Downside Detected
And in Bay Area news:
Auto glass repair businesses suffer as Oakland break-ins decline.
A decline in car break-ins across Oakland is being welcomed as a public safety win, but it is also contributing to a downturn for some local auto glass repair businesses.
According to Oakland Police Department, car break-ins are down by some 37% from the previous year and significantly lower than the preceding decade, in which reported break-ins, or “bipping,” reached an impressive 30,000 per year, or around 82 break-ins each and every day. With some single blocks reporting 10 such thrilling events occurring daily. And with shattered car glass being dubbed “San Francisco diamonds.”
At Low Price Auto Glass on San Leandro Street in East Oakland, owner Raj Singh said the decrease has directly impacted a once-reliable portion of his business. “There is the door glass repair if there is any break-ins or vandalism — that segment of my business has been down about 30 percent,” Singh said.
Apparently, Bay Area businesses have also been hit by a lamentable reduction in catalytic converter thefts. Happily, however,
Singh said demand for windshield replacements caused by road debris remains steady enough to keep his business operating.
And as someone quips in reply,
Sadly, a fall in gun violence has led to layoffs in the East Bay mortuary business.
Via Kane.
Consider this an open thread.
Frederic Bastiat could not be reached for comment.
An earlier article on the subject, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, referred to the epidemic of car break-ins – again, the highest in the country, rivalled only by Seattle, some 30,000 a year – as “misfortune.”
As if the phenomenon were merely something to which one should be resigned, akin to bad weather. Not human agency.
You don’t hate them enough.
Beat me to it. I have been in a couple of…discussions…over the last week or so but more intently over the two days specifically with two academics or at least academic defenders, hard to know to what degree some people lie about such things, regarding economics and Elon Musk’s trillionaire status. The one guy calls himself a historian and through the discussion he likely/probably is. The other guy may just be an idiot with a lib arts degree. But he does seem to have some advanced education, possibly beyond a bachelor’s.
The economic ignorance of supposedly “educated” and even highly educated people is stunning. The profound ignorance itself is something I have generally known to be but recent discussions have made it clearer to me that the problem is much, much worse than even I thought. And amongst people claiming to be historians…I just…yet my high school history teacher thought much like the people writing this article.
Here’s something I really wanted to know…why do historians seem to not understand basic economics. Some even have gotten upset when I reference it. Like it’s irrelevant to understanding history. So I asked Grok if most history degrees require a course or two in economics and:
So then I explicitly asked about Ivy schools like Harvard or Yale:
So then I asked, “What about upper crust British schools like oxford or Cambridge or…dare I ask…the London School of Economics” to which:
It kinda skirts around the LSE thing by saying that they don’t offer what would comparably be called a history degree. A whole other rabbit hole. This is just amazing to me. Like a chemistry degree that did not require any physics. Is it any wonder we’re so f’d up.
Not gonna lie, I want one.
You’d have to hire a chauffeur, for the full glam lifestyle effect.
Hard to believe it’s only $50K. The comments on that thread have an unusually high stupidity factor, even for Twitter.
Though personally I think you should go the whole Valaida Snow and have a chauffeur and a pet monkey in matching uniforms.
[ Opens Amazon app, orders pet monkey. ]
Isn’t that just life imitating Norma Desmond?
Is there a hierarchy of disapproval for football club supporters?
Surely not the last.
Is Simone de Beauvoir talking about herself?
Allow me to update one of Terry Pratchett’s jokes:
What bloody tier is this?
By no means, unfortunately, and don’t call him Shirley. Regarding this one though, I do believe this defense was also unsuccessful in “Idiocracy”.
Regardless, it does make one wonder about the people of New Hampshire, unless the Masshole invasion has been that bad.
Not going to apologize for this one, y’all did it to yourselves.
After the rapes that we now know were in the hundreds of thousands, the near beheading in the street (not that there haven’t been earlier successful beheading in the street in broad daylight of a military guy, iirc), the pitiful state that their military, especially their once great navy has fallen into, the knifing and then arresting Henry Nowack, and now the absolutely, yet still not addressed, tone deafness from the their royal family, I have lost my last shred of respect for the people of the UK. They get what they are willing to tolerate. They might as well be Canadians or Venezuelans.
I give the US two, three more years to get there, though I would love to be wrong. In the longer direction of course.
A short shout out for all the dads out there today.
As promisingly awesome as those last two sentences started, the ending was very disappointing.
I’m still looking for an easy way to block posts from specific countries.
In a saner world, a low IQ or serious mental illness would not be regarded as mitigating factors, but as aggravating factors. It’s a warning that this creature is broken in ways we cannot hope to fix and is unable to restrain his urges to, for instance, murder three-year-old children.
Even if he promises not to do it again.
