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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Apparently the tariffs are at least partially to blame.

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).

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The copper theft has been going on since well before the tariffs. For a time it was hard to find a ev charger that still had a cable in seattle, this was like pandemic era.

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.

IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money.

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.

If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/

Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.

It seems to be very easy, especially when you have a truck:

> 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.

Just because they weren't stealing bread doesn't mean they didn't have very immediate concerns they were stealing for.

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.

Its easier to steal $400 of copper and buy bread than it would be to steal $400 of bread. You don't steal high value objects because you need them, you steal high value objects because the reward is much greater while minimizing perceived or actual risk.

Desperation is a fairly subjective thing.

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.

While I agree, it also seems to me some people pay a premium to screw people over. Given two tedious, unprofitable miserable ways to turn a profit, they choose the one which lets them feel like they're ruthless bastards outsmarting the system.

Stealing a catalytic converter to sell for money cannot be equivocated to shoplifting. Plenty of shoplifters are doing it for the thrill or to obtain things that they wouldn't pay for, no one is doing that with cats, they are doing it to try and survive.

There was serious money in catalytic converter theft and an organized ring behind it raking in millions of dollars (up to $545 million) [0]. That’s not trying to survive. Since the arrest of the organizers of the ring, catalytic converter theft has fallen off significantly: without that criminal enterprise, catalytic converter theft ceased to be wildly lucrative. People who steal to survive steal essentials like food, not catalytic converters.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_...

What point are you trying to make here? We're talking about scrap metal theft. No rich person is casually stealing guard rail posts, get real. Scrap metal thieves are drug addicts who need drugs

The issue is basically this:

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?

I do enjoy this view that every poor person is out to steal your shit at any moment. It's so archaic and classist. Just neat to see someone hew to these old ways. A modern, more egalitarian view might be that the poor are just as principled as the rich and just as likely to create societies free from crime.

But this is a real throwback. Enjoyable in that respect.

More like we are all equally unprincipled when it comes to survival

Dope is probably a more likely explanation than wealth inequality for copper theft.

It's a book, the TV series is an adaptation.

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 possible an “average” president could have done OK, but I’m comparing to his predecessors.

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.

FDR was an appeasement to the business community in opposition to IWW, socialists, and communists.

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.

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An actual centrist looks a bit like Bernie Sanders. A centrist in the US is a moderate republican that "is fiscally conservative but socially liberal". Ends up looking a bit like a libertarian, so I kinda get it.

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Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

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He was an appeasement to the populists. Which is why he got a 3rd term.

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.

> (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 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.

The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated.

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.

Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me.

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?

Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.

> they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil

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.

Most modern nations have adopted national socialism as their form of government by now, haven't they?

A different us president could've blamed Russia for starting that war, could've stopped supplying Russia...

I should read the book (I’ve liked every Philip K Dick thing I’ve read), though the sets were 50% of the appeal for the TV show for me. Not sure if it pulls in the FDR subplot or not, so I cited the show.

I didn't watch more than the first season of the show... but the setting for the novel is an alternate history in the 1960's where FDR had been assassinated in the 30's (failed in our timeline) and the US was isolationist and never entered WW2 until it was conquered by Nazi Germany and Japan.

And he wrote the plot for each character by tossing coins and looking up corresponding passages in the I-Ching

> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.

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.

> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule

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.

> The New Deal delayed the recovery from the Depression to 10 years or so.

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).

Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn.

"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

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