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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> Same thing with ripping up train tracks to sell for scrap metal, which happens in some parts of the world.

This happens at times in the Netherlands too, and I bet many other affluent places, which sort of half invalidates your point. It's just theft. Theft also happens in places where most people aren't poor.

I don't know a single place in the world that managed to distribute sufficiently much wealth sufficiently evenly that crime never pays.

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Definitely. It doesn't even require poverty. I worked in film & TV on the back end. My former boss was pilfering 4/O copper wiring (I managed the stock) and trying to pin me for it. The guy made over $100K CAD a year. He wasn't suffering.

He was caught loading up his pickup before operating hours and running it to the scrap metal shop down the street.

There is nuance if you're willing to see it. That you can't get to a point where it "never pays" doesn't mean people don't become more willing to steal as situations become more desperate and vice versa. You see a lot more copper getting ripped off during a recession.

Desperate people steal food, not cooper. Turning cooper into whatever they're supposedly desperate for requires patience and business-like level of effort organization, which goes beyond what desperation can explain. People chose to steal cooper because it's likely that they will get away with it, as there isn't much security in the areas of "work" to be taken into account, and probably also (cooper being a relatively cheap commodity) because getting get caught doesn't carry that much of a penalty risk.

Selling stolen copper isn’t hard, there already is a network of scrap metal dealers that exist to purchase legitimately collected metal scrap for eventual reuse. All one needs to do is find one that’s willing to turn a blind eye to suspicious volumes, which is basically just the process of finding a fence in any other criminal enterprise. It’s not exactly rocket science.

Doing it effectively requires organization, yes. Stealing manhole covers, taking them to the forest and breaking them with a club, then selling them at the scrap yard as damaged -- only requires stupidity. Guy probably spent more on gas alone. And this actually happened if you were wondering.

People will literally rip out metal wires from reinforced brick towers making them collapse while they are still inside. You can't make this shit up.

It's not so much about poverty per se but about inequality - and there definitely is a correlation between blue collar crime and inequality: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...

Not doubting your claim, but can you link to any news articles regarding this happening in the Netherlands?

https://www.nu.nl/economie/2417355/koperdiefstal-kost-prorai...

Interesting, thanks.

Everywhere has poor people, or at least there are always people that have less than everyone else.

It happens in Poland too but it's only one ethnic group doing that, and most of them have moved to Western Europe already anyway.

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