Like Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union when people stole power lines.
Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when every crook is out to steal catalytic converters from cars at people's homes, that's pretty bad.
Macroeconomic and microeconomic cannibalism are further signs of a trend towards decay and decline. Oh and school shootings and mass shootings. And a lack of functional, universal healthcare. It will take far more, like the garbage not being picked up, for major reforms, but it will also take a charismatic leader really on the side of the ordinary people for that to manifest. Another "FDR".
Power line theft was my first thought as well. I was just at the FDR library and one thing that stood out was how uncertain/experimental he was: we think of FDR's work as "public works, new deal, social security, WWII" but per the library he came in basically saying, "this is a hard problem and what we've been doing hasn't worked. so we'll try other things, and some of them will work, some won't. we'll do more of the former and less of the latter over time and get better at fixing this."
Apparently the tariffs are at least partially to blame.
According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.
I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series).
FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule, and also set the stage for the scientific and economic advances in the post war period (including the moon landing, internet, etc, etc).
The copper theft has been going on since well before the tariffs. For a time it was hard to find a ev charger that still had a cable in seattle, this was like pandemic era.
The problem is that we have extreme wealth inequality, such that it makes sense for people to go through the trouble of stealing fucking scrap metal.
If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control.
Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.
It seems to be very easy, especially when you have a truck:
> Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.
I’d categorize using a likely gas-powered truck to steal EV charging cables for $400 worth of copper from some $1000 cables as pretty antisocial. These guys aren’t stealing bread because they’re hungry but easily fenced metal. They just burn off the insulation, so this is hardly deliberate, tedious work: it’s a quick and easy $400.
Its easier to steal $400 of copper and buy bread than it would be to steal $400 of bread. You don't steal high value objects because you need them, you steal high value objects because the reward is much greater while minimizing perceived or actual risk.
Just because they weren't stealing bread doesn't mean they didn't have very immediate concerns they were stealing for.
Things cost money, and sometimes only money can help you. The system simply won't take care of all of the basics. Medical care, car insurance, clothing, shelter, utilities, and so on. Plus a few comforts people steal for: Christmas and birthday gifts, for example. Especially for children.
You might easily have access to a truck and tools, though. Stuff is sometimes easier to get than money - years of collecting when you could in addition to gifts make this easily possible. Plus, you might have had money some years ago - and people keep a lot of stuff after they lost their monetary status.
A quick and easy $400 isn't a weird, antisocial choice at this point. It's just trying to keep a standard of living.
Plenty of people steal because they are desperate to acquire narcotics. Or to support a gambling habit. Or because they desperately need brand-name clothes to be validated by the rotten people they hang around with. I think we can all agree that those classes of so-called desperate people are probably far bigger than the class who steals for basic necessities
It's interesting how the decent pleasures of life don't provide such motivation. Have you heard of the man who stole to support his hunting trips and his woodworking hobby? Me neither.
While I agree, it also seems to me some people pay a premium to screw people over. Given two tedious, unprofitable miserable ways to turn a profit, they choose the one which lets them feel like they're ruthless bastards outsmarting the system.
If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.
The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.
This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?
What point are you trying to make here? We're talking about scrap metal theft. No rich person is casually stealing guard rail posts, get real. Scrap metal thieves are drug addicts who need drugs
Stealing a catalytic converter to sell for money cannot be equivocated to shoplifting. Plenty of shoplifters are doing it for the thrill or to obtain things that they wouldn't pay for, no one is doing that with cats, they are doing it to try and survive.
There was serious money in catalytic converter theft and an organized ring behind it raking in millions of dollars (up to $545 million) [0]. That’s not trying to survive. Since the arrest of the organizers of the ring, catalytic converter theft has fallen off significantly: without that criminal enterprise, catalytic converter theft ceased to be wildly lucrative. People who steal to survive steal essentials like food, not catalytic converters.
I do enjoy this view that every poor person is out to steal your shit at any moment. It's so archaic and classist. Just neat to see someone hew to these old ways. A modern, more egalitarian view might be that the poor are just as principled as the rich and just as likely to create societies free from crime.
But this is a real throwback. Enjoyable in that respect.
IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money.
You have a lot of countries objectively poorer than the conditions in where cats are routinely stolen in the US that don't devolve into utter lawlessness.
Also, I'm an FDR fanboy but I still think it's rather a stretch to pretend he single handedly won WWII (or even that he single handedly defeated the great depression).
It’s possible an “average” president could have done OK, but I’m comparing to his predecessors.
It’s hard to see how the isolationist macroeconomic geniuses that created the Great Depression would have built a war machine that could have won the war.
I doubt they would have wanted to. It’s more likely that, like the Bush family, they were supporting Hitler behind the scenes during the war.
That crowd’s running the US today. We need another FDR.
He was an appeasement to the populists. Which is why he got a 3rd term.
The capitalists barely were able to hold their nose to what he did to stop the rich from being eaten alive, but they knew what the alternative looked like.
Because of this, the socialists and communists, et. al. couldn’t get enough momentum to ‘win’ an argument form a coherent group and mostly just fought among themselves, and FDR was able to salve the hurt lower classes with enough give aways they mostly lost steam.
But the business groups got totally reamed in the process.
An actual centrist looks a bit like Bernie Sanders. A centrist in the US is a moderate republican that "is fiscally conservative but socially liberal". Ends up looking a bit like a libertarian, so I kinda get it.
> (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series)
The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better.
> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule
The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.
The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated.
May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.
I should read the book (I’ve liked every Philip K Dick thing I’ve read), though the sets were 50% of the appeal for the TV show for me. Not sure if it pulls in the FDR subplot or not, so I cited the show.
I didn't watch more than the first season of the show... but the setting for the novel is an alternate history in the 1960's where FDR had been assassinated in the 30's (failed in our timeline) and the US was isolationist and never entered WW2 until it was conquered by Nazi Germany and Japan.
And he wrote the plot for each character by tossing coins and looking up corresponding passages in the I-Ching
Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me.
But also they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil - isn't that what triggered the invasion in the first place?
Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.
I don't know if that'd cover the war needs in oil of Germany, but once they had started a war with the soviet, they had no choice but to try to get to the Caucasus for the oil.
> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.
Yep. Is partially why I don't live in Austin anymore, because the police there are actively underfunded, short by ~250, and the police left do have really don't care about reducing violent crime and DGAF about property crime.
> I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series).
The opposite is a Trump and becoming more like Mexico or Brazil where corruption is endemic, the masses in favelas, the government DGAF about ordinary people because it's all about enriching the already rich, and the middle class live in fortresses and are constantly worried about going out in public to be robbed by roving gangs.
> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule
The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. American industrial power saved the planet from Nazism and Japanese imperial rule.
US industry supplied all the Allies (including the Soviet Union) with large quantities of everything needed to fight with, on a global scale. That had nothing to do with the New Deal.
The Depression ended with the flood of foreign money pouring into the US to buy armaments.
> The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so.
This is categorically wrong: the WW2 GDP boom started in 1939, by which point we'd already been out of the great depression (1936 was the first year that Real GDP was above the previous peak of 1929). Regardless, that point is only 6 years after the New Deal took effect, meaning a delay of 10 years would require reversing the flow of time.
Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn.
"It is a measure of the severity of the preceding contraction that, despite such sharp rises, money income was 17 per cent lower in 1937 than at the preceding peak eight years earlier and real income was only 3 per cent higher. Since population had grown nearly 6 per cent in the interim, per capita output was actually lower at the cyclical peak in 1937 than at the preceding cyclical peak. There are only two earlier examples in the recorded annual figures, 1895 and 1910, when per capita output was less than it was at the preceding cyclical peaks in 1892 and 1907, respectively. Furthermore, the contraction that followed the 1937 peak, though not especially long, was unusually deep and proceeded at an extremely rapid rate, the only occasion in our record when one deep depression followed immediately on the heels of another." pg 493
Repeat until true: No metal has been stolen due to inflated pricing, job creation and factory construction are at all time highs, and downtown Chicago is a mixture of killing fields and charnel pits.
Spoiler alert: They’re all verifiably false with a quick internet search. Be sure to check primary sources, and not opinion pieces on “entertainment” networks like Fox News or Newsmax.
This is the force keeping India trapped in poverty. Turns out indoctrinating a caste system at all levels of society fundamentally dissuades young people from engaging in objective thinking about social outcomes for others and normalizes self-first thinking.
China has adopted capitalist egoism wrapped in a reinterpreted Confucian family-unit ideal but has the guiding party to ensure stability (read: political security) and economic function remain on the agenda. Anyone attacking infrastructure will be dealt with severely (this was the leadup to the Xinjiang crackdown post 911, a small Uyghur group had been bombing the rail lines). That said, I did have a fiber optic line to one of my offices in China disconnected by a copper thief ~2008. Unheard of recently.
It seems important to note, as the article you link does but you do not, that there is no allegation she was trying to steal or damage the cable in use. She was digging for unused cables buried long ago.
That may not be a high-value activity in most contexts, but it is a value-added activity.
You need to consider the externalities of the activity, which in this case includes taking a whole country offline. I strongly believe this would make the whole activity a net negative. I very much doubt that recycling some copper wires produces more value than the cost of losing the Internet and fixing the cable.
Recycling old cables is probably valuable, in isolation, but not when this can occur.
My understanding is that ISPs have good maps of their cables, so I doubt the SPOF was something that didn't know about. However, I take the wider point that calculating all the externalities is at least difficult and probably impossible. At the very least, updating their threat model to include "Grandma with spade" was probably some benefit they gained :-)
Something that isn't said or asked is what scrapyards are accepting these. For catalytic converters, most yards are supposed to measures in place to deter accepting stolen cats. Someone has to be seeing loads of things like statues or guardrails coming in by someone who almost certainly doesn't own them (and probably looks like it). There's financial incentive to accept anything and everything that comes in, but there needs to be more aggressive measures to punish yards that are unscrupulous and end up accepting stolen goods without a fight.
To my understanding, stolen catalytic converters move through criminal channels until they get out of the country, are recycled, and then come back in as raw materials. At some point in the chain, they're turned from catalytic converters into bulk metal-containing ceramic powder for easier transport.
That's a fancy way of saying "the scrap yards used to accept them, but then the states passed documentation laws, so now the thieves bring them to auto shops who pay them a lesser price and then print up some BS invoice and reciepts so that the scrap yard can feel like their ass is covered"
I don't understand how the yards will take nearly-new AC condensers and things like that. The building next door had three installed, on the ground. They were gone the first weekend. The next 3 they installed were put on the roof, and had razor wire around them.
Because that stuff comes in all the time as a result of normal business inefficiency, obviously not a whole truck load but a few wouldn't raise eyebrows and the kind of people stealing are the same kind of people scrapping the same things legitimacy so profiling only works in the most flagrant cases.
Because some scrap yards are ran by sleezeballs that know exactly what they are doing. They know it's some methhead that stole it so they pay far below market rates then run it through a shredder to launder it.
see my handle
so where the fuck to start
go to a bunch of scrap yards, someones "door yard", like mine, where as a matter of course, bits and chunks of most metals end up as part of building and repairing, to larger operations that are huge, fast paced with prices and markets changing by the hour, and cash is used as the entisement to get people to bring metal in
on everything from bicycles to the biggest rigs on the road, a cacophany of heavy equipment like car shredders, that reduce a full sized car to hand sized bits, and seperate out the more valuable metals, and waste plastic, grrrrrank!, done
it's a wild, dangerous madhouse populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers.
then there are hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses that generate several hundred tons of scrap per year in acompletly normal, organized, boring fashion, except for when it gets dropped, and the expected and tolerated losses to dumpster diving.
