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by Marshall Brain — November 11, 2022.
Editor’s Note: Marshall Brain, futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and writer of “How Stuff Works,” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire. Brain takes a serious and entertaining look at a world of probabilities for Earth and the human race. it is also that of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats. “
Note to readers: WRAL TechWire would like to hear from our contributors. Send an email to: info@wraltechwire. com.
RALEIGH – We had the election this week, and one big thing we take away from an election cycle is information. We find out what the American electorate is involved in through all the voting that is taking place. This year, the economy is the largest. something in the minds of Americans. But something strangely vital in electoral crime. Here’s a Gallup ballot from last week:
The economy is the electoral issue; Abortion and then crime
“Nearly a portion of registered American voters, 49 percent, say the economy will be incredibly vital to their vote for Congress. But abortion and crime are almost as vital; 42% and 40% of voters, respectively, say those elements are incredibly vital. . . Women today are also particularly whiter than men in crime (45% vs 35%) and immigration (40% vs 33%). All other gender differences are minimal.
Why is crime such a vital factor in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of American women?
The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, occurred on May 14, where another 10 innocent people died at a grocery store. Then, on May 24, nineteen children and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The event itself and its aftermath dominated headlines for weeks, and also highlighted the number of other mass shootings that took place in the country. Here’s a typical video describing thirteen mass shootings in the U. S. U. S. during a weekend in June: https://www. youtube . com/watch?v=pDV1fo39SmM
The video begins with a mass shooting in Philadelphia in June. Then, last Saturday, there was another primary mass shooting in Philadelphia with nine wounded. The article describes Saturday’s incident: “The gunmen got out of a black vehicle and opened fire on a crowd on the sidewalk before getting back into the vehicle and fleeing. “
Crime in general is significant. This Time magazine article highlights:
Crime in the U. S. U. S. Population Still Significantly Higher Than Before the Pandemic
“The number of homicides for the first part of 2022, which is based on knowledge of 23 cities, is still 39 percent higher than at the same time in 2019. “losing too many of its citizens to bloodshed,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, a co-author of the study, in a press release. The report’s authors also reviewed property, violent and drug-related crimes. in 29 major cities. Aggravated assault and robbery increased by 4% and 19%, respectively. Property crimes also increased by 6%, while burglaries increased by 20%, residential burglaries by 6% and motor vehicle thefts increased by 15%.
Shootings and mass killings make headlines, and those headlines generate valid concern in people.
And then the challenge of crime multiplies. Bloody headlines appear throughout thousands of petty crimes happening all around us. It might seem like every time you turn around, some other crime happens, as opposed to a friend or neighbor. Example, the incredible explosion of parcel theft.
In case you’ve never heard the term “porch hacker,” this crime refers to unattended packages that have been delivered to someone’s porch (e. g. , via Amazon, UPS, Fedex, etc. ). The porch hacker runs and steals the porch packages. Porch, in broad daylight. Lately it’s a simple crime: some porch hackers are so brazen that they stick to a UPS or Amazon truck and pick up the packages moments after delivery. Here’s an example of the KJRH news station challenge in Tulsa: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=7rV4RX7UqD4
One thing that is so uncomfortable about porch pirates is the magnitude of the problem. This article claims that piles of millions of packages were stolen:
210 Million Packages Stolen from Americans This Year: Research
“The annual influx of Christmas packages would likely seem like a cause for celebration. However, experts warn gift recipients to stay extra vigilant this Christmas: A recent investigation revealed that 210 million packages have disappeared from America’s porches in the past 12 months. . . . Package theft in the past year, a 36% increase over the previous year, according to the survey, and 53. 5% had multiple packages stolen in that period.
It turns out to assume that all those package thieves are also causing social distress in other ways. In other words, a user who is a porch hacker is unlikely to become a stylish citizen in other situations. And looking at the numbers quoted above, there are millions of porch pirates. Most likely, you or someone you know has recently been a victim of this type of crime.
