Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.
I know a guy who works for a major broadcast site company here in the UK, who caught some people up at a remote transmitter site by blocking their pickup in with his van. They admitted they were there to steal copper scrap. He gave them about 100kg of scrap aluminium (decommissioned aerials) that had been subject to the usual "We'll come and get it next week, next week, oh so busy this week, how about next week, maybe the week after?" from the people that were supposed to pick them up.
Then he offered to give them a tour of the transmission building.
"See that?" he said, pointing to some nice thick copper cabling, "if you touched that you'd die, instantly. And see that over there? Yeah, if you touch that, you'd die. That stuff there, too, kill you if you even went near it."
Then he pointed out the big polished copper waveguide going up to the main TX stack, think in terms of a thick copper 4" sewer pipe leading out through the building.
"See that, know what would happen if you touched *that*?"
"We'd die?"
"Naaaaaw, of course you wouldn't die! Your arms would vapourise looooong before your heart stopped!"
Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of.
I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.
I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history.
Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.
The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.
We had an antenna range built inside of a shipping container. We had some pretty fancy copper cladding that had some pricey dielectric inside of it. Somehow, a copper thief found it and stole all of the cladding. That stuff was probably worth 1000x its copper scrap value. I'm sure the thief was expecting to find some equipment to pawn but instead opened up a treasure chest.
> a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value
I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.
Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.
People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.
It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.
They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.
I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.
Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.
I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.
The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.
> However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario
Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.
It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.
Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.
Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.
Your body builds up a tolerance to opioids. If you can receive a constant dose of heroin every day, your body will eventually want more of it to chase the high. For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.
Methadone (and Suboxone) is slow releasing so your brain is kept satisfied but without the massive high that a needle of heroin gives you. And because of that, taking other opioids at the same time blunts their effects. Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
> For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.
It turns out that this is not actually a problem, particularly when you are using diamorphine to control people's street smack addiction. They want to get off the gear anyway.
> Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
It turns out that this doesn't actually work. Methadone is completely ineffective at reducing cravings and most people on methadone programs go out to steal things for money to buy street heroin. That coupled with the massive health problems that methadone causes makes it an utterly useless thing for solving the problem. It also is massively physiologically addictive, so you've now got the problem of getting someone with failing health and no teeth and a roaring heroin addiction off of methadone as well. Good work.
It is really expensive though, so it's great for funnelling public money from the NHS into the pockets of drug companies, who generally have a few relatives of prominent politicians on the board.
It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.
We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4.
At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)
Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation.
The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.
Some nonzero percentage of these people could have been helped cheaper and more easily earlier on to prevent them from getting to this point in the first place.
Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery
the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.
Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.
Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.
Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.
This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.
The "cali-decriminilization" of shoplifting is entirely a lie. It's based on shoplifting not being a felony in California for less than $1k, but plenty of other states have higher thresholds for felony shoplifting.
Meanwhile, there is actually (probably? It won't show up in the data) organized crime doing shoplifting now, and that's pretty shitty. But cops just aren't doing their jobs. They need to investigate, and they have that authority, they just choose to not do it because it's boring and there's zero penalty for police department that doesn't do it's job.
That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container.
The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative.
For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix.
Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.
These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
Because the only solutions that work are social.
> There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
Kipling has a poem about that one, it doesn't work out.
This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."
I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."
Prison is expensive and has downstream costs as well--it should be a last resort.
There's definitely times where it absolutely is the right thing but it should not be default mode.
Note that these crimes are almost always done by drug addicts. We have the War on Drugs that was supposed to make this never happen and yet it's a fucking epidemic. So how's that war working for you, eh?
It's cheaper to get these people off drugs and redirected to being "good citizens" again, or even just give them their drugs in a controlled medical setting (like is done with methadone).
The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.
The economics solution is to legalize drugs and give addicts an unlimited supply.
Addicts do not want money, they are doing this because they have a near-perfectly inelastic demand for drugs. Satisfy the demand and they'll will get high all day + opt out of society.
I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter
The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.
It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.
The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).
In my country it was eventually accepted that some people are too far gone. The junkies got their daily ration of drugs until they died of natural causes.
I don't think America is culturally capable of doing that though.
Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.
I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.
Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.
They probably didn't independently come up with the idea to steal cables or catalytic converters either.
It's all word of mouth. But if half your buddies get shot [1] or jailed when they steal cables for drugs, it probably doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Same thing when your buddy finally fills their trailer full of cats and brings them to the scrap yard to find out they can't get anything from that anymore. Unfortunately, there's a lag, but afaik, cat thefts drop pretty reliably after they become economically useless... not all the way to zero, some people don't get the news very fast.
[1] this is not an endorsement of lethal force to deter cable theft
> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?
Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.
Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.
Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.
It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.
That is one point made in the essay *Million Dollar Murray". This Malcolm Gladwell essay is nominally about power law distributions, but also makes the point about homelessness, drug abuse and car emissions/pollutions. Denver is one domestic city that has a small program that hands apartment keys to homeless people. "Murray" cost the public health system at least one million dollars during his lifetime.
There's the criminal guilds approach from Discworld, I suppose (in which thieves, assassins etc are regulated and given quotas). May be some practical problems.
Meth is already incredibly cheap. Meth addicts would definitely still engage in this behavior even if meth were free, because they still need money for rent, gas, food, whatever.
Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
> Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
Those +P 185gr .45ACP hollow points with the nickel plated cases are pretty sweet. But it's a hell of a lot better to not have to do some kind of Old West standoff shootout shit whenever someone wants to rob something. That was my point. It's so much better instead of hiring a posse of gunfighters, to just trust that the system will (barring anomalies like this one) unfuck itself.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.
