I don’t think retail theft is as big as retailers claim ( https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html ) , but even if it was it’s still not even close

In 2012, there were 292,074 robberies of all kinds, including bank robberies, residential robberies, convenience store and gas station robberies, and street robberies. The total value of the property taken in those crimes was $340,850,358. By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. Further, the nearly $1 billion successfully reclaimed by workers is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/

If you need help visualizing scale, revisit https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

In another thread someone was saying that conservatives follow a worldview of “whatever works for me right now”. There’s no internal consistency or facts. This explains a lot. It looks a lot like being stupid, but i think is something slightly different

Pay people more work and have them do dignified jobs (ie: not making them pee in a bottle) and you’d have more people working.

Treat people like shit and crash the global economy, not so much.

But it’s not like conservatives care about making sense of being consistent. Hang mike johnson.

You shouldn’t do the George W Bush “Believe the same thing on Monday as Wednesday, no matter what happens Tuesday” thing, no. But you should ideally have some underlying belief system that’s more sophisticated than “What is best for me right now?”

The whole “the only moral abortion is my abortion” thing is understandable but also kind of reprehensible. People will make a big stink about how abortion is murder, only horrible people do it because they suck at life. And then they have a pregnancy, and they’re like “oh well this is different.” If you’re not going to reconcile those, you’re shit. You can say “I was wrong, and the people I was shitting on were in positions like I am not. I didn’t understand, and now I do. I was wrong.”

You’re not required by cosmic forces to defend past beliefs, but a decent person can acknowledge where and why they changed.

Wage theft is bigger than all other theft combined, but your coworkers probably aren’t nearly so upset about that.

Someone elsewhere on lemmy made the argument that conservatives essentially live in the eternal now. Any position is at that moment evaluated on if it’s good for them/their-group or not. Past responses don’t matter. Internal consistency doesn’t matter. It’s just “is this good for me right now?”

They’re trash people, essentially.

That’s excessive for typical people. The flowers and chocolate are going to look like you’re expressing romantic interest, which is inappropriate to do to a child.

Also if they try to pull a “These aren’t employees they are independent contractors that just happen to work in my store and wear my uniform and…” we hang them as an example to the rest.

I had an argument about this with a friend once. I was saying if we just abolish the police, private enterprise will probably step in to fill the gap. I don’t want that. I don’t want amazon offering policing services (as part of Prime. vomit).

I think the police need to be split up into smaller institutions, and have a lot less murder powers.

Someone needs to address the “Someone broke into my house and stole my TV” problem, without a profit motive and with accountability.

There should be something to address “My neighbor is screaming at his wife and I think he’s hitting her” that doesn’t involve some low empathy assholes with guns rolling up to mock the woman.

I don’t know how to fix this.

The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.

At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.

Conservatives aren’t known for being smart or rational. It’s a worldview of emotions and immediacy.

A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like “Wait. What am I doing?” and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It’s good, but kind of too hard for my brain )

It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn’t have as many people readily available. There’s a lot of “Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I’m in my inventory, sometimes?” stuff you have to worry about when you’re doing the whole thing.

Everyone involved in this decision should be shot.

What happened to all the republicans crying about “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers”? Oh right, they’re hypocritical little shits that should be in the ground.

So tired of everything trash because like a third of the country has less emotional maturity than a toddler.

Conservatism isn’t rational. It is fear and hate. It’s a child slamming their head into the floor sobbing because their teddy bear is wearing the wrong shirt.

They should not be allowed to make decisions of any import.

I looked it up, it’s $15 currently. Suburban NJ to Manhattan.

$15 is still kind of a lot when you’re a kid

You all see that article that said there’s a study saying at least a third of Americans are okay with musk being murdered? Shit like this is going to goose those numbers.

Fuck her. Sheepshead Bay has pretty good subway access, too. You don’t really need a car there, I don’t think.

Right?? I’m like, didn’t you learn anything in high school history? But then I know that conservatives have been attacking education for decades, and a lot of people just kind of slept through school.

I think a lot of people are legitimately too stupid to understand harm reduction and multi step processes. It’s like that SpongeBob meme with Patrick’s wallet, except it ends in incalculable sorrow.

Another reason “I’m a rugged individual don’t tell me what to do” people are absolute fools.

Benefitting from untold quantities of rules and regulations, thinking it’s all their personal merit, wanting to swing an axe at the branch they’re sitting on.

I’ve had people tell me that “the market” would solve the problem is people were selling tainted food. idiots.