Infrastructure things related to water pipes (at the buildings level) gets stolen, too (happened in my building recently). Everything that can be resold as raw materials gets stolen.
I think the cables are of variable thickness. Thicker at the shore and in areas there is higher risk for damage because of rocks etc, and thinner where it's deeper and flatter.
I was just arguing it wasn't unreasonable for telegraph skeptics to believe vandalism would be common.
We still have bikes though.
In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA funded IPv4, and for exactly this reason.
The comment you're replying to:
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
Is, in fact, about the telegraph network. Thus your objection to it is bootless, because it isn't true about the telegraph network, which is the topic of that comment. The fact that it's true of other things doesn't really matter, because most wrong statements might be correct if made about some other topic.
Here is different, if you don't think a subthread is interesting instead of telling people they are talking about the wrong thing, just scroll down. You can skip it entirely.
It turns out that empirically, in every area, such '1 person' risks are very low, even though theoretically it sometimes seems likely to us.
For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a political/social movement (or set of movements) that require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it is very much against our nature to do such things. We are social creatures that live in groups and work together, and have been for millions of years. That's how we survive and thrive.
It would take '1 person' to drive their car over a busy sidewalk or to push you into traffic, but I don't worry about it when I'm waiting to cross a busy street. It would take one to poison your dinner or push you off a cliff when hiking or set a bear trap in a park ... . You can come up with endless scenarios. (And yes, with 7+ billion people in the world, even with very low odds you can find examples.)
Come to think of it, I can't think of other animals that do such things either, including non-social animals.
Almost everything we do, we do in groups trusting each other. It's deeply ingrained human nature.
Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they steal the baby Jesus.
If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage.
It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)
The last mile usually isn't, but recent events have shown that even cutting several cables doesn't have any noticeable impact on international traffic patterns: https://blog.cloudflare.com/resilient-internet-connectivity-...
I'm actually much more concerned about e.g. a logical attack against Cloudflare, which could actually bring down tons of services globally.
it’s been 10 years, and you think it’d be easier to catch someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance advances to protect infrastructure assets but there’s really only so much unknown you can protect yourself from.
so does that make someone stupid because they're not an evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the world burn?
One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin cities for everyone else is because of the charitable take.
In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying things the majority relies on just for fun.
There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people acting evil and there's zero reason to attribute intelligence where there's typically close to none.
Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.
TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.
Because I had this epiphany about how we lead such passive lives, complying with the rules of the system around us.