For who? I doubt anyone is being inconvenienced by the bitcoin thing now. Perhaps some number of people will be bankrupt in a few years, but that is a suitable reward for bad decisions, not a problem.
"Mining" Bitcoins, OTOH, generally doesn't beyond the basic equipment and net access.
And turning them into something valuable. That little task happens to require significant additional infrastructure and resources. But "time value" was a good answer just the same. Sometimes it's better to just have the money now than a hypothetically greater amount some years down the road.
And why would Japan have continued to present such easy targets? Even "ineffective" antiair and sparse fighter planes kill bombers. So harder targets and more cost to bomb them.
If they could have resisted they would have done so already.
And that is what the die-hards in Japan were counting on. Making it so costly to invade that the US and USSR would eventually give up. And you may be right, Japan might not be a threat thereafter.
I'll just point out that once before, Japan was just a ground force on an island they couldn't leave.
The Japanese were negotiating in earnest with Truman
No, they weren't. I doubt even that the people who were attempting to negotiate with the US had the authority or power to do so.
It was a heinous act, even if done out of ignorance and especially if contemplated as a show of force to deter the Russians ambition to claim Japan as their own.
And even if that were true, that probably saved millions to tens of millions of lives by stopping a hot war between the USSR and the "First World".
Aside from which a National Park should be preserved for its natural beauty and source of recreation through the appreciation of the out of doors, as has been the tradition since Theodore Roosevelt advocated for Yellowstone NP. Los Alamos doesn't begin to qualify for consideration in that regard. In addition, the National Park Service budget has been under assault for years out of sheer ignorance on the part of those who believe we should cater to the RV set and those who believe that every non-essential service of the federal government should be paid for on a fee-for-service basis.
Whine whine whine. I guess it's better to not pay for a National Park Service and simply let people and businesses do whatever they want on NPS land Fee for service at least funds some protection of those lands which is more than you can say for its absence.
At a time when legislators on both sides of the aisle argue for fiscal responsibility, I can find absolutely no justification for the acquisition of this land, let alone its designation as a National Landmark. For once I'll side the Potty Tea People of America, this NOT an acceptable use of federal funds, especially if you are at all concerned about the budget, and even if you're not.
I'd put it as one of the most important moments in human history on the scale of discovering fire or inventing writing. That's the justification for making some of these sites national historical parks.
I think the reality would have been that that USA would have used conventional weapons to firebomb Japanese cities
The reality also is that conventional weapons pf that era weren't that effective. The US had already been firebombing Japanese cities for years. And the Japanese could have made that effort very expensive for the result by investing in a lot of flak guns and otherwise spreading out their residual industry and military targets. So continued loss of bombers combined with reduced effectiveness from hitting hardened, dispersed targets.
At some point, the US would need to invade. Then it would be a bloodbath with a lot of allied deaths and a lot of Japanese dying for each of those deaths.
The atomic bombs changed that by greatly reducing the cost to the allies. One bomber now could take out one city. There was no hope to draw out the war or cause enough harm to get the US to give up.
No, they didn't. What had happened is that some Japanese had decided to seek surrender through odd channels (such as via the USSR), but there's no indication either that the ones seeking surrender had the authority to do so or that the US knew that status either.
I see no reason stemming from those diplomatic activities to question the use of the atomic bombs or the allegation that the war would have continued otherwise and resulted in hundreds of thousands of allied deaths and millions of Japanese deaths.
How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?
Well, one obvious solution is to kill everyone with some other superweapon so nobody is around to use atomic bombs in warfare. Otherwise, I think sooner or later atomic bombs will be used again. There are huge disincentives to using them, but there's no reason to expect those disincentives to always be good enough.
Consider for example, Syria's situation in the Middle East. The current government is facing its doom by a massive rebellion. But it might be able to hold on by using sarin nerve gas on the rebels. According to the media, various US military sources are claiming that Syria has mixed precursor chemicals for sarin and loaded it into warheads on aerial bombs.
Now it depends on whether a dying regime thinks it'll get better return from using sarin than not. A lot will depend on what sort of threat the rest of the world can and does choose to make with respect to these terrible weapons and whether Assad will be bold or desperate enough to call their bluff.
This is likely to be an occasional occurrence for dictatorships down the road as well. And some of those will be nuclear armed.
