Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.
I know a guy who works for a major broadcast site company here in the UK, who caught some people up at a remote transmitter site by blocking their pickup in with his van. They admitted they were there to steal copper scrap. He gave them about 100kg of scrap aluminium (decommissioned aerials) that had been subject to the usual "We'll come and get it next week, next week, oh so busy this week, how about next week, maybe the week after?" from the people that were supposed to pick them up.
Then he offered to give them a tour of the transmission building.
"See that?" he said, pointing to some nice thick copper cabling, "if you touched that you'd die, instantly. And see that over there? Yeah, if you touch that, you'd die. That stuff there, too, kill you if you even went near it."
Then he pointed out the big polished copper waveguide going up to the main TX stack, think in terms of a thick copper 4" sewer pipe leading out through the building.
"See that, know what would happen if you touched *that*?"
"We'd die?"
"Naaaaaw, of course you wouldn't die! Your arms would vapourise looooong before your heart stopped!"
Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of.
I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.
I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history.
Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.
We had an antenna range built inside of a shipping container. We had some pretty fancy copper cladding that had some pricey dielectric inside of it. Somehow, a copper thief found it and stole all of the cladding. That stuff was probably worth 1000x its copper scrap value. I'm sure the thief was expecting to find some equipment to pawn but instead opened up a treasure chest.
The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.
> a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value
I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.
Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.
People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.
It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.
They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.
I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.
Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.
I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.
The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.
> However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario
Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.
It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.
Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.
Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.
Your body builds up a tolerance to opioids. If you can receive a constant dose of heroin every day, your body will eventually want more of it to chase the high. For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.
Methadone (and Suboxone) is slow releasing so your brain is kept satisfied but without the massive high that a needle of heroin gives you. And because of that, taking other opioids at the same time blunts their effects. Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.
We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4.
At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)
The brushing doesn’t help. The teeth decay is from lack of saliva.
I think it’s more because it’s a simple task that feels productive. It satiates the desire to be doing something without introducing the added frustration of failing at a more complex task.
In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts.
I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.
Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation.
The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.
Some nonzero percentage of these people could have been helped cheaper and more easily earlier on to prevent them from getting to this point in the first place.
Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery
the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.
Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.
Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.
Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.
This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.
The "cali-decriminilization" of shoplifting is entirely a lie. It's based on shoplifting not being a felony in California for less than $1k, but plenty of other states have higher thresholds for felony shoplifting.
Meanwhile, there is actually (probably? It won't show up in the data) organized crime doing shoplifting now, and that's pretty shitty. But cops just aren't doing their jobs. They need to investigate, and they have that authority, they just choose to not do it because it's boring and there's zero penalty for police department that doesn't do it's job.
That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container.
The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative.
For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix.
Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.
The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.
See, I imagine you live in a black and white world where people are good and bad. Bad people do things like steal from walgreens and should be punished with death. Good people simply make mistakes, like steal hundreds of thousands via wage theft from their employees, and when they are caught they should be forced to pay 1% of that as a fine.
Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
Because the only solutions that work are social.
> There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
Kipling has a poem about that one, it doesn't work out.
This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."
I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."
Prison is expensive and has downstream costs as well--it should be a last resort.
There's definitely times where it absolutely is the right thing but it should not be default mode.
Note that these crimes are almost always done by drug addicts. We have the War on Drugs that was supposed to make this never happen and yet it's a fucking epidemic. So how's that war working for you, eh?
It's cheaper to get these people off drugs and redirected to being "good citizens" again, or even just give them their drugs in a controlled medical setting (like is done with methadone).
The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.
The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.
These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.
The economics solution is to legalize drugs and give addicts an unlimited supply.
Addicts do not want money, they are doing this because they have a near-perfectly inelastic demand for drugs. Satisfy the demand and they'll will get high all day + opt out of society.
I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter
The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.
It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.
The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).
In my country it was eventually accepted that some people are too far gone. The junkies got their daily ration of drugs until they died of natural causes.
I don't think America is culturally capable of doing that though.
Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.
I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.
Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.
They probably didn't independently come up with the idea to steal cables or catalytic converters either.
It's all word of mouth. But if half your buddies get shot [1] or jailed when they steal cables for drugs, it probably doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Same thing when your buddy finally fills their trailer full of cats and brings them to the scrap yard to find out they can't get anything from that anymore. Unfortunately, there's a lag, but afaik, cat thefts drop pretty reliably after they become economically useless... not all the way to zero, some people don't get the news very fast.
[1] this is not an endorsement of lethal force to deter cable theft
> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
> They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.
Since most current-day legal systems severely limit employment opportunities for former criminals, it's pretty hard to determine whether they would re-offend in a society that didn't inflict continual punishment in this way
It’s not that hard to know, since they’re often not caught on their first crime but on their Nth. They leave fingerprints that’ll link the crimes together, so we already have stats on how likely a person will reoffend even when they are not punished at all.
Criminal behavior is strongly linked to IQ and like IQ is largely hereditary. It’s dumb people thinking they’ve figured out a trick to game the system.
We have a labor glut which is the primary reason employment opportunities are so restricted for offenders, I think it’s unhealthy for society to keep importing so many people in these circumstances. I also think allowing so much violence in prisons, effectively pressuring people to join gangs, is extremely counterproductive.
