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Comment by nbf_1995 | Hacker News Reader

nbf_1995

It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no? The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap. Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field. You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.

Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper. The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.

The best reasoning they give is that California has insane permitting requirements, and it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.

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Anecdotally speaking, I have heard of a massive California solar farm in an undeveloped area that has serious vandalism problems. Junkies will find ways through the fencing at night, strip copper and other materials from panels, and cause thousands in damages and lost energy just to extract enough scrap for a fix.

Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals, so there it is a challenging cost-benefit balance. At least panels in parking lots and other developed spaces have the benefit of witnesses. I'm sure a 20 foot climb up a steel beam over running water is a decent deterrent as well.

> Anecdotally speaking

First hand experience here - worked with a non-profit that has a tiny solar and battery installation for a light display, and we have had constant theft and vandalism problems with it. It's not even easy to get to - those meth-heads had to work to steal the lead acid batteries and copper wire...

Several years ago one of the local youth sports complex was limited to daylight use because the copper would get stolen from the light poles. This was a large complex with many light poles. Within a week of them being fixed, they'd come and steal the new copper. I never did follow up to see what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.

> what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.

https://youtu.be/PfHu-UJaK0Q?is=bp0HygfjqBJBDpoO

There are large, large stretches of highway near me that’re all but pitch black at night because people have stolen copper from the light poles. It’s only getting worse.

Is this in California? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in Texas.

Kind of a different point, but I never saw it in my neck of the woods either because there was no lighting in the first place.

In a just society the penalties for that behavior would be commiserate with the societal costs. Even if the single act is relatively low cost, the societal-wide implication means no one can reasonably do this at a small scale without losing their investment. Therefore the penalties should be harsh, widely publicized, and extreme

This I believe is part of why forgery is dealt with so harshly, copying a few thousand bucks isn’t a big deal but destroying the integrity of hard currency is.

I always thought the same logic should be applied to corruption by any kind of official. No matter if politician, judge or police officer - their crimes should be punished 10- or even 100-fold because the real damaged is undermining the entire system.

The system being protected in nations today is the pay-for-play,

not “do the right thing for society”.

Such a society would pay a whole lot more attention to white-collar financial and environmental crimes than to anything all the motivated junkies in the country could wreak.

Then you stack the courts with bent judges. I mean, what's the point of taking all that money if it doesn't get you what you want?

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.

This kind of thing is why Dirty Harry style crime-punishment-porn exists.

Maybe I'm missing context from your locality, but you think the meth heads tried to sell gasoline on the sidewalk, and not that the shadiest shop in town paid some people to drum up business?

I've met enough to know that selling sidewalk gas is totally an option in their mind.

You'd be amazed at how many fences are out there and what they will accept

Never attribute to malice… etc.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply to acts of clear malice.

Apparently the definition of clear is debatable here? It’s ridiculous to think a mechanic would pay people to damage gas tanks in the hopes of drumming up business.

There used to be a house opposite me in Chicago that was a big crack/meth dealer. They would accept literally anything as payment. People would turn up there all day long with storage totes filled with random crap. The crap would be picked through, narcotics exchanged and then the rest thrown out the back. It was an excellent source for storage totes, though I sometimes had to retrieve my trash can from there as they would steal half a dozen of them every week to put all their leftover crap into.

Good to see your comment as always.

I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.

You in a decent spot now?

In the middle of nowhere! Pretty quiet now. Miss the craziness from time-to-time :) Hope everything is good with you.

the same thing happens in my area where there's a lot of car/RV homeless. If you take a look and think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that they're definitely not driving a decrepit 1980s winnebago to a gas station and paying $5/gal for gas to run their heat and generators.

> Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns.

We do. Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

The problem will solve itself in a few weeks. Hang the fences, and the thieves will starve. It's both way easier to go after them, and they have something to lose if they don't follow the law.

> Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?

How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?

Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?

If it's a scrapper willing to buy sketchy sourced copper, they'll be the type that pays the least for it.

Is that actually helpful or does it just cause the addicts to commit twice as many thefts?

Perhaps we should pay them more instead?

Probably more efficient to lower the cost of the drugs.

You may have missed my sarcasm.

There is a very strong link with higher prices for copper with more wire theft, as anyone would expect. You pay more for it you get more of it.

There is a strong link between lower fentanyl prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.

They don't need to know if something was stolen. All they need to do is require an ID, not pay in cash, and pay 30 days after receiving the merchandise.

At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else because the repeat players resent having 30 days worth of interest stolen from them every month and the one-time sellers don't trust an IOU from a company they've never done business with before.

Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.

You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.

> At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else

Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).

Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions (which make up the overwhelming, massive majority of legitimate trade in this space), but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.

> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs

Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.

The engine block in an old car blew up so I ripped it completely apart and sold the parts online and in person to various people. I tried to sell my own catalytic converter to a shop I found online that was some kind of on-the-up-and-up licensed buyer.

What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.

I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.

I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.

Some states (Alabama, for instance, as I'm told by a contractor business operator friend who lives in it), requires you to either have a receipt from a licensed contractor who replaced whatever you're scrapping, or a business license to sell scrap copper.

I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.

FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.

requiring some kind of license doesn't really fix the problem of theft at all. it just adds layers of middlemen to collect up the copper from the layer below and further legitimize it. so it does reduce the street price for stolen copper, but since copper and stolen bikes (which also have almost no value now) are one of the few income sources available, it could conceivably increase the volume of stolen copper.

The middleman need to be doing incredible volume for it to be worth the margin and the risk, and finding and shutting them down is very easy, because:

- They are trivial to find, because they need a large, physical, business presence. This sort of trade doesn't happen under a highway overpass, or in an alley off 3rd.

- There are paper trails that point to them from any legitimate businesses upstream of them.

- Anyone lower in the criminal chain will happily flip on them.

Is argument over this an example of learned helplessness, a desire for society to do nothing and declare failure, or just arguing for the sake of contrarianism?

We have evidence of trying it with catalytic converters, and it worked. Catching every thief is hard. Catching one thief, and having them point to their fence is easy.

no, its not really learned helplessness, and I don't know the industry that well, but I move a certain amount of scrap and there's methheads all over the neighborhood where I work. once they started being more careful at the scrapyard the tweakers started selling their copper to a guy I call 'mr froggy'. he's around a lot of the time, and he's a larger scale copper thief. I don't know who mr froggy sells to.

> And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.

Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.

> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product

The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?

Very, very few people who aren’t a licenced scrapyard, auto repair shop, junkyard, etc need to scrap catalytic converters.

In my state, if you do, you can present your car title for the vehicle it came from to an auto dealer who can take it off your hands.

99,999% of people won't pull their car apart to sell the parts individually. We just take the whole car to the scrap yard.

So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.

> Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else.

So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.

> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.

Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular problem, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.

This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.

> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.

They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?

And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.

Street dealers aren't laundering their money through running an Albuquerque car wash.

In CA we had a clothes dryer motor replaced. As a result we were left with the old part.

I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.

California’s tried cracking down on catalytic converter theft with significant measures. (I think a legitimate scrapyard would have to do a bunch of paperwork to buy a cat.) Anyone know the outcomes?

There was a nationwide catalytic converter theft ring for the first few years of the pandemic. Junkies around the country would steal cats and ship them off to New Jersey. The ringleader pleaded guilty last year: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...

I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.

Seems trivial to just AirTag a few car parts and follow the thieves to their warehouse, doesn't it?