I could go into much greater detail as to how it works, the safeguards to prevent theft that are in place, but as in the case of guardrails say, the problem is that, legitimatly scrapped guardrails come in every day, or hyway crews just leave crash damaged ones lay beside the hyway when they fix the rails, 1 they are too busy, and 2 they know the bent ones spontainoiusly disapear, the scraped one is worth $17.26......nobody is doing extra paper work for that, right
we are talking millions of tons pe anum of material moved in a completly random ad hock manner,
dont take it the wrong way, but...
go the fuck ahead bub, you fix it
I'll watch
I brought all the rabbit in from a big union data center job in Texas, over a decade ago. We had spent weeks installing thousands feet of 500kcm (that's a THICK wire) and I brought in trashcans full of bare bright.
Scrapyard actually called the police requiring our facility manager to visit (they assumed it was all stolen, since there wasn't a drop of corrosion on any copper).
>populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers.
Really appreciated that they let me cut in line (the police forced this) so-as to not attact this unwanted attention.
This was fifteen years ago, but IIRC they handed me/boss a check for $6k (made out to my company). Lots of leering onlookers.
"kilo-circular mils", that's an impressively cursed unit even for US standards: Combining an SI prefix, a decimal fraction (1/1000th) of an imperial base unit (inch) and then defining the area by diameter instead of square. Even if someone told you it's an imperial area measure that's about 0.5 mm², you'd never figure out on your own how kcm was defined to arrive there.
As blue-collars, we always referred to 500kcm as elephant cock (350kcm is donkey dick)... because it's almost an inch thick, with the sheathing. The copper is approximately 253mm² (177mm², respective).
When phased we used brown/yellow/purple ... so it was anatomically correct, from afar. Sword-fights with 3ft sections of scrap [@$$$$$$$$$/foot] could actually become bloody (accidental).
If a cmil has a diameter of one thousandt (mil) of an inch, then a kcmil (kilo=1000) has a diameter of 1 inch? 500kcmil has a diameter of 500inch? Which is about 10 meter??
Yes, but that's what makes it even more cursed. SI prefixes normally bind tighter than exponents, so km² = (km)² = (1000 m) * (1000 m) = 1 million m², not 1000 m². Meanwhile kcm applies the prefix last - so it's off by three orders of magnitude from the normal way.
Next time just call the metal recycler and have them pick up from you! Never had an issue and we’re usually recycling several thousand pounds of copper wire at a time.
We had a similar thing replacing a radiator in our house years ago. We asked the plumber what to do with the old one, and he said "leave it on the street and it will be gone by the morning". He was true to his word and the magic scrap metal fairies came overnight to take it away.
This year there were multiple reports of people stealing bronze sculptures from graves here in the Netherlands. Thinks butterflies, birds, and other personal memorabilia. That's a fairly new development (and a new low). Small sculptures in public parks already were the occasional target.
You don't need things to be bad to have theft, especially of small or easy to steal things. It is one of those crimes that sticks around regardless of how "good" or "bad" things are, though admittedly it seems to be a bit less when times are good. I moved from the midwest, US to Norway - and theft seems to be one of the more common crimes. Things really aren't especially bad here from my point of view.
Regardless, You still have thrill seekers, folks that mismanage money, folks that slip through the state support cracks, drug users and alcoholics, gamblers, teens whose parents don't provide for them (both real and perceived) and so on.
Roma or Romani people, commonly known in Europe as gypsies, are not the same as Romanian people, although there is a large population there. You'll have to reference Wikipedia for a deeper dive.
In my trips to Bulgaria in the early 2000's I saw rampant metal theft. It got so bad that sidewalks had open 8 foot holes to utility spaces because someone tool the access doors. The problem has improved a lot over the years.
Also: I try to always separate any metals from our household trash stream that would not be accepted by the municipal recycling program. I store it up in a box and put it on the curb when it's full.(usually just aluminum, iron, and steel.) It disappears within 12 hours every time. I wish more people would do the same.
We have alleys where I am in the US and I sort out all the things thst could be useful and leave them in the alley and they all get picked up by folks before the day is over
As a poor-student-ish activity in a US college town, I used to systematically walk trash pickup zones of the city streets the night before the zone's pickup, looking for useful household items that people customarily set beside their trash bags for some poor student type to grab.
Occasionally, it would look like some scavenger had come along before me, and cut the connectors off computer cables, and took only the cable. Not even cut the cable off an appliance to which it was attached, but simply a cable with connectors on both ends.
For example, one time it was for a complete vintage Mac setup, which someone had taken some care to set out with all the required items... but the cables were missing; only their cut-off connectors were there.
One time, I actually saw a/the person doing this. He looked just like a comfortable gray-haired engineer, calmly standing on the sidewalk with a heavy wire cutter, snipping the connectors off a computer cable someone had set out on the curb. I was so surprised, that I didn't say anything to him.
That's more commonly done by the original owner to render them inoperable. You're right that the scrap value in those is absolutely miniscule; and many are actually copper-coated aluminum these days.
I did that the other day but for a warranty replacement. The company wants to make sure you're not getting a free second item but also don't want to pay for return shipping so they require a photo of the item that includes the serial number and the snipped cord visible so they know it's non-operational.
I've done this in the past few years for a broken fan, blender, immersion circulator, vacuum, wireless charging pad, and probably some other items I'm forgetting. (For whatever reason, I tend to be lucky that things tend to break slightly before the warranty is up.)
Are you sure that's not it? Why are you even assuming the items are functional? Most broken items still look fine, they just don't work properly.
Well, I'm not certain, but there are plenty of comments about it in local hard rubbish groups.
>Why are you even assuming the items are functional?
Obviously I can't know for sure, but I have seen cases where someone has put out a fridge with a note saying "Free - it works! :)" and...cord is cut. etc.
Nah. Any sorting won't be done until they've finished their rounds. People who gather metal from street side dumps just cart it all to the nearest scrap metal dealer. Most is aluminium and steel anyway; both recycle just fine.
There is a place nearby where there is just a bit pile of rusting train rails, kinda off the beaten path and i've been constantly surprised that someone hasn't pulled up a truck and carted it away. Must be to unweildly (they are like 20ft long).
A temporary powerline was installed to keep a small industrial area in Amsterdam powered up while there was a new substation built. Step up and step down transformers on either side of the link took care of not having to use a massive diameter cable which amongst other obstacles had to be strung underneath a bridge. After a week or so the power failed. A hacksaw blade was found embedded in the cable. The police declined to investigate because the people from the power company told them that whoever did that had already been punished sufficiently.
There was a person with severe burns admitted to the nearest hospital (OLVG) so that wasn't a real problem (for the authorities, for that guy it was a completely different matter). I trust his copper thieving days were over. It was a real problem too because it wasn't exactly a trivial thing to splice, in the end they just ran a new cable in exactly the same way and that one lasted until the substation was back online. I lived there (illegally) at the time so I got to be the one to call it in. I got some funny looks from the cops when I returned to my company quarters with the power off.
To make matters worse: I also took that whole lot offline one cursed evening not that long afterwards just before a tradeshow. Not my best moment. To put it mildly.
They do that here with the ISP wires and it takes out internet and cell service all over the county and beyond for usually two days straight each time. All the providers here run off the same infrastructure, so the only people with internet are those with satellite internet when it happens. I started driving in a direction to see how long it would take me cell service during it once and I had to drive about 40 miles.
At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.
Not just meth heads, but junkies too. Only around here, they climb the poles to cut the cables. Unfortunately for all involved, they are cutting the fiber lines so not only do customers loose signal, the junkies don't actually get any copper.
wait until it becomes widely known how much copper is in one of those EV super chargers. Although witnessing a bug zapper effect may deter some thieves.
The unfortunate thing (for deterring theft at least) is that the actual DC cabling is going to be unenergized for safety reasons unless you’re actually charging. Copper theft on those charger plugs is already happening.
I'm told that many (if not most) chargers in Europe are Bring Your Own Cable. I don't know if that's for compatibility or for theft reasons, but it makes sense.
I’m not aware of any DC fast chargers that do that, even in Europe. It wouldn’t make sense, since the amount of power you have to push through a DCFC setup is so immense that the cabling is quite unwieldy and specialized. Often the cables are liquid cooled.
Indeed, they're talking about L2 AC public chargers in Europe being BYOC. And going back to the idea that cables are de-energized when not charging, this is true for L2 AC also (the EVSE will have a contactor that the car effectively controls).
Yup, basically the only chance for you to get zapped by a charger is either ripping the whole thing out so you make contact with the input AC, or cutting the wire while it’s actively charging a car. And even then, chargers have ground fault protection for L2, and L3 chargers have high voltage isolation monitoring. They’re remarkably safe even against blatant tampering.
Would we be able to insulate sufficiently for a new generation of DC fast charging where voltage is so much higher that current is so much lower that the cable isn't thick enough to be worth stealing? Could eliminate active cable cooling, as well.
I guess the problem would be stepping it back down inside the car to match the battery voltage, which is an AC endeavor, at which point it might as well just be AC grid power delivered to the car (albeit high/primary voltage, not residential/secondary voltage), and we're back to the car having enormous equipment on board that ought to be stationed, so no.
Stepping up the voltage for DC power makes the overcurrent protection insanely expensive, there is no ‘zero point’ for DC like there is for AC so circuit breakers are tricky to manufacture. Maybe fuses would work, I’m not entirely sure.
You’d be better off replacing the charger cables, in my best estimation.
AFAIK you can’t charge a battery with AC current, you’d need an inverter onboard the vehicle to convert to DC.
DC fast charging is already 500-800volts- so 125A max for 100kW, only they liquid cool the lines so you're not trying to plug in a big floppy... 4/0awg... anyway, its mostly a water/liquid jacket- not copper.
Most DCFC cables are not watercooled. A typical 175 kW / 350 kW (400 V and 800 V, respectively) DCFC cable spec is 4x50 + 1G35 + 3x 2x 1, so around 250 mm² of copper, about 2.5 kg/m. They're usually around 4 m long (exterior to the dispenser), let's say five bucks per kg, so 2.5 * 4 * 5 = 50 bucks each. Most chargers have two cables, so 100 bucks. I'm guessing the methhead bringing them to the scrap fence/yard gets like 15 bucks for having caused around 10k in property damage.
Though in many of these cases the cables are not actually stolen. People just cut them off and throw them in the bushes or don't even bother moving them. In those cases the motivation is obviously anti-EV vandalism.
That's an even more complicated system. How would we catch them without the type of surveillance or anti-fencing measures that have even more downsides than the amount of theft they eliminate?
>Over the last two years, the state transportation agency has spent more than $62,000 on repairs related to guardrail theft in the region.
If the full cost of replacement is ~$31k/yr, the scrap value of the stolen guardrails is surely far less. Seems like there wouldn't be enough for even a single thief to make a living.
Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.
Is that really how cat theft works- thief gets a couple hundred and it’s smuggled offshore and broken up for raw materials to make new cats? Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair maybe the very car it was stolen from? Are cats serialized and tracked?
When I was in Central America people would steal windshields from cars left outside at night. New replacements were very expensive because of import taxes but you could just go to the nearest shady shop and what do you know, they just happen to have a used one for your car in stock!
When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.
So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.
> Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair
Because there are federal laws against selling for re-use and installing used emissions parts[1] and there are federal laws that make the remanufacturing operation you'd need to make "new cats" less profitable than shipping the used stuff overseas and doing it there.
Portable electric power tools, which are likely stolen themselves, can make quick work of almost anything. Only thing that stops even more theft is the tools themselves will get pawned for drug money quick enough.
i don't understand how a stolen iphone is worth anything, do they part it out? I thought apple explicitly had coded/serialized parts, and i thought that would prevent someone from installing a stolen screen onto a different phone.
or, is it just because apple is a jerk and wants all repairs to be done by apple?
