Internet outage affected nearly 30k people after Oakland fiber cable was shot

Isn't the purpose of planter boxes to grow living things?

Plants are living things.

Or a human who is tired of his small children picking up literal cat feces from the feral cat who is pooping in their planters. I would recommend looking up Toxoplasma Gondii.

You can also enjoy this classic comic to help re-align you on how many birds cats kill: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

Shooting an animal is only "cruelty" in the legal definition. People shoot and trap animals all the time without being psychopaths.

Wisconsin generally allows any land owner to shoot/trap coyote, beaver, fox, raccoon, woodchuck, rabbit, and squirrel.

I do agree pellets are mostly cruel for a creature that size since they don’t ensure a clean and quick kill.

You will find that people who grew up on farms or just in the country have a very different definition of "cruelty to animals". Shooting a pest animal is just a Tuesday. Not worth mentioning or remembering. Doing it with the pellet gun instead of the .22 or shotgun is because you were feeling magnanimous that day, or you sold out and moved to the 'burbs but still don't want pests wrecking your stuff, and don't want to risk discharging a real firearm. A cat that you don't have around on purpose very well may qualify as a pest animal. Know how people complain about outdoor cats killing enormous numbers of birds? You got a bird feeder or birdhouse, and a cat is hanging around it, that's a pest animal. Got chickens, or other fowl, same ("how will a cat kill a chicken?" Well, 1. you'd be surprised, and 2. most people keep chicks inside but juvenile chickens exist and tend to live outdoors). Just prefer not to have wild predators spreading disease to your own pets or livestock, same. That it only got a pellet means this is its lucky day. Blame the people who keep breeding more damn cats than the world needs, or assholes who abandon their pets if they decide they don't want them. Listen to Bob Barker, folks.

... that out of the way, there are way too many people who do shoot stuff, and even animals, that they have no reason to and probably shouldn't, for fun. Some may be psychopaths, but I'd bet most are just actual card-carrying morons with poor impulse control. All are best avoided.

Neighbor had 16k in damage from the raccoon living under porch. Found a screen into crawl space, destroyed water pipes, flooded crawl space and caused extensive water damage to flooring. Gut and remodel bathroom and adjoining wall.

Feral cats are absolutely wrecking bird populations. They are legitimate pests.

It's definitely not the second-most common pistol round, especially in crime. It's way below .22LR and 9mm. Might even be below .380 ACP, .38 Special, and .25 ACP too. The guns used in crime are quite different than the guns preferred by the enthusiast community -- they're generally older, smaller, and cheaper.

It’s almost a daily occurrence around where I live in the San Francisco Outer Sunset suburbs.

It may be normal, but it’s still poor engineering practice.

So, I got interested, and I took some time and asked around and did some research.

According to somebody on /r/Grid_Ops, normal practice is for every single electrical substation to have redundant incoming feeds.

PG&E's "Local Capacity Area Substation List" lists 33 substations in Oakland. Wikipedia says that the population of Oakland is 440,000. So that's about 13,500 subscribers per substation (rounding up). I imagine the size varies, and some of those substations are probably dedicated to big industrial users. So let's say the bigger ones are more than double the average size and serve 30,000 subscribers.

That means that the utility is, in fact, providing redundant transmission lines at the scale of 30,000 subscribers. In fact, on the average they're probably providing redundancy at a much smaller scale than that. That's in spite of the fact that electrical power line redundancy is many times more expensive than data line redundancy. Running a 115kV feed for a substation is a whole different kind of project from running a fiber bundle.

But we're not done. That 30,000 is what you'd lose if the whole substation went out, but a substation is much better protected than a cable. To get to something comparable to this fiber case, we need to ask how many people losing any single cable might take out. That's much less than 30,000 or even 13,500, because a substation has a lot more than one downstream line, and those downstream lines are independent of one another. Losing any one of them doesn't knock out every subscriber of the substation.

I'm still unsure about that number, but from what I've seen it looks like it'd be more like 5000 at the absolute maximum, if a line got hit right next to the substation. If it got hit after some branching had happened, it would be much less than that.

It's less clear, but another person on /r/Grid_Ops suggested that they'd think of anything over 15MW as a "major outage", in a context that seemed to imply that "major outages" were the sort of thing you'd expect to have redundancy to prevent. I'm again not completely sure, but I get the impression that that's around 3000 residential subscribers.

So, no, it is not "normal" for "any type of infrastructure" service not to have redundancy for three densely populated square miles.

lol, the car metaphor again.

That came from the guy who thought the next big thing is talking paperclips, right?

Terminal velocity. What is that going to hurt?

And lethal, as with this senseless death a few weeks ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/21/british-man-...

And before that https://www.wired.com/2009/04/cable-sabotage/

> It was fiber optic cable so you can't blame copper theft as the motive, sabotage was clearly intended.

It very well could be. But, people who steal things often do so hastily.

that must be a west coast thing then, because here in the Mid-West where corn out numbers people I do not see any sign's shot up... Teen Pranks of Spray painting a 1 in front of the 60 on a speed limit is about is far is I have seen

When we go plinking here we are shooting cans, jugs, and other trash. Not road signs, and power cables

Glorious.

Maybe it's a West Coast thing.

In most of the south, besides maybe Austin or Atl, we ain't got no fiber to be shootin'.

> In 25 cities, such as Denver and Oakland, officials moved to remove police from schools, saving an additional $34m.

I take the "saving" money as a form of "defunding" the police (as the defunding isnt actually the point, but the redirection of resources toward better applications and away from racially unequal applications)

We're generally agreeing here.