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posted by n1 on Friday July 29 2016, @04:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the opportunists dept.

The crime rate, especially drug crime, decreases significantly when more 16-44 year olds have access to affordable Vocational Education and Training, (VET) according to a new University of Melbourne report.

Drug crime rate decreased 13 per cent when more people had access to a publicly-funded place in VET. The research also recorded a five percent and 11 per cent decrease in personal and property crime respectively, including assault, theft and burglary.

Report author, Dr Cain Polidano from the Melbourne Institute found that the extra public funding of VET (TAFE and private colleges) reduced the costs of crime.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday July 29 2016, @05:07AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Friday July 29 2016, @05:07AM (#381429)

    You get welfare. It sux, but you can feed yourself and get basic cable + internet. You get a minimum wage job. It sucks, but you can feed yourself, you didn't need basic cable anyway. Especially now that you're working $WageAndBenefitsIncreaseHours - 1 per week, so you don't watch as much TV. You get promoted to head fry cook. Now you have a title, so $WageAndBenefitIncreaseHours goes up, so you're now working more hours for more money per week but your money/hour went down.

    Then little Joey down the street says "hey bud, sell some weed, make a week's salary in a day.". Everybody you know smokes weed, seems a no brainer, till little Joey turns out to be working for the feds and you're now looking at 10+ years in the joint.

    Give people options to work honestly and make a decent living, or work dishonestly and get farked. Never lived in an inner city, but I can sure as hell understand why those drug dealers take the chances they do.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @05:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @05:35AM (#381440)

    I knew a guy who used to sell drugs. He actually stashed a lot of his money, and lied and claimed the other stuff was his cut of the Social Security check his mom got for him. Doing so got him through high school until he got busted and had his cash confiscated (he hadn't thought to stash any of it because he was smalltime.) Ended up getting job placement as a janitor once he got out on parole. Haven't heard what happened to him since.

    Another story from that same HS: Kid dropped 50k on an STI as his own graduation present after dealing drugs for the length of high school. Not sure if he stopped then, or kept going, but he still had the car at least 6 months later, so the cops didn't crack down on him immediately.

  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 29 2016, @09:57AM

    They have options, they're just too lazy or stupid to learn a skill/trade on their own. The solution isn't to pay more for minimum wage jobs, which were never meant for adults supporting themselves in the first place, the solution is to require a minimum of one year of vocational/technical training in school. Having basic skills in a trade is a fuckload more valuable to anyone than highschool English ever will be.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:58AM (#381482)

      They have options, they're just too lazy or stupid to learn a skill/trade on their own.

      Yes, those lazy fucktards working three minimum wage jobs, barely surviving on the edge of starvation. They should use all of that free time, disposable income, and excess energy they have to go back to school and learn something more useful then cleaning or flipping burgers.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 29 2016, @11:17AM

        Yes, they should. You think it's easy for those of us who did? Should I tell you how I used to get two hours of sleep twice a day while I was in college all day and jockeying a register all night? Would you like to hear how my large family lived off the income of one waitress while my dad went to school? How about when he finished and she went to school? Cry me a fucking river.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @12:40PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @12:40PM (#381500)

          "If I could do it, everyone can" argument. That's a bit ignorant.

          So please tell me, oh Mighty Buzz, of the time you broke the 10 second barrier for a 100m sprint. Speak to me about your thought-provoking theories about the nature of space-time. Please, grace us with your world-class singing skills.

          Or if you didn't do all those things, explain to me why not? After all, other people could.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @03:03PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @03:03PM (#381557)

            Buzz is really proud of how he was the smartest kid in school. Not just smarter than all the other kids, smarter than all the teachers too. He'll tell you how he didn't learn anything from them because teachers are useless. He's such a special snowflake.

            And now here he is pretending to be nothing special at all.

            Which is it buzz? Are you exceptional or are you run of the mill?

            • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @04:41PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @04:41PM (#381599)

              I'd say it's more likely that he didn't learn much because our schools are and were utterly useless and without decent standards.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @11:30PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @11:30PM (#381797)

                Easy to say. But far from true. You don't get to be the most prosperous country in the world if your public education system is total shit.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by rondon on Friday July 29 2016, @12:44PM

          by rondon (5167) on Friday July 29 2016, @12:44PM (#381502)

          Serious question - regardless of the arguments before this, the sum of your argument seems to be, "because my family had it hard and made it out ok, everyone else that has it hard should do the same." Is that accurate?