The typical violent criminal has a very low IQ, is pathologically selfish, has a shocking lack of foresight, and has extremely poor impulse control.
Which is why you can find shootings caused by disgruntlement with the size of guacamole portions.
A person who not only breaks the law and violates others, but who does so in ways that are irrational and shockingly impulsive, is likely to reoffend, and to go on reoffending, undeterred by any moral consideration, any notion of reciprocation, or even by the prospect of further incarceration.
He is therefore a greater danger. Not less of one.
If someone cannot be relied upon to observe normal social restraints, and cannot be relied upon to learn from their arrest, they are likely to remain dangerous, and this is more of a reason to brick them up in a dungeon.
Or… you know, the cheaper option.
When the US federal government changed the rules for the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits so that they could only be applied to, well, food, numerous journalists and pundits went apoplectic.
One CNN commentator said that it was racist, because it would make black women pay for their own hair weaves and nail glitter. As proof, she provided anecdotes about multiple black-owned nail salons who were going bankrupt directly as a result of the changes in the SNAP benefit rules.
She seemed quite surprised that the majority of civilians she spoke with were unsympathetic about this. A few even went so far as to say that as taxpayers, they saw no reason for the government to fund nail salons.
Oh, the humanity.
FYI, the BBC quotes the police saying that the attacker is a white British man, not an immigrant. But I’m still waiting for other sources to confirm this.
ALSO: None of the reports I have seen say what “released on bail” means in this case. I’m hoping that there are bail conditions, including a requirement that he be confined to his mental institution under proper guard with no further excursions outside to zoos or anywhere else. But nobody is saying.
Three cheers for those bricks! And thirty three for the cheaper option!
Make that three hundred and thirty three:
(found years ago via “Black Mischief” by Amity Shlaes.)
I am shocked, shocked that migrants in law enforcement might be thugs.
Change “might” to “usually”.
@David, how hot is it where you live?
It’s currently 23°C, late afternoon, and expected to reach 33°C by Wednesday.
People wonder why kickyball is so ignored in the US&A, it is because we have real sporting events.
Let’s take a peek into the wide world of Brobdingnagian Science™.
OK, then. RTWT.
And in other Bay Area Crime news, at the Oakland PD … the interim Police Chief … interim … because the anti-police communist city of Oakland has had 11 Police Chiefs over the past 15 years and haven’t had one since Oct. 2025 … were able to arrest the 10 criminals responsible for 90% of all break-ins.
Congrats interim Oakland PD!
This may be worth revisiting:
The UK is in no way unusual in this regard. See also Sweden:
Those with a taste for grim humour are steered towards this rather vivid indication of how a crime rate can improve when just three burglars – with over 200 convictions between them – flee the police in a stolen car before colliding with something solid and ceasing to be.
They’ll be cashiered soon.
Time to fill the freezer with ice cubes and the fridge with gin and mixers.
I’m confused: fewer break-ins benefits only those bourgeois enough to own a car, and obv no one should care about them; but that also means the police will have less of a pretext to harass and arrest young BIPOCs, which is great good news. And on top of that, there’s a reduction in economic activity, which lowers the risk of climate change – seems like a win-win.
From the comments in the linked item:
And a large fraction of the criminal “youths” in America, the UK, and Western Europe are indeed at war with society.
Perhaps criminologists who are at a loss for ways to reduce crime should consider doing something about those who incite kids to be at war with society.
On it.
Wishing a Happy Father’s Day to all! A difficult job made more so by hostile elements of toxic feminized culture. My dad circa 1952 a couple years prior to my arrival on scene. He passed in 2018 and I miss him every day.
Soooo…in my head, that’s 73 to 91 in Freedom degrees, right? Plus rounding errors.
I’m still blown away by this idea that no one with a history degree is required to take even one economics course. All that shit about Franklin Deleno Roooooosevelt “saving” us from communism…is it any wonder things are so f’d up? I really thought I had somehow been unlucky in that maybe my AP history teachers…both…had somehow been asleep when economics came up.
And on top of that, history is one of the more popular undergraduate degrees that lawyers take. Especially those that go on to become state supreme court justices and up.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Instalanche!
I want to be a Jew: They control everything!
[ Peers out of window at garden. ]
[ Sees neighbour’s cat on lawn, being all quiet and stealthy. ]
[ Cat realises its being watched by a stupid human, gets all huffy, and walks off in a not-particularly-stealthy manner. ]
The cat seemed genuinely annoyed.
It might have been looking to relieve itself. Cats do not like having anyone watch them defecate.
It would be a shame if someone were to inform all the parents at the new school of this teacher’s history.
An awesome brownie is an experience not to be missed.
With “certain demographics” it’s more like the bottom half.