very low incomes who have turned down more work because the resulting loss of centrelink money + higher tax would basically wipe out their increased income. But it makes it sustainable. And of course there are conditions attached, like you need to apply for a certain number of jobs per week. But there's no rule that your applications need to be any good or take more than the barest modicum of effort. If you stay on it for long enough they make you sit through an online job-finding-advice-course saying things like "Hey, have you considered showering before job interviews?" And of course the money is not great - it's about $375/week (which converts to $240 US).
I'm also not sure of the extent to which the popularity of different drugs matters. The most common drug here (other than pot, which will probably end up getting decriminalised at some point) is meth, which I'm given to understand is substantially cheaper than opioids.
It's quite interesting that you report clients basically never steal for personal use. I did some googling to see if my anecdotal impressions of the situation here were right and found this paper which reports the uses of stolen goods by Australian thieves (figure 2). It confirms my impression that it's overwhelmingly for personal use, with "swap for drugs" coming a distant second, and selling them coming third.
That's a very interesting paper, thanks for linking it. It's an admirable effort though I remain skeptical at their methodology because the source of their information is social workers asking police detainees. I'd imagine that there would be an intense social desirability bias to claim you're just stealing food for personal use rather than say you steal electronics to buy drugs. At the same time, I can't account for why the trends would change (since presumably social desirability bias would be constant).
Here's another data point for you, from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics. They report (table 2) that alcohol is by far the most commonly stolen item, followed by clothing and footwear. More high-value resellable items like personal electronics come 5th and tools and suchlike are way down. This confirms what I've heard from friends and family who have worked in retail that the biggest shoplifting problem is obvious alcoholics swiping booze.
I also found this interesting:
I have no idea what the comparable statistic would be in an American jurisdiction, but I'm willing to bet it would be way way lower.
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