What happens sometimes is they get trafficked outside of the country, then they start sending messages to the original owner trying to manipulate them in various ways to remove the activation lock. Including lying that it's necessary to wipe the sensitive photos off the phone, lying that they're poor and got scammed by a seller who sold them a stolen phone, and sometimes harassing the owner with really graphic texts cursing their family members or threatening their lives until the phone is unlocked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/iphone-theft-sto...
It's not like the users are really losing anything by wiping and removing activation lock, the phone is already stolen, so it often works
People willing and able to do this probably have a few things going on at a time. Plus they're not necessarily at the high end of living expenses. A couple grand haul for a couple hours work is pretty good.
So much theft going on for metals. Many streetlights get robbed for their copper wire. The new 6th street bridge in LA gets routinely stripped of wires. Most of the older bridges have been robbed of their old brass lamps already. Many brass plaques in parks or on infrastructure has been stolen.
What is interesting is that this has been ramping up just in the last couple of years. Some of the brass has been out in public for decades but is only now getting stolen hand over fist. I wonder what the impetus has been these days that wasn’t there in the past?
Presumably multi-causal (economic desperation, rising metal costs, perception that the crime won't be punished, getting the idea from others, etc.) but at least one component is probably the rise of high-powered, battery-operated tools. Battery tools are so much better today than they were even 10 years ago. In the picture from the article you can see the guy using a battery-powered reciprocating saw. Not long ago, an approach like that wouldn't have been feasible.
To your point, you can get a Stihl Cutquik TSA 230 Cordless Cut-Off Saw for ~$500-600, and this will make quick work of anything getting in the way of scraping. I've cut through thick steel with it like its butter (and the only portable way to go faster is something like a plasma torch, depending on material and thickness).
I helped cut off the tail cone of a Boeing 747 (former United tail #882) using of those at the Tupelo MS boneyard a few years ago. Well, actually I drew a sharpie line and said “cut here” and someone did.
There’s a pic of the result of our handiwork on Airliners.net, I have much cooler and closer pictures with sparks flying and non-OSHA approved crane rigging being employed that I unfortunately cannot share, but yes, hot knife through butter described it.
Planes are basically made of beer cans though. Sawzalls really struggle with thicker material because the reciprocating nature makes for fuck all chip evacuation.
Ironically those battery-powered tools used to steal metal were often stolen themselves, either shoplifted from hardware stores or taken out of construction workers' trucks. Local law enforcement doesn't take those minor thefts seriously and this causes more problems.
It's hard to impress upon people how big a change in capabilities there was when things like Milwaukee's M18 line came out and became common. I can remember when it was unimaginable to have a battery powered sawzall worth a damn, and it's even crazier to think the battery powered M18 impact guns now often will do better than most pneumatic ones. The 18 volt lithium tools (Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Bosch, etc.) are everywhere and cheap now and kind are revolutionary in what kind of stuff they enable.
I went to an NHRA drag race event this year and watched some mechanics rebuilding an engine between races, I was surprised to see them using M18 impacts, but that’s a hell of a lot easier than dragging around a compressor and a bunch of lines!
Yup, all sorts of bike locks are totally useless now.
In the EU they make hard-disk manufacturers pay tax for the inevitable copyright theft. I think that's nonsensical but I daydream of having that for makers of these things (and glass bottles).
Maybe that needs a sawzall. But getting into a utility box only took hand tools. Only recently after thefts have gotten so bad have they been welding these boxes shut. When they stole all the historic lights off the Hyperion Bridge in LA, it looks like they were merely unbolted:
Im wondering of regulatory enforcement on the metals dealers has gone down. The last time Southern California had problems like this they added required identification and thumbprints for any seller at the dealers. Presumably there have been workarounds since that allow stolen metals to be moved
Demand is up and supply is increasingly getting more costly. Ripe conditions for this kind of behavior.
When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.
Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.
In my area, we've taken to replacing brass hydrant fixtures with hardened resin covers and such, because they were constantly being stolen.
And as much as that is an issue in itself, gotta love the scrap metal dealers who see someone show up with a shopping trolley full of brass hydrant covers and "sure, no problem here".
$4.60 is not an all time high for copper. Copper has been around this price for a while. It’s traded within about a 10% band for the last year. It had some fluctuations prior to that, but there hasn’t been any kind of long extended run up in price.
Some local plugs are closer to fences as they will take pretty much anything of value. Recently heard of someone taking a high end bottle of cologne or expensive bottles of wine. Whether the plug enjoys the product themselves or is able to turn them around somewhere else is more information than I want to know.
If you get lucky you can pull out hundreds of feet of wire, the wire is in conduit that goes from pole to pole and it’s usually decent sized wire to account for voltage drop. The city where I live is using aluminum wire for streetlights now after having miles and miles of copper stolen.
One problem with west africa is they desperately need better roads but whenever a foreign country/NGO comes in and builds a road the locals dig out the gravel and it collapses.
I'll need a source for that claim since it sounds blatantly made up. Aggregate/gravel costs $10/t., So, to get enough money for a snack, an addict would need to do an ungodly amount of work, digging up large stretches of highway and breaking it up hundreds of meters, or even a few kilometers.
The cost-to-benefit ratio just breaks down. You spend more calories making just $10. That's why vandals go for catalytic converters, copper, and aluminum. These are expensive metals that have an attractive labor-to-payoff ratio. Gravel is abundant in the countryside and no matter how poor or addicted a person is, the labor-to-payoff ratio makes no sense.
Also they're not selling the gravel, they're mostly just using it to build their homes. The economics are also very different. There's this idea that you're a dummy for buying anything. Like my sister would buy fruit at the market and her neighbors would laugh at her "don't you know you can just pick fruit on the tree??"
I'm just assessing your claim logically and it still doesn't make sense. For locals who live in the countryside, surrounded by fruit trees, it doesn't make sense paying for fruit when you can just walk over to your neighbor's tree, collect as much as you want and walk away.
The tradeoff is that your neighbor can also do to the same to your tree when it's ripe. This is not an African or third-world thing. In any farming community, whether in the US, Europe, or China, some even pick fallen fruit and put them in baskets for passersby; if you don't, it decays where it fell.
Given this is a low-income, agrarian community, this makes sense. It'd be unwise to spend money buying fruits when trees are (maybe) communally owned. So, the locals are not shortsighted ghouls who believe in just taking what they want. They see your sister as a member of their community and they're telling her, "Gee! help yourself. Stop acting like an outsider, lol."
Regarding gravel: anyone (relatively) wealthy enough to embark on building a concrete home in a third-world country won't have the energy/time to break up concrete to harvest aggregate. And when you break it up, you can't extract it perfectly. This is concrete we're talking about, no? So, it'll be clumpy. Again, the effort-to-outcome ratio is insane. Doing your boring day job and buying gravel from bulk suppliers is more reasonable.
My sister was a peace corps volunteer in guinea and the development workers told her this. On a related note a huge problem in Africa is that a lot of things happen and no reputable news organization bothers to cover it (see Lolianda in Tanzania or early Tigray in Ethiopia)
This turned into something of an internet meme, with people claiming that Hamas was destroying their own critical water infrastructure to make rockets.
Apparently the actual pipe that was dug up in the video was originally installed by Israelis to supply water to an Israeli settlement, long since abandoned. It wasn't actually being used, and there were no prospects for it being used again any time soon.
There's also some like pretty practical stuff they could do, like actually create a great west african airline (to get from neighboring countries in west africa you need to usually travel via dubai or europe). Ethiopia is a pretty horrible government but Ethiopian airlines makes eastern africa function in a way no other African airline has.
Reminds me of when I used to work in Newark New Jersey. The cobblestone streets were pried up with crowbars and the cobblestones were sold. The old buildings had all of the plumbing ripped out so it could be sold. The new buildings had all of the wires ripped out so it could be sold.
I think about this every single time I drive by a stretch of road that has these. You can't have public goods when the value of those goods in private hands is greater than the risk of, ahrm, converting those public goods into private goods.
When a society fails to provide sufficient opportunity for all its members then those who have been left behind can simply make up the difference by retrieving their share of the common wealth by other means.
The cost of trying to police this (ignoring entirely the moral and ethical implications of such policing) at the scale of e.g. all roads with guardrails is more than the value if replacing the rails, and likely substantially more than just providing the missing opportunity and removing the sources of wealth inequality that make wealth redistribution in the form of guard rails an inevitability.
But the police are paid for with the taxation of normal people, not the ultra wealthy class. Which is who would need to be taxed to redistribute wealth and opportunity. Our politicians have zero interest in properly taxing themselves and their friends. So easier to just keep taxing the middle and over funding policing.
In Argentina is common to steal high voltage cable lines.
On one occasion a young man attemping to do so received a discharge that literally changed his skin color and pulverized his clothes. He was able to survive only a few hours as it turned out most of his organs suffered severe burns.
People wouldn't believe that after that he was still able to walk and talk normally until emergency services arrived.
And the solution is rather easy, if draconian: absolute liability, sky-high civil penalties, and enforcement by private individuals (a la "qui tam" or the Texas Heartbeat Act). Let the average person (read: lawyer) sue the scrap yards into oblivion, and make it lucrative enough that the thieves themselves will turn them in. Fight greed with greed, it works. For those people who think it's being sent across the border: secure the border.
They're intended to save lives by slowing down a car careening out of control or bouncing it out of oncoming traffic at least.
Galvanized steel would increase the hazard by having a higher likelihood of piercing through the shell of the vehicle and striking the passengers than the softer and more bendy aluminum would. It also corrodes over time, so barring an accident aluminum despite its higher initial cost is a better choice of material for guardrails.
Tradeoff is that they would need to make the fines for recyclers so onerous that they would knowingly never accept guardrail material since the only truly effective deterrent is removing the profit motive.
Galvanized steel is used the world over. It's a simple engineering exercise to interchange one for the other.
Steel has some superior properties with regard to tearing/bending so you can actually make "softer" barriers out of it if that's what you're going for.
Aluminum also has some long term corrosion benefits over galvanized steel especially in the context sometimes where they are attached to treated wooden posts. They use isolation these days but still not enough usually.
Related: I recently had a few hundred lbs of clean galvanized steel to dispose of and looked into selling to scrap yard. I would have spent more on gas, one way, taking it up there than I’d have gotten for it. Luckily my local recycling yard (2-3mi away) was happy to take it for free. Ironically, I also took a few half-full trash bags of AL cans and got ~$35 for them.
Where I grew up it was not that uncommon from time to time to experience no trains for weeks because of power lines theft. Insane the fact that people can just somehow cut such thick long cables without getting fried - just like that.
Same idea as birds not getting fried on uninsulated overhead lines, I reckon. Depending on voltage, shoes on the earth wouldn't be nearly as good as a huge air gap, but maybe a tall fiberglass ladder is decent.
Look at the bottom. That's a discarded light post. The arm and light at the top has been removed and it was broken off by the bottom. The construction crew likely left it where it was and these guys came along.
There's one in the woods near me that I keep meaning to grab but I don't really have a use for aa tapered pole and it's kinked pretty high up so....
> Nearly 470 sections of guardrailing were stolen in the last fiscal year alone in L.A. and Ventura counties, costing the state transportation agency $17,000 to replace, the agency said.
This implies that the total value to the thieves is pretty tiny.
Actually hang on...that must be an error. Do they mean $17,000 each? That seems too high, but $36 each seems way too low.
It's like when they say they found a bajillion bucks of coke by lying and projecting wholesale quantity of coke down to what it would retail for as nickle bags of crack.
Literally every stat institution does this sort of math slight of hand by default in situations like this.
They're probably using the most unfavorable triple OT, gotta close a lane, lots of people involved assumptions for labor rate.
