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Comment by rpcope1 | Hacker News Reader

Something that isn't said or asked is what scrapyards are accepting these. For catalytic converters, most yards are supposed to measures in place to deter accepting stolen cats. Someone has to be seeing loads of things like statues or guardrails coming in by someone who almost certainly doesn't own them (and probably looks like it). There's financial incentive to accept anything and everything that comes in, but there needs to be more aggressive measures to punish yards that are unscrupulous and end up accepting stolen goods without a fight.

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To my understanding, stolen catalytic converters move through criminal channels until they get out of the country, are recycled, and then come back in as raw materials. At some point in the chain, they're turned from catalytic converters into bulk metal-containing ceramic powder for easier transport.

wrong, most catalytic converter theft has been laundered through legal auto parts sellers and associated companies that are breaking the law

That's a fancy way of saying "the scrap yards used to accept them, but then the states passed documentation laws, so now the thieves bring them to auto shops who pay them a lesser price and then print up some BS invoice and reciepts so that the scrap yard can feel like their ass is covered"

Source? Not disagreeing, just interested in seeing some articles that cover this/hearing personal anecdotes.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...

the wikipedia article on 2020-2022 catalytic converter theft also covers it pretty well

I don't understand how the yards will take nearly-new AC condensers and things like that. The building next door had three installed, on the ground. They were gone the first weekend. The next 3 they installed were put on the roof, and had razor wire around them.

Because some scrap yards are ran by sleezeballs that know exactly what they are doing. They know it's some methhead that stole it so they pay far below market rates then run it through a shredder to launder it.

Just store them for a while then put them on sale on ebay in a different county, they're worth more like that than their scrap value.

There's huge networks of grey market people willing to buy / install / etc "secondhand" car parts or in this case AC units.

Because that stuff comes in all the time as a result of normal business inefficiency, obviously not a whole truck load but a few wouldn't raise eyebrows and the kind of people stealing are the same kind of people scrapping the same things legitimacy so profiling only works in the most flagrant cases.

see my handle so where the fuck to start go to a bunch of scrap yards, someones "door yard", like mine, where as a matter of course, bits and chunks of most metals end up as part of building and repairing, to larger operations that are huge, fast paced with prices and markets changing by the hour, and cash is used as the entisement to get people to bring metal in on everything from bicycles to the biggest rigs on the road, a cacophany of heavy equipment like car shredders, that reduce a full sized car to hand sized bits, and seperate out the more valuable metals, and waste plastic, grrrrrank!, done it's a wild, dangerous madhouse populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers. then there are hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses that generate several hundred tons of scrap per year in acompletly normal, organized, boring fashion, except for when it gets dropped, and the expected and tolerated losses to dumpster diving. I could go into much greater detail as to how it works, the safeguards to prevent theft that are in place, but as in the case of guardrails say, the problem is that, legitimatly scrapped guardrails come in every day, or hyway crews just leave crash damaged ones lay beside the hyway when they fix the rails, 1 they are too busy, and 2 they know the bent ones spontainoiusly disapear, the scraped one is worth $17.26......nobody is doing extra paper work for that, right we are talking millions of tons pe anum of material moved in a completly random ad hock manner, dont take it the wrong way, but... go the fuck ahead bub, you fix it I'll watch

A couple presses of the enter key would greatly improve the readability of your comment.

But would it have properly communicated their manic energy?

Thank you! I first dismissed the post as badly edited, but it's a masterpiece!

Three, four sentences.

I brought all the rabbit in from a big union data center job in Texas, over a decade ago. We had spent weeks installing thousands feet of 500kcm (that's a THICK wire) and I brought in trashcans full of bare bright.

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.

> 500kcm

"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.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_mil

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).

If a cmil has a diameter of one thousandt (mil) of an inch, then a kcmil (kilo=1000) has a diameter of 1 inch? 500kcmil has a diameter of 500inch? Which is about 10 meter??

Yeah I'm an engineer but this must be wrong.

This is incorrect. Please see the wikipedia link, above.

Yes, but that's what makes it even more cursed. SI prefixes normally bind tighter than exponents, so km² = (km)² = (1000 m) * (1000 m) = 1 million m², not 1000 m². Meanwhile kcm applies the prefix last - so it's off by three orders of magnitude from the normal way.

I recently saw the much simpler but still deeply, viscerally upsetting unit of length ∛tsp

Almost 3/4 in

Next time just call the metal recycler and have them pick up from you! Never had an issue and we’re usually recycling several thousand pounds of copper wire at a time.

We had a similar thing replacing a radiator in our house years ago. We asked the plumber what to do with the old one, and he said "leave it on the street and it will be gone by the morning". He was true to his word and the magic scrap metal fairies came overnight to take it away.

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This is intensely pedantic.

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No, we don’t want that energy on HN, please.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances... They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry! I'm quite new here, so I guess I don't have the rules internalized. Thank you for the reminder.

All good, thanks for the reply!

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