How do you guarantee the tagged parts are the ones to get stolen? Tangentially, there was a theft ring caught like this but IIRC it was power tools.

My state used a few undercover cops to start fencing (not actually) stolen cats to scrapyards, identified scrapyards that would knowingly take stolen property, and then turned a few of the employees / owners of such places into CIs. Eventually a large nationwide ring was found.

No way. Was this is Canada? Specifically in the upper interior of BC, during ski season? Either we know each other, or drilling holes in gasoline tanks is way more widespread. I have never heard of another instance of this happening, ever.

Happened right here too: thieves opened up man hole covers in city parks and took the wires. The city now has large boulders right over those man hole covers...

why not switch to aluminum? I believe most building codes allow aluminum conductors.

Aluminum has a lot of weird strict rules. It is cheaper, but the labor is more expensive. You can slap copper together quick and it will be safe and work perfectly fine for decades - there is no real world advantage to doing any better. For Al you need to take a lot more care to follow the rules or you have a fire in a few years.

Al is typically used for the large wires - the cost of the wires makes it worth the extra labor. For your typical house though the cost of labor is more than the wires, so Al is more expensive than copper.

Does the labor actually cost more? It's not that much extra work to use a torque driver and some anti-ox paste. If anything I'd expect buying aluminum rated terminations and outlets would be the biggest additional cost. Might be a little harder to pull aluminum with the larger diameter I suppose.

Why can't we aim these meth supervillians at the surveillance cameras then?

they're hitting those too to be fair. In South America its a big problem in communities that are really poor. The components of even CCTV cameras are so valuable that surveillance cameras get taken down almost immediately

I’ve heard in some places it’s hard to keep light bulbs in stairwells.

Bulbs get taken from stairwells, because someone needed them. Sand, gravel, slabs, pipes disappear from construction storage and when you look around a neighbour's yard looks a lil snazzier than it did the week before.

It's a mix between culture and poverty. In high trust society much fewer people would consider taking that material fair.

I’m willing to bet if we gave them their fix they wouldn’t steal a thing. But because their fix is illegal they have to steal to get their fix.

Seems to me like the root cause is the illegality of the drugs. I hope you never have to deal with substance abuse problems yourself. You won’t like being on the dehumanizing end of the stick that you’re presently poking with.

If you're going to give junkies their fix, are you going to buy my alcohol too? What about my gambling debts? What about my escort bill for my sex addiction? Shy are you differentiating addiction to drugs?

Someone with heavy, habitual alcohol use can still get drunk on $20 of alcohol. Someone with a heavy opiate habit may spend hundreds of dollars a day on drugs just to maintain. A habituated opiate user could also get through the day with $20 worth of drugs if we allowed opiates to be produced and sold like alcohol, but we don't. So the unemployed junkie needs to beg or steal a lot more than the unemployed alcoholic to get their fix. That's why the parent comment highlighted "illegality of the drugs" as the cause.

If you think an alcoholic stops drinking when they get drunk, then it sounds to me like you don't really understand alcoholism

I think you missed the posters point. I just checked prices on a store nearby and for the cheap Vodka you can buy a handle which is ~40 drinks for $12. So basically no matter how extreme for $20 you can buy more alcohol than pretty much any human could consume in a day.

Sex addiction isn't a real thing.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-014-0016-8

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

Junkies and meth-heads are a different kind of animal from your average drunk, and the reality of the proposal that you responded to is a simple economic analysis of investing in keeping them placated or paying for the damage they cause. It's far cheaper to prevent rather than react and repair.

If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.

I don't have anything to add, other than my appreciation for this comment. Glad I'm not the only one here that gets it.

Ending the war on drugs doesn't mean making all drugs legal. It means removing the stigma and jail time for people who use drugs.

Some drugs are genuinely dangerous. Many are addictive and will damage the quality of one's life, even if buying and using the drug isn't illegal. Normalizing addiction to drugs as a regular, normal, accepted part of everyday life is not the answer.

I'm advocating for all drugs to be legal -- regulated and taxed.

Keeping them illegal does not "protect" anyone and just creates more crime, death, and misery. You've swallowed the propaganda -- it was never about protecting people, it was designed for oppression and it's wildly successful at that.

Take a look at any video of police busting people for drugs: does it look like they're trying to help those poor innocent victims or are they gleefully enjoying their ability to completely fuck with those people in the name of "protecting" them?

The fact that drugs are still such a problem despite countless billions of dollars shows that it's never going to work in the way that they promise.

Drug addiction is a health issue, not a crime. My brother died of a heroin overdose and the law did not help him and the fact that the only resources public money went to were jails and prisons vs clinics shows where the priorities lie.

Feel free to read up on the truth of this matter: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/race...

No, you misunderstand, which means I didn't communicate it well: The problem is that the drugs are illegal. I would make them legal so they could be purchased from a pharmacy. The problem with junkies stealing to get their fix is that they're already criminals for the addiction and already people without support in society. So straight up stealing copper from wherever isn't really a big deal. You're already a criminal. You're already halfway down that slippery slope.

But there was a world in which junkies existed when the junk wasn't criminal. People had serious addictions, but kept normal lives, because their addiction wasn't criminal. I'm not trying to solve addiction. I'm trying to end the criminality for substance abuse.

And to answer, no, buy your own booze. Cover your own debts, gambling or otherwise. Sex addiction is made up bullshit. I don't need to differentiate because I am not trying to solve that problem.

I suppose you'd agree that some drugs will actually hamper one's ability to function as a productive member of society, whether or not it is illegal; for example, heroin. So if heroin was legal and you could buy it at the pharmacy, and you become addicted and you lose your job and alienate your friends and family, why wouldn't you also end up stealing copper? Maybe heroin being illegal would have made that trajectory one step shorter, but I don't see the story changing fundamentally.

Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?

> Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?

This can be done by going after suppliers.

There's non-trivial elements to this, otherwise we (I'm not American or in America, but many of the problems are broader) would have already done it.

Off the top of my head (and it will go much deeper): if all vendors are punished then the price remains high ("the iron law of prohibition") -> so you need the government to supply it to avoid dealers getting dollar signs in their eyes at the potential income -> the government must not promote it as part of this -> I'd say "medical prescriptions", but that's from a bias to my experience growing up in the UK where we don't have all the "talk to your doctor about ${pharmaceutical_brand}" ads I hear about in the USA -> would the USA even be able to pass laws preventing this, or is that a 1st Amendment problem?

Fundamentally I disagree. Specifically about heroin, because that is the junk I am referring to specifically. It does not follow that legal heroin leads to job loss, alienation, etc. Because those are social penalties applied by pious douchebags who wish to punish the addicted.

Perhaps give the book “Chasing the Scream” a read. It is eye opening and respectfully, you seem to need that.

We do have a legitimate interest in making sure people don’t ever take that hit. BUT .. in the USA punishments take precedent over everything. Because we’re cunts from what I can tell.

> It does not follow that legal heroin leads to job loss, alienation, etc. Because those are social penalties applied by pious douchebags who wish to punish the addicted.

I follow what you're saying, that the downsides of drug addiction outside of the user's own body is imposed by the people around them. I suppose that's almost definitionally true. I and many people do in fact find it unpleasant to be around people who are high out of their minds. I do not wish to associate with such people while they're in that state. I do not think that society would be better off with more of them, so I would prefer that society actively disincentivize such behavior. And you could certainly make the argument that this is the same thing as wanting punishment.