I'd try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're quoting the base material cost but that math don't math. $36 probably only just barely covers a 6ft section of 6" I beam pounded into the ground for guardrail and certainly wouldn't cover a section of guard rail let alone a 3"+ pipe of steel say nothing of aluminum
I work with a lot of scrap and scrappers. they did this at the local scrapyard, and indeed they stopped accepting anything from anyone without a city-issued business license.
now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.
That's how it works in the UK, following too many thefts of copper cables for railways which are at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude more expensive to repair than highway barriers.
You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.
Yep, they only care about crimes that earn them bonuses either financially or materially. And drug crime lets the courts rake in fines and fees which filter down to cops too and many police also seize all sorts of material goods that disappear both legally and illegaly into their personal possessions.
The numbers just don't seem big enough. Repair costs of $62,000 over two years in LA and Ventura counties - an area with 10 million people. The savings from 100% enforcement at the scrapyard level would pay for what, one full time employee inspector for the state of California?
It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.
The guardrails aren't the only things being stolen for scrap, they're just what the article focuses on. There's a link included to an article about streetlight copper theft which probably costs even more, and another about telecom theft.
That's all there is to it. All these scum know they are buying stolen items, but they do it anyway. Same thing for catalytic converters and copper stolen from just about anywhere.
Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.
Once pharmacies and drug manufacturers in the American legal system started getting held liable for excessive opioid prescriptions and pushing, it became less common. So yeah. It might work.
Isn't America experiencing absurd amounts of petty theft right now? Maybe pawn shops are no longer in the equation (doubtful, though. Any data on this?) but did it actually help alleviate the problem?
As for the opioid crisis... well, I don't want to open up that can of worms.
I think this is more about institutional collapse. What's the mechanism by which I see jeff bezos and then want to go and rob someone? Keeping in mind that the typical criminal is a moron who literally can't understand delayed consequences
The institutions are collapsing because people don't identify with them because they serve their own interests (which has a lot of alignment with moneyed interests) rather than the people's interests.
The mechanism is that society/state is structured in a way to allow them to extract ever more money from regular people, with their social/financial/medical security and general govt services like education deteriorating further and further, creating more desperate, disillusioned, disenfranchised people, some of which steal copper.
Properly tax rich people (again), make politicians act in good faith again, actually care for regular people, and things will improve.
These guardrails are made of Aluminium. In my country guardrails are mostly made of steel or at least iron, which is mauch harder to cut and lower value.
Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...
> The next step the agency is considering is using fiberglass composite instead of aluminum to construct guard rails “to remove the value to the thieves.”
Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.
Plenty of stories about yahoos hitching their pickup to a telephone repeater box around where I live to pull the copper cable only to find it's fibre. You can't beat stupid.
Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.
About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.
What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.
In the third world, people gang up against criminals and police comes and beats them too. After a few manhole covers were stolen by the typical group, half the village went to their "neighborhood" until they got the covers back.
My wife said in South Africa, growing up in the 1980s, everything metal was harvested like old growth forest. I guess people are as destitute everywhere now.
It's definitely about money, but "inequality" makes it sound like the fact that other people out there are wealthy is the cause of antisocial people destroying property to pay for drugs
I would posit that a society of reasonably well-off people would be less likely to steal guardrails for drug money than a society with a lot of poverty.
I would guess certain voting patterns would be different too, for that matter.
Perhaps part of that is: what underlies the inequality? Are folks getting wealthy by good old-fashioned hard work? Or something else?
> The details will seem foreign to many in the West, where building home equity is baked into the system. But the central idea is simple: What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains?
The value provided by the infrastructure greatly exceeds the value of selling it as scrap. If it seems worthwhile to an individual to, effectively, turn dollars into pennies a reasonable explanation is that none of those dollars come to them.
You have a strange way of looking at this. From those doing the theft, it is pennies from nothing. It's not like they are spending money on anything. The tools being used are at best borrowed, but most likely stolen. So they only expense would be their time, and that's nothing especially if it's going to get them medicine so they aren't sick for however short time those pennies earned gets them.
It is only pennies from nothing if the thief derives no benefit from the infrastructure. I don't, say, dig up a copper cable if that cable provides the Internet access I rely on to run my business or talk to my friends.
The next obvious question to ask is why the thief doesn't benefit from the infrastructure, and the systemic answer is inequality. That's literally what inequality means: unequal access to resources and opportunities. Using your medicine example, it's unequal access to medicine that drives the crime.
> I don't, say, dig up a copper cable if that cable provides the Internet access I rely on to run my business or talk to my friends.
That’s the reason you’re going with? Not that you’re not a junkie and have decent paying job that makes this a money losing proposition for you because you are on the positive side of the inequality equation compared to a junkie?
Failed central planning, excessive barriers to commerce, rent seeking bureaucrats and other anti-market forces. Paradoxically, poverty as an outcome of economic mismanagement is used to rationalize further interventions.
I have heard people complain about how hard things are all my life. Yet I never have a proplem finding someone with less income who isn't stealing, is happy, and raising more kids than the complainer.
Don't put words in my mouth. You're the one assuming that, not me. People are broke, not illiterate, and articles like this just publicize that a certain high-value metal is available in a certain place that many wouldn't have considered on their own.
One person digging for copper took the whole of Armenia offline:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman...
This is how you turn dollars into pennies. It suggests society is a bit broken if this seems a worthwhile thing to do.
Like Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union when people stole power lines.
Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when every crook is out to steal catalytic converters from cars at people's homes, that's pretty bad.
Macroeconomic and microeconomic cannibalism are further signs of a trend towards decay and decline. Oh and school shootings and mass shootings. And a lack of functional, universal healthcare. It will take far more, like the garbage not being picked up, for major reforms, but it will also take a charismatic leader really on the side of the ordinary people for that to manifest. Another "FDR".
Power line theft was my first thought as well. I was just at the FDR library and one thing that stood out was how uncertain/experimental he was: we think of FDR's work as "public works, new deal, social security, WWII" but per the library he came in basically saying, "this is a hard problem and what we've been doing hasn't worked. so we'll try other things, and some of them will work, some won't. we'll do more of the former and less of the latter over time and get better at fixing this."
Apparently the tariffs are at least partially to blame.
According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.
I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series).
FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule, and also set the stage for the scientific and economic advances in the post war period (including the moon landing, internet, etc, etc).
The copper theft has been going on since well before the tariffs. For a time it was hard to find a ev charger that still had a cable in seattle, this was like pandemic era.
The problem is that we have extreme wealth inequality, such that it makes sense for people to go through the trouble of stealing fucking scrap metal.
If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/
Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.
It seems to be very easy, especially when you have a truck:
> Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/thieves-are-taking-e...
I’d categorize using a likely gas-powered truck to steal EV charging cables for $400 worth of copper from some $1000 cables as pretty antisocial. These guys aren’t stealing bread because they’re hungry but easily fenced metal. They just burn off the insulation, so this is hardly deliberate, tedious work: it’s a quick and easy $400.
Its easier to steal $400 of copper and buy bread than it would be to steal $400 of bread. You don't steal high value objects because you need them, you steal high value objects because the reward is much greater while minimizing perceived or actual risk.
Just because they weren't stealing bread doesn't mean they didn't have very immediate concerns they were stealing for.
Things cost money, and sometimes only money can help you. The system simply won't take care of all of the basics. Medical care, car insurance, clothing, shelter, utilities, and so on. Plus a few comforts people steal for: Christmas and birthday gifts, for example. Especially for children.
You might easily have access to a truck and tools, though. Stuff is sometimes easier to get than money - years of collecting when you could in addition to gifts make this easily possible. Plus, you might have had money some years ago - and people keep a lot of stuff after they lost their monetary status.
A quick and easy $400 isn't a weird, antisocial choice at this point. It's just trying to keep a standard of living.
Desperation is a fairly subjective thing.
Plenty of people steal because they are desperate to acquire narcotics. Or to support a gambling habit. Or because they desperately need brand-name clothes to be validated by the rotten people they hang around with. I think we can all agree that those classes of so-called desperate people are probably far bigger than the class who steals for basic necessities
It's interesting how the decent pleasures of life don't provide such motivation. Have you heard of the man who stole to support his hunting trips and his woodworking hobby? Me neither.
While I agree, it also seems to me some people pay a premium to screw people over. Given two tedious, unprofitable miserable ways to turn a profit, they choose the one which lets them feel like they're ruthless bastards outsmarting the system.
The issue is basically this:
If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.
The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.
This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?
What point are you trying to make here? We're talking about scrap metal theft. No rich person is casually stealing guard rail posts, get real. Scrap metal thieves are drug addicts who need drugs
Stealing a catalytic converter to sell for money cannot be equivocated to shoplifting. Plenty of shoplifters are doing it for the thrill or to obtain things that they wouldn't pay for, no one is doing that with cats, they are doing it to try and survive.
There was serious money in catalytic converter theft and an organized ring behind it raking in millions of dollars (up to $545 million) [0]. That’s not trying to survive. Since the arrest of the organizers of the ring, catalytic converter theft has fallen off significantly: without that criminal enterprise, catalytic converter theft ceased to be wildly lucrative. People who steal to survive steal essentials like food, not catalytic converters.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_...
I do enjoy this view that every poor person is out to steal your shit at any moment. It's so archaic and classist. Just neat to see someone hew to these old ways. A modern, more egalitarian view might be that the poor are just as principled as the rich and just as likely to create societies free from crime.
But this is a real throwback. Enjoyable in that respect.
More like we are all equally unprincipled when it comes to survival
Dope is probably a more likely explanation than wealth inequality for copper theft.
IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money.
You have a lot of countries objectively poorer than the conditions in where cats are routinely stolen in the US that don't devolve into utter lawlessness.
It's a book, the TV series is an adaptation.
Also, I'm an FDR fanboy but I still think it's rather a stretch to pretend he single handedly won WWII (or even that he single handedly defeated the great depression).
It’s possible an “average” president could have done OK, but I’m comparing to his predecessors.
It’s hard to see how the isolationist macroeconomic geniuses that created the Great Depression would have built a war machine that could have won the war.
I doubt they would have wanted to. It’s more likely that, like the Bush family, they were supporting Hitler behind the scenes during the war.
That crowd’s running the US today. We need another FDR.
FDR was an appeasement to the business community in opposition to IWW, socialists, and communists.
Not too much later, is when you get 'National Day' or Labor day, as opposition to international workers day, or May 1.
FDR was just a moderate capitalist. But still a capitalist. Money/power gets more money/power.
He was an appeasement to the populists. Which is why he got a 3rd term.
The capitalists barely were able to hold their nose to what he did to stop the rich from being eaten alive, but they knew what the alternative looked like.
Because of this, the socialists and communists, et. al. couldn’t get enough momentum to ‘win’ an argument form a coherent group and mostly just fought among themselves, and FDR was able to salve the hurt lower classes with enough give aways they mostly lost steam.
But the business groups got totally reamed in the process.
[flagged]
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Much like the German Democratic Republic was democratic, and the DPRK is democratic, too.
Dawns flame retardant Vinalon suit
don
Dahaha and there I was trying to cleverly tie an internet trope with a bit of DPRK fashion history, I doft my cap to you sir!
*doff
An actual centrist looks a bit like Bernie Sanders. A centrist in the US is a moderate republican that "is fiscally conservative but socially liberal". Ends up looking a bit like a libertarian, so I kinda get it.
[flagged]
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series)
The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better.
> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule
The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.
A different us president could've blamed Russia for starting that war, could've stopped supplying Russia...
The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated.
May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.
I should read the book (I’ve liked every Philip K Dick thing I’ve read), though the sets were 50% of the appeal for the TV show for me. Not sure if it pulls in the FDR subplot or not, so I cited the show.
I didn't watch more than the first season of the show... but the setting for the novel is an alternate history in the 1960's where FDR had been assassinated in the 30's (failed in our timeline) and the US was isolationist and never entered WW2 until it was conquered by Nazi Germany and Japan.