That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?
Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.
Yes, not only are both true, but one is the consequence of the other's extreme.
When you socially punish people for sticking out, even harmlessly, eventually you end up criminally punishing people for sticking out, even harmlessly.
The answer is, you still do socialism, and you also pay someone to go around busting scrap yards that buy obviously-stolen material.
Just focusing on the demand-side dramatically reduced incidences of catalytic converter theft in the US. You still get the occasional attempt, but basically no scrap yard will take catalytic converters without a title to the vehicle with matching VIN, and most will want to see the vehicle.
Yes, requiring paperwork to scrap wiring is bureaucracy manifest. But legitimate people just do not roll up to scrap yards with a van full of tangled 4/0.
The big catalytic converter buyer was so brazen, he had a mobile app. Free markets for stolen scrap is just beyond tolerable at this point.
Italy is no Denmark but you still require to register before selling you scrap copper.
I think it's a reasonable response for a real problem and refusing to do this due to some idealistic free market principle appears to me to be a sign of fanaticism.
Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.
Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.
Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.
It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.
That is one point made in the essay *Million Dollar Murray". This Malcolm Gladwell essay is nominally about power law distributions, but also makes the point about homelessness, drug abuse and car emissions/pollutions. Denver is one domestic city that has a small program that hands apartment keys to homeless people. "Murray" cost the public health system at least one million dollars during his lifetime.
There's the criminal guilds approach from Discworld, I suppose (in which thieves, assassins etc are regulated and given quotas). May be some practical problems.
Meth is already incredibly cheap. Meth addicts would definitely still engage in this behavior even if meth were free, because they still need money for rent, gas, food, whatever.
Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
> Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
Those +P 185gr .45ACP hollow points with the nickel plated cases are pretty sweet. But it's a hell of a lot better to not have to do some kind of Old West standoff shootout shit whenever someone wants to rob something. That was my point. It's so much better instead of hiring a posse of gunfighters, to just trust that the system will (barring anomalies like this one) unfuck itself.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.
I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.
>You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
So then they'll just sell to middle men.
And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)
Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.
In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.
> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.
That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.
I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.
Historically, the insurer would provide or contract out loss prevention, or require the insured to do so, e.g. security guards to prevent theft, fire fighters to prevent fire damage, bounty hunters to prevent loss of bail bonds, etc.
In many ports of of the world, governments now have a monopoly on several of those services, and it's illegal for insurance to play a part in them. When such governments don't then provide those services, the insurance market collapses. Either the prices rise substantially, or especially in areas where rate changes are prohibited, insurers stop providing services.
It's pretty hard to protect outside plant with security guards. Burying the outside plant helps, but only until those who would steal cables figure out how to operate a backhoe.
It's also pretty hard to bury cables that lead to the top of an antenna.
In the Russian far east, where it's not practical to bury cables, many roadside bars have small signs showing a piece of fibre cable and how it's worthless for scrap.
Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.
> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night.
Our society has failed these people in many ways.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Some people can't stomach the idea that some individuals can be blamed for their own bad behavior, so this lie that all crime must be society's fault is the only way they can avoid rethinking their worldview.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion. 9 times out of 10 they're junkie lowlives who would amount to nothing with all the opportunity in the world.
wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion.
The concept of a "luxury belief" makes a lot more sense of it. Believing that thieves aren't just scumbags is like driving a Porsche, it's a way to signal to other people who've never had to struggle in their life that you're one of them.
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro.
As a gross generalization, they don't. But not because they don't understand being poor, but because there are various powerful groups that benefit from pitting the lower class against themselves.
But "poor people" aren't a monolithic group with an absolutist view on the issue. There's a nuanced understanding of low level crimes in impoverished communities. People are much more likely to be pissed at a crackhead that stole their neighbors stuff, than a mother stealing food from a chain store.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. If you run the math, there's not many places in the US that a mother can raise a child on a minimum wage job without relying heavily on assistance.
don't move the goalpost. "raising" is expensive, sure, but that was not what I replied to, I replied to the image you tried to evoke with "mother stealing food from a chain store", and I'm telling you that it doesn't make any sense. US wages - even the minimum wage - are incredibly high compared to your very low prices of food. "share of household income spent on food" is a common metric, and it is very low in the US.
"mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Moving the goalpost? Every household has expenses other than food.
People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.
> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.
Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs.
The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.
Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.
I'm well aware that people with drug issues exist -- that doesn't mean that there are zero poor people who struggle to afford food.
SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.
No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.
That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.
The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.
Right, like I said don't tolerate the behavior, but that doesn't mean every thief is an irredeemable piece of shit who doesn't deserve help or empathy.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
Even murderers also get the same assumption, from the same liberal voices, that it's really due to their lack of opportunity.
> but that doesn't mean every thief...
Sure maybe, but I think a lot of the blowback that people who advocate for this more compassionate view of criminals are starting to see, is because it seems that they won't admit that any thief is an irredeemable POS, which reads as gaslighting to everyone (poor or not, even including other criminals) who has spent time around actual criminals.
