Crime & Punishment

I certainly don't want anymore Crime and Crime producing And Crime fighting in the Mod. We have plenty as it is. As Faustmouse stated,"IMO we reached a point in the mod where crime is not THE main thing to control in the mod, but rather a side distraction that can mess you up when you don't pay attention." This was my Original goal for Crime when I introduced my 1st Modmod and then was allowed on the Team.

The Only thing Crime needs is a few tweaks here and there, and most of that is from T-brd's new Law and Criminal units getting settled in and a bit more balanced (working out the kinks still left).

JosEPh

As I said crime is fairly good balanced until the modern era, where with all the jails and stuff it gets too easy. also, jails and the like give HUGE espionage bonuses, that's rather insane. I think thats a relict from the original jail building and rather than adjusting that to c2c, all other jail-like buildings were based on the vanilla jail.

I do have some tweaking and debugging to do and when we get the arrest trial function taken care of a lot more unique crime fighting options will emerge there as well. We've taken the full extent where buildings and units can address crime directly but things like sending informant criminals back out onto the streets to help you bring down other criminals has yet to be implemented.

Crime and law enforcement are setup now so that the kinds of crimes and the strategies in committing them do change dramatically over time. Hackers may have it rough as they live in a world where law has mostly come to dominate, but they are extremely powerful at some things no other unit can do. The development of crime really becomes a storyline rather than just an arms race the way it's been developed now... projects to come will bring some of these plot points to life even more.

Does this take into consideration the two big impacts on crime in the late 20th-21st centuries? A couple of my long standing friends are police officers and they state the following:-

Not only this but it takes a lot more people now to create the same amount of crime as existed in earlier times. Their, no doubt, exaggerated example is that a small nation today, eg England, has less crime than London in the early industrial era.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Since about 1980 non war related violent have been dropping around the world. Slowly at first then increasing. It decreases as access to the internet increases. It is either that or the rise in atheism, but that is not as good a fit.

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There's certainly a shift in the type of criminal once you hit the Hacker. More direct adjustments to how and what crimes are taking place in that era are possible through Outbreaks and Afflictions once that's up and running for crime. This can also be capable of making the rise of console games a factor.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Not only this but it takes a lot more people now to create the same amount of crime as existed in earlier times. Their, no doubt, exaggerated example is that a small nation today, eg England, has less crime than London in the early industrial era.

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Due to existing crime control measures, sure. But if those measures were eliminated and desperation were to rise, there would be a huge reversal of that trend and suddenly all that population in a small area becomes almost lethal with crime. Economic stability is what's keeping things afloat. Sociology 101: Deviant behavior is what happens when people cannot get what they want, and especially what they need, by the normally acceptable means society expects people to be capable of achieving these things. There's always the strategy of going a deviant or criminal path, but people generally follow the path of least resistance and if participation in the legal economy is either unrewarding enough or nearly impossible to make work, that is when people will resort to crime, morality and enforcement aside.

Depending on the government you have, many developed nations are showing decreases in crime because they are taking pretty good care of their people in general.

The rise in console games may, due to certain game content, also be a contributing factor to a dramatic increase in extraordinarily violent crime here, and possibly also a contributor to tremendous improvements in military objective success rates.

The problem is that the big reduction in minor crime was "emergent behaviour" not something that was planned for. It certainly had noting to do with "crime control measures" as police were baffled by what was happening. The same goes with access to the internet reducing violent crime. However you are right about lacking needs leads to crime, both internet and games fulfill needs that were missing.

As far as I can see neither of these things in C2C reduce crime when they should.

Aside: Have you seen the science-fiction movie "Virtual Revolution"? It is in English but is mainly a French based movie, or maybe EU based. It is not a "big production" movie but worth it IMO. A near future society with almost no crime, basic universal income and a complete "dystopia/utopia" where humans are going extinct by choice. Although that is not in the story anywhere or even it's message.

Thunderbrd said:

There's certainly a shift in the type of criminal once you hit the Hacker.

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It is not just a shift in crime but a reduction in the percentage of the population involved in crimes.

Thunderbrd said:

Due to existing crime control measures, sure.

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Only if you consider providing all the needs as a crime control measure.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

The same goes with access to the internet reducing violent crime. However you are right about lacking needs leads to crime, both internet and games fulfill needs that were missing.

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Did you know that there is a strong correlation between the number of pirates worldwide and the average global temperature? You have to be VERY careful with correlations as often they are just coincidences. The average lifespan grows with the number of cars. Dropping numbers of bees correlate somewhat with effectivness cancer treatments.

Also crime control is not only done by the police but to a huge part by the way the goverment cares for people, so if still is possible that the polices is baffled about that.