Or we'll develop some technology that makes the food-related cost similar to what it is now. That's another "invisible hand" thing that happens. Before we chicken-little maybe we should consider the availability of phosphorus outside of the obvious sources.
Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two.
Not when I address that issue in my very next sentence.
No. That's not how you address inappropriate comparisons. You just don't make them in the first place. And if the pigeons had been farmed, they wouldn't be the "diminishing resource".
For salmon, you don't even give a diminishing resource. Here, "ocean/shore localities suitable for farming" don't become less suited for salmon farming just because there is a farm there for any period of time. Sure, you can't make infinite acreage of salmon farms, but everything else would be just as "unsustainable" in that trivial, uninteresting sense because everything relies on finite resources such as land, human labor, information storage, whatever.
Except that is what I said: "Salmon, on the other hand, is not really sustainable using current practices." Why are you insinuating I am not being fair or truthful?
You're not being fair because you label salmon fish farming "unsustainable" because of diminishing real estate, while other forms of fish farming, which have the very same real estate problem, get labeled as sustainable.
Similarly, you're not being truthful because you haven't actually come up with a sustainability problem with salmon farming. The real estate that is used for salmon farming can just continue to be used for salmon farming indefinitely.
Doing "not so well" doesn't mean that they can't do well enough. I wouldn't rule out altogether an engineered species tailored for Mars.
It's worth noting that there is a huge gap between the worst survivable environments of Earth and the best of Mars. For example, the pressures that lichen survives at on Earth (roughly half of an atmosphere at 19,000 feet) and the best spots on Mars ( Hellas Planitia with a bit over 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure).
Carbon dioxide partial pressure is actually higher for Mars than Earth, but that's not going to be the main constraints on lichen growth. Nitrogen partial pressure would be about a thousand times less dense for Hellas Planitia so it's going to be very hard for lichen to fix nitrogen.
Similarly, temperatures are vastly colder even at the best spots on Mars (once again Hellas Planitia) with high summer temperatures near 0C (according to this site). Lichen could operate at the hottest parts of the day, but night time temperatures are around -50C in summer in the best location on Mars. So needless to say, until someone builds up a heat-preserving atmosphere, lichen is going to grow very little only in the warmest parts of the day during the warmest parts of the summer in a single deep impact crater on Mars.
So far, I just mentioned gaps in temperature and pressure, both which stop lichen on Earth apparently around 19,000 feet well above the levels found in Hellas Planitia.
Water is probably not that bad. It might even be liquid at rare times in Hellas Planitia. There might be enough vapor/frost for lichen to harvest water from air. I certainly wouldn't consider it as big an obstacle as the rest.
Finally, there's UV and cosmic radiation. This is a huge problem due to how slowly any lichen would grow on Mars. Even a very radiation resistant lichen will have to repair damage to its DNA at some point. And that will only be able to occur during the infrequent periods during the Martian summer day when it is remotely active.
So can it repair itself, while surviving and reproducing? I think so, but not with any currently living lichen on Earth.
Then why does a hot black object, at the same temperate as a hot white object, cool down significantly faster
Note I said surface temperature. It is possible for paints to insulate to different degrees the underlying object in which case the surface temperatures will be different and hence the amounts radiated will be different. That will account for the difference in cooling.
As to your remark, it can go the other way, if the white painted object is more transparent to infra red frequency EM than the black paint (in those frequencies, their roles might be reversed with the white in visible light paint being black in IR and vice versa).
Nah, the real problem is that it's work to take your stuff. I don't mind you owning stuff, I just mind not having your stuff right when I want it.
Stooge: "Here is foma84's kid's bike. You know, the one you'll want in five seconds."
Me: "Did you give that brat a wedgie?"
Stooge: "Of course"
Me: "Ok. I don't want it anymore. How about ten learjets? All painted with the appropriate 'Hello Kitty' markings."
Stooge: "Right away, sir!"
Hunger Games takes place in a fictional nation of Panem, which just happened to be located in North America. It's not obvious at all. You might as well say it's a shot at Canada (Blame Canada! Blame Canada!)
So you're not going to be serious about this? I answered your question with a high profile movie in the past ten years. This thread is done as far as I'm concerned.
Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable.
Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two. For example, if passenger pigeons had been farmed instead of just harvested in the wild, they would still be with us today.