And he wrote the plot for each character by tossing coins and looking up corresponding passages in the I-Ching
Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me.
But also they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil - isn't that what triggered the invasion in the first place?
Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.
> they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil
Didn't they were receiving oil (and other raw materials) from the URSS beforehand?
edit: found a figure on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic...
I don't know if that'd cover the war needs in oil of Germany, but once they had started a war with the soviet, they had no choice but to try to get to the Caucasus for the oil.
Most modern nations have adopted national socialism as their form of government by now, haven't they?
> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.
Yep. Is partially why I don't live in Austin anymore, because the police there are actively underfunded, short by ~250, and the police left do have really don't care about reducing violent crime and DGAF about property crime.
> I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series).
The opposite is a Trump and becoming more like Mexico or Brazil where corruption is endemic, the masses in favelas, the government DGAF about ordinary people because it's all about enriching the already rich, and the middle class live in fortresses and are constantly worried about going out in public to be robbed by roving gangs.
> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule
The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so. American industrial power saved the planet from Nazism and Japanese imperial rule.
US industry supplied all the Allies (including the Soviet Union) with large quantities of everything needed to fight with, on a global scale. That had nothing to do with the New Deal.
The Depression ended with the flood of foreign money pouring into the US to buy armaments.
> The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so.
This is categorically wrong: the WW2 GDP boom started in 1939, by which point we'd already been out of the great depression (1936 was the first year that Real GDP was above the previous peak of 1929). Regardless, that point is only 6 years after the New Deal took effect, meaning a delay of 10 years would require reversing the flow of time.
Source: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=GDPCA (I can't figure out how to hotlink to a specific time range so you'll have to plug it in yourself).
Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn.
"It is a measure of the severity of the preceding contraction that, despite such sharp rises, money income was 17 per cent lower in 1937 than at the preceding peak eight years earlier and real income was only 3 per cent higher. Since population had grown nearly 6 per cent in the interim, per capita output was actually lower at the cyclical peak in 1937 than at the preceding cyclical peak. There are only two earlier examples in the recorded annual figures, 1895 and 1910, when per capita output was less than it was at the preceding cyclical peaks in 1892 and 1907, respectively. Furthermore, the contraction that followed the 1937 peak, though not especially long, was unusually deep and proceeded at an extremely rapid rate, the only occasion in our record when one deep depression followed immediately on the heels of another." pg 493
Or just have a police state. Problem solved.
Oh yea. Nothing is ever stolen or defrauded in russia.
To be fair (not that I much want to be fair to police states), Russia doesn't so much have a police state as an organised crime state.
but you go to jail if you report. like reporting correct jobs numbers. "problem solved"
Doesn't work, it just makes corruption more probable.
Laws dont say what can't happen. They say what the people who are allowed to break laws are allowed to do. It's called norm asymmetry.
Deploy the national guard to protect Californian highway guardrails! :)
What's the going rate for bribes/fees/"tips" these days?
Impossible to tell if this is satire
Repeat until true: No metal has been stolen due to inflated pricing, job creation and factory construction are at all time highs, and downtown Chicago is a mixture of killing fields and charnel pits.
Most of these are already true, though.
Spoiler alert: They’re all verifiably false with a quick internet search. Be sure to check primary sources, and not opinion pieces on “entertainment” networks like Fox News or Newsmax.
You could just ask :)
Nobody can take a fascism joke these days. For some reason.
>”Or just have a police state. Problem solved.”
The you can send the copper thieves to work in the copper mines. That’s killing two birds with one stone right there!
It turns out society-wide prosperity doesn't naturally arise from maximization of individual egoism. Who knew…
This is the force keeping India trapped in poverty. Turns out indoctrinating a caste system at all levels of society fundamentally dissuades young people from engaging in objective thinking about social outcomes for others and normalizes self-first thinking.
China has adopted capitalist egoism wrapped in a reinterpreted Confucian family-unit ideal but has the guiding party to ensure stability (read: political security) and economic function remain on the agenda. Anyone attacking infrastructure will be dealt with severely (this was the leadup to the Xinjiang crackdown post 911, a small Uyghur group had been bombing the rail lines). That said, I did have a fiber optic line to one of my offices in China disconnected by a copper thief ~2008. Unheard of recently.
[dead]
> This is how you turn dollars into pennies.
It seems important to note, as the article you link does but you do not, that there is no allegation she was trying to steal or damage the cable in use. She was digging for unused cables buried long ago.
That may not be a high-value activity in most contexts, but it is a value-added activity.
> there is no allegation she was trying to steal or damage the cable in use. She was digging for unused cables buried long ago.
That feels like a polite fiction to me. Every cable thief presents themselves that way.
You need to consider the externalities of the activity, which in this case includes taking a whole country offline. I strongly believe this would make the whole activity a net negative. I very much doubt that recycling some copper wires produces more value than the cost of losing the Internet and fixing the cable.
Recycling old cables is probably valuable, in isolation, but not when this can occur.
Now we are pretty deep in the weeds ... but ... what about the value-added activity of finding a single point of failure for a critical resource?
It seems hard to compare the value of material goods against the stream of time.
My understanding is that ISPs have good maps of their cables, so I doubt the SPOF was something that didn't know about. However, I take the wider point that calculating all the externalities is at least difficult and probably impossible. At the very least, updating their threat model to include "Grandma with spade" was probably some benefit they gained :-)
Something that isn't said or asked is what scrapyards are accepting these. For catalytic converters, most yards are supposed to measures in place to deter accepting stolen cats. Someone has to be seeing loads of things like statues or guardrails coming in by someone who almost certainly doesn't own them (and probably looks like it). There's financial incentive to accept anything and everything that comes in, but there needs to be more aggressive measures to punish yards that are unscrupulous and end up accepting stolen goods without a fight.
To my understanding, stolen catalytic converters move through criminal channels until they get out of the country, are recycled, and then come back in as raw materials. At some point in the chain, they're turned from catalytic converters into bulk metal-containing ceramic powder for easier transport.
wrong, most catalytic converter theft has been laundered through legal auto parts sellers and associated companies that are breaking the law
That's a fancy way of saying "the scrap yards used to accept them, but then the states passed documentation laws, so now the thieves bring them to auto shops who pay them a lesser price and then print up some BS invoice and reciepts so that the scrap yard can feel like their ass is covered"
Source? Not disagreeing, just interested in seeing some articles that cover this/hearing personal anecdotes.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...
the wikipedia article on 2020-2022 catalytic converter theft also covers it pretty well
I don't understand how the yards will take nearly-new AC condensers and things like that. The building next door had three installed, on the ground. They were gone the first weekend. The next 3 they installed were put on the roof, and had razor wire around them.
Because that stuff comes in all the time as a result of normal business inefficiency, obviously not a whole truck load but a few wouldn't raise eyebrows and the kind of people stealing are the same kind of people scrapping the same things legitimacy so profiling only works in the most flagrant cases.
Because some scrap yards are ran by sleezeballs that know exactly what they are doing. They know it's some methhead that stole it so they pay far below market rates then run it through a shredder to launder it.
Just store them for a while then put them on sale on ebay in a different county, they're worth more like that than their scrap value.
There's huge networks of grey market people willing to buy / install / etc "secondhand" car parts or in this case AC units.
see my handle so where the fuck to start go to a bunch of scrap yards, someones "door yard", like mine, where as a matter of course, bits and chunks of most metals end up as part of building and repairing, to larger operations that are huge, fast paced with prices and markets changing by the hour, and cash is used as the entisement to get people to bring metal in on everything from bicycles to the biggest rigs on the road, a cacophany of heavy equipment like car shredders, that reduce a full sized car to hand sized bits, and seperate out the more valuable metals, and waste plastic, grrrrrank!, done it's a wild, dangerous madhouse populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers. then there are hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses that generate several hundred tons of scrap per year in acompletly normal, organized, boring fashion, except for when it gets dropped, and the expected and tolerated losses to dumpster diving. I could go into much greater detail as to how it works, the safeguards to prevent theft that are in place, but as in the case of guardrails say, the problem is that, legitimatly scrapped guardrails come in every day, or hyway crews just leave crash damaged ones lay beside the hyway when they fix the rails, 1 they are too busy, and 2 they know the bent ones spontainoiusly disapear, the scraped one is worth $17.26......nobody is doing extra paper work for that, right we are talking millions of tons pe anum of material moved in a completly random ad hock manner, dont take it the wrong way, but... go the fuck ahead bub, you fix it I'll watch
A couple presses of the enter key would greatly improve the readability of your comment.
But would it have properly communicated their manic energy?
Thank you! I first dismissed the post as badly edited, but it's a masterpiece!
Three, four sentences.
I brought all the rabbit in from a big union data center job in Texas, over a decade ago. We had spent weeks installing thousands feet of 500kcm (that's a THICK wire) and I brought in trashcans full of bare bright.
Scrapyard actually called the police requiring our facility manager to visit (they assumed it was all stolen, since there wasn't a drop of corrosion on any copper).
>populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers.
Really appreciated that they let me cut in line (the police forced this) so-as to not attact this unwanted attention.
This was fifteen years ago, but IIRC they handed me/boss a check for $6k (made out to my company). Lots of leering onlookers.
> 500kcm
"kilo-circular mils", that's an impressively cursed unit even for US standards: Combining an SI prefix, a decimal fraction (1/1000th) of an imperial base unit (inch) and then defining the area by diameter instead of square. Even if someone told you it's an imperial area measure that's about 0.5 mm², you'd never figure out on your own how kcm was defined to arrive there.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_mil
As blue-collars, we always referred to 500kcm as elephant cock (350kcm is donkey dick)... because it's almost an inch thick, with the sheathing. The copper is approximately 253mm² (177mm², respective).
When phased we used brown/yellow/purple ... so it was anatomically correct, from afar. Sword-fights with 3ft sections of scrap [@$$$$$$$$$/foot] could actually become bloody (accidental).
If a cmil has a diameter of one thousandt (mil) of an inch, then a kcmil (kilo=1000) has a diameter of 1 inch? 500kcmil has a diameter of 500inch? Which is about 10 meter??
Yeah I'm an engineer but this must be wrong.
This is incorrect. Please see the wikipedia link, above.
Yes, but that's what makes it even more cursed. SI prefixes normally bind tighter than exponents, so km² = (km)² = (1000 m) * (1000 m) = 1 million m², not 1000 m². Meanwhile kcm applies the prefix last - so it's off by three orders of magnitude from the normal way.
I recently saw the much simpler but still deeply, viscerally upsetting unit of length ∛tsp
Almost 3/4 in
Next time just call the metal recycler and have them pick up from you! Never had an issue and we’re usually recycling several thousand pounds of copper wire at a time.
We had a similar thing replacing a radiator in our house years ago. We asked the plumber what to do with the old one, and he said "leave it on the street and it will be gone by the morning". He was true to his word and the magic scrap metal fairies came overnight to take it away.
[flagged]
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances... They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm sorry! I'm quite new here, so I guess I don't have the rules internalized. Thank you for the reminder.
All good, thanks for the reply!
This is intensely pedantic.
[flagged]
No, we don’t want that energy on HN, please.
This year there were multiple reports of people stealing bronze sculptures from graves here in the Netherlands. Thinks butterflies, birds, and other personal memorabilia. That's a fairly new development (and a new low). Small sculptures in public parks already were the occasional target.
Railroad wiring is a common target too of course.
Guardrails seem to be immune here though.
Similarly, in Seattle, a bronze statue was sawed off at the base and stolen about a year ago: https://southseattleemerald.org/news/2024/08/01/healing-hate...
Don't forget the bronze gates at the Arboretum: https://www.historylink.org/File/22556 (though that happened in 2020).