But if you're making the argument that being high on drugs might lead a user to job loss organically, I find that hard to believe. What if I didn't even know what heroin was, and saw that an employee was nodding off on the job? Wouldn't I be inclined to fire him?

I also find it unpleasant to be around people when they're high out of their minds. But the way society chooses to disincentivize a thing matters. What we presently choose is absolutely a punishment, and a cruel one. People who are addicts aren't partying anymore. They're broken inside, broken spiritually. You seek that solace because something happened and you're dealing with it alone.

On a purely human level we should all want to help someone like that. But we choose to turn a blind eye, criminalize their actions, break them further. Because it's uncomfortable right? To have to be a person and help someone else? Isn't it a lot easier to, say, throw them in jail?

I'm confused by your final statement. If you saw an employee nodding off on the job and ended up firing them, wouldn't that be job loss organically? I'm not sure how to respond to that? I don't think I'm making that argument though -- I'm saying it's possible to hold down some kinds of jobs while being a junkie. You're not running at full capacity but you can still do something -- so long as you aren't in jail.

I'll say this though: I am not against social consequences for drug addiction. You kinda need that to get clean? But it doesn't have to be criminal. It could be more like: when it's discovered you're using a drug, you're mandated to get it from the state while attending counseling, you have to check in with some state agency, etc. As opposed to: right to jail. Perhaps that's entirely too empathetic?

Or you could give them an option of treatment instead of jail.

No differentiation here, alcohol is widely available from legal sources and very affordable compared to illegal drugs.

I come from a country with social healthcare, and here we also heavily subsidize drugs for people who need them because of their own lifestyle choices, e.g. diabetes medicine due to obesity. Why do people who have become addicted to psychoactive drugs not deserve the same compassion?

Obesity is a bit more complicated than "lifestyle choice"; I don't think it's worth engaging with your question without you understanding that.

So is drug addiction, and that's my point.

You can become addicted if you're mom is a junkie. You can become addicted from scripts given to you by Dr.Feelgood. There are many ways of becoming an addict without waking up one day and deciding "I'm going to become an addict today".

Exactly, noone decides to become an addict, it's a long sequence of lines that are crossed until you find you crossed one that would seem unthinkable before. You also don't become obese from one day to the other, and I genuinely also don't think that it's peoples own fault.

I am frankly appalled by the absence of compassion towards other people in this thread.

The root cause is all the people addicted to drugs. We are never going to entirely stamp out addiction, but certainly there are structural things we can do with our society to make it less common, and make it easier for people to get out of that situation.

I don't think dangerous, addictive drugs should be legalized, or available to buy at pharmacies. People who traffic in these sorts of drugs should be jailed.

But possession and use should be decriminalized. People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

Ultimately, a healthy society that actually takes care of the people who live in it will have fewer people getting into addictive drugs in the first place. That's a huge lift, though, unfortunately: fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way.

> fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way

On food insecurity: the five states that are the least food-insecure are a swing state, two solid red states, and two solid blue states[0].

On housing insecurity: the states with the most affordable homes (median house price to median income ratio, or share of income spent on housing) are for the most part solid red states[1]. I would wager this is largely due to stronger private property rights in red states that make it easier for supply to rise to meet demand and establish a better-functioning rental market[2].

Let's not make the mistake of judging politicians and government programs by their stated intent and not their factual outcomes. Whether someone "wants to" fix society in one way or another is very, very far removed from whether it actually gets fixed under their leadership. Plenty of times in history, the problem actually got worse!

On income and wealth inequality: unfortunately, these things cannot be fixed except by fixing the fact that different people have different abilities, talents, preferences, and tastes, and some of those differences include the ability to make money and build wealth. Nobody would look at me and think I have an equal chance of making it in the NBA as, say, the guys in this picture[3], but for some reason we're supposed to believe that when it comes to the skills of moneymaking and wealth-building, anyone is about as good as anyone else.

[0]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/food...

[1]: https://www.affordabilityindex.org/rankings/states/, https://www.businessinsider.com/every-state-ranked-by-housin...

[2]: In parts of California, tenancy laws are so insane that it could take a landlord over a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to evict a nonpaying tenant. There's a whole cottage industry of landlords paying those same nonpaying tenants good money to just leave quietly. If you had property to rent, how much extra money would you charge to compensate for this risk?

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft#/media/File:NBA_Draf...

Red v. Blue is not the issue here. Neither of those parties is doing much to combat inequality. You should be comparing the USA to countries that actually try (or have historically tried) to combat inequality and social precarity, like Switzerland, or the Scandinavian countries.

> People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

I agree with you, but it's worth spelling out exactly why. Philosophically, prison has one of three purposes: protecting society, rehabilitation, or punishment.

If the sentence for use is anything less than spending the rest of your life in jail, then society isn't really protected from addicts; the recidivist rate is too high. Get out, steal again for the next high, rinse and repeat through the revolving door.

Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts. Leaving aside drug smuggling into prisons, getting people past the withdrawal period is the "easy" part of rehab, the real work is in therapy, developing better relationship models, better boundaries, better strategies for the triggers that drove people to look for a high. It's very, very difficult to facilitate that in prison.

Finally, it's debatable whether prison is actually punishment for addicts. If they keep access to drugs through the people who smuggle them into prisons, and the prison pays for meals and a roof that were often lacking for the addict on the street, then, is it really a punishment?

> Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts.

IMO, prison makes it worse. Once an addict gets out, it is much harder to go back into regular society. Getting a job, etc., after prison is harder which leads to despair and back to drugs.

Right, this is why a real war on drugs would use social workers, not police, as its soldiers. But they are underpaid, so there are hardly enough of them to be effective.

I would love to see more project specs call for aluminum cable. For a given ampacity, it’s lighter, cheaper and more flexible than copper.

The major downsides are that the exposed wire is much less corrosion resistant underground (which is irrelevant) and that you need appropriate lugs. But standard lugs can easily be purchased in aluminum-compatible variants at no additional cost.

There are downsides though, alu wiring breaks over time when exposed to any kind of stress and the connections loosen and have to be re-checked periodically.

I think you even need to be careful about working Al too much during installation. it will bend in one direction just fine, and even back another direction, but after that cracks are going to start developing.

The 1960s called; they want their trailer fires back.

Not really. The 1960s used small-gauge aluminum wire with inappropriate alloys and inappropriate connectors. The modern stuff doesn’t have the same problems.

Aluminum wire is completely safe these days. Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.

There was an issue with aluminum wire and terminations, the wiring devices and breakers used for copper only wire didn’t work with aluminum (wrong coefficient of expansion of the metal where the terminations were made) and caused arcing and fires. Once the termination points were made out of an alloy that worked with both Cu/Al, it’s been safe to use.

> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.

I agree with your general point, but be a bit careful here.

> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.

It’s true that, for a little over 50 years, the UL has regulated what devices may “accept” Al wire. But devices have had markings suggesting use of Al wire for longer than that, and it was quite unwise:

https://inspectapedia.com/aluminum/Aluminum_Wiring_Repair_CO...

Don’t get caught up in all the discussion of repair devices — AIUI this article is mostly about “repair” of old pre-8000-series Al wire. You can’t buy that stuff any more. As far as I know, modern Al listed building wire is only sold in 8 AWG and up, and this stuff doesn’t need “repair”: it’s perfectly fine in any appropriately listed connector.

Ah I see what you’re referring to.

