Dewey McBrewster

Local stores have very little locked up here. My area has industry, which provides wages. Wages produce taxes. Taxes are used for police. Through surveilance police arrest shoplifters.

Complacency of theft only backslides society. I will agree that a waning industry, or that our hyper-fixation on growth effects society negatively, but that’s another discussion.

If someone offers a free item, someone will take it whether they need that item or not, whether they can afford that item or not. Nature takes the path of least resistance. It’s easier to take than to work.

As such, there is no incentive to work if the item is free. If there is no incentive to work nothing gets made. Yet people will need things so you’re forced to make items people need. Which makes items not really free after all to the dismay of many an anti-capitalist.

Regardless, there will always be some percentage of the population that will feel above the rest, mainly due to mental deficiency or addiction, independent of the economic system. For punishment of theft I would prefer to see forced induction into the municipal workforce for 5 years, flat sentence with a minimum wage earned in municipal bonds, held in a community barracks with a tapered reintegration into society. A sort of forced communism for those who can’t cope.

I’m ready for the downvotes.

Maybe, Pixelfed.

If you consider this from an evolutionary standpoint…

The human race is built upon many layers. Some of those layers are animal while others are highly social. Think clans and tribes for thousands of years. If you didn’t fit in that was it for you, it was the collective that made survival possible. Because of this we constantly judge and compare ourselves. It’s ingrained in us through a long succession of embodiments that cared where we stood in the pecking order of the tribe and how we looked to attract a mate. That’s what brought you to your existence. Old habits die hard, and you are seeing them manifest in different ways, we are walking around with the hyper-sensitive, status-obsessed, mate-seeking hardware of a hunter-gatherer, but living in a world of social media.

Want to know more? Richard Wrangham, R. Douglas Fields, and René Girard have some interesting theories on the origins, mechanics, and triggers associated with what you see in society.

You know, I’ve heard RFK Jr admit to some some pretty fucked up shit… but, I’ll take honesty over the lie through your teeth, sell out to the highest bidder mentality any time. Admitting that, “yes it was me who put a bear carcass in Central Park, or that, yes I have done drugs and or had addiction” takes an amount of courage that few in the public spotlight are willing to take, and for that I feel admiration and wish others could be as forthcoming.

Reading and Listening: “Chemistry 2e” Openstax

If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we’ll just have to start dynamic shopping.

Many many years ago, I had returned home from a friends. Think rural country road, cinder block garage a few yards off a dusty road that was separate from the house. A single industrial lamp fixture burning a 100 watt bulb swarmed by moths and insects. The night is heavy, hot and humid. Crickets and katydids turn nights silence away.

Like I’ve done many nights, before going inside I would walk to the other side of the road to take a leak in the bushes, and as I was finishing up… What the hell was that?!? Something was moving toward me.

Now I’ve been scared, gun pulled on me etc, but whatever I was seeing had me frozen, I literally couldn’t move, I was affixed as the little character bent down to climb through a hole in a rusty cattle fence overgrown with brush. A grey body, big eyes, hard to make out in the dull glow of the garage light and whatever faint moonlight existed, approached to within a few feet and stopped. All I could do was try and think of how much I love the Earth, the science of the universe and my reverence for nature and that of the natural world, and it stared, seeming to read my thoughts.

And like that it turned around and went back through the hole in the fence from whence it came, diminishing into the darkness of the night. Finally I was released and my muscles began to work. Half-way to the house, I began to wonder if that was real, like my memory of it was already fading quickly. I never said I saw an alien or anything like that, however I have told the story about the grey thing with little hands that had me paralyzed with fear.

Not so long ago I witnessed a raccoon walking and I sometimes wonder, was it a raccoon? Was it just the low light, brain filling in faint details of an out of world visitor??? I certainly would like to know.

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