          Because I would think that having it hard would lead to some empathy, instead of disgust, which is what it appears that you have for poor people.

          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 29 2016, @04:25PM

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday July 29 2016, @04:25PM (#381591) Journal

            Look up his post history, please. Uzzard is one of those pathological cases whose mental world is a bubble of predatory, self-regarding darkness. About half a dozen of his best (hah...) should convince you what I'm talking about. There is a kind of toxic solipsism at work here.

            We are speaking here of a person whose entire political outlook begins and ends with "taxation is theft," which is how overgrown rebellious teenagers with beer guts and mesh caps say "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me." Remember that quote about the difference between Atlas Shrugged and LotR? It may not have been written specifically with carrion-face here in mind, but it could very well have been.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @11:39PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @11:39PM (#381798)

              > There is a kind of toxic solipsism at work here.

              Its a defense mechanism. As a kid he was a social outcast. So he reacted by deciding that his social failures were not a function of his poor skills but rather that everybody else sucked. He aged physically, but intellectually he never matured out of that mindset. Whether his parents enabled that or not, he's a cautionary tale for all those parents who tell their children they are superior in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Which is especially ironic since he's the first to complain about that sort of attitude.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:29PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @10:29PM (#381776)

            Its a common rraction from people who have worked their way out of bad situations. Pretty sure there is some demographic layout to who feels that way as well.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday July 29 2016, @02:29PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday July 29 2016, @02:29PM (#381543)

      The solution isn't to pay more for minimum wage jobs, which were never meant for adults supporting themselves in the first place

      That argument, which is quite popular in right-wing circles, is complete and total hogwash meant to justify their policy of keeping minimum wage below the point where an adult could support themselves. Also relevant is that most of those putting forward this argument would actually prefer that no minimum wage existed, because apparently making people live on $1250 a month is too generous.

      The stated purpose of the federal minimum wage was to ensure that adults making minimum wage would to be able to support themselves from the moment it was created. Here's Franklin Roosevelt explaining why he was instituting a minimum wage as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933:

      In my inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living. Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe.

      Also, I have to question this part as well:

      They have options, they're just too lazy or stupid to learn a skill/trade on their own.

      According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report [bls.gov], there are approximately 3 million people making minimum wage in the US. Of those, 250,000 or so have a bachelor's degree, another 200,000 or so have an associates degree (including 75,000 with occupational degrees, which probably means they learned a skilled trade of some kind at their community college), and another 900,000 have some college under their belt. That's about 1 out of 3 that's been accepted to college and gotten at least some college-level coursework under their belt. Which means they probably aren't stupid.

      What actually jumps out to me is that nearly half of minimum wage workers live in the southeast region of the US. That trend is more significant than race, age, and second only to educational attainment.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @03:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @03:02PM (#381556)

        Well now we have difficult choices, do we believe the facts, or the right wing news and barely warmed over talking points.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @05:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @05:48PM (#381628)

      i would disagree with the blanket statement that "they have options". that's not necessarily true. If you have no computer, no internet, no money, and maybe no food in a town where there are no jobs (unless you're connected) it can be damn near impossible for an immature, demoralized teen to find a trade to learn. The schools are prisons. The whole towns are battlegrounds. teens are more worried about surviving the gang/race wars and gaining power/security in said struggle than learning about some trade or business they don't even know exists or that they don't see any way that they could partake in. I'm not going to fund these socialist indoctrination centers when they can't even train kids to work any freakin' job at all. just preparing them for prison, to be a sycophantic leech, or a treasonous pig.

      i guess studies like these are what it takes for dumb ass politicians/curriculum planners to learn that real world training and skills(exposure to the working world and a chance to succeed in it) is what "schools" need to be providing since they don't have the common sense to figure it out on their own.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday July 29 2016, @04:34PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday July 29 2016, @04:34PM (#381596)

    You get welfare. It sux, but you can feed yourself and get basic cable + internet.

    I don't know where you got that idea, but no, you can't afford basic cable + Internet while surviving on welfare, at least in my state.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.