When cities stop prosecuting crimes like shoplifting under the assumption it's driven by poverty, they inadvertently create a lucrative market for organized crime. Sophisticated gangs exploit this leniency to run large-scale theft operations, harming the community more than the original policy intended to help.

As digital media like movies and music becomes infinitely reproducible and essentially free, its value diminishes. Elon Musk agrees that the truly scarce resource, and therefore the most valuable commodity, will be live, in-person events that cannot be digitally replicated.

A novel form of organized crime involves gangs buying small, established freight forwarding businesses. They leverage the company's legitimate reputation to take possession of high-value shipping containers, steal the goods, and then promptly shut down the business and disappear, making the crime nearly untraceable.

Technology in finance is a double-edged sword. While it can increase access, it can also be used to gamify trading, encourage impulse spending with 'buy-now-pay-later' schemes, and circumvent traditional consumer protection laws.

Thieves who steal high-profile items like the Louvre's jewels have an alternative to breaking them down: selling them to adversarial nations. A country like North Korea or a figure like Vladimir Putin could acquire and display the items publicly, using them as a political tool to mock France.

The thieves' success hinged on using seemingly ordinary professional equipment in broad daylight. A truck-mounted furniture elevator allowed them to access a second-floor gallery without raising suspicion, as they looked like regular workers. This highlights the power of social engineering in physical security breaches.

A recent $11M crypto robbery during a home invasion highlights a critical vulnerability. As individuals accumulate significant wealth in self-custodied digital assets, the primary threat vector shifts from remote hacking to physical, violent attacks, necessitating a focus on personal security.

For younger generations who are digitally native, the concept of physical value (e.g., gold being a "real thing") is meaningless. They trust the digital realm more than physical storage, viewing both gold and Bitcoin simply as assets whose value is determined by what others will pay.

While convenient, the decline of physical cash risks locking the economy into tech platforms and creating barriers for the unbanked. Cash represents an open, uncontrolled system whose loss has significant societal and class-based downsides, concentrating power in the hands of platform owners.