We also had yet another delay on the new light rail line because the power lines were stolen... Twice, in a week.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/copper-wire-theft-l...
Damn junkies man
As long as they leave Lenin alone, I guess.
why would Dutch people steal graveyard statuettes? Are things that bad in Holland right now?
Theft is a weird crime.
You don't need things to be bad to have theft, especially of small or easy to steal things. It is one of those crimes that sticks around regardless of how "good" or "bad" things are, though admittedly it seems to be a bit less when times are good. I moved from the midwest, US to Norway - and theft seems to be one of the more common crimes. Things really aren't especially bad here from my point of view.
Regardless, You still have thrill seekers, folks that mismanage money, folks that slip through the state support cracks, drug users and alcoholics, gamblers, teens whose parents don't provide for them (both real and perceived) and so on.
This was in the news. Thieves got caught. They were Romanian gypsies.
Roma or Romani people, commonly known in Europe as gypsies, are not the same as Romanian people, although there is a large population there. You'll have to reference Wikipedia for a deeper dive.
It is of course entirely possible to be a Romanian gypsy, just as it's possible to be a Canadian Apache or a Syrian Kurd.
FYI they're not Romanian.
It does not take many to steal many little statuettes.
In my trips to Bulgaria in the early 2000's I saw rampant metal theft. It got so bad that sidewalks had open 8 foot holes to utility spaces because someone tool the access doors. The problem has improved a lot over the years.
Also: I try to always separate any metals from our household trash stream that would not be accepted by the municipal recycling program. I store it up in a box and put it on the curb when it's full.(usually just aluminum, iron, and steel.) It disappears within 12 hours every time. I wish more people would do the same.
We have alleys where I am in the US and I sort out all the things thst could be useful and leave them in the alley and they all get picked up by folks before the day is over
The annoying thing around here is people cutting off the cords from otherwise functional electrical appliances for the tiny scrap value.
As a poor-student-ish activity in a US college town, I used to systematically walk trash pickup zones of the city streets the night before the zone's pickup, looking for useful household items that people customarily set beside their trash bags for some poor student type to grab.
Occasionally, it would look like some scavenger had come along before me, and cut the connectors off computer cables, and took only the cable. Not even cut the cable off an appliance to which it was attached, but simply a cable with connectors on both ends.
For example, one time it was for a complete vintage Mac setup, which someone had taken some care to set out with all the required items... but the cables were missing; only their cut-off connectors were there.
One time, I actually saw a/the person doing this. He looked just like a comfortable gray-haired engineer, calmly standing on the sidewalk with a heavy wire cutter, snipping the connectors off a computer cable someone had set out on the curb. I was so surprised, that I didn't say anything to him.
Around here (Melbourne, Australia) it's not "occasionally", it's extremely common, and often happens very soon after stuff is put out.
That's more commonly done by the original owner to render them inoperable. You're right that the scrap value in those is absolutely miniscule; and many are actually copper-coated aluminum these days.
I did that the other day but for a warranty replacement. The company wants to make sure you're not getting a free second item but also don't want to pay for return shipping so they require a photo of the item that includes the serial number and the snipped cord visible so they know it's non-operational.
I've done this in the past few years for a broken fan, blender, immersion circulator, vacuum, wireless charging pad, and probably some other items I'm forgetting. (For whatever reason, I tend to be lucky that things tend to break slightly before the warranty is up.)
Are you sure that's not it? Why are you even assuming the items are functional? Most broken items still look fine, they just don't work properly.
>Are you sure that's not it?
Well, I'm not certain, but there are plenty of comments about it in local hard rubbish groups.
>Why are you even assuming the items are functional?
Obviously I can't know for sure, but I have seen cases where someone has put out a fridge with a note saying "Free - it works! :)" and...cord is cut. etc.
Hopefully they aren't just picking out the good bits and dumping the remainder of the box somewhere else.
Nah. Any sorting won't be done until they've finished their rounds. People who gather metal from street side dumps just cart it all to the nearest scrap metal dealer. Most is aluminium and steel anyway; both recycle just fine.
There is a place nearby where there is just a bit pile of rusting train rails, kinda off the beaten path and i've been constantly surprised that someone hasn't pulled up a truck and carted it away. Must be to unweildly (they are like 20ft long).
Do you really think that deters metal theft? "We've cashed in enough today boys, let's not be greedy." C'mon.
In my little corner of heaven we get meth heads tying grappling chains to their trucks in order to yank down live power lines to sell for the copper.
I have no idea how none of them have died yet, as frequently as this seems to occur.
A temporary powerline was installed to keep a small industrial area in Amsterdam powered up while there was a new substation built. Step up and step down transformers on either side of the link took care of not having to use a massive diameter cable which amongst other obstacles had to be strung underneath a bridge. After a week or so the power failed. A hacksaw blade was found embedded in the cable. The police declined to investigate because the people from the power company told them that whoever did that had already been punished sufficiently.
Wouldn't they be looking for a dead body?
There was a person with severe burns admitted to the nearest hospital (OLVG) so that wasn't a real problem (for the authorities, for that guy it was a completely different matter). I trust his copper thieving days were over. It was a real problem too because it wasn't exactly a trivial thing to splice, in the end they just ran a new cable in exactly the same way and that one lasted until the substation was back online. I lived there (illegally) at the time so I got to be the one to call it in. I got some funny looks from the cops when I returned to my company quarters with the power off.
To make matters worse: I also took that whole lot offline one cursed evening not that long afterwards just before a tradeshow. Not my best moment. To put it mildly.
They do that here with the ISP wires and it takes out internet and cell service all over the county and beyond for usually two days straight each time. All the providers here run off the same infrastructure, so the only people with internet are those with satellite internet when it happens. I started driving in a direction to see how long it would take me cell service during it once and I had to drive about 40 miles.
At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.
Not just meth heads, but junkies too. Only around here, they climb the poles to cut the cables. Unfortunately for all involved, they are cutting the fiber lines so not only do customers loose signal, the junkies don't actually get any copper.
Alcoholics in Poland steal live train and tram traction. Once in a while, they die.
How do you know they haven't?
Fair enough. I supposed it would be in the local headlines, but I frequently tune out from the news for long stretches of time.
Back when watchpeopledie was a subreddit you could catch a clip of this type making a fatal mistake.
These are people who just disappear. Nobody reports them missing because nobody cares.
wait until it becomes widely known how much copper is in one of those EV super chargers. Although witnessing a bug zapper effect may deter some thieves.
The unfortunate thing (for deterring theft at least) is that the actual DC cabling is going to be unenergized for safety reasons unless you’re actually charging. Copper theft on those charger plugs is already happening.
I'm told that many (if not most) chargers in Europe are Bring Your Own Cable. I don't know if that's for compatibility or for theft reasons, but it makes sense.
I’m not aware of any DC fast chargers that do that, even in Europe. It wouldn’t make sense, since the amount of power you have to push through a DCFC setup is so immense that the cabling is quite unwieldy and specialized. Often the cables are liquid cooled.
Indeed, they're talking about L2 AC public chargers in Europe being BYOC. And going back to the idea that cables are de-energized when not charging, this is true for L2 AC also (the EVSE will have a contactor that the car effectively controls).
Yup, basically the only chance for you to get zapped by a charger is either ripping the whole thing out so you make contact with the input AC, or cutting the wire while it’s actively charging a car. And even then, chargers have ground fault protection for L2, and L3 chargers have high voltage isolation monitoring. They’re remarkably safe even against blatant tampering.
It's already widely known. Here in Seattle all the outdoor HVDC chargers are now down, with the cables cut.
Would we be able to insulate sufficiently for a new generation of DC fast charging where voltage is so much higher that current is so much lower that the cable isn't thick enough to be worth stealing? Could eliminate active cable cooling, as well.
I guess the problem would be stepping it back down inside the car to match the battery voltage, which is an AC endeavor, at which point it might as well just be AC grid power delivered to the car (albeit high/primary voltage, not residential/secondary voltage), and we're back to the car having enormous equipment on board that ought to be stationed, so no.
Stepping up the voltage for DC power makes the overcurrent protection insanely expensive, there is no ‘zero point’ for DC like there is for AC so circuit breakers are tricky to manufacture. Maybe fuses would work, I’m not entirely sure.
You’d be better off replacing the charger cables, in my best estimation.
AFAIK you can’t charge a battery with AC current, you’d need an inverter onboard the vehicle to convert to DC.
Junkies get about $50 per cable, apparently. The scrap value is already low.
It's just that property crimes are not prosecuted around here. So there's no downside for thieves.
They're switching to aluminum cables, with a much lower scrap value.
AC into the battery? Or did I misunderstand?
I neglected to mention rectifying, but to clarify I meant that the process of stepping down wants to be AC, not that the battery wants AC.
DC fast charging is already 500-800volts- so 125A max for 100kW, only they liquid cool the lines so you're not trying to plug in a big floppy... 4/0awg... anyway, its mostly a water/liquid jacket- not copper.
I’ve never seen a DC ampacity table but #1 wire is all you need for 125A of AC current (assuming 75 degree rated terminals)
Most DCFC cables are not watercooled. A typical 175 kW / 350 kW (400 V and 800 V, respectively) DCFC cable spec is 4x50 + 1G35 + 3x 2x 1, so around 250 mm² of copper, about 2.5 kg/m. They're usually around 4 m long (exterior to the dispenser), let's say five bucks per kg, so 2.5 * 4 * 5 = 50 bucks each. Most chargers have two cables, so 100 bucks. I'm guessing the methhead bringing them to the scrap fence/yard gets like 15 bucks for having caused around 10k in property damage.
Though in many of these cases the cables are not actually stolen. People just cut them off and throw them in the bushes or don't even bother moving them. In those cases the motivation is obviously anti-EV vandalism.
Instead of re-engineering complicated systems to be resilient to thieves, what if we just got rid of the thieves?
That's an even more complicated system. How would we catch them without the type of surveillance or anti-fencing measures that have even more downsides than the amount of theft they eliminate?
We could easily detect damage and dispatch law enforcement.
Maybe the solution is “Tesla Coil” quick charging stations for Teslas.
Instead of a cable, an electric bolt of air-cooled plasma wirelessly charges the car.
(/s)
No, it's aluminum wire actually. They are not copper
Doesn't sound very profitable:
>Over the last two years, the state transportation agency has spent more than $62,000 on repairs related to guardrail theft in the region.
If the full cost of replacement is ~$31k/yr, the scrap value of the stolen guardrails is surely far less. Seems like there wouldn't be enough for even a single thief to make a living.
Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.
Is that really how cat theft works- thief gets a couple hundred and it’s smuggled offshore and broken up for raw materials to make new cats? Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair maybe the very car it was stolen from? Are cats serialized and tracked?
When I was in Central America people would steal windshields from cars left outside at night. New replacements were very expensive because of import taxes but you could just go to the nearest shady shop and what do you know, they just happen to have a used one for your car in stock!
When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.
So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.
> Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair
Because there are federal laws against selling for re-use and installing used emissions parts[1] and there are federal laws that make the remanufacturing operation you'd need to make "new cats" less profitable than shipping the used stuff overseas and doing it there.
Portable electric power tools, which are likely stolen themselves, can make quick work of almost anything. Only thing that stops even more theft is the tools themselves will get pawned for drug money quick enough.
People that steal almost anything off the street aren't making a successful career out of it, they're addicts.
A second hand iPhone is only worth a few tens of dollars on the black market, but that's enough for the next hit.
i don't understand how a stolen iphone is worth anything, do they part it out? I thought apple explicitly had coded/serialized parts, and i thought that would prevent someone from installing a stolen screen onto a different phone.
or, is it just because apple is a jerk and wants all repairs to be done by apple?