By doing things like California's Prop 47, which had the very real result of making it virtually impossible for most thieves to ever go to prison (at least the ones who can do math), we've codified into law that all thieves are just nice people who apparently had some kind of "misunderstanding" about property.
So when someone has their work truck burgled or their business robbed for the 6th time, and the police won't even come because it was an "under $950" misdemeanor, they would rather see all theft dealt with harshly than keep the status quo.
It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.
The transmitter will have a VSWR trip for just this sort of eventuality. It would likely be damaged severely if allowed to operate into an open circuit for more than a brief moment.
My first thought also .. possibly pulled a breaker rendering cable inert, or perhaps rigged a remote cutting tool - drop saw poised to cut on a long extension cord ready to be turn on ... (problematic).
I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.
I'm surprised nothing more serious happened. There was obviously a serious electrocution risk, but I think that is the easiest bit to deal with. 100kW of radio waves, whilst non-ironising, can still microwave you. With 100kW there could have also been a serious reflection back to the transmitter. This guy cutting the cable is far luckier than he will ever know.
I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.
I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper
Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.
Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.
How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.
100 watts at 100 MHz is so low that if you spent an entire lifetime in proximity to it, you would never notice.
At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.
The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.
This kind of thing is totally routine here in South Africa. Probably about a third of power cuts in my area these days are due to some kind of cable or electrical theft.
Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.
>Total repair costs, he estimates, are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000
This is always so depressing to read, especially when you realize the thief did the damage only to gain a couple hundred dollars in copper. It's just a massive net loss for society to deal with this.
It's a similar problem places have with people destroying ac units to steal some small amount of copper.
Theft is always bad, but this blatant net negative for the world theft is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about societies long term.
Furthermore, going after scrap metal sites makes an important business harder and fails to be inquisitive enough about the reasons why the thefts happen at all. Maybe we should try to understand why people are stealing copper. (Presumably poverty, drug addiction, lack of opportunity)
If you believe we can just fix poverty and drug addiction with some government program, I have a bridge to sell you. So far, no one has, anywhere in the world.
Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.
If you think most people "are just terrible", I think you've let cynicism corrupt your thinking, and I don't think we're going to get very far by talking.
I believe the opposite -- people fundamentally want to help each other, and we've structurally set up our society to force people out of that mode and into a competitive mode. Read "A Paradise Built in Hell", when push comes to shove, communities care for each other.
If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We do this. We have programs for all those things. Anyone who is willing to go through the "process" can get free or reduced housing, food, and medical care. Education through 12th grade has always been free.
I think the GP was talking about addicts and those who for other reasons refuse to go through the "process" to get help. They are content living a life of begging, petty crime, getting high, and rejecting any help that comes with expectations of changing problematic behaviors.
Read my comment again. Many = more than a few people. Nowhere near most people. Most people are great.
However, yes, most addicts who are in the grips of addiction - not in treatment or recovery - I stand by that.
> If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We don't agree on this point. Addiction itself is a huge barrier to the people who need help getting help, and a huge barrier to that help making any medium or long-term difference. We do not have a reliable way to fix addiction.
I admit I can't prove this, but I think it's more common that addiction causes complete collapse of everything else (job, housing, and relationships) than the other way around ("Gee, I lost my job, home, and my family and friends abandoned me -- I guess I'll just take up an expensive substance addiction").
Addiction can fixed by either:
1. An incredibly dedicated solo effort, hitting rock bottom and somehow having the personal strength left -- in a body and mind damaged by poison -- to fight it off through sheer force of will, or
2. An incredibly resource-intensive labor of love: Many people coming together to intervene, to help the addict through the most horrible experience of their life (withdrawal), and to monitor them, ideally indefinitely.
The extreme addicts I'm talking about are the ones who have generally driven their families and friends away by their behavior (frequently by lying and stealing to get money for drugs, basically proving too many times that they can't be trusted.) There aren't ever going to be enough government-funded 'surrogate friends' to help every addict in the absence of them having their own support system, which limits them to Option 1, which is wildly difficult and uncommon to happen or succeed.
The USA opioid epidemic was caused by gross government negligence and corruption. Is it really a stretch to think that a policy solution could have prevented the majority of the harm? And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
>There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
That's every scrap yard and most small businesses. Nothing makes you hate the law and it's enforcers, peddlers and proponents like being on the business end of regulations and a scrap yard probably has at least half a dozen agencies they are subject to.
Heck, I bet half of these guys would aerosolize radioactive waste out of spite if they thought the wind would blow it into a "good school district".
You need a license to sell more than $25 of copper in my state. You won’t be issued a copper selling license without holding something like a journeyman electrical worker license or similar.
In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.
Wait a second, I just realized something... how much would the station be paying in electricity to transmit at 100,000 watts 24/7 ? Their electric bill must be like $200,000 per year??
It’s 100,000 watts ERP with a 6 bay antenna. The higher gain antenna means the transmitter output power would be much less (about 35 kw), although at still extremely dangerous levels to mess with.
I'm looking for a Kalshi bet that the perp is a tweaker.
They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.
Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.
