Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
laist.com
laist.com
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.
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".
Nobody can take a fascism joke these days. For some reason.
The you can send the copper thieves to work in the copper mines. That’s killing two birds with one stone right there!
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And he wrote the plot for each character by tossing coins and looking up corresponding passages in the I-Ching
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.
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).
"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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_...
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?
But this is a real throwback. Enjoyable in that respect.
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.
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.
That feels like a polite fiction to me. Every cable thief presents themselves that way.
Recycling old cables is probably valuable, in isolation, but not when this can occur.
It seems hard to compare the value of material goods against the stream of time.
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.
Three, four sentences.
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).
Yeah I'm an engineer but this must be wrong.
There's huge networks of grey market people willing to buy / install / etc "secondhand" car parts or in this case AC units.
the wikipedia article on 2020-2022 catalytic converter theft also covers it pretty well
Railroad wiring is a common target too of course.
Guardrails seem to be immune here though.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/copper-wire-theft-l...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no idea how none of them have died yet, as frequently as this seems to occur.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of a cable, an electric bolt of air-cooled plasma wirelessly charges the car.
(/s)
It's just that property crimes are not prosecuted around here. So there's no downside for thieves.
At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.
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.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
A second hand iPhone is only worth a few tens of dollars on the black market, but that's enough for the next hit.
or, is it just because apple is a jerk and wants all repairs to be done by apple?
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
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?
It would seem like sitting on a large inventory of scrap metal would be a dumb way to run a "drug house".
https://www.stihlusa.com/products/cut-off-machines/battery-c...
(no affiliation, I just like the tool)
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...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-05/historic...
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).
Fentanyl and cheap battery powered tools
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I know that's not what you meant, it sounds like he was fine until emergency services decided to teach him a lesson ;)
This is likely less than minimum wage for huge amounts of property damage.
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.
so more deposit than recycling for metal.
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.
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.
I'd be interested to see what the alleged reason for this is.
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,"
They seem to be very expensive.
One of the top comments was: "This would get stolen in [American city] in 1 day."
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/Albuquerque/comments/1fakprt/watche...
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....
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
Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.
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
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.
What you can do is make it illegal to buy particular materials, and then the intent to break that law becomes obvious.
You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.
now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.
It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.
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.
In addition to basically no consequences for US police breaking the law, there are actually zero consequences to them not doing their jobs.
It's really sad some people can't find employment more gainful than scrapping highway guardrails.
Properly tax rich people (again), make politicians act in good faith again, actually care for regular people, and things will improve.
(And yes, I’m from a third world country lol)
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.
> 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.”
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.
Why the fuck was "LAist" getting federal funding? Glad they're not anymore.