A second bit of deception comes from the term, "sustainable". Sustainability is not a bit you set, but a matter of degree. Merely farming a fish that was previously harvested in the wild is a huge improvement in sustainability. Also virtually everything is sustainable in small amounts, be it fish farming or nuclear meltdowns.
If one were being fair and truthful, one wouldn't say that salmon farming isn't sustainable, but that it isn't sustainable at its current volume under current circumstances (an assertion which I'm not convinced is true BTW).
If people were honest in the first place, why would they structure society in such a way that increases/encourages dishonest acts?
My view is that it is emergent behavior. People didn't intend dishonest societies, they just came about as a result of natural effects (such as population growth) and unintended consequences (such as criminalizing drug use).
Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out.
That gets fixed by switching to the many cases that are viable.
Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.
Wikipedia disagrees. They claim salmon and carp are the most farmed fish in the world.
It's a common theme that fishing boats have to fish more, travel further, and fish less desirable species in order to get a catch. This issue is also pretty orthogonal to most environmental issues, particularly, the notorious sky-is-falling rhetoric of catastrophic AGW. It requires some sort of controlled fishing either by governments or fishermen of wild fish stocks. It doesn't require you to buy in to the other issues.
I cannot actually think of an example from the past decade where the U.S. was portrayed as evil in a movie.
The Hunger Games is a pretty obvious one in the top 10 list for 2012. A common ploy is to denigrate US society and culture (see, for example, "The Help" a 2011 movie). Even when a movie doesn't focus on this aspect, you can get driveby insults (eg, a brief, shallow cameo by the stereotypical "ugly American" tourist, narcissistic yuppie, or an ignorant soccer mom).
Instead, policymakers should focus their attention on the demand side of the radicalization issue, Neumann argues, with the government spearheading outreach initiatives that would bring together schools, community groups and businesses to advance awareness and media literacy and offer a competing narrative to that presented by sites that traffic in radical propaganda.
There's no way this would work in the U.S. It sounds like socialism. It also incorporates zero bombs. A bill to attempt such a thing would be regarded by the right wing of this country as an encroachment on freedom far worse than censorship(of people they disagree with).
Why would this work at all? A first move in radicalization is to cut off the target from rival propaganda. Second, who really thinks the problem here is that people aren't indoctrinated enough? The real problem is societies that breed lots of terrorists and pretty nasty ideologies. That's not going to be cured by some feelgood on the internets.
It also depends on Hollywood and other US media centers, the people who profit the most from currently portraying the US as the bad guys. You'll just have some Hollywood or ad people making lukewarm propaganda, and then turning around and making some anti-US blockbuster. What's going to be the net effect?
So I agree that the people haven't really changed.
In other words, you agree with the GP, that people were just as dishonest then as they are today (i.e they haven't changed)
No. You missing a big point here. How you structure a society and what sort of incentives there are for dishonesty can result in more or less dishonest people even though the people don't change. Honesty is a combination of inherent morality (which let's assume for our debate doesn't change) and opportunity/incentive (which does change).
In my view, committing dishonest acts does make one more dishonest and it is more likely that people will commit dishonest acts, if the opportunities for those acts and incentive for committing dishonest is increased (that is, "higher payoff" for dishonesty). So that's why I think it is possible to have more dishonest people merely by having more payoff for dishonesty.
Now, if we include that payoffs for dishonesty are influenced by both skill of the one committing the dishonesty and that one can develop infrastructure for more efficiently committing dishonesty (such as a group that is experienced in running a shell game, theft ring, creating bogus businesses, a system of corruption, or maintaining bot networks), then we might actually be able to make people more dishonest in moral viewpoint than they would be in the absence of widespread exercise of dishonesty. For example, if the most respected members of society are so respected because of their dishonesty, I think that would create a more dishonest society than one where the most respected members are so respected for honesty - even in cases where those members are being rather hypocritical.
In my view, people didn't lock their doors back then was not because people were any more or less honest or society more wholesome, but because they were stupid
It'd take only one theft to cure them of that stupidity. Also keep in mind that security has cost to it. If you don't need security, because no one steals from you, then there's no reason to pay for the security.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think a book is somehow better than preserving the places where history was made?
people are a problem.