The article mentions it will cost around $160 per foot to replace, totalling $70k to 100k
I know a guy who works for a major broadcast site company here in the UK, who caught some people up at a remote transmitter site by blocking their pickup in with his van. They admitted they were there to steal copper scrap. He gave them about 100kg of scrap aluminium (decommissioned aerials) that had been subject to the usual "We'll come and get it next week, next week, oh so busy this week, how about next week, maybe the week after?" from the people that were supposed to pick them up.
Then he offered to give them a tour of the transmission building.
"See that?" he said, pointing to some nice thick copper cabling, "if you touched that you'd die, instantly. And see that over there? Yeah, if you touch that, you'd die. That stuff there, too, kill you if you even went near it."
Then he pointed out the big polished copper waveguide going up to the main TX stack, think in terms of a thick copper 4" sewer pipe leading out through the building.
"See that, know what would happen if you touched *that*?"
"We'd die?"
"Naaaaaw, of course you wouldn't die! Your arms would vapourise looooong before your heart stopped!"
In Detroit copper theft was an epidemic a few years back. Once the easy stuff in abandoned houses was gone thieves went further afield. .
A few brave thieves went after power substations. For some thieves a lack of knowledge was fatal.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017...
An example shown when I worked around a 7000A rail was also two men. One formed a circuit and the other tried to pry him off.
Darwin Award recipients!
Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of.
I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.
> people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else
Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k.
Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m...
I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history.
Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.
We had an antenna range built inside of a shipping container. We had some pretty fancy copper cladding that had some pricey dielectric inside of it. Somehow, a copper thief found it and stole all of the cladding. That stuff was probably worth 1000x its copper scrap value. I'm sure the thief was expecting to find some equipment to pawn but instead opened up a treasure chest.
The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.
> a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value
I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore
Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.
Didn't we use to hang cattle rustlers?
Anecdotes, observation, and a wish:
Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.
People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.
It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.
They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.
I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.
Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.
I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.
The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.
Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much.
Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.
> However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario
Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.
It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.
Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.
Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.
Imagine if we just did something that worked.
Your body builds up a tolerance to opioids. If you can receive a constant dose of heroin every day, your body will eventually want more of it to chase the high. For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.
Methadone (and Suboxone) is slow releasing so your brain is kept satisfied but without the massive high that a needle of heroin gives you. And because of that, taking other opioids at the same time blunts their effects. Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes.
Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.
It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.
It's meth.
We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4.
At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)
What do you mean by color coordinated the closet?
Not op, but meth is like, amphetamines the thing that drives people to do boring pointless work, like organizing clothes by color.
Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.
+1, and how does that relate to meth?
It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.
>excessively brushing their teeth Is that in spite of why their teeth decay so badly?
The brushing doesn’t help. The teeth decay is from lack of saliva.
I think it’s more because it’s a simple task that feels productive. It satiates the desire to be doing something without introducing the added frustration of failing at a more complex task.
In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts.
I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.
This reads like one of those jokes about "my car is so bad that when someone crashed into it they caused thousands of dollars of improvements".
It's a mystery to me why the scrap metal industry doesn't have more scrutiny given how much copper is stolen.
Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation.
The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification.
This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.
In the US you typically have to give identification to sell scrap, so it sets up a chain of evidence against you. Still doesn't stop methheads.
Should we police the scrap yards, or help the fellow citizens who are “skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine”
What a place to live.
What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.
Some nonzero percentage of these people could have been helped cheaper and more easily earlier on to prevent them from getting to this point in the first place.
Cope that you called out. May your house always smell of roses.
The for some reason is a meth epidemic.
>Do the perps get prosecuted?
Pretty often, but drug addicts are rather senseless and do stuff anyway.
>Do the places that buy stolen copper?
Sometimes. Like any criminal enterprise there are groups that launder stolen metals and turn them into 'good' metals.
> Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment
Depending on what you do, it can be a felony, which in this case is likely 1-5 years, with each repeat offense adding more.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinan...
the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.
> Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this
The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...
Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.
Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.
"Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this."
Meth.
Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.
This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.
Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?
The "cali-decriminilization" of shoplifting is entirely a lie. It's based on shoplifting not being a felony in California for less than $1k, but plenty of other states have higher thresholds for felony shoplifting.
Meanwhile, there is actually (probably? It won't show up in the data) organized crime doing shoplifting now, and that's pretty shitty. But cops just aren't doing their jobs. They need to investigate, and they have that authority, they just choose to not do it because it's boring and there's zero penalty for police department that doesn't do it's job.
That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container.
The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative.
For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix.
Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.
The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.
See, I imagine you live in a black and white world where people are good and bad. Bad people do things like steal from walgreens and should be punished with death. Good people simply make mistakes, like steal hundreds of thousands via wage theft from their employees, and when they are caught they should be forced to pay 1% of that as a fine.
Working backwards from clues in the article, thief maybe stole 200-400 ft of wire.
Assuming between 3-1/8″ - 6-1/8″ diameter.
Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value. $70k-$100k to repair...
Absurd.
That's the usual car stereo theft economics: cause $1,000 of damage to sell a $100 radio for $10.
probably $10 of meth to harm a body so that it eventually needs $50k of medical work, or $100k of dental work
10 dollars? Who's your meth guy?