The good news is that, despite the news tell a different story, the world as a whole gota whole lot more peaceful in the last 50 years. There are now more people dying from suicide than from war, vilolant crimes and terrorism combined. Also more people die now from eating too much than from eating enough (worldwide) and more die from old age instead of communicable diseases.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

It is not just a shift in crime but a reduction in the percentage of the population involved in crimes.

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That's just what low crime property amounts is. It's not an absolute necessity that things go that way... our societies pretty much are on top of things having spent many years (turns) getting on top of internal matters rather than being swept away by external threats. If you were to start removing crime control measures that are in place, you'd see a rise in crime. But also, we have been programming people into a pattern of fear of the law and have been increasing the militarization of police. Forensics is getting so advanced people are beginning to truly believe they would likely be caught if they did commit a crime. All this is well established in the C2C assets. In fact mid-modern you really start to see a growing pattern of more natural crime control factors over growing crime factors. Of course, it should depend a bit on the type of crime - ID theft is rampant today. That's the sort of thing we can't yet show till O&A. Plus I'm sure we do have a lot more tweaks and design subtleties to implement in all of this. Just saying there's really a lot of the reasons for all this already in place in the assets.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Only if you consider providing all the needs as a crime control measure.

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Not only. Modern investigation methods scare the hell out of otherwise would-be criminals. Again... path of least resistance. If you truly expect to get caught, which indeed would be a likelihood these days, then you're not nearly as likely to plot a crime. DNA, fingerprinting, and all the amazing ways we can determine truth and collect evidence is really making people feel like the all-seeing eye is pretty much indomitable and can only be beat by never straying outside the lines. And since you CAN generally make it in the standard way if you even half try to, particularly in a socialist state like the UK where there's a very healthy safety net if you are not all that well endowed at working the system in a standard manner, why take the risk unless it's REALLY rewarding and you're REALLY clever and you know it (and have balls of steel.)

Thunderbrd said:

.....particularly in a socialist state like the UK where there's a very healthy safety net if .....

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Did you meant Social Democratic?
Socialism and Social Democracy are two different things like Astrology and Astronomy
Venezuela is socialist, Nordic countries are best example of Social Democracy.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Since about 1980 non war related violent have been dropping around the world. Slowly at first then increasing. It decreases as access to the internet increases. It is either that or the rise in atheism, but that is not as good a fit.

Similarly the very big drop in minor crime is directly related to the introduction and spread of console games!

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Don't forget the removal of lead from gasoline: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

Not sure about the whole world, but in Western countries the average age has risen considerably, and crime peaks in the 18-30 band.

raxo2222 said:

Did you meant Social Democratic?
Socialism and Social Democracy are two different things like Astrology and Astronomy
Venezuela is socialist, Nordic countries are best example of Social Democracy.

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Socialism is not Communism. Venezuela is Communist, not Socialist. Australia and the UK are highly socialist in that they provide programs for their people's well being. Even the US is socialist. Just not nearly as much. Social Democracy is just a term in use to confuse the subject. Socialism is not a form of government but rather government economics, where the government actually does something, aka provides a service, for its people.

I say all this knowing that the discussion about agnosticism suffers the same problem, that around the world people mean different things with the same words. This is how I mean this term.

Thunderbrd said:

around the world people mean different things with the same words

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Like "liberal". The fact that european "liberal" means "libertarian" (which is the original meaning of the word) can really confuse people on both sides of the Atlantic. This is not helped by the fact that party colors in the USA are almost completely opposite to the meaning in Europe (in Europe, red means socialist - remember the USSR flag? - and blue means either libertarian or right-wing).

tmv said:

Like "liberal". The fact that european "liberal" means "libertarian" (which is the original meaning of the word) can really confuse people on both sides of the Atlantic. This is not helped by the fact that party colors in the USA are almost completely opposite to the meaning in Europe (in Europe, red means socialist - remember the USSR flag? - and blue means either libertarian or right-wing).

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Australia uses the same meanings as Europe on this.

Thunderbrd said:

Social Democracy is just a term in use to confuse the subject.