Another trend of thieves in it is the theft of catalytic converters. The thief slips under your car with a battery saw and cuts its catalytic converter in seconds. The converter is the length of a loaf of bread, but the thief can lock it up for $150. This video from Houston KHOU shows security camera footage of an ongoing crime in a church parking lot in broad daylight. ?v=qYqIdhFthdE
This article highlights how catalytic converter crime is spreading and why:
Catalytic converter thefts skyrocket the country
“In 2020, claims for catalytic converter theft increased tremendously to 14,433, a 325% increase in a single year. While it is a report on all catalytic converter flights, it provided information on catalytic converter flight trends. »
Something has replaced in America’s largest cities. ABC News KOMO in Seattle trended to document the challenge when it released the video “Seattle is Dying” 3 years ago. At this point, thirteen million people have seen it: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
The video opens with this idea:
What if Seattle is dying and we don’t even know?This story is about a boiling, latent anger that is now turning into outrage. These are other people who have felt compassion, yes, but who no longer feel safe, no longer feel heard, no longer feel protected.
Just before Covid hit, 60 Minutes Australia arrived to cover Chicago’s gang wars https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=Y1YUiTRREF0 “Imagine living in a position where every two hours someone gets shot and every 14 hours someone gets killed. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan, but one of the largest and most complicated cities in the world: Chicago.
Domestic violence is such a big challenge in the United States that we want a national helpline for it:
National Domestic Violence Hotline: https://www. thehotline. org/
The hotline is backed by the U. S. Department of Justice. The U. S. Department of Health and Human Rights Studies, which has a special on violence against women (OVW), which has an online page on the topic:
Domestic violence: https://www. justice. gov/ovw/domestic-violence)
There is the National Council Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) that proposes this definition:
NCADV National Statistics: https://assets. speakcdn. com/assets/2497/domestic_violence-2020080709350855. pdf?1596828650457)
“Domestic violence is intentional intimidation, physical assault, assault, sexual assault and/or any other abusive habit as a component of a systematic tendency of force and perpetrated through an intimate component opposed to another. This includes physical violence, sexual violence, threats, economic violence. “and emotional/psychological violence. The frequency and severity of domestic violence varies widely. In the United States, more than 10 million adults revel in domestic violence each year.
This figure of 10 million is staggering. That there are millions of abusers walking among us. Some are captured and imprisoned, yes, but many others are on the loose at any time.
How destructive can domestic violence be? At worst, the victim is beaten, shot, or strangled to death by the perpetrator. Here’s a domestic violence survivor, a woman named Emma Murphy, talking about her experience of domestic violence in her TEDx talk. Millions of others have heard his story: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=frFEdN7aMh8
And yet, the tragedy of domestic violence continues on this scale.
Offenders who spread sexual violence in the form of rape are strongly linked. As shown in this CDC video, “Sexual violence includes rape and any other unwanted sexual touching or experience. About 1 in 3 and 1 in 6 men have experienced sexual violence in the form of physical contact at some point in their lives. Violence starts early. Before the age of eighteen, 8. 5 million were raped for the first time. ” https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=LWctQH4C0P8
It is mind-boggling to realize that there are so many criminals in our society who make the lives of their victims so depressing through domestic violence and sexual violence. Imagine how much bigger our world could be if we could aggressively eliminate all this criminal behavior. .
Thugs are low-level criminals in America who affect millions of people. They make their innocent victims depressing for no reason. Bullying is such a challenge that the U. S. The U. S. Department of Health has an official online page called StopBullying. gov:https://www. stopbullying. gov/
The American Psychological Society also has a giant segment on bullying: https://www. apa. org/topics/bullying and defines it as follows:
“Bullying is a form of competitive habit in which it deliberately and continuously causes harm or discomfort to another person. . . Cyberbullying is behavior that threatens or verbally harasses through electronic technologies such as cell phones, emails, social media, or text messages. “
Another example of how serious the problem of bullying has become: If you type “bully” or “bullying” into YouTube as a search term, YouTube submissions will take notice of the 988 suicide prevention hotline.