I was taught that the safe way to keep using the old pre-8000 series wire is to use the specific listed fittings for this purpose (WAGO 221 series nuts are fit for purpose) with contact paste and a copper pigtail that connects to the device.

I assume you mean 222, and Wago's have earned a reputation for working themselves loose after enough years rather randomly to the point some reputable electrician outfits here won't use them. I would not bother with pre-8000 wire at all in thinner gauges (10 and thinner).

Alum wire isn't any safer than it used to be. It's just banned by the electrical code to use it in many applications, and elsewise the requirements to be UL listed to take Al wire are lot more stringent than they used to be.

The cost of copper for house wiring is not significant (if it were, every spec home builder would be wiring houses with #12 gauge Al instead of #14 Cu) until you get into thicker gauge stuff, and that's almost always Al anyway.

>Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals

Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?

I can only imagine why?

It’s only US states that don’t arrest people for stealing that have this issue

Not true that it's limited to certain states. It's a nationwide problem, according to AT&T.

https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention

Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...

Extra data point - Oklahoma is top five in the country for incarceration rate, too.

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/crime/copper-theft-disrupt...

Happens a lot in Texas too.

Sadly, the US is not alone here.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...

No, this is becoming widespread. The Brazilfication of the first world has largerly accelerated in the last few years.

You violently punish a few of the thieves and problem solved. Why have other countries solved this problem yet america pretends there isn't a gigantic Solve Problem button that is yet to be pressed? Just cane thieves! Imagine how beautiful our country could be.

These thieves are probably drug addicts and have mental health problems. The “violent punishment” (I think you mean capital punishment) is not going to be a deterrent for them, unlike for normal people who can still think with normal risk-reward calculus.

Ah man, I guess we can’t do anything then.

yeah, except throw a tantrum and the towel in

You can violently punish the buyers instead. These 'businessmen' can do the risk-reward calculus of being shut down. Use civil forfeiture and the varied and interesting arsenal of tools available to government.

Punishment isn't just about deterrent. An equal and perhaps more important part of it is incapacitation; the criminal, while incarcerated, cannot inflict more harm upon the public.

America locks up more people per capita than basically any country on earth, so your theory that this is easily prevented by harsh penalties doesn’t make sense.

Or, you view them as human beings who are desperate and try to help them instead, and probably save money in the process? People who find themselves addicted to opioids or other drugs would not have to steal copper in the first place if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave.

> if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave

What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?

> probably save money in the process

That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.

This is a good question. Off the top of my head:

* Less crime because people who are addicted to drugs do not have to raise instant money for their next fix,

* Getting open, visible drug use off the streets and into a controlled supervised setting (this is not strictly part of safe supply though, but an orthogonal related service),

* Making drug use safer for the users by ensuring quality and consistent strength. Fentanyl, orphines and nitazenes are killing lots of people, and they exist on the market not because of demand from the users but because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture and smuggle than heroin.

* Making it easier to help the drug user by removing the burden and stress of obtaining the drugs. This is often an endless cycle of stress which leaves no room for getting help.

* Making it possible for drug users to be functional members of society. Not all people who are addicted to drugs need to stop, for some the safer choice is to accept that they are dependent and work around it. Taking opioids to prevent withdrawal is not incompatible with holding a job and contributing to society, committing crimes to get money for the next fix is. For many people who are addicted to opioids, abstinence programs are not the best option because the rate of falling back to using is very high, and once that happens the risk of fatal overdose is also very high due to decreased tolerance. I won't quote concrete numbers because I cannot remember them right now, but last I heard the rate of failure in abstinence programs was well above 70%.

* By supplying the drugs from sources that have no financial incentive in keeping the drug users on the drugs, you can ensure that users are exposed to all public offers to get help with their addiction or any underlying socioeconomic factors that are probably contributing to why they have become addicted in the first place.

Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate. I believe that to be true, and I think that a much better way is to address the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime. It doesn't mean that we should stop at the safe supply, because that would indeed be the cynical approach, we of course also have to help people overcome all the problems that are probably keeping them in their drug addiction, such as mental health issues and homelessness.

> Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate

Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.

And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.

To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.

> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime

From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.

The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.

The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.

One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.

But shouldn't that be coupled with mandatory de-addiction program participation? Otherwise, how does the problem end?

We have to address the root causes of drug use and addiction and ultimately accept that current addicts may stay that way, but over time we have fewer people becoming addicts.

Wouldnt you have more drug addicts since the option of dropping out of society to do free drugs all day is made more appealing?

You'd think reducing crime and saving money in the process would be enough incentive, but it turns out that can be a hard sell on a public that's been trained to relish in seeing violence applied to people presented as bad. I've found that there are people so keenly keyed to said relish that they'll just dead refuse to believe that supportive approaches to drug addiction can be cheaper than coercive approaches with better results to boot, and that's kind of tragic honestly.

Is there any country where this works? AFAIK the safest countries have consistent but not draconical enforcement. The US has pretty harsh enforcement for a western country but it's very inconsistent and not timely enforced.

Studies show that the severity of the expected punishment has a relatively small impact on crime (and in some cases, more severe punishments can lead to more severe crimes). The probability of getting caught has a much bigger impact.

Yes, yes quarter them publicly ina square. Make executions great again - that solved the societal issues back in the day.

And dont think about any kind of social support net and caring for people that would be girly and a socialism. Can't have that.

The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, so maybe that is not the solution? Sounds easy and direct, but it does not seem to work.

… Ah, yes, why not emulate peaceful crime-free utopias like, er, Iran and Somalia. The only developed country which does this is Singapore, and these days it doesn’t do it much; about 1000 cases of judicial corporal punishment per year.

The US has the highest large-country rate of incarceration in the world (besides likely North Korea, for which reliable data is not available); not sure what makes you think “more punishment” would be the way to go tbh.

We can't have nice things until we migrate away from desperation-based economics.

That does still leave many things like malice (or ignorance that's as good as), organized crime (including political), and possibly neighbours that still have desperation. Lots of things are in the way of having nice things. But nice things are also a spectrum.

Yeah, there are other root causes. I'm just saying that we should focus on those. Much of this conversation is focused on enforcement. Getting enforcement right is like having the right sized bucket for bailing out your sinking boat: some answers are better than others, but none change the fact that the boat wasn't seaworthy to begin with.

Although to nitpick your examples... Can you really imagine a malice fueled crime that has to do with stealing copper from infrastructure? If you're angry but not desperate for money, there are more satisfying ways to express it.

And organized crime... That's for stealing Venezuelan oil tankers. If you're involved with organized crime and you're stealing copper from infrastructure, maybe you need to find a more ambitious boss because any junkie can do that. You don't even need to be organized about it.

I think the panels are safe if there's enough of a safety net that nobody's desperate

Oh, I meant those as "We can't have nice things" reasons. There's a lot of non-copper related vandalism that has prevented or taken away nice things for the public, at least here. And that doesn't seem to be easy to solve.

A few years ago, some foreigners entered a subway depot in South Korea, drew graffiti, and left the country before they were caught.

South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.

A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.

The U.S. locks up a far, far, far higher rate of people than any other advanced economy. The U.S. locks up people at 5x the rate of South Korea. Whatever the difference is, it’s not because the U.S. is unwilling to punish people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

The issue is that the US perceives poverty as personal issue rather than public issue. If my neighbor has no housing their likelihood of becoming addicted is way higher than if we simply gave them a house to live in, and far cheaper than constantly policing them.

