It's not a crime if we do it with an app

Luigi Inc.

Thanks. I suppose the “more than all others combined” would be “except shoplifting,” which is a big “except.”

I still maintain that wage theft is covered and enforced far less than it should be given the scale, precisely because of who the victims and perpetrators are. Your link lays it out nicely: “ While wage theft is a horrible crime against workers, retail theft also directly causes higher costs for consumers and arguably hurts workers even more than wage theft does.” Don’t worry about what we’re stealing from you, peons, the real problem is what you’re stealing from us.

Setting aside that 'too few young people' is by definition when there's a problem, thus making it a tautology, there's a lot we can do by changing our views of what retirement means.

Retirement should not mean a life of air travel and cruises, achieved by pension savings.

Retirement should not mean continuing to live in your 2,500 sq. ft. ranch house in the suburbs with only car access.

John Maynard Keynes famously predicted we would be working 15 hours a week due because of increasing productivity. Where did all that productivity go?

If it's because we believed we needed ('deserved') more, then change those beliefs. If it's because of the concentration of wealth into the 0.01% then AI productivity improvements won't fix things.

The AI-mongers sell the false and unsustainable promise that AI will magically solve things so people don't need to change their habits.

Yet we can achieve a lot of savings by building more compact areas to live which don't require a car, and by building mass transit with the needs of the elderly in mind (no steps, low-frequency lines which run through neighborhoods, for those with limited mobility, etc.)

We can save money and get better health outcomes with a tried-and-true single-payer health care system done in every other developed country (eg, "Medicare For All".)

That can all be done now.

Yet we aren't. Because it's easier, and more profitable to those with money, to ignore the festering problem, with the fig leaf of 'AI' or some other future technology, and let someone else deal with it,

IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery.

AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures.

IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy).

It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

Here is a page DOJ publishes on that (at least for fines). https://www.justice.gov/atr/sherman-act-violations-yielding-...

I also found this for criminal prosecutions under section 2 which is the section covering illegal monopolies. Pages 12 and 14 have some quick summary charts and tables.

https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/ant...