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This is not really true. Social Democracy is a broad ideology in which a society uses socialistic concepts combined with the principals of the free market and the democratic means of enabling them. So in essence both America and most of Europe would fall into this idea. With the U.S. being more corporate friendly(and thus corporatist) and Europe being more labor friendly(thus more socialistic). AND I USE THE WORD SOCIALISTIC TO DESCRIBE EUROPE NOT SOCIALIST! As in using many socialist principles but not full fledged and true socialism. You see in America what we consider to be communism is really pure socialism, that is the redistribution of the means of production through the government. Most of this confusion comes from the fact that the CIA and the Federal Government tried to oversimplify the various Marxist concepts together and just call them communism. This was for the sole purpose of making it easier to create anti-communist and anti-soviet propaganda throughout the cold war and "inform" a public that might not really have the insight into a larger more complex reality. Even though the government eventually stopped making anti-communist propaganda with the end of the cold war, this misinformation has passed from older generations to younger ones and even seeped into the education system. Which is why most Americans have different and not really accurate definitions of Marxist ideologies when compared to Europeans. Communism in truth is more of a general over-arching philosophical idea in which various ideologies have sprouted from. The basic premise of communism is that of a utopian society where there is no class differentiation, no money, no religion, no sense of property, no government, and people share and produce goods freely between each other out of their own hearts and for the common good. This is what's known as the Marxist Utopia(which has NEVER existed!) and is essentially what communism is trying to ultimately fulfill. Traditional communism simply uses pure socialism as the means in which to transition human society from a state where government exists to one where it doesn't(thus creating the Marxist Utopia). Marxism is not an ideology but rather the prediction and theory that communistic thought would inevitably prevail over the previous systems of governance through violent revolutions that would create socialist nations across the planet. After these socialist nations transitioned and prepared their respective populations through a grace period, they would eventually unite under a single global society(without government) and create the so called utopia. Now some people who prescribe to Marxist thought believe the utopia is an impossible pipe dream and so prefer a perpetual system of redistribution through government(aka socialism). These people are known as socialists, where as those who do think the utopia is possible and actively push for it's creation are known as communists. For instance Venezuela is a socialist nation ruled by the socialist party(meaning they want to perpetually stay socialist and keep their national sovereignty). In China even though they are ruled by the communist party, the party considers the nation as a whole to be socialist(which is true considering that the utopia has not been achieved). Same thing was true for the Soviet Union which identified themselves as individuals to be communist but considered their union of "republics" to be socialist. Now a lot of people in the west like to identify as "socialist" in order to be more edgy in elections and conjure up more votes but are really just left leaning social democrats(which has actually added to a lot of the confusion over socialism). That's not to say there are no true ones in the west, just that there are a lot of posers which really skew things up. Now those are just the basics, but there are also totalitarian vs democratic means of running such transitional/permanent(communist/socialist) societies. Maoism, Stalinism, and Leninism are of course the most famous of examples and tend to rely on brute force and tyranny within a socialist society to forcefully coerce the population to abandon any and all capitalistic, theistic, and cultural(which is seen as bad because it prevents the masses from forming a global identity which is necessary for the coming utopia, so the only "culture" to be allowed are those which endorse a communistic worldview.) ideas for the utopia and global revolution. Now traditional communism and traditional socialism are actually supposed to be democratic in form. That is the people would have control over how they would transition into the utopia or govern as a perpetual socialist nation. The only problem with this is that if people are given the ability to vote, they can also vote out of and essentially opt out of these systems of governance if they feel like they are not working. When Lenin first tried to create the very early Soviet Union he tried experimenting to see what would happen if the people had control through the various soviets. Eventually the Soviet economy began to tank under redistribution and the people where trying to essentially do just that. Realizing that his ideology might be doomed if people just willfully left it, Lenin decided to quickly reorganize the soviets in a more oligarchic and totalitarian fashion to insure that no one could simply just leave. Then the economy plummeted further and farmers started to hide their grain from the government because they were beginning to starve and then the government started to pillage and plunder the countryside for grain and etc., etc., etc. the rest is history. So that's basically why democratic versions of communism and socialism are rare(if not non existent). Though it should be known that these more totalitarian forms of communism and socialism are considered to be Revisionary Marxist ideas. Which basically means any form of ideology that is founded in Marxist principles that strays from the traditional theoretical canon as set by Karl Marx. Another example of a Revisionary ideology would be the Anarcho-Communists(known as An-Coms for short) who believe in waging a violent revolution against capitalism and then immediately turn society into the utopia without any transitional government in between. So yah that's pretty much all for now but I've already created a giant wall of text rambling on about social democracy and Marxist ideas.

The more socialist/communist a system is, the less incentive people have to work. Especially the not-so-fun work. Thus, in order to get anything done, a form of slavery must be used by the state. And slavery can only exist together with oppression. That is why communism leads to misery. People get lured in with promises of free stuff and utopian illusions, and the fairy tale ends with oppression and slavery.

Noriad2 said:

... People get lured in with promises of upward mobility and utopian illusions, and the fairy tale ends with oppression and slavery.

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Sounds very much like Capitalism to me.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Sounds very much like Capitalism to me.