I think is a very unfair allegation to make against homeless people. Most are not drug addicts.

Drug addicts, however, have a hard time holding on to a house, apartment, etc and will often decide to exchange a stable living situation for another drug fix.

Giving houses to drug addicts means: - a non drug addict doesn’t get to get that house - the drug addict now has a house to use drugs in, not take care of, and generally destroy

The answer is for drug addicts to be placed in a rehab program until they aren’t an addict anymore.

The issue in the US is that punishment is comparatively harsh but relatively few criminals are punished and punishment is usually quite delayed. Studies show that timely, consistent punishment is much more effective.

> The U.S. locks up people at 5x the rate of South Korea. Whatever the difference is, it’s not because the U.S. is unwilling to punish people.

The difference is in consistency in enforcement and general background crime rate.

If you have a nearly guaranteed chance of getting caught doing something, the punishment almost doesn't matter. If every single time you went over the speed limit you got a $500 fine 100% guaranteed, there would be effectively zero speeders ever. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting caught but the punishment is 10 years in prison - there will still be plenty of speeders all over the place.

Humans do not do well with estimating risk on low probability events. We are all just big children in the end. Consistency in consequences are what actually matters, not overly harsh punishment.

Yes, this is why “death penalty for everything“ wouldn’t suddenly eliminate crime.

No, but it would gradually lower it. However, the rate of violent felonies to misdemeanors would rise rapidly (cf. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising).

Depends how effective the enforcement is; but anyone who wants to repeat Pol Pot is someone to run from quickly, if they get anywhere near a position of power.

He killed people for such crimes as wearing glasses, knowing French, and being able to read.

Many crimes are committed by repeat offenders so it would eliminate a decent chunk of crime. Over 60% of violent criminals in the US get rearrested for another crime. Almost 40% of nonviolent criminals get rearrested for another crime.

If they stop committing crimes either because they are still in jail or dead, the crime rate would absolutely drop.

https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...

That is very interesting and I have to think some more about it. Thank you.

What would that look like - increasing the number of US police officers by 2x etc. to ensure they catch every person who commits any crime? Reducing the rights of those accused of a crime to ensure they don't skate?

I think you have to start with increase policing so that there’s a high chance of being caught. In the US, 2x is nowhere near enough given the size and number of street lights available to vandalize.

We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement

Neither. The US has a problem with incompetency in policing. Part of that stems from the prevalence of far-right ideology that is common among US police but not common in peer developed countries. Far-right officers are ideologically disposed to not being effective, either because they prefer punishment to procedure, or because it's in their interest to keep crime high.

Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.

Or maybe what constitutes a crime should be rethought (e.g. there is no reason at all to keep the "war on drugs" going, it clearly has failed), and instead focus on prevention?

That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.

What would ‘prevention’ look like? (As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.)

> What would ‘prevention’ look like?

1. Give people housing.

2. Give people housing.

3. Give people housing.

4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.

5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.

6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.

7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.

> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.

with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.

>1 2 3. Give people housing.

That’s already been done in my area and really doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people are so antisocial they are difficult to house (causing fights with neighbours, burning buildings down and so forth). But yes, it does help to have both abundant inexpensive housing and also programs for people who can’t afford it.

It does have to be paired with police enforcement that doesn’t tolerate living on the street or in a park when housing is available.

It also becomes a problem when people who live in such housing abuse it, such as operating drug dealing out of it.

>4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.

We tried that too. It’s great for people like me. Some people refuse to access mental health or addiction rehab services. So the access is there.

>5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.

There is zero public support to give drug addicts extra cash to go buy more drugs.

Other than that, benefits are generous - I can say definitively nobody is going hungry. Some people will still refuse to apply for benefits. I stayed a few days in a hospital and my hospital roommate refused to apply for any benefits because he didn’t want to give the government info they could use to try to get the child support he owes. (The hospital sent a social worker in every few hours to try to persuade him.) Should such a person be given benefits including cash benefits?

>6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.

We have that too. You need staff to clean them and it’s not fun to clean up after an antisocial person.

>7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.

There is no public support for a heroin dispensary.

> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes. with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.

Well, around here drugs are so cheap it’s not a big deal to pay for them. Now we just have loads of drug addicts who are strung out all the time, and in addition they can’t earn income with small time drug dealing like they used to. A fentanyl habit is cheap (maybe $10 a day) which is easily financed by selling eg your children’s food stamps card.

The public is not going to support the government paying people to shoot up drugs all day.

I think you've hit the point with "don't tolerate" the antisocial behavior, once you've put the avenues for assistance in place. If you're homeless, or addicted, and you accept help to get over those things, great. If you reject it, that choice should not be tolerated, and you should be bused to the county line and trespassed.

My thoughts:

- Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?

- After setting up safeguards to enforce privacy protections, vastly increase the use of camera-based traffic enforcement. For example, create separate traffic enforcement agencies so that police don't have access to camera data. Use trajectcontroles (Dutch word for a system where multiple cameras on highway entrances/exits track your license plate and ensure your average speed was below the limit), cameras that detect texting while driving (pioneered by the UK), microphone-linked cameras in residential areas that detect modified exhausts (pioneered by Taiwan), and HOV-lane enforcement cameras. Keep traffic officers focused on ensuring that everyone has a valid/viewable license plate. The result should be a system where committing small traffic violations is not normalized.

- Reduce the punishments for most crimes. Large punishments are cruel, expensive to dole out, and less effective than consistent enforcement + small punishments.

- Set high expectations for police officers and create a culture of accountability. Fire those who are playing on their phones and arrest those who are committing crimes. You probably need independent oversight agencies to be able to do this.

- Make police highly visible - bright yellow high-vis vests and cars (pioneered by Antwerp) ensure that police are there to deter crime rather than hide and catch it.

- Provide actual public services so that people have a chance to succeed. A variety of unpleasant behaviors (e.g. public defecation, being disruptive/yelling in public, public drug use/intoxication) are things that no one wants to do - they are driven by a lack of, for example, homeless services, mental health services, and drug treatment services.

- Reprioritize enforcement (looking at you, drug task forces). Expand the legal definition of entrapment and stop doing so many B.S. sting operations.

> Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?

Yeah bro, your average diseased junkie is definitely watching MSNBC and reading the WSJ in between rounds of fentanyl and shitting on the side walk.

It's about a general sense of accountability. It actually does trickle down.

My state has tried this (very low sentences, often just a few days in jail, if that) and it doesn’t help the repeat offender rate at all.

Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on. That doesn’t do any good for people who refuse to use it. Sometimes a court orders someone to attend their mental health provider appointments, drug rehab, etc as terms of a sentence.

Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere. It turns out some drugs are actually bad.

As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?

"My state"?

> My state has tried this (very low sentences, often just a few days in jail, if that) and it doesn’t help the repeat offender rate

Doesn't do anything unless you also get consistent about catching people

>Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on.

Really? If so, that's amazing. What state in the US has actually given all people access to mental health services and addiction help.

> Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere.

Fentanyl is a thing because strict enforcement necessitates drugs that are more compact/easier to hide. Many other countries still have heroine.

>As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?

I would suggest focusing on impounding vehicles rather than chasing people.

Lots of states in the U.S. have a comprehensive Medicaid system where someone not otherwise covered by insurance can access healthcare. In some states it is better than others. My own state happens to be exceptional.

