One person digging for copper took the whole of Armenia offline:
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.
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.
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.
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.