Rising crime rate
Last night, I had a drink with an old friend of mine. One of the issues we talked about was on sociology and the conversation side tracked to crime. He told me his friend's car was stolen the night before right infront of his house. According to the neigbours, they heard the alarm went off for a while. Thinking that it was just a case of a mispressed remote control, they shruged off any suspicions. About 15 minutes, a gear lock and a steering lock later, the Satria GTi was gone.
My friend believe this occurred because of "cause-and-effect". He thinks these crimes were executed by former VCD peddlers. The current stem on pirated vcd have caused much grief to the peddlers.
Doesn't make sense? Consider this, a vcd peddler operates from, let's say 6pm to 12 midnight. During that course, he sells an average of 60 vcds (10 vcd per hour). His margin is about RM2 per vcd. That's RM120 a day. Times that by 26 days; they conservatively earn about RM 3,120 a month, that's almost double what fresh graduates earn. Im sure in a good month (summer movies) they could easily double or even triple that amount.
For a peddler, that is a lot of money. Even for an average Malaysian, that is a substantial amount of money.
In socialogy, we can relate this to "systems theory" where everything have its own function in the system. Take a component away, and the system cease to work, or it could still work but at the expense of other components in the system. That, according to my friend, is exactly what's happening.
This morning, we found out that my sister's car was broken into last night. The car was parked across the street, in front of my house. Fortunately, nothing was missing. It was almost similar to the ordeal i had a couple of months back.
No it does not stop there. Sharizal's car was also broken into last night.
Perhaps the theory is right, afterall?
Reading: Human Development Report 2003 (Available in PDF)
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