That doesn't mean you can force everyone who needs mental health services to go actually avail themselves of them.

You can't impound a vehicle without stopping the person driving it first. Most people don't use non visible plates anyway; they would first steal tags from another vehicle.

It would look like an AI-driven surveillance state, combined with near-immediate consequences which are individually slap-on-the-wrist penalties and only become severe if they are repeated.

AI, not human, because the actual incidence rate for a lot of crimes is much much higher than most people realise, including for extremely severe cases:

• Statistically speaking I think it's something like most Americans commit three felonies per day*, but that's probably mostly drugs which IMO should be liberalised anyway.

• For an example of extremely serious crimes, and again statistically speaking, your first day in highschool, your first class on that day, you likely met someone who had been sexually assaulted by a family member.

Increasing a human police force to the scale needed to catch all crimes is theoretically possible (the Stasi basically operated at this scale even if they only thing they cared about was sedition) but is a terrible idea.

If all crimes keep their current penalties, a fully automated surveillance state bankrupts everyone almost immediately.

Note: I'm not suggesting this is a good future. I don't think it's a stable equilibrium, I think there's too high a risk of a leadership using such a surveillance capability to hold power, and they may even not care too much about non-state crimes once they do seize power, so this could easily become Stasi 2.0 or worse.

* Or the mean felonies per day is 3, which is a very different claim. I've not read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Silverglate

Yeah, as a human race, we've clearly reached the technological era where deep, ubiquitous surveillance is both technologically and economically feasible. For a few years now, I've been thinking we need a constitutional amendment to restrict the mechanisms, deployment, and use of mass automated surveillance.

Human beings don't empathize well with situations nor people they never have to personally face. That's a well-lit path to fascism. We're one step closer to 1984.

> For a few years now, I've been thinking we need a constitutional amendment to restrict the mechanisms, deployment, and use of mass automated surveillance.

The fourth amendment should really have been interpreted to cover this, but the courts have an unreasonable bias for giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt

It'd definitely be my preference to lean on existing law where it makes sense (law is already too complicated). Unfortunately, IANAL, so I don't know what makes the most sense. Whatever we have doesn't seem to be doing a great job against the mass spread of cameras and abuse.

An acquaintance of mine experienced severe domestic violence (trying to choke him to death with an accomplice in front of his children + another witness).

She got arrested for that since the law requires it for domestic violence and turned out she had skipped bail for a grand theft auto conviction. She served 3 days then got released because the county jail was full.

Her conviction for domestic violence ended up being 6 days in another county jail.

She has since been running around committing more crimes, including stealing her children’s IDs, birth certificates, social security cards, and using them commit welfare benefits fraud. Police took a report and won’t go pick her up since it’s a nonviolent crime despite her violent history.

I’m not sure what’s needed (more police to say sorry, we can’t help you isn’t what’s needed), but having an antisocial person selling her children’s food benefits is not a good thing. Before anyone says she needs “services”, she already gets a guaranteed disability income, free housing, and her own food and free medical benefits including addiction rehab services.

Wow. Your single anecdote showing humans have created an imperfect system, and/or sometimes some people just don't want to live in society with others no matter what, once again has really shown me that we should only ever go after the symptoms instead of working on the real problems. More police! More jail time for everyone! Death penalty for minor offenses! More jails need to be built! Surely that will fix it this time!

That was sarcastic in case you couldn't tell.

Domestic abusers need to be in prison until they can decide to stop being an abuser, full stop.

Likewise people who abuse welfare benefit programmes and steal food from their own children in order to trade it for cash.

There is simply no excuse for that, period, and it doesn't help anyone to tolerate it or be lenient on it.

See Mark Kleiman's - When Brute Force Fails. The book mentions the Hawaiian HOPE project. The dealt with parolees by punishing violations with immediate mild punishment (i.e. you're back in jail over this weekend)instead of allowing violations to accumulate over time and then coming down on the person like a ton of bricks ( on your 10th positive urine test you go back to jail for a month).

Your point only stands if you assume that Americans and Koreans commit crime at the same rate, which is eminently false. The high rate of incarceration in the US is directly downstream of higher criminality compared to other advanced economies.

In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.

US has massively lomger sentences. It does not have that much higher ceime rates, but it loves to lock people.

The US has a substantially greater crime rate than South Korea.

> It does not have that much higher ceime rates

This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.

That's just due to issues in regulating gun ownership, though.

I personally advocate evidence-based approaches to reducing gun crimes, yes. However even if we exclude guns, when I’ve previously looked at knife crime rates between US and UK, US was still was higher.

A general comparison of crimes in SK vs US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore...

Interestingly, embezzlement rate seems way higher in SK.

The non-gun murder rate in the US is about double that of the UK.

I think the difference in the gun murder rate reflects other legal differences, such as those around carrying and storing guns more than the level of ownership. If you have to go home and unlock a safe to get a gun it gives you lots of time to cool down.

Crime rates are not independent of incarceration rates and durations (bbviously, since incarceration is a mechanism to deter crime). We could say 'the incarceration required to reduce crime rate to x is much higher/lower in country y'.

How easy can you learn a skill while in jail? How easy do you find a job when you get out of jail?

That would be an interesting statistic in any country discussing number of jailed people, repeat crime, and jail time.

If it's a crime skill... Very easily. If it's a crime job, very easily.

The prisons here have programs where people who want to can complete high school and college degrees. I met a guy who had two degrees (he was in for life since he, well, killed several people.)

Because in US, most prisons are run by private companies. Lot of them are listed on the stock market.

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore... puts US crime rate at 27% higher than SK.

Let's use a metric immune to over-policing and different definitions of "crime": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... puts the US homicide rate at 11.8x higher than SK.

  The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.

  Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.

Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.

Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.

And, FWIW, SK's 25+0.5 per 100k suicide/homicide rate eclipses America's 15+5 (roughly). If you don't want to die a violent death at the hands of a human being, the US is safer than SK.

> The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary. Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.

The reliability of incarceration data can also vary, but you didn't dismiss that. In fact, all data is unreliable, so should we just give up on comparisons entirely? Unless you have a specific reason to think US/SK numbers are wrong (and by how much - we're not giving up on comparisons over 1-10% errors, when the difference is 10x), what you've done is provided a fully generic counterargument: "well data isn't perfect, therefore I am right and you are wrong."

> Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.

Typical feigned intellectual helplessness. Knowing nothing else, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher. And we use homicide because it's harder to fudge - if I used crime in general, your complaint would have been over-policing or different definitions instead.

> Also, SK suicide rate

How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate? Especially when it's legal in both US and SK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation

You presented the data as authoritative when it's clearly not, by the admission of its own compilers. This is a simple thing to disclose if you're certain that the portions your argument relies on are sound. Burden of proof lies with you.

>, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher.

Not at all. Different societies have different net values (e.g., violence as a political tool or as a means to some economic end) which will influence the deadliness of violence. So will the nature of the weapons that are available. It's reasonable to expect a trend, but lockstep is unreasonable, and you always have to question if perhaps the situation is unintuitive and higher homicide rates don't go hand-in-hand with higher crime rates for a particular example.

>How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate?

It isn't, but the incarceration rate was put forward to advance an argument about the relative virtue (and implicitly the relative safety and suitability for a dignified living) of American and SK societies. Suicide rate is relevant. Do you want to make it to your next birthday or not?

A Scandinavian economist reportedly said to Milton Friedman:

“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”

Friedman replied:

“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”

You think that was a good use of resources and not something deeply dystopian and authoritarian?