Lately we live in a society in which bullies have so much leeway that they have created a significant accumulation of suicidal behavior. This CDC article]: https://www. cdc. gov/violenceprevention/pdf/yv/bullying-suicide -translation-final-to. pdf) states: “We know that bullying behaviors and suicide-related behaviors are closely related. This means that youth who report being involved in bullying behaviors are more likely to report high levels of suicide-related behavior. “behavior that youth who report not being involved in bullying behavior.
This video shows typical harassment and how bystanders may react to it: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=_z8oevTEcSY
It is easy to perceive that the bullying demonstrated in the video is wrong, that its intention is only to make innocent victims miserable, and that bullying like this is corrosive to our society.
Racism makes life miserable, dangerous, and unjust for tens of millions of innocent people in the United States. A colleague once told me this:
“I’m a user like any other and that’s enough to be able to exist without fear. “
Racism turns out to be endemic. In October, there was even an incident involving the Los Angeles City Council, as described in this PBS Newshour article: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=16cUEegsFS4
Time magazine that:
Martinez, a descendant of Mexican immigrants who was the first Latina to be elected city council president 3 years ago, made inflammatory comments while discussing redistricting with two other councilors, saying Councilman Mike Bonin’s son, who is black, “looked like a monkey. “He also called Oaxacans, the population of Mexico’s Oaxaca state, “short and black people” and “ugly. “Oaxaca has one of the largest indigenous populations in Mexico. “
If senior government officials casually make racist comments like this, it’s easy to see how normal racism can be in the general population. This video presents the case from a clinical point of view: https://www. youtube. com/watch ?v=rBWImda1Zig
Imagine if we could have a society where every racist habit has been suppressed. It would be a much better society for everyone.
We’ve all had fun with liars, but it might seem like liars are absolutely out of control:
Liars have been a problem, but it turns out that their strength and success is expanding because of social media. On social media, it sometimes turns out that liars have free rein. It might seem that they can publish any lie they want. Then others may share the lie vaguely, infrequently to millions. This can happen at the individual, corporate and political levels. There is enough evidence that foreign governments can use robots, ads, and human actors on social media sites to initiate and magnify lies and misinformation, and on complex levels, those lies are called “information warfare. “
The third article reads: “As the U. S. As the US and EU have deteriorated in recent years, China has more actively sought to allocate what the CCP calls ‘foreign propaganda’ abroad, waging what it has called a ‘smokeless war. ‘”He has spread incorrect information about COVID-19, the effectiveness of Western vaccines, the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, and much more.
Companies can do the thing:
We see many domestic examples:
There is a procedure called radicalization, fostered through lies and misinformation, as described in this Wall Street Journal video: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=A6984NNJyWQ
This quote from the video is valuable: “People who own Internet sites are allowed what is left and what disappears. This is not controversial. But when we face the challenge of scale, when that discourse evolves to the point of being comparable to broadcasting, when there are another 50,000, 60,000 people watching specific messages and videos online that contain racist speech, hate speech, harassment, incitement, then we have to come up with a scheme similar to amplification as we have done with radio and as we have done with TV that sets another set of rules.
All those lies are mixed up with all the mass shootings and homicides and porch pirates and thieves of catalytic converters and rapists and racists and thugs and flash mobs and all the bureaucracy of crime, and it all adds up. On the whole, it can give the impression that our society is collapsing; As if things were out of control; As the bad guys win, the smart guys win, and the bad guys tear our communities apart.
If we were to hold a contest for the biggest thief of 2022, who could win this honor?In fact, one candidate would be Vladimir Putin. This exclusive individual has been the architect of so much global angst that he actually deserves to be “Criminal of the Year”:
The active risk of nuclear weapons is appalling because there will be civilian casualties, as noted in recent headlines:
With all these crimes, Putin has sown anguish in Ukraine, anguish in Russia and anguish in the world. Billions of other people are affected by this criminal. It’s amazing that we, as a global community, allow a user to cause so much suffering. to a whole planet.