For who? I doubt anyone is being inconvenienced by the bitcoin thing now. Perhaps some number of people will be bankrupt in a few years, but that is a suitable reward for bad decisions, not a problem.
"Mining" Bitcoins, OTOH, generally doesn't beyond the basic equipment and net access.
And turning them into something valuable. That little task happens to require significant additional infrastructure and resources. But "time value" was a good answer just the same. Sometimes it's better to just have the money now than a hypothetically greater amount some years down the road.
If they could have resisted they would have done so already.
Well, they were resisting.
And that is what the die-hards in Japan were counting on. Making it so costly to invade that the US and USSR would eventually give up. And you may be right, Japan might not be a threat thereafter.
I'll just point out that once before, Japan was just a ground force on an island they couldn't leave.
The Japanese were negotiating in earnest with Truman
No, they weren't. I doubt even that the people who were attempting to negotiate with the US had the authority or power to do so.
It was a heinous act, even if done out of ignorance and especially if contemplated as a show of force to deter the Russians ambition to claim Japan as their own.
And even if that were true, that probably saved millions to tens of millions of lives by stopping a hot war between the USSR and the "First World".
Aside from which a National Park should be preserved for its natural beauty and source of recreation through the appreciation of the out of doors, as has been the tradition since Theodore Roosevelt advocated for Yellowstone NP. Los Alamos doesn't begin to qualify for consideration in that regard. In addition, the National Park Service budget has been under assault for years out of sheer ignorance on the part of those who believe we should cater to the RV set and those who believe that every non-essential service of the federal government should be paid for on a fee-for-service basis.
Whine whine whine. I guess it's better to not pay for a National Park Service and simply let people and businesses do whatever they want on NPS land Fee for service at least funds some protection of those lands which is more than you can say for its absence.
At a time when legislators on both sides of the aisle argue for fiscal responsibility, I can find absolutely no justification for the acquisition of this land, let alone its designation as a National Landmark. For once I'll side the Potty Tea People of America, this NOT an acceptable use of federal funds, especially if you are at all concerned about the budget, and even if you're not. I'd put it as one of the most important moments in human history on the scale of discovering fire or inventing writing. That's the justification for making some of these sites national historical parks.
I think the reality would have been that that USA would have used conventional weapons to firebomb Japanese cities
The reality also is that conventional weapons pf that era weren't that effective. The US had already been firebombing Japanese cities for years. And the Japanese could have made that effort very expensive for the result by investing in a lot of flak guns and otherwise spreading out their residual industry and military targets. So continued loss of bombers combined with reduced effectiveness from hitting hardened, dispersed targets.
At some point, the US would need to invade. Then it would be a bloodbath with a lot of allied deaths and a lot of Japanese dying for each of those deaths.
The atomic bombs changed that by greatly reducing the cost to the allies. One bomber now could take out one city. There was no hope to draw out the war or cause enough harm to get the US to give up.
The Japanese have already agreed to capitulate
No, they didn't. What had happened is that some Japanese had decided to seek surrender through odd channels (such as via the USSR), but there's no indication either that the ones seeking surrender had the authority to do so or that the US knew that status either.
I see no reason stemming from those diplomatic activities to question the use of the atomic bombs or the allegation that the war would have continued otherwise and resulted in hundreds of thousands of allied deaths and millions of Japanese deaths.
How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?
Well, one obvious solution is to kill everyone with some other superweapon so nobody is around to use atomic bombs in warfare. Otherwise, I think sooner or later atomic bombs will be used again. There are huge disincentives to using them, but there's no reason to expect those disincentives to always be good enough.
Consider for example, Syria's situation in the Middle East. The current government is facing its doom by a massive rebellion. But it might be able to hold on by using sarin nerve gas on the rebels. According to the media, various US military sources are claiming that Syria has mixed precursor chemicals for sarin and loaded it into warheads on aerial bombs.
Now it depends on whether a dying regime thinks it'll get better return from using sarin than not. A lot will depend on what sort of threat the rest of the world can and does choose to make with respect to these terrible weapons and whether Assad will be bold or desperate enough to call their bluff.
This is likely to be an occasional occurrence for dictatorships down the road as well. And some of those will be nuclear armed.
Or we'll develop some technology that makes the food-related cost similar to what it is now. That's another "invisible hand" thing that happens. Before we chicken-little maybe we should consider the availability of phosphorus outside of the obvious sources.
Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two.
Not when I address that issue in my very next sentence.
No. That's not how you address inappropriate comparisons. You just don't make them in the first place. And if the pigeons had been farmed, they wouldn't be the "diminishing resource".
For salmon, you don't even give a diminishing resource. Here, "ocean/shore localities suitable for farming" don't become less suited for salmon farming just because there is a farm there for any period of time. Sure, you can't make infinite acreage of salmon farms, but everything else would be just as "unsustainable" in that trivial, uninteresting sense because everything relies on finite resources such as land, human labor, information storage, whatever.
Except that is what I said: "Salmon, on the other hand, is not really sustainable using current practices." Why are you insinuating I am not being fair or truthful?
You're not being fair because you label salmon fish farming "unsustainable" because of diminishing real estate, while other forms of fish farming, which have the very same real estate problem, get labeled as sustainable.
Similarly, you're not being truthful because you haven't actually come up with a sustainability problem with salmon farming. The real estate that is used for salmon farming can just continue to be used for salmon farming indefinitely.
Doing "not so well" doesn't mean that they can't do well enough. I wouldn't rule out altogether an engineered species tailored for Mars.
It's worth noting that there is a huge gap between the worst survivable environments of Earth and the best of Mars. For example, the pressures that lichen survives at on Earth (roughly half of an atmosphere at 19,000 feet) and the best spots on Mars ( Hellas Planitia with a bit over 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure).
Carbon dioxide partial pressure is actually higher for Mars than Earth, but that's not going to be the main constraints on lichen growth. Nitrogen partial pressure would be about a thousand times less dense for Hellas Planitia so it's going to be very hard for lichen to fix nitrogen.
Similarly, temperatures are vastly colder even at the best spots on Mars (once again Hellas Planitia) with high summer temperatures near 0C (according to this site). Lichen could operate at the hottest parts of the day, but night time temperatures are around -50C in summer in the best location on Mars. So needless to say, until someone builds up a heat-preserving atmosphere, lichen is going to grow very little only in the warmest parts of the day during the warmest parts of the summer in a single deep impact crater on Mars.
So far, I just mentioned gaps in temperature and pressure, both which stop lichen on Earth apparently around 19,000 feet well above the levels found in Hellas Planitia.
Water is probably not that bad. It might even be liquid at rare times in Hellas Planitia. There might be enough vapor/frost for lichen to harvest water from air. I certainly wouldn't consider it as big an obstacle as the rest.
Finally, there's UV and cosmic radiation. This is a huge problem due to how slowly any lichen would grow on Mars. Even a very radiation resistant lichen will have to repair damage to its DNA at some point. And that will only be able to occur during the infrequent periods during the Martian summer day when it is remotely active.
So can it repair itself, while surviving and reproducing? I think so, but not with any currently living lichen on Earth.
Then why does a hot black object, at the same temperate as a hot white object, cool down significantly faster
Note I said surface temperature. It is possible for paints to insulate to different degrees the underlying object in which case the surface temperatures will be different and hence the amounts radiated will be different. That will account for the difference in cooling.
As to your remark, it can go the other way, if the white painted object is more transparent to infra red frequency EM than the black paint (in those frequencies, their roles might be reversed with the white in visible light paint being black in IR and vice versa).
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I don't automatically assume something is wrong just because it's been taken over by the usual mob.
Nah, the real problem is that it's work to take your stuff. I don't mind you owning stuff, I just mind not having your stuff right when I want it.
Stooge: "Here is foma84's kid's bike. You know, the one you'll want in five seconds."
Me: "Did you give that brat a wedgie?"
Stooge: "Of course"
Me: "Ok. I don't want it anymore. How about ten learjets? All painted with the appropriate 'Hello Kitty' markings."
Stooge: "Right away, sir!"
All the problems I want solved are solved.
Hunger Games takes place in a fictional nation of Panem, which just happened to be located in North America. It's not obvious at all. You might as well say it's a shot at Canada (Blame Canada! Blame Canada!)
So you're not going to be serious about this? I answered your question with a high profile movie in the past ten years. This thread is done as far as I'm concerned.
Until we get our phosphorus from plentiful sources that are currently not economically to mine.
Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable.
Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two. For example, if passenger pigeons had been farmed instead of just harvested in the wild, they would still be with us today.