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.

This definition of “Rich” is referring to the people who pay most of the taxes. The government hasn’t prioritized using those tax dollars for this purpose. It’s likely being utilized more so to benefit the poor and needy more than you think in other ways though, education and healthcare come to mind and are quite big ticket items.

They're pretty clearly being given to AI companies right now.

> I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Or you can give poor people some sort of support so they don't have to ride in public transit just to have a place to sleep without being exposed to the elements?

> Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized.

Come to Europe. Sure, the truly rich still drive in SUVs, but in general, people of all backgrounds take public transit, and "gated communities" are not a thing here.

>Come to Europe.

I find increasing evidence that we're heading the same way as migration is used in a way that creates an underclass and the previously homogenous high trust society dismantles ever so slowly as resource constraints (graying of the population) puts pressure.

> the previously homogenous high trust society

Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.

> migration is used in a way that creates an underclass

The underclass always existed, especially in the US.

Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.

>Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.

Europe has been rather damn homogenous. The attempts to reframe that by putting a magnifying glass on the exceptions just end up standing out and sometimes being weird. It's also only ever people from more diverse cities who seem to think differently. Here in Belgium a rather damn urbanised country now i can get you a municipal census list from 300 years ago that just happens to feature almost all the same family names that i went to school with. This same census yields very different results if you go more west. One kid on that school was and looked african among hundreds. It is not the same today. At the next school i went to there were only 2 Russian kids and my generation already saw manifold more of this long distance migration than there once was. On the other hand in the bigger cities such as the capital there was more diversity but even there in living memory different parts still had different dialects tied into socioeconomics. Today it speaks mostly a different language, has different ethnic zones and belgians make up 20% or less of the population. Turns out this changes how people see it's funding.

yes there's exceptions in the balkans and among other ethnic borders but many people today wouldn't even call that diverse. Disregarding exceptions the average working class people were not quite as mobile. 32andme and the like would have been out of business from the start if that weren't the case. My grandmother cried when she took 2 busses for her first job. It was such a shocking distance to her and everyone she knew down her family line had been farmers in that area. She can also still describe ever old person in the wider area if not trough name then trough very extended family ties. We didn't have the language unifying drive of france and the netherlands so their dialects are all very very local.

The US has always been much more diverse and the people more mobile from my understanding but it's not like it did not have major demographic shifts either in places like new york.

>The underclass always existed, especially in the US.

There was an underclass but when there's no sectarianism and everyone essentially self identifies as the same "tribe" i dare say it's easier to tackle. From easier unionisation to no influx of distinct people without little generational wealth earning less on average and doing less attractive jobs by design. The US and anglo world in general actually do better on this front. Trough distance and other factors they attract wealthier, more educated and less religious migrants who more easily assimilate in a larger cultural sphere and in the case of the US can't really lean on a social safety net. Comparatively here there's muti generational issues.

>Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.

What? I can see, have a memory and there's plenty of demographic data?

Hell the original comment that got my one line response is particularly contrasting: Most of our new cars are SUV's and crossovers now. There's now a more easily visible demographic difference in who uses which mode of transportation. (we have a company car system so incentivise car use for the upper middle class too whilst the poor can get cheaper or free public transport) It should be no suprise then that public transport is very gradually getting less coverage as it's being defunded whilst there's an entire growing issue with violence towards personel. Whilst gated communities are indeed not a thing i'd dispute that we don't have an equivalent among the richest. Go to Knokke or the south of Brussels,etc

Okay but you're talking about using an international police organization, that is mostly involved with stopping human trafficking, to stop a couple of graffiti artists. If you don't see that as an extreme example of both government overreach and authoritarianism then you're simply lost.

>A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure.

Yes.

But California.

Or maybe, you know, create conditions so that we don’t have as many drug addicts? And homeless ppl starving? Not arguing against the rule of law, just saying that maybe, the “drug addict” didn’t have the choices in life others non-drug-addicts had? Maybe? Maybe not though, who knows…

Homeless people aren’t starving in America. (I volunteer at our nearby homeless facilities, where I’m proud my region maintains a 100% service rate - nobody who needs a place to stay is turned away, through a network of shelters, halfway houses, group homes, and subsidised market vouchers.)

In addition, they’re all eligible for government food assistance which is quite generous. In my experience, though, many people sell off their food benefits for drugs. So that’s a problem.

Carful now. Sounds like Communism.

Sounds nothing like communism

No, it sounds like market socialism, which has absolutely nothing to do with communism.

Communism did not distribute food benefit cards that functioned like cash that could be used in lieu of cash at any store that sold food.

For just graffiti? That's completely ridiculous and totalitarian.

killer robots will solve the problem don't worry

Imagine if companies could pay meth addicts in meth the amount of work they could get out of them would be incredible.

I imagine they actually do, in that pay is just meth with extra steps. But for some reason a lot of the hiring isn't happening. Would be interesting to know where the barriers are.

There are lots of functional meth addicts who aren’t antisocial criminals who simply work a normal job whilst high.

> Junkies will find ways through the fencing at night, strip copper and other materials from panels, and cause thousands in damages and lost energy just to extract enough scrap for a fix

I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it

This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).

In rural UK where phone lines are sometimes laid in a shallow ditch by the road, my relative's village loses their landline phone wiring every once in a while because someone stripped the whole roads-length of wire. They tie off to a trailer hitch and drive away.

Been happening occasionally for at least a decade.

Once in a while though, not constantly.

The Netherlands has one of the best healthcare systems in the EU, 30% social housing, treatment programs, one of the best drug policies...

And still has a yearly 6 to 8 million euro in damages from copper thieves just on the rail system alone. And that doesn't include economic damages from people being late for work.

I can only imagine what it would be without that! I was told once that in said country (and probably other lands) police tolerates some kind of small petty crimes so that things do not escalate to bigger things

Probably not much worse.

I can't confidently refute your claims, but all of those socialist policies have backslid over time; social housing (i.e. affordable housing with eligiblity for government support to pay rent) has a 10+ year wait list in a lot of places, because there's not enough. Non-social housing is unaffordable and unobtainable for a lot of people with housing prices having gone up 2x or more since 2010.

And the social systems don't reach everyone, in part thanks to 20+ years of conservative governments. People can't find jobs, if they're entitled to one (i.e. are nationalized) they can apply for government subsidies, but those come with strict conditions including a requirement to apply to jobs on the regular (and provide evidence, and you get cut on your subsidies if you don't).

On paper it still looks good ish, but in practice it sucks if you're in the system. Health care is becoming unaffordable (creeping to 200/month just for the insurance, plus 375 or so copay which the new government wants to increase even further, which means poor people will avoid seeking health support because who can afford up to 375 on top of 200 / month, and that's not even the essentials?)

Healthcare is €145 a month with a €385 deductible and can be lower if you raise your deductible voluntarily. If you are low income you get €129 a month in allowance towards your health insurance. Various municipalities have their own allowances for low income people to help them pay for healthcare. The deductible is for all healthcare in the entire year, not per procedure. It has not gone up with inflation for years hence why government is talking about raising it.

Healthcare is already income based in The Netherlands. I used to pay €5000 a year as a high earner. My neighbor paid €0 per year as he didn't have a job. If poor people avoid seeking healthcare over cost they are doing things very wrong as they can seek financial help and get it.

