I said it above but the thieves don't usually sell these types of items. They were probably paid by some organized crime group do it. That crime organization now has a very valuable bargaining chip to have charges dropped by returning the stolen items. Basically its probably going to be used as insurance for organized crime.
Usually these items are used as bargaining chips by organized crime. The state agrees to drop the multiple homicides and RICO charges (or whatever the French equivalent of that is), they return the Crown Jewels.
As an alternative I've paid a mechanic I trust (not a cousin or uncle) to inspect a car I was looking to buy. Cost like $75 and I had the peace of mind that I wasn't buying a lemon.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
I think the real answer is that executives at large companies live in a completely different world than their employees.
For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.
Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.
Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.
Its unprecedented in modern times for a nation state to act this way. We declared to the world that we think we have the right to kill foreign nationals in international waters so long as there is "suspicion" of crime. The people on that boat were not even given a chance to explain themselves or surrender. Its monstrous behavior by this administration. Not even countries like North Korea or Russia operate this way.
An integral part of authoritarianism is cruelty. How else can you assert that you have unalienable authority over a group of people? If compliance with authority is easy and painless, you don't really know if people are just acquiescing but silently resisting or not resisting yet but could if they wanted to. By enacting cruelty on others you put them in a position where they absolutely would resist if they could, and thus you demonstrate to the world that people cannot resist your authority.
I fully agree. I think will be debated for a very long time what allowed the USA to get to this point where half the country has talked itself into authoritarianism as a solution to imaginary immigration problems.
For my money I'd say a combination of
1) Poor economic conditions & extreme wealth inequality provides fertile ground for political extremes on all sides.
2) Gerrymandering producing political candidates that are more extreme and more likely to agree with Trump.
3) Over representation of unpopulated rural states in Congress further tipping the balance of Congress towards Trump.
4) The decades long effect of propaganda networks like Fox, Newsmax, etc. producing a media bubble for half the country such that we no longer have a shared reality.
And some interactions between all those factors that exacerbate the problem.
For a root cause below this, I think people have lost perspective on just how good things are. Members of the greatest generation that experienced the great depression and ww2 would be smacking us upside the head if they were still alive. "poor economic conditions" hardly describes the US. It arguably has the best economy in the world.
This is the most worrying aspect of it to me. It is hard to imagine an economy or society in general to continue functioning indefinitely with such an extreme difference in outcomes between different groups. As far as I know there is no historical example of a society that allowed inequality to grow at the level ours is that did not ultimately face massive socio-political upheaval. Needless to say it would not be pleasant to live through those times
Seems to me that capitalism, especially when unregulated as has been in the US since the late 70's/early 80's ultimately results in wealth concentrated somewhat in the top 10%, but especially the top 1%, while the bottom 90% sees their share of national wealth drop every lower.
It feels like we are entering a second guilded age, just like the late 1800's. Maybe a few world wars and a global depression will reset the board and we can start again.
A lot of jobs really only exist to increase headcount for some mid/high level manager's fiefdom. LLMs are incapable of replacing those roles as the primary value of those roles is to count towards the number of employees in their sector of the organization.