It turns out that last week we got a glimpse of how amazing a crime-free world can be in a viral TikTok video from Singapore, as discussed in this article:
Shock when man leaves his MacBook unattended at Starbucks: https://www. newsweek. com/guy-macbook-starbucks-singapore-safe-viral-video-1754729
“Millions of other people online were shocked to see that a man’s computer was not stolen from a Starbucks in Singapore when he left it unattended for an hour, on purpose. Uptin Saiidi spoke to Newsweek about his viral TikTok video that has earned more than 20 million. prospects and more than 2. 9 million likes.
If you go to the article and watch the TikTok video, everything is surreal, if not impossible. Especially the statistic he cites about crime in Singapore. In fact, you may be wondering if the statistic he cites is true. Yes, that’s right, as demonstrated here:
Robbery, burglary and Singapore crime free days from 2015 to 2021
In 2021, Singapore had 250 days without crimes for burglary, burglary and theft. This astonishing statistic proves at least two things. First, Singapore shows us that much more can be done about criminal behaviour in a society. And second, the number of perspectives shows an enormous pent-up preference for the criminal habit that is so corrosive in America today.
The examples above give you an idea of the disorders that thieves cause in our world today. Just for a moment, close your eyes and think about the big picture. Try to believe how fantastic our world would be if we eliminated all thieves and disruptors. described above. Then it creates a society absolutely free of criminal behavior. All the porch pirates, catalytic cutters, rapists, racists, thugs, liars and dictators are gone, along with everything else:
Imagine if we could eliminate all those thieves and their poisonous habits from our society. Imagine a competitive national crusade against all the habits of thieves. There would be no need to lock our doors or cars. Women can simply walk down the street at sunset without constant fear. People would not be shot in the street in mass shootings.
Our overall would be much greater for everyone, so why haven’t we already aggressively eliminated all criminals?
We are looking in some aspects. We have police officers, we have courts and we have prisons. But it is transparent that they can be more effective, as the scenario in Singapore previously noted.
It turns out there’s room for innovation. Look at what happened to Kanye West in October after he spewed anti-Semitic garbage:
What if each and every anti-Semite and racist saw genuine ramifications like this?How can we bring that same kind of condemnation to the masses?There are millions of racists in America, plus a legion of white supremacists who are even worse. How can we simply shut down all the millions so that the rest of us can live in peace?Let’s take a look at thinking creatively.
In the United States, we have several national lists that can have a significant effect on people’s lives:
If a user ends up on one of those lists, it punishes them. You may find it difficult to find a job. They may find it difficult to rent an apartment. They may find it difficult to find it freely. They would possibly have trouble getting a loan, etc.
Why not create a national racist watch list?When you post racist curtains on social media, or post a racist video on YouTube, or introduce yourself and film yourself at a racist rally, etc. , you publicly present yourself as racist. As a result, they are on the national watch list of racists and suddenly begin to feel genuine effects because of their racism.
What if we banned all members of the National Racist Watch List from all social media and news platforms?What would happen if they were barred from holding public or authority office?Suddenly, there would be no racists in our flows, in our governments and in our police. What if we also purge our army of racists?That would be a massive victory for freedom and democracy.
Second, as a society, we would like to locate cutting-edge tactics to rehabilitate racists. Of course, the toughest white supremacists may be a lost cause. But many racists have fallen into racist burrows because of radicalization, misinformation, bad parenting, etc. Perhaps a smart rehabilitation program can pull them out of those holes and allow them to enroll in the society of decent people.
This is just one example of an effective way to decrease racist behavior. We can use a similar technique with liars. With racists and liars sorted out, we can think creatively about getting rid of all the bullies and porch kidnappers, sex offenders, etc.
Think about how much better everything in our world would be if we introduced a competitive program for all criminal habits in the public sphere. Our society would be completely reshaped into a much better position for everyone.
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