What happens sometimes is they get trafficked outside of the country, then they start sending messages to the original owner trying to manipulate them in various ways to remove the activation lock. Including lying that it's necessary to wipe the sensitive photos off the phone, lying that they're poor and got scammed by a seller who sold them a stolen phone, and sometimes harassing the owner with really graphic texts cursing their family members or threatening their lives until the phone is unlocked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/iphone-theft-sto...
It's not like the users are really losing anything by wiping and removing activation lock, the phone is already stolen, so it often works
People willing and able to do this probably have a few things going on at a time. Plus they're not necessarily at the high end of living expenses. A couple grand haul for a couple hours work is pretty good.
Your cost of living is pretty low if you live in a nylon tent
Well, they're freelancers, so they probably have another half-dozen things going on.
So much theft going on for metals. Many streetlights get robbed for their copper wire. The new 6th street bridge in LA gets routinely stripped of wires. Most of the older bridges have been robbed of their old brass lamps already. Many brass plaques in parks or on infrastructure has been stolen.
What is interesting is that this has been ramping up just in the last couple of years. Some of the brass has been out in public for decades but is only now getting stolen hand over fist. I wonder what the impetus has been these days that wasn’t there in the past?
Presumably multi-causal (economic desperation, rising metal costs, perception that the crime won't be punished, getting the idea from others, etc.) but at least one component is probably the rise of high-powered, battery-operated tools. Battery tools are so much better today than they were even 10 years ago. In the picture from the article you can see the guy using a battery-powered reciprocating saw. Not long ago, an approach like that wouldn't have been feasible.
To your point, you can get a Stihl Cutquik TSA 230 Cordless Cut-Off Saw for ~$500-600, and this will make quick work of anything getting in the way of scraping. I've cut through thick steel with it like its butter (and the only portable way to go faster is something like a plasma torch, depending on material and thickness).
https://www.stihlusa.com/products/cut-off-machines/battery-c...
(no affiliation, I just like the tool)
I helped cut off the tail cone of a Boeing 747 (former United tail #882) using of those at the Tupelo MS boneyard a few years ago. Well, actually I drew a sharpie line and said “cut here” and someone did.
There’s a pic of the result of our handiwork on Airliners.net, I have much cooler and closer pictures with sparks flying and non-OSHA approved crane rigging being employed that I unfortunately cannot share, but yes, hot knife through butter described it.
https://www.airliners.net/photo/Untitled-United-Airlines/Boe...
Planes are basically made of beer cans though. Sawzalls really struggle with thicker material because the reciprocating nature makes for fuck all chip evacuation.
While that is a great saw. Metal thieves are likely using harbor freight angle grinders and sawzalls costing well under $200.
They're probably using stolen goods to begin with. This is in CA. IIRC, there was no penalty for thefts of <$1000 until recently.
Ironically those battery-powered tools used to steal metal were often stolen themselves, either shoplifted from hardware stores or taken out of construction workers' trucks. Local law enforcement doesn't take those minor thefts seriously and this causes more problems.
It's hard to impress upon people how big a change in capabilities there was when things like Milwaukee's M18 line came out and became common. I can remember when it was unimaginable to have a battery powered sawzall worth a damn, and it's even crazier to think the battery powered M18 impact guns now often will do better than most pneumatic ones. The 18 volt lithium tools (Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Bosch, etc.) are everywhere and cheap now and kind are revolutionary in what kind of stuff they enable.
I went to an NHRA drag race event this year and watched some mechanics rebuilding an engine between races, I was surprised to see them using M18 impacts, but that’s a hell of a lot easier than dragging around a compressor and a bunch of lines!
Yup, all sorts of bike locks are totally useless now.
In the EU they make hard-disk manufacturers pay tax for the inevitable copyright theft. I think that's nonsensical but I daydream of having that for makers of these things (and glass bottles).
Maybe that needs a sawzall. But getting into a utility box only took hand tools. Only recently after thefts have gotten so bad have they been welding these boxes shut. When they stole all the historic lights off the Hyperion Bridge in LA, it looks like they were merely unbolted:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-05/historic...
> I wonder what the impetus has been these days that wasn’t there in the past?
Fentanyl and cheap battery powered tools
Not a lot of fentanyl use in CA, it's mostly meth use. Dremels and Sawzalls are nothing new.
Im wondering of regulatory enforcement on the metals dealers has gone down. The last time Southern California had problems like this they added required identification and thumbprints for any seller at the dealers. Presumably there have been workarounds since that allow stolen metals to be moved
Demand is up and supply is increasingly getting more costly. Ripe conditions for this kind of behavior.
When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.
Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.
In my area, we've taken to replacing brass hydrant fixtures with hardened resin covers and such, because they were constantly being stolen.
And as much as that is an issue in itself, gotta love the scrap metal dealers who see someone show up with a shopping trolley full of brass hydrant covers and "sure, no problem here".
Social media hyping it? Stupid kids get an idea? I'm speculating.
Is brass more expensive than it used to be?
Yes. Copper (major component of brass) is seeing all-time highs at around $4.60 lb.
$4.60 is not an all time high for copper. Copper has been around this price for a while. It’s traded within about a 10% band for the last year. It had some fluctuations prior to that, but there hasn’t been any kind of long extended run up in price.
I had assumed it was much higher. How many pounds of copper could be in the wiring of a street lamp? 5 pounds?
Enough to get high, in Dallas the drug houses take copper and other metal as payment. No need to make the trip to the junk yard.
Source? I can't find any.
It would seem like sitting on a large inventory of scrap metal would be a dumb way to run a "drug house".
Some local plugs are closer to fences as they will take pretty much anything of value. Recently heard of someone taking a high end bottle of cologne or expensive bottles of wine. Whether the plug enjoys the product themselves or is able to turn them around somewhere else is more information than I want to know.
If you get lucky you can pull out hundreds of feet of wire, the wire is in conduit that goes from pole to pole and it’s usually decent sized wire to account for voltage drop. The city where I live is using aluminum wire for streetlights now after having miles and miles of copper stolen.
One problem with west africa is they desperately need better roads but whenever a foreign country/NGO comes in and builds a road the locals dig out the gravel and it collapses.
I'll need a source for that claim since it sounds blatantly made up. Aggregate/gravel costs $10/t., So, to get enough money for a snack, an addict would need to do an ungodly amount of work, digging up large stretches of highway and breaking it up hundreds of meters, or even a few kilometers.
The cost-to-benefit ratio just breaks down. You spend more calories making just $10. That's why vandals go for catalytic converters, copper, and aluminum. These are expensive metals that have an attractive labor-to-payoff ratio. Gravel is abundant in the countryside and no matter how poor or addicted a person is, the labor-to-payoff ratio makes no sense.
Also they're not selling the gravel, they're mostly just using it to build their homes. The economics are also very different. There's this idea that you're a dummy for buying anything. Like my sister would buy fruit at the market and her neighbors would laugh at her "don't you know you can just pick fruit on the tree??"
I'm just assessing your claim logically and it still doesn't make sense. For locals who live in the countryside, surrounded by fruit trees, it doesn't make sense paying for fruit when you can just walk over to your neighbor's tree, collect as much as you want and walk away.
The tradeoff is that your neighbor can also do to the same to your tree when it's ripe. This is not an African or third-world thing. In any farming community, whether in the US, Europe, or China, some even pick fallen fruit and put them in baskets for passersby; if you don't, it decays where it fell.
Given this is a low-income, agrarian community, this makes sense. It'd be unwise to spend money buying fruits when trees are (maybe) communally owned. So, the locals are not shortsighted ghouls who believe in just taking what they want. They see your sister as a member of their community and they're telling her, "Gee! help yourself. Stop acting like an outsider, lol."
Regarding gravel: anyone (relatively) wealthy enough to embark on building a concrete home in a third-world country won't have the energy/time to break up concrete to harvest aggregate. And when you break it up, you can't extract it perfectly. This is concrete we're talking about, no? So, it'll be clumpy. Again, the effort-to-outcome ratio is insane. Doing your boring day job and buying gravel from bulk suppliers is more reasonable.
My sister was a peace corps volunteer in guinea and the development workers told her this. On a related note a huge problem in Africa is that a lot of things happen and no reputable news organization bothers to cover it (see Lolianda in Tanzania or early Tigray in Ethiopia)
[flagged]
You might be thinking about Gaza, where Hamas released a video of them digging up a water pipe and using it to make rockets.
The Telegraph released an article about how the EU is worried that Hamas might dig up EU-funded water lines to make rockets:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/10/eu-funded-...
This turned into something of an internet meme, with people claiming that Hamas was destroying their own critical water infrastructure to make rockets.
Apparently the actual pipe that was dug up in the video was originally installed by Israelis to supply water to an Israeli settlement, long since abandoned. It wasn't actually being used, and there were no prospects for it being used again any time soon.
Unlike some other groups, that just get their rockets directly donated.
[flagged]
[flagged]
There's also some like pretty practical stuff they could do, like actually create a great west african airline (to get from neighboring countries in west africa you need to usually travel via dubai or europe). Ethiopia is a pretty horrible government but Ethiopian airlines makes eastern africa function in a way no other African airline has.
Reminds me of when I used to work in Newark New Jersey. The cobblestone streets were pried up with crowbars and the cobblestones were sold. The old buildings had all of the plumbing ripped out so it could be sold. The new buildings had all of the wires ripped out so it could be sold.
I think about this every single time I drive by a stretch of road that has these. You can't have public goods when the value of those goods in private hands is greater than the risk of, ahrm, converting those public goods into private goods.
When a society fails to provide sufficient opportunity for all its members then those who have been left behind can simply make up the difference by retrieving their share of the common wealth by other means.
The cost of trying to police this (ignoring entirely the moral and ethical implications of such policing) at the scale of e.g. all roads with guardrails is more than the value if replacing the rails, and likely substantially more than just providing the missing opportunity and removing the sources of wealth inequality that make wealth redistribution in the form of guard rails an inevitability.
But the police are paid for with the taxation of normal people, not the ultra wealthy class. Which is who would need to be taxed to redistribute wealth and opportunity. Our politicians have zero interest in properly taxing themselves and their friends. So easier to just keep taxing the middle and over funding policing.
you got so close...
The degree to which the line between the state and moneyed individuals and interests blurs as they converge near the top confuses a lot of people.
In Argentina is common to steal high voltage cable lines.
On one occasion a young man attemping to do so received a discharge that literally changed his skin color and pulverized his clothes. He was able to survive only a few hours as it turned out most of his organs suffered severe burns.
People wouldn't believe that after that he was still able to walk and talk normally until emergency services arrived.
> he was still able to walk and talk normally until emergency services arrived.
While I know that's not what you meant, it sounds like he was fine until emergency services decided to teach him a lesson ;)
You are becoming Brazil (brazilian here).
Brazil is the end state
Cast aluminum is 47cents per pound (~$1/kilo). https://sgt-scrap.com/todays-prices/
This is likely less than minimum wage for huge amounts of property damage.
Enough for the next hit of meth or fentanyl, which is all they care about.
And the solution is rather easy, if draconian: absolute liability, sky-high civil penalties, and enforcement by private individuals (a la "qui tam" or the Texas Heartbeat Act). Let the average person (read: lawyer) sue the scrap yards into oblivion, and make it lucrative enough that the thieves themselves will turn them in. Fight greed with greed, it works. For those people who think it's being sent across the border: secure the border.
[dead]
I'm surprised the guardrails are aluminum rather than galvanized steel.
They're intended to save lives by slowing down a car careening out of control or bouncing it out of oncoming traffic at least.
Galvanized steel would increase the hazard by having a higher likelihood of piercing through the shell of the vehicle and striking the passengers than the softer and more bendy aluminum would. It also corrodes over time, so barring an accident aluminum despite its higher initial cost is a better choice of material for guardrails.