A second bit of deception comes from the term, "sustainable". Sustainability is not a bit you set, but a matter of degree. Merely farming a fish that was previously harvested in the wild is a huge improvement in sustainability. Also virtually everything is sustainable in small amounts, be it fish farming or nuclear meltdowns.
If one were being fair and truthful, one wouldn't say that salmon farming isn't sustainable, but that it isn't sustainable at its current volume under current circumstances (an assertion which I'm not convinced is true BTW).
If people were honest in the first place, why would they structure society in such a way that increases/encourages dishonest acts?
My view is that it is emergent behavior. People didn't intend dishonest societies, they just came about as a result of natural effects (such as population growth) and unintended consequences (such as criminalizing drug use).
Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out.
That gets fixed by switching to the many cases that are viable.
Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.
Wikipedia disagrees. They claim salmon and carp are the most farmed fish in the world.
It's a common theme that fishing boats have to fish more, travel further, and fish less desirable species in order to get a catch. This issue is also pretty orthogonal to most environmental issues, particularly, the notorious sky-is-falling rhetoric of catastrophic AGW. It requires some sort of controlled fishing either by governments or fishermen of wild fish stocks. It doesn't require you to buy in to the other issues.
I cannot actually think of an example from the past decade where the U.S. was portrayed as evil in a movie.
The Hunger Games is a pretty obvious one in the top 10 list for 2012. A common ploy is to denigrate US society and culture (see, for example, "The Help" a 2011 movie). Even when a movie doesn't focus on this aspect, you can get driveby insults (eg, a brief, shallow cameo by the stereotypical "ugly American" tourist, narcissistic yuppie, or an ignorant soccer mom).
White object radiate less enery but also absorb less. Black objects radiate more energy, but also absorb more.
No, for a given surface temperature, they radiate the same.
Instead, policymakers should focus their attention on the demand side of the radicalization issue, Neumann argues, with the government spearheading outreach initiatives that would bring together schools, community groups and businesses to advance awareness and media literacy and offer a competing narrative to that presented by sites that traffic in radical propaganda.
There's no way this would work in the U.S. It sounds like socialism. It also incorporates zero bombs. A bill to attempt such a thing would be regarded by the right wing of this country as an encroachment on freedom far worse than censorship(of people they disagree with).
Why would this work at all? A first move in radicalization is to cut off the target from rival propaganda. Second, who really thinks the problem here is that people aren't indoctrinated enough? The real problem is societies that breed lots of terrorists and pretty nasty ideologies. That's not going to be cured by some feelgood on the internets.
It also depends on Hollywood and other US media centers, the people who profit the most from currently portraying the US as the bad guys. You'll just have some Hollywood or ad people making lukewarm propaganda, and then turning around and making some anti-US blockbuster. What's going to be the net effect?
So I agree that the people haven't really changed.
In other words, you agree with the GP, that people were just as dishonest then as they are today (i.e they haven't changed)
No. You missing a big point here. How you structure a society and what sort of incentives there are for dishonesty can result in more or less dishonest people even though the people don't change. Honesty is a combination of inherent morality (which let's assume for our debate doesn't change) and opportunity/incentive (which does change).
In my view, committing dishonest acts does make one more dishonest and it is more likely that people will commit dishonest acts, if the opportunities for those acts and incentive for committing dishonest is increased (that is, "higher payoff" for dishonesty). So that's why I think it is possible to have more dishonest people merely by having more payoff for dishonesty.
Now, if we include that payoffs for dishonesty are influenced by both skill of the one committing the dishonesty and that one can develop infrastructure for more efficiently committing dishonesty (such as a group that is experienced in running a shell game, theft ring, creating bogus businesses, a system of corruption, or maintaining bot networks), then we might actually be able to make people more dishonest in moral viewpoint than they would be in the absence of widespread exercise of dishonesty. For example, if the most respected members of society are so respected because of their dishonesty, I think that would create a more dishonest society than one where the most respected members are so respected for honesty - even in cases where those members are being rather hypocritical.
In my view, people didn't lock their doors back then was not because people were any more or less honest or society more wholesome, but because they were stupid
It'd take only one theft to cure them of that stupidity. Also keep in mind that security has cost to it. If you don't need security, because no one steals from you, then there's no reason to pay for the security.