I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.
>You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
So then they'll just sell to middle men.
And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)
Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.
In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.
> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.
That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.
I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.
Historically, the insurer would provide or contract out loss prevention, or require the insured to do so, e.g. security guards to prevent theft, fire fighters to prevent fire damage, bounty hunters to prevent loss of bail bonds, etc.
In many ports of of the world, governments now have a monopoly on several of those services, and it's illegal for insurance to play a part in them. When such governments don't then provide those services, the insurance market collapses. Either the prices rise substantially, or especially in areas where rate changes are prohibited, insurers stop providing services.
It's pretty hard to protect outside plant with security guards. Burying the outside plant helps, but only until those who would steal cables figure out how to operate a backhoe.
It's also pretty hard to bury cables that lead to the top of an antenna.
In the Russian far east, where it's not practical to bury cables, many roadside bars have small signs showing a piece of fibre cable and how it's worthless for scrap.
Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.
> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night.
Our society has failed these people in many ways.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.
No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.
That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.
The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.
It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.
The transmitter will have a VSWR trip for just this sort of eventuality. It would likely be damaged severely if allowed to operate into an open circuit for more than a brief moment.
My first thought also .. possibly pulled a breaker rendering cable inert, or perhaps rigged a remote cutting tool - drop saw poised to cut on a long extension cord ready to be turn on ... (problematic).
I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.
I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.
I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper
Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.
Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.
How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.
100 watts at 100 MHz is so low that if you spent an entire lifetime in proximity to it, you would never notice.
At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.
The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.
I'm surprised nothing more serious happened. There was obviously a serious electrocution risk, but I think that is the easiest bit to deal with. 100kW of radio waves, whilst non-ironising, can still microwave you. With 100kW there could have also been a serious reflection back to the transmitter. This guy cutting the cable is far luckier than he will ever know.
This kind of thing is totally routine here in South Africa. Probably about a third of power cuts in my area these days are due to some kind of cable or electrical theft.
Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.
>Total repair costs, he estimates, are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000
This is always so depressing to read, especially when you realize the thief did the damage only to gain a couple hundred dollars in copper. It's just a massive net loss for society to deal with this.
It's a similar problem places have with people destroying ac units to steal some small amount of copper.
Theft is always bad, but this blatant net negative for the world theft is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about societies long term.
Furthermore, going after scrap metal sites makes an important business harder and fails to be inquisitive enough about the reasons why the thefts happen at all. Maybe we should try to understand why people are stealing copper. (Presumably poverty, drug addiction, lack of opportunity)
If you believe we can just fix poverty and drug addiction with some government program, I have a bridge to sell you. So far, no one has, anywhere in the world.
Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.
If you think most people "are just terrible", I think you've let cynicism corrupt your thinking, and I don't think we're going to get very far by talking.
I believe the opposite -- people fundamentally want to help each other, and we've structurally set up our society to force people out of that mode and into a competitive mode. Read "A Paradise Built in Hell", when push comes to shove, communities care for each other.
If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We do this. We have programs for all those things. Anyone who is willing to go through the "process" can get free or reduced housing, food, and medical care. Education through 12th grade has always been free.
I think the GP was talking about addicts and those who for other reasons refuse to go through the "process" to get help. They are content living a life of begging, petty crime, getting high, and rejecting any help that comes with expectations of changing problematic behaviors.
Read my comment again. Many = more than a few people. Nowhere near most people. Most people are great.
However, yes, most addicts who are in the grips of addiction - not in treatment or recovery - I stand by that.
> If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
We don't agree on this point. Addiction itself is a huge barrier to the people who need help getting help, and a huge barrier to that help making any medium or long-term difference. We do not have a reliable way to fix addiction.
I admit I can't prove this, but I think it's more common that addiction causes complete collapse of everything else (job, housing, and relationships) than the other way around ("Gee, I lost my job, home, and my family and friends abandoned me -- I guess I'll just take up an expensive substance addiction").
Addiction can fixed by either:
1. An incredibly dedicated solo effort, hitting rock bottom and somehow having the personal strength left -- in a body and mind damaged by poison -- to fight it off through sheer force of will, or
2. An incredibly resource-intensive labor of love: Many people coming together to intervene, to help the addict through the most horrible experience of their life (withdrawal), and to monitor them, ideally indefinitely.
The extreme addicts I'm talking about are the ones who have generally driven their families and friends away by their behavior (frequently by lying and stealing to get money for drugs, basically proving too many times that they can't be trusted.) There aren't ever going to be enough government-funded 'surrogate friends' to help every addict in the absence of them having their own support system, which limits them to Option 1, which is wildly difficult and uncommon to happen or succeed.
The USA opioid epidemic was caused by gross government negligence and corruption. Is it really a stretch to think that a policy solution could have prevented the majority of the harm? And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
>There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
That's every scrap yard and most small businesses. Nothing makes you hate the law and it's enforcers, peddlers and proponents like being on the business end of regulations and a scrap yard probably has at least half a dozen agencies they are subject to.
Heck, I bet half of these guys would aerosolize radioactive waste out of spite if they thought the wind would blow it into a "good school district".
You need a license to sell more than $25 of copper in my state. You won’t be issued a copper selling license without holding something like a journeyman electrical worker license or similar.
In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.
Wait a second, I just realized something... how much would the station be paying in electricity to transmit at 100,000 watts 24/7 ? Their electric bill must be like $200,000 per year??
It’s 100,000 watts ERP with a 6 bay antenna. The higher gain antenna means the transmitter output power would be much less (about 35 kw), although at still extremely dangerous levels to mess with.
I'm looking for a Kalshi bet that the perp is a tweaker.
They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.