GP is talking out of his ass - he’s probably not up to speed on meth economics like you and me.
Methenomics say that you can step on product however much you need to reach the demanded price point.
HN constantly undervalues meth and this has been called out since at least 2009. Horrible.
So what IS a current price of meth in some locale?
You may need to revise your methematical model.
And people think it's OK because it's "equity".
Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
Because the only solutions that work are social.
> There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
Kipling has a poem about that one, it doesn't work out.
>Because the only solutions that work are social.
This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."
I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."
Prison is expensive and has downstream costs as well--it should be a last resort. There's definitely times where it absolutely is the right thing but it should not be default mode.
Note that these crimes are almost always done by drug addicts. We have the War on Drugs that was supposed to make this never happen and yet it's a fucking epidemic. So how's that war working for you, eh?
It's cheaper to get these people off drugs and redirected to being "good citizens" again, or even just give them their drugs in a controlled medical setting (like is done with methadone).
Yea, this is a bunch of ignorant right wing blather.
https://smartdrugpolicy.org/decriminalization-the-portuguese...
The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.
Incidentally, that's basically the plot of Zootopia
Underrated film from the perspective of social critique.
Yes it’s very easy to have 90% approval and hear no downsides to your regime when you execute and imprison people for disapproval.
Oh you have some complaints? You must be a drug dealer. Death for you.
He didn't even execute anyone. They are all just in that prison. Do some basic research first or you show your ignorance.
Oh sorry, we're calling them "forced disappearances" now.
Can't be an execution if the body is never found.
The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.
These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.
The economics solution is to legalize drugs and give addicts an unlimited supply.
Addicts do not want money, they are doing this because they have a near-perfectly inelastic demand for drugs. Satisfy the demand and they'll will get high all day + opt out of society.
I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter
The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.
It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.
This is called prison, but that's pushing the easy button which is strictly forbidden.
If that was the easy solution then the US would have solved it in the 1990s during the war on drugs.
The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).
If prison solved a society's problems, the USA would be a utopia.
Putting people in prison has substantial costs.
In my country it was eventually accepted that some people are too far gone. The junkies got their daily ration of drugs until they died of natural causes.
I don't think America is culturally capable of doing that though.
Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.
I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.
Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.
They probably didn't independently come up with the idea to steal cables or catalytic converters either.
It's all word of mouth. But if half your buddies get shot [1] or jailed when they steal cables for drugs, it probably doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Same thing when your buddy finally fills their trailer full of cats and brings them to the scrap yard to find out they can't get anything from that anymore. Unfortunately, there's a lag, but afaik, cat thefts drop pretty reliably after they become economically useless... not all the way to zero, some people don't get the news very fast.
[1] this is not an endorsement of lethal force to deter cable theft
[flagged]
Criminal punishment research consistently shows that reality does not follow initial intuition here.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
"Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse.”
(“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”)
> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
> The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
Your terms are acceptable.
In all seriousness, there are cultures in the middle east that do (or did) this sort of thing. Losing a hand for stealing, etc.
That's not a 100% probability of being harmed, though. That's only if you get caught. Most criminals believe they won't get caught.
They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.
> They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.
Since most current-day legal systems severely limit employment opportunities for former criminals, it's pretty hard to determine whether they would re-offend in a society that didn't inflict continual punishment in this way
It’s not that hard to know, since they’re often not caught on their first crime but on their Nth. They leave fingerprints that’ll link the crimes together, so we already have stats on how likely a person will reoffend even when they are not punished at all.
Criminal behavior is strongly linked to IQ and like IQ is largely hereditary. It’s dumb people thinking they’ve figured out a trick to game the system.
We have a labor glut which is the primary reason employment opportunities are so restricted for offenders, I think it’s unhealthy for society to keep importing so many people in these circumstances. I also think allowing so much violence in prisons, effectively pressuring people to join gangs, is extremely counterproductive.
That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.
Those are pre-requisites, but not enough.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?
Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.
Yes, not only are both true, but one is the consequence of the other's extreme.
When you socially punish people for sticking out, even harmlessly, eventually you end up criminally punishing people for sticking out, even harmlessly.
You are glossing over the fact that Japan severely punishes crime, and acquittals are almost unheard of.
It's not a theory. It's socialism and it works fine in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places.
Im Danish, and I approve of the welfare state system, but we still have people cutting down EV charger cables etc here.
The answer is, you still do socialism, and you also pay someone to go around busting scrap yards that buy obviously-stolen material.
Just focusing on the demand-side dramatically reduced incidences of catalytic converter theft in the US. You still get the occasional attempt, but basically no scrap yard will take catalytic converters without a title to the vehicle with matching VIN, and most will want to see the vehicle.
Yes, requiring paperwork to scrap wiring is bureaucracy manifest. But legitimate people just do not roll up to scrap yards with a van full of tangled 4/0.
The big catalytic converter buyer was so brazen, he had a mobile app. Free markets for stolen scrap is just beyond tolerable at this point.
Italy is no Denmark but you still require to register before selling you scrap copper.
I think it's a reasonable response for a real problem and refusing to do this due to some idealistic free market principle appears to me to be a sign of fanaticism.
Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
The replies to you illustrate this is provably false. Socialism has yet to work anywhere it's tried.
Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.
Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.
Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.
Nope.
The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.
If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?
The data doesn't agree with you, as others in this subthread have noted with references.
I saw only one submission to a paper, would you be willing to share links to the other references you mention?
It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.
That is one point made in the essay *Million Dollar Murray". This Malcolm Gladwell essay is nominally about power law distributions, but also makes the point about homelessness, drug abuse and car emissions/pollutions. Denver is one domestic city that has a small program that hands apartment keys to homeless people. "Murray" cost the public health system at least one million dollars during his lifetime.
There's the criminal guilds approach from Discworld, I suppose (in which thieves, assassins etc are regulated and given quotas). May be some practical problems.
From an economics perspective the solution is to legalize everything. Black markets cause incentives like this.
Yep. Meth costs pennies to make. Sell it cheap in liquor stores and nobody would do this any more.
Meth is already incredibly cheap. Meth addicts would definitely still engage in this behavior even if meth were free, because they still need money for rent, gas, food, whatever.
I prefer the 9mm solution
Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
> Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
$0.20 isn't enough to cover good self-defense 9mm rounds, and no you shouldn't just use FMJ.
Those +P 185gr .45ACP hollow points with the nickel plated cases are pretty sweet. But it's a hell of a lot better to not have to do some kind of Old West standoff shootout shit whenever someone wants to rob something. That was my point. It's so much better instead of hiring a posse of gunfighters, to just trust that the system will (barring anomalies like this one) unfuck itself.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
>That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
The UK does that - a scrap dealer can only pay by bank transfer or cheque. That way there's a paper trail.
Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.
Yeah you really need to make sure there is a high chance folks are caught in the act.
I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.
>You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
So then they'll just sell to middle men.
And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)
Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.
> They have. It's called insurance.
In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.
> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.
That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.
I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.
Historically, the insurer would provide or contract out loss prevention, or require the insured to do so, e.g. security guards to prevent theft, fire fighters to prevent fire damage, bounty hunters to prevent loss of bail bonds, etc.
In many ports of of the world, governments now have a monopoly on several of those services, and it's illegal for insurance to play a part in them. When such governments don't then provide those services, the insurance market collapses. Either the prices rise substantially, or especially in areas where rate changes are prohibited, insurers stop providing services.
It's pretty hard to protect outside plant with security guards. Burying the outside plant helps, but only until those who would steal cables figure out how to operate a backhoe.
It's also pretty hard to bury cables that lead to the top of an antenna.
I license doesn't stop someone from doing something illegal. It doesn't cost much for the equipment to turn scrap copper into billet.
The bigger absurdity is when thief mistakes bunch of fiber for copper wires and then whole countries can go offline
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12985082
In the Russian far east, where it's not practical to bury cables, many roadside bars have small signs showing a piece of fibre cable and how it's worthless for scrap.
Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
Theft is a very inefficient tax on civilization.
Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.
> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night. Our society has failed these people in many ways.
Russian(?) scientists during the siege of... Leningrad? starved to death while surrounded by seed potatoes.
The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.
I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.
Lack of healthcare, limited job opportunities, growing income inequality, are just a few reasons off the top of my head.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Look at sibling comments on copper theft in Scandinavian countries.
The idea that humans only commit crime out of necessity and wouldn't do it if they could just get a 9-5 job is extremely naive.
Some people can't stomach the idea that some individuals can be blamed for their own bad behavior, so this lie that all crime must be society's fault is the only way they can avoid rethinking their worldview.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
Some people just want drugs.
> Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Counterexample: China.
No. We (society) don’t need to care for everyone equally.
Drugs. It's usually drugs.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
As someone who grew up on food stamps, I'd fully believe the mean and median income on hackernews are six figure numbers.
At least. And also living in a metropolis, in a burrough where SaaS is the only way of life and all of the benefits of society come from NPCs.
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
Insightful and nuanced comment.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion. 9 times out of 10 they're junkie lowlives who would amount to nothing with all the opportunity in the world.
wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion.
The concept of a "luxury belief" makes a lot more sense of it. Believing that thieves aren't just scumbags is like driving a Porsche, it's a way to signal to other people who've never had to struggle in their life that you're one of them.
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro.
As a gross generalization, they don't. But not because they don't understand being poor, but because there are various powerful groups that benefit from pitting the lower class against themselves.
But "poor people" aren't a monolithic group with an absolutist view on the issue. There's a nuanced understanding of low level crimes in impoverished communities. People are much more likely to be pissed at a crackhead that stole their neighbors stuff, than a mother stealing food from a chain store.
>a mother stealing food from a chain store
oh come on now, how can that Dickensian scenario happen in a country where even a McJob pays, per hour, more than enough to feed for a week?
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. If you run the math, there's not many places in the US that a mother can raise a child on a minimum wage job without relying heavily on assistance.
don't move the goalpost. "raising" is expensive, sure, but that was not what I replied to, I replied to the image you tried to evoke with "mother stealing food from a chain store", and I'm telling you that it doesn't make any sense. US wages - even the minimum wage - are incredibly high compared to your very low prices of food. "share of household income spent on food" is a common metric, and it is very low in the US.
"mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Moving the goalpost? Every household has expenses other than food.
People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.
> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.
Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs.
The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.
Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.
I'm well aware that people with drug issues exist -- that doesn't mean that there are zero poor people who struggle to afford food.
SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
> We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
Is that blameworthy?
Yes.
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
Incarcerating people is not free.
And the more people you incarcerate the more you normalize incarceration and it loses its power of dissuasion.
Surely it is worthwhile to encourage other ideas. We might have to experiment with a lot of ideas to find some game changers.
If this is sarcasm, fine.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
My general rule for posting sarcasm is to phrase it seriously first and see if it's something I still want to post.
How did it go for this one?
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
This is why Islamic countries have more severe punishments for thieves. At worst, they never commit a third offense.
Don't ever read about the Red Army marching west (and plundering) through Europe. You'll get a heart attack.
Or as mentioned upthread, a Henry Moore statue was stolen for scrap.
They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.
No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.
That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.
The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.
Compassionate care does not exist for people like this.
*in the US
Which, notably, is the place where this happened and therefore the place we're discussing.
The villains are those of us who tolerate this kind of behavior in the name of compassion.
You shouldn't tolerate the behavior, but announcing disgust for people who are struggling is just not helpful.
Lots of people who are struggling don't become thieves.
Right, like I said don't tolerate the behavior, but that doesn't mean every thief is an irredeemable piece of shit who doesn't deserve help or empathy.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
> not a homicidal...
Even murderers also get the same assumption, from the same liberal voices, that it's really due to their lack of opportunity.
> but that doesn't mean every thief...
Sure maybe, but I think a lot of the blowback that people who advocate for this more compassionate view of criminals are starting to see, is because it seems that they won't admit that any thief is an irredeemable POS, which reads as gaslighting to everyone (poor or not, even including other criminals) who has spent time around actual criminals.
By doing things like California's Prop 47, which had the very real result of making it virtually impossible for most thieves to ever go to prison (at least the ones who can do math), we've codified into law that all thieves are just nice people who apparently had some kind of "misunderstanding" about property.
So when someone has their work truck burgled or their business robbed for the 6th time, and the police won't even come because it was an "under $950" misdemeanor, they would rather see all theft dealt with harshly than keep the status quo.
>Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value
If it's a "normal" wire specification that someone else can use it was likely sold for ~50% of retail.
It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.
I doubt they would attempt to sell it as is. They'd break out the copper portion and trade on that alone
Thieves typically burn off the insulation so it's not likely to be easily reused.
This isn't just any regular copper cable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Hard_line
Looks like this guy has a history of drug trafficking: https://wchstv.com/news/local/deputies-boyd-county-man-charg...
Oddly downvoted?!
How is this person alive? That’s a terrifying amount of relatively high frequency energy. And pressurized gasses of some sort.
The transmitter will have a VSWR trip for just this sort of eventuality. It would likely be damaged severely if allowed to operate into an open circuit for more than a brief moment.
My first thought also .. possibly pulled a breaker rendering cable inert, or perhaps rigged a remote cutting tool - drop saw poised to cut on a long extension cord ready to be turn on ... (problematic).
I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.
You can buy high voltage gear online cheap. Just this one job would pay for the complete setup if you're buying cheap brands.
I bet it's Vevor. They make everything.
Meth induced superhero powers?
I'm surprised nothing more serious happened. There was obviously a serious electrocution risk, but I think that is the easiest bit to deal with. 100kW of radio waves, whilst non-ironising, can still microwave you. With 100kW there could have also been a serious reflection back to the transmitter. This guy cutting the cable is far luckier than he will ever know.
I like your typo. Seriously, non-ironising.
Somewhat ionical.
[dead]
That’s wild. Radio transmission power is no joke.
I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.
I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper
I'm surprised.
Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.
Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.
How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.
Maybe like 1-2 feet away i was manually adjusting something on the top of a 8 foot radio tower on vandenburg hall at USAFA.
You think exposure to 100 watts at ~100 MHz is going to cause your head to ring?
Are you saying it won't? What sort of RF power density in the FM range can the human body tolerate without noticeable effect?
100 watts at 100 MHz is so low that if you spent an entire lifetime in proximity to it, you would never notice.
At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.
The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.
Call Dave West who is still a radio engineer in CO and was with me on the roof in 2006 if you care so much about it
Very lucky not to have been killed by the high voltages or intense RF energy and or suffer severe burns / blindness ....
Come to think of it it wasn’t even 10 seconds, more like 2 or 3 before my ears and eyes were burning
Literally.
This kind of thing is totally routine here in South Africa. Probably about a third of power cuts in my area these days are due to some kind of cable or electrical theft.
That's 100,000 watts "ERP"- the actual power in the transmission line can be as low as 5,000 watts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_radiated_power
The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp
Nominative determinism in action.
Or subverted in this case, I suppose. Can't have been very crisped if he could flee from the police.
any paulcrisp on HN want to discuss?
Is this not an old story? I seen to recall hearing it awhile ago
Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.