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Yeah, the return of slavery in the states in the form of privatized prison labor is a very disturbing development that seems to be much the same kind of reaction to a flaw in the system. Given that one is promised that if you take the right risks and try hard enough, you can be a successful capitalist and you can be the boss employing others, who has the humility to accept that they are 'stuck' working at such a bottom feeder position except for the truly desperate? So making the system harder and harder to survive in is necessary to make the poor person inspired to work the crap jobs and thus they tend to turn to crime and thus they end up in the slave prison system and that system is rigged to make it very hard for people to succeed after having been there and it creates a tough to escape cycle of poverty, misery, and incarceration/slavery. Go capitalism - we have so many systems designed to fail on purpose that the whole system as a whole is quite good at maintaining itself for the benefit of the few financial oligarchs we have.

At their extremes, socialist and capitalist systems pretty much come to the same conclusions, few winners who live like kings and many losers who live under the bootheels of those winners or worse, out in the cold and left to die. Only those systems that achieve a balance between the two economic forces of private and state seem to ever do well and with any system that has allowed an imbalance between the two, you can quite easily spot the imbalance and find it to blame for the economic woes that nation suffers.

@Joij21 I do agree but I like to simply use the term socialism to point at the opposition of capitalism, aka, private free market vs government provided industry. I believe that some systems are better for one than the other but that neither are trustworthy - the goal of profit is often at odds to the goal of the betterment of the public and the goal of provision for the people is often at odds to accountability. The politics of pushing to use primarily one form of economic force over the other is where the term Socialism loses clarity, like many political terms do thanks to numerous forms of propaganda over the years.

And try breaking up what you say into a paragraph or two now and then huh? lol That was a little tough to read... of course I can be quite guilty of the same problem now and then.

raxo2222 said:

Did you meant Social Democratic?
Socialism and Social Democracy are two different things like Astrology and Astronomy
Venezuela is socialist, Nordic countries are best example of Social Democracy.

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Semantics, there is nothing wrong with talking about the socialism of Europe, it exists... Social democracy is just a fancy term meant to confuse Americans into not hating us for employing socialism in our policy decisions. ^^
Social Democracy is a categorical construct that envelops governmental structure and ideology in a way that does not really apply 100% to any country and is mostly worthless as a term.

Nordic countries are not republics as our executive branch is not that of a president but rather that of ministers and a prime minister, we do not elect a person to take the steering wheel but a party, and therefore in a sense we elect a political program. The executive branch in Nordic countries hold less authority than most examples of presidents, almost everything has to be approved by the parliament (legislature branch). We don't elect our executive branch directly, we elect our legislature branch. The parliament consist of representatives from the different parties, the amounts from each party are proportional to the number of votes the parties got during the election. The parties in the parliement that holds a majority of the mandates either on their own or in coalitions of multiple parties can form a majority executive branch, if the parties can't agree, our king (at least in norway) can actually decide upon a party to run a minority executive branch. Our executive branch is as powerful as the percentage of votes they get, coalition governments are the norm in Norway, rarely does one party get a majority vote and when they do there is usually a lot of disagreement within the party.
Parliamentarism or "Representative democracy" are the best terms to describe our governmental structure, but many would call this social democracy.

Venezuela is a republic in the sense that it has a president, it has a parliament/congress/legislature called the national assembly. The national assembly is voted forth in the same manner as is seen in the parliament elections in Nordic countries, party lists of potential representatives from that party, names of individuals within that party who a voter may give weighting to, or decide to simply make a neutral vote for the party.

None of the above is related to socialism, but it is an important part of what distinguish and defines the governmental structure part of the term "social democracy". The ideological part of the term "social democracy" about mixed economy, liberalism, socialism, and about embracing capitalism without leaving communism entirely is not really clearly defined, it is obscure and foggy at best, and that is why that part of the term is imo pretty much worthless and don't really apply to much. It contain so much meaning that it becomes meaningless. Many Nordic people view themselves as social democrats, but knowing that doesn't make you much wiser about what kind of politics they prefer, they could be hardcore liberalists or socialists to the extreme when it comes to economics.

Both Venezuela and the Nordic countries has passed policies which are ideologically based in socialism, policies meant to reduce the difference between the rich and the poor of the society. Sure there are differences in political opinions, methods and ideology between the average nordic politician and the average venezuelan politician, but when it comes to socialism in general, they are actually more on the same page than most would think.

Toffer90 said:

Sure there are differences in political opinions, methods and ideology between the average nordic politician and the average venezuelan politician

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Are those the oh so small differences that are causing Venezuela to collapse while yours is still moseying along?