Bidenomics

View From The Porch Tam shares a New York Times story about modern day train robbery. It's all about thieves breaking into shipping containers traveling on trains and making off with the loot. It's a good story. I picked out a few tidbits.

 

Railroad from Los Angeles to Tucson

“Between L.A. and Tucson is where I know a lot of theft happens,” Hall said.

Quelle suprise. Between L.A. and Tucson there is 500 miles of nothing. Of course, thieves aren't going to be attacking trains high-balling on main lines in the middle of nowhere, they are going to hit them where it is most convienient for them, which will be in towns where the trains slow to a crawl.

Piracy is an age-old occupation, particularly prevalent in places and times when large gaps have separated the rich and the poor. But this modern-day resurgence in cargo theft stems in no small part from the extreme ways the internet has altered the buying and selling of things. When the United States Census Bureau began collecting data on e-commerce, in 1998, online sales amounted to some $5 billion. Now that figure is upward of $958 billion; e-commerce revenue is forecast to exceed $2.5 trillion by 2027.

If you aren't talking about trillions of dollars, you're talking about chump change.

On the website of Operation Boiling Point, which the Department of Homeland Security recently created to go after organized theft groups, the agency states that cargo theft accounts for between $15 billion and $35 billion in annual losses.

Everybody has a website now: Operation Boiling Point, courtesy of Homeland Security.

Ouroboros

We do know that often these hijacked goods are cycled back into the online ecosystem, turning up for sale on places like Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace (some e-bikes Chavez watched Llamas and others take from the trains later showed up on OfferUp). Sometimes products stolen out of Amazon containers are resold by third-party sellers back on Amazon in a kind of strange ouroboros, in which the snakehead of capitalism hungrily swallows its piracy tail.

So theft shows up as losses, but sales of stolen goods are contributing to the GDP.

Over the past decade, in a push for greater efficiency, and amid record-breaking profits, the country’s largest railroads have been stringing together longer trains. Some now stretch two or even three miles in length. 

I remember seeing mile long trains when we drove back to Iowa, but two or three miles? That's friggin' nuts.

The human geography of the West is so entangled with the railroad as to be indistinguishable from it: Entire cities and towns exist and persist because people organized themselves around the train.

The area between the Mississippi and the West Coast may as well be on a different planet for all that is has in common with the East Coast.

The entire region has been altered by digital commerce; the inland empire now has in excess of 1.4 billion square feet of warehouse space, with plans for millions more.

1.4 billion square feet = 50 square miles. Fifty square miles of warehouse space? That's mind boggling. You want a double boggle? The United States has 500 square miles of warehouse space.

So now I understand California's lax approach to enforcing laws against theft. Rent has gotten so high that nobody who's working any kind of regular job can afford it, so they're homeless. Without a home, it's pretty hard to hold down a regular job. Some people are not going to happy about their situation and will turn to theft in order to make a little money to pay for their burgers and fries. As long as the Federal government policies are driving the country towards the abyss of economic collapse, there is little California can do.