Tradeoff is that they would need to make the fines for recyclers so onerous that they would knowingly never accept guardrail material since the only truly effective deterrent is removing the profit motive.
Galvanized steel is used the world over. It's a simple engineering exercise to interchange one for the other.
Steel has some superior properties with regard to tearing/bending so you can actually make "softer" barriers out of it if that's what you're going for.
Aluminum also has some long term corrosion benefits over galvanized steel especially in the context sometimes where they are attached to treated wooden posts. They use isolation these days but still not enough usually.
Yeah, I’m rather surprised rather they’re AL.
Related: I recently had a few hundred lbs of clean galvanized steel to dispose of and looked into selling to scrap yard. I would have spent more on gas, one way, taking it up there than I’d have gotten for it. Luckily my local recycling yard (2-3mi away) was happy to take it for free. Ironically, I also took a few half-full trash bags of AL cans and got ~$35 for them.
The cans are artificially inflated by the deposit fee at the cash register when you buy them.
so more deposit than recycling for metal.
In a state with no road salt to speak of no less.
I'd be interested to see what the alleged reason for this is.
The symbolism of thieves stealing our guardrails!
With cordless tools from Chi…, I mean Harbor Freight.
I remember reading that some policemen set up a recycling center, and basically 100% of the metal taken in was stolen in some way.
https://www.wired.com/2008/01/drugs-guns-remo/
""Of the 278 people who came in to the store, only two people had (items) from a legitimate source,"
Where I grew up it was not that uncommon from time to time to experience no trains for weeks because of power lines theft. Insane the fact that people can just somehow cut such thick long cables without getting fried - just like that.
Same idea as birds not getting fried on uninsulated overhead lines, I reckon. Depending on voltage, shoes on the earth wouldn't be nearly as good as a huge air gap, but maybe a tall fiberglass ladder is decent.
I didn't know fiberglass ladders existed. Interesting!
They seem to be very expensive.
Only if one is going to buy it, which arguably not a case for wire thieves.
Why do they steal metal instead of sitting peacefully at home eating cake?
I still remember a Reddit post, maybe a decade ago, about sewer manhole covers with fancy art in a Japanese town.
One of the top comments was: "This would get stolen in [American city] in 1 day."
You stole Freenode. Give it back.
There was a somewhat viral photo of people stealing an entire Albuquerque street light.¹
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/Albuquerque/comments/1fakprt/watche...
Look at the bottom. That's a discarded light post. The arm and light at the top has been removed and it was broken off by the bottom. The construction crew likely left it where it was and these guys came along.
There's one in the woods near me that I keep meaning to grab but I don't really have a use for aa tapered pole and it's kinked pretty high up so....
> Nearly 470 sections of guardrailing were stolen in the last fiscal year alone in L.A. and Ventura counties, costing the state transportation agency $17,000 to replace, the agency said.
This implies that the total value to the thieves is pretty tiny.
Actually hang on...that must be an error. Do they mean $17,000 each? That seems too high, but $36 each seems way too low.
Cop math, aka lying.
It's like when they say they found a bajillion bucks of coke by lying and projecting wholesale quantity of coke down to what it would retail for as nickle bags of crack.
Literally every stat institution does this sort of math slight of hand by default in situations like this.
They're probably using the most unfavorable triple OT, gotta close a lane, lots of people involved assumptions for labor rate.
I'd try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're quoting the base material cost but that math don't math. $36 probably only just barely covers a 6ft section of 6" I beam pounded into the ground for guardrail and certainly wouldn't cover a section of guard rail let alone a 3"+ pipe of steel say nothing of aluminum
Don't try to catch thieves. Go for the scrapyards/recycling companies buying the metal.
I work with a lot of scrap and scrappers. they did this at the local scrapyard, and indeed they stopped accepting anything from anyone without a city-issued business license.
now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.
That's how it works in the UK, following too many thefts of copper cables for railways which are at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude more expensive to repair than highway barriers.
You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.
Railway cable theft is still relatively common in the UK
Don’t worry, the police definitely aren’t trying to catch thieves.
In addition to basically no consequences for US police breaking the law, there are actually zero consequences to them not doing their jobs.
Yep, they only care about crimes that earn them bonuses either financially or materially. And drug crime lets the courts rake in fines and fees which filter down to cops too and many police also seize all sorts of material goods that disappear both legally and illegaly into their personal possessions.
The numbers just don't seem big enough. Repair costs of $62,000 over two years in LA and Ventura counties - an area with 10 million people. The savings from 100% enforcement at the scrapyard level would pay for what, one full time employee inspector for the state of California?
It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.
The guardrails aren't the only things being stolen for scrap, they're just what the article focuses on. There's a link included to an article about streetlight copper theft which probably costs even more, and another about telecom theft.
According to https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/la-city-council-copp... :
> In the [2023] fiscal year, that number skyrocket to a staggering 6,842 cases, with repair costs exceeding well over $20 million.
That's all there is to it. All these scum know they are buying stolen items, but they do it anyway. Same thing for catalytic converters and copper stolen from just about anywhere.
Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.
Criminal charges generally require proving intent. It's very hard to prove what somebody knew.
What you can do is make it illegal to buy particular materials, and then the intent to break that law becomes obvious.
As I understand it after having been informed by authoritative sources over a significant period of time, they should just say "no".
You honestly believe a scrapyard owner should go to jail for buying metal that might be stolen?
Fines, sure. But "long prison sentences"?
> this problem would vanish in short order.
Anyway that's worked well for drug abuse/sales, so it should probably work here too
Once pharmacies and drug manufacturers in the American legal system started getting held liable for excessive opioid prescriptions and pushing, it became less common. So yeah. It might work.
Same with pawn shops.
> Same with pawn shops.
Isn't America experiencing absurd amounts of petty theft right now? Maybe pawn shops are no longer in the equation (doubtful, though. Any data on this?) but did it actually help alleviate the problem?
As for the opioid crisis... well, I don't want to open up that can of worms.
They're made from aluminium??!
And some how he still struggled to cut through it apparently. Must have been the cheapest used recip saw blade he could buy.
Buy? Lol he most certainly didn’t purchase it.
i've never thought of this before, that poverty makes other things more expensive.
Yeah, paying people to not be poor is actually not a bad idea.
It's really sad some people can't find employment more gainful than scrapping highway guardrails.
Make less of the wealth in society belong to the very very few and this wont happen as much.
I think this is more about institutional collapse. What's the mechanism by which I see jeff bezos and then want to go and rob someone? Keeping in mind that the typical criminal is a moron who literally can't understand delayed consequences
The institutions are collapsing because people don't identify with them because they serve their own interests (which has a lot of alignment with moneyed interests) rather than the people's interests.
The mechanism is that society/state is structured in a way to allow them to extract ever more money from regular people, with their social/financial/medical security and general govt services like education deteriorating further and further, creating more desperate, disillusioned, disenfranchised people, some of which steal copper.
Properly tax rich people (again), make politicians act in good faith again, actually care for regular people, and things will improve.
This is not an issue for those very very few, no-one is stealing their jets.
These guardrails are made of Aluminium. In my country guardrails are mostly made of steel or at least iron, which is mauch harder to cut and lower value.
Prime third world country behavior.
(And yes, I’m from a third world country lol)
Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...
There's an old network admin adage that if you ever need a backhoe to show up, all you need to do is bury some fiber optic cable.
Soon enough a backhoe will magically appear to sever your buried fiber.
This trick works great if you ever get lost. They say a master network admin always carries 6ft of fiber optic just for this reason.
In my experience, you can easily find any buried telecom cable as long as you dig several feet away from the marked utility lines.
[dead]
"Backhoe fade"
Looks like the same is happening here:
> The next step the agency is considering is using fiberglass composite instead of aluminum to construct guard rails “to remove the value to the thieves.”
Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.
They also have far more mobile phones than landlines, because it's easier and cheaper to put up a few towers than run wires to every building.
http://geographylists.com/list21n.html
Plenty of stories about yahoos hitching their pickup to a telephone repeater box around where I live to pull the copper cable only to find it's fibre. You can't beat stupid.
Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.
About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.
What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.
In the third world, people gang up against criminals and police comes and beats them too. After a few manhole covers were stolen by the typical group, half the village went to their "neighborhood" until they got the covers back.
My wife said in South Africa, growing up in the 1980s, everything metal was harvested like old growth forest. I guess people are as destitute everywhere now.
Just like during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
> Congress has cut federal funding for public media — a $3.4 million loss for LAist
Why the fuck was "LAist" getting federal funding? Glad they're not anymore.
LAist went out of business and the local public radio station bought it and kept it going, it's a great public service. https://laist.com/shows/airtalk/kpcc-will-now-be-known-as-la...
People who steal safety equipment should be summarily executed.
Thats QE for you
Ah yes, the great benefits of rampant inequality
[flagged]
What do you think it's about if not money?
It's definitely about money, but "inequality" makes it sound like the fact that other people out there are wealthy is the cause of antisocial people destroying property to pay for drugs
I would posit that a society of reasonably well-off people would be less likely to steal guardrails for drug money than a society with a lot of poverty.
I would guess certain voting patterns would be different too, for that matter.
Perhaps part of that is: what underlies the inequality? Are folks getting wealthy by good old-fashioned hard work? Or something else?
There are poor people only because there are wealthy people.
I know it doesn't sit well at the American audience, but there is not such thing as inequality where it doesn't harm the people who has nothing.
The easiest way to understand that is that people need to see yield on their capital - regardless of that means unaffordability for the poor.
You might find this an interesting piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/realestate/switzerland-re...
> The details will seem foreign to many in the West, where building home equity is baked into the system. But the central idea is simple: What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains?
The value provided by the infrastructure greatly exceeds the value of selling it as scrap. If it seems worthwhile to an individual to, effectively, turn dollars into pennies a reasonable explanation is that none of those dollars come to them.
You have a strange way of looking at this. From those doing the theft, it is pennies from nothing. It's not like they are spending money on anything. The tools being used are at best borrowed, but most likely stolen. So they only expense would be their time, and that's nothing especially if it's going to get them medicine so they aren't sick for however short time those pennies earned gets them.
> it is pennies from nothing
It is only pennies from nothing if the thief derives no benefit from the infrastructure. I don't, say, dig up a copper cable if that cable provides the Internet access I rely on to run my business or talk to my friends.
The next obvious question to ask is why the thief doesn't benefit from the infrastructure, and the systemic answer is inequality. That's literally what inequality means: unequal access to resources and opportunities. Using your medicine example, it's unequal access to medicine that drives the crime.
> I don't, say, dig up a copper cable if that cable provides the Internet access I rely on to run my business or talk to my friends.
That’s the reason you’re going with? Not that you’re not a junkie and have decent paying job that makes this a money losing proposition for you because you are on the positive side of the inequality equation compared to a junkie?
[flagged]
s/live/buy recreational illegal narcotics/
Why do you think buying recreational narcotics isn't desperation to live?
Failed central planning, excessive barriers to commerce, rent seeking bureaucrats and other anti-market forces. Paradoxically, poverty as an outcome of economic mismanagement is used to rationalize further interventions.
[flagged]
Is being desperate to buy drugs a new thing? Because it sounds like stealing these guardrails is new thing.
What makes you think it is desperation as opposed to just thril seeking.
[flagged]
I have heard people complain about how hard things are all my life. Yet I never have a proplem finding someone with less income who isn't stealing, is happy, and raising more kids than the complainer.
Journalists are willing this to happen more by reporting on it.
You think that scrap metal thieves read their news? That they are also so stupid that the idea of stealing metal has never occurred to them?
Don't put words in my mouth. You're the one assuming that, not me. People are broke, not illiterate, and articles like this just publicize that a certain high-value metal is available in a certain place that many wouldn't have considered on their own.