The photo shows a cable ( with insulation ) that looks at least 4 inches thick ... (from a distance )
Probably something like this:
HJ9HP-50 Heliax High-Power Air-Dielectric Coax
https://www.alldataresource.com/Commscope-HJ9HP-50-HJ9-50-HE...
Is just setting up a mixcloud accountafter this a viable solution?...100k for the ant...
Darwin awards should give this guy an honorable mention.
Sigh. Can these thieves figure out how much copper and gold is in Flock cameras?
>Total repair costs, he estimates, are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000
This is always so depressing to read, especially when you realize the thief did the damage only to gain a couple hundred dollars in copper. It's just a massive net loss for society to deal with this.
It's a similar problem places have with people destroying ac units to steal some small amount of copper.
Theft is always bad, but this blatant net negative for the world theft is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about societies long term.
Reads like a super-villain origin story. Welp, I guess he doesn't have to worry about getting the electric chair.
Is it too soon to talk about regulating the $#@* out of scrap-metal dealers?
They already are. You need to show ID to sell scrap metal. The thieves use a fence.
Furthermore, going after scrap metal sites makes an important business harder and fails to be inquisitive enough about the reasons why the thefts happen at all. Maybe we should try to understand why people are stealing copper. (Presumably poverty, drug addiction, lack of opportunity)
Sorry, buy we can't build a civilization around people like that, or sustain our existing one by indulging them.
But we can build a society around periodically replacing catalytic converters?
I feel like you end up indulging them either way.
If you believe we can just fix poverty and drug addiction with some government program, I have a bridge to sell you. So far, no one has, anywhere in the world.
Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.
If you think most people "are just terrible", I think you've let cynicism corrupt your thinking, and I don't think we're going to get very far by talking.
I believe the opposite -- people fundamentally want to help each other, and we've structurally set up our society to force people out of that mode and into a competitive mode. Read "A Paradise Built in Hell", when push comes to shove, communities care for each other.
If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We do this. We have programs for all those things. Anyone who is willing to go through the "process" can get free or reduced housing, food, and medical care. Education through 12th grade has always been free.
I think the GP was talking about addicts and those who for other reasons refuse to go through the "process" to get help. They are content living a life of begging, petty crime, getting high, and rejecting any help that comes with expectations of changing problematic behaviors.
> most people "are just terrible",
Read my comment again. Many = more than a few people. Nowhere near most people. Most people are great.
However, yes, most addicts who are in the grips of addiction - not in treatment or recovery - I stand by that.
> If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We don't agree on this point. Addiction itself is a huge barrier to the people who need help getting help, and a huge barrier to that help making any medium or long-term difference. We do not have a reliable way to fix addiction.
I admit I can't prove this, but I think it's more common that addiction causes complete collapse of everything else (job, housing, and relationships) than the other way around ("Gee, I lost my job, home, and my family and friends abandoned me -- I guess I'll just take up an expensive substance addiction").
Addiction can fixed by either:
1. An incredibly dedicated solo effort, hitting rock bottom and somehow having the personal strength left -- in a body and mind damaged by poison -- to fight it off through sheer force of will, or
2. An incredibly resource-intensive labor of love: Many people coming together to intervene, to help the addict through the most horrible experience of their life (withdrawal), and to monitor them, ideally indefinitely.
The extreme addicts I'm talking about are the ones who have generally driven their families and friends away by their behavior (frequently by lying and stealing to get money for drugs, basically proving too many times that they can't be trusted.) There aren't ever going to be enough government-funded 'surrogate friends' to help every addict in the absence of them having their own support system, which limits them to Option 1, which is wildly difficult and uncommon to happen or succeed.
The USA opioid epidemic was caused by gross government negligence and corruption. Is it really a stretch to think that a policy solution could have prevented the majority of the harm? And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
Portugal
Where does the fence sell the scrap? Somebody is buying it.
Same as stolen TVs, catalytic converters, and anything else.
There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
>There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
That's every scrap yard and most small businesses. Nothing makes you hate the law and it's enforcers, peddlers and proponents like being on the business end of regulations and a scrap yard probably has at least half a dozen agencies they are subject to.
Heck, I bet half of these guys would aerosolize radioactive waste out of spite if they thought the wind would blow it into a "good school district".
Didn't know fences contained copper ;)
Wonder if they steal the fence too!
You need a license to sell more than $25 of copper in my state. You won’t be issued a copper selling license without holding something like a journeyman electrical worker license or similar.
In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.
How the fuck is the thief alive????
Wait a second, I just realized something... how much would the station be paying in electricity to transmit at 100,000 watts 24/7 ? Their electric bill must be like $200,000 per year??
It’s 100,000 watts ERP with a 6 bay antenna. The higher gain antenna means the transmitter output power would be much less (about 35 kw), although at still extremely dangerous levels to mess with.
The criminal will be out in a few months to strike again I'm sure.
So, prison doesn't work?
Prison works if they never get out, see El Salvador's successes. Death penalty works too.
The trash thief will never be able to replace that. I guess insurance will help but that’s just another excuse for them to raise rates.
That thief should be indentured until he pays it back in full.
I'm looking for a Kalshi bet that the perp is a tweaker.
They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.
This feels like force majeur from a contract perspective…