Also I think it is good that you need to actively look for a new job in order to get unemployment benefits. It's a safety net not a hammock.

Swiftcoder, I don't think we Europeans have a recipe for treating fentanyl addiction.

We are just lucky that this horrible drug isn't as accessible here as it is in Cali.

BTW recently I spent eight hours in a stopped train because a family of career criminals decided to steal cables from the railway. They didn't even escape, they were immediately caught with their loot, but the damage was done and thousands were stranded on the main rail corridor in Moravia deep into the night. I was home at 3 AM instead of 7 PM.

There is no treatment for this sort of stupidity where people do damage to themselves and to everyone else because of a really bad judgment.

My friend was in prison for causing a serious road accident. Some six months. When he came back, he commented that most of the repeat offenders are just stupid as f*ck, unable to put two and two together, getting repeatedly caught over crimes done impulsively and without due preparation.

I really hope we don't get a California situation. If you look at the addicts at the Frankfurt train station, that is starting to look like Skid Row.

"Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" probably rings a bell for you. With respect to drug addiction, in Europe/Germany at least, I'm more inclined to say "little has changed in 40 years" than to say "things are worse now".

It's sobering to think we've not made much inroads into giving addicts a better perspective (or getting "preemptive" messaging across) in all that time.

> There is no treatment for this sort of stupidity where people do damage to themselves and to everyone else because of a really bad judgment.

I'd argue there is; why do people steal stuff? Because it's easier and more profitable than jobs they can do. What's the solution? Meaningful employment for everyone. People generally don't steal if they earn a living wage that doesn't kill them. (some still would because they get a kick out of it though but there's therapy available for them if they want to change)

We also have ample evidence that you can solve this sort of problem via UBI. As politically inconvenient as that result has proven to be...

...would that this (micro) evidence actually show that, and had any hope of practical scale without unintendeded consequences...

UBI is not the panacea imo. We need UBS, and not the bank - universal basic services. Whether that's healthcare, education, unemployment, free transportation, food stamps for the needy, housing loans, more government jobs, etc.

UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.

> UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did...

I would not put the one-time covid cheques on par with the various rigorous UBI and/or free housing experiments that have been run over the last 30 years

But the COVID cheques were the only ones done at a scale comparable enough to what a UBI programme would look like in the US, one that could inform government on what usage would look like.

Free housing is just another form of UBS that I was talking about.

I do wonder; my naive expectation is that while it will solve "petty criminality out of need" it would do little to "pretty criminality out of boredom / for-fun".

And BI would be attacked for the latter - some ingrateful on-basic-income person committing vandalism for no financial benefit. It's the "workhouse"/"treadmill" argument - supposedly boredom breeds crime and people must be made to work, even pointless or below-poverty tasks, else the streets get taken over by criminals or worse.

Like tourists taking over the country.

Arguments acknowledging (and steering / manipulating) feelings weigh stronger here than economic facts, alas.

Right. Where I live, there is plenty of vandalism. Breaking public benches, defecating in public toilets outside the bowl, rampant littering when there are trash cans all over the place, etc.

There's no financial gain in that. Doing this won't get you healthcare (we've got socialized healthcare anyway, and it's pretty much free for "the poor"), won't help you eat. It's just stupid, antisocial people. How would giving them money help any of that?

Because it's easier and more profitable than jobs they can do. What's the solution? Meaningful employment for everyone. People generally don't steal if they earn a living wage that doesn't kill them.

You seem to believe that everyone wants to work. I don't think this is a given.

You also seem to believe that people who steal are just trying to make ends meet. Quite a lot of thiefs are addicts who steal to feed their drug habit. Given the cost of drugs in the street, unless they have really good jobs (and can keep them even when taking drugs), they will resort to stealing just to be able to buy their fix.

America is an entirely different cultural universe and simple things like this seem logical but just wouldn’t really solve the entire problem, IMO, as an American that’s lived in Europe for a decade+.

Another great example are the “open air” transit systems in Germany, Poland, etc. where you can freely enter trams and buses, with inspectors patrolling infrequently to check if you bought a ticket. That kind of system would absolutely never work in America, no one would pay, and the ticket inspectors would be hated as some kind of secret police.

> Another great example are the “open air” transit systems in Germany, Poland, etc. where you can freely enter trams and buses, with inspectors patrolling infrequently to check if you bought a ticket. That kind of system would absolutely never work in America

This is exactly how Seattle's light rail worked for years. You could just walk on and off, and I saw an inspector maybe 1-in-10 trips at best

Interesting, I’ve never been to Seattle. But it looks like they are adding fare gates, so apparently it isn’t working.

Yeah, the system was tiny originally - just a single line from the airport to downtown. I left right before the big system expansion started, I wouldn't be surprised if scale has exposed more issues with the system

From what I've heard, fare compliance used to be relatively high but dropped massively (alongside ridership) during COVID and hasn't really recovered.

Of course ridership dropped during COVID, but it very quickly recovered and is now well over double the ridership before the COVID dip. Also note that prior to COVID, the system was still under construction and not even the 1 Line was fully operational yet. It could take you from UW to the Airport, and that's about it, the complete 1 Line route to Northgate did not open until October 2021, Lynnwood to downtown extension did not open until 2024, and Line 2 from Redmond to downtown did not open until earlier this year.

So, it's hard to make a direct comparison of fare compliance before and after the "COVID times" however you define the time period, as the are very different transit systems that now serve a different geographical area and population. But fare compliance has recovered from 56% during the peak of COVID to 63% in 2025, and 2026 numbers are not out yet.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sea...

This is still the way it works in San Francisco on the buses and light rail.

Improved fare gates for BART have increased revenue and dramatically reduced maintenance costs:

"Comparing the six month period before the 'next generation' fare gates debuted, to the six months that followed, Embarcadero station saw a significant reduction in the need for maintenance work — from 112 hours to two hours. "

...

"When you see how dramatically these maintenance requests fell, the numbers tell us that these fare gates are preventing unwanted behavior that impacts the station environment," BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told the Chronicle. "Those people are no longer entering BART."

https://www.transittalent.com/articles/index.cfm?story=BARTs...

I read in the paper that 90% of the riders on the Seattle busses don't pay the fare. Grocery store looting is rampant.

Seattle has become a low trust society.

Source for the 90% number and rampant looting? This sounds like low-quality "information"/propaganda to me.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/only-suck...

Of course, there's a case that the Seattle Times itself is a source of low-quality information.

https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/seattle-grocery-crime-p...

"One million dollars will be set aside for the theft and upgrades, which are backed by Seattle Police crime data that is helping determine which stores get the funding."

https://bottomline.seattle.gov/2026/09/20/mayor-katie-b-wils...

https://www.kuow.org/food/2026-09-18/seattle-launches-plan-t...

"Supermarkets experiencing high theft will be provided one-time security and facility upgrades."

Transit source seems fine I think you're just misinterpreting it. That first source says about a third board without paying, not 90%. The 90% number you're quoting is I assume from the <10% farebox recovery which is a different metric from fare evasion. North America generally has low farebox recovery (car centric development therefore transit needs bigger subsidies to compete) and the pandemic made it worse. Don't get me wrong the numbers aren't good but I don't think it's evidence that Seattle is an especially low trust society like you're implying, I think it just indicates a lack of enforcement - a third is in line with fare evasion problems in other places in the world when they lack enforcement. People in Seattle behave no different from people in other places - they estimate risk vs reward in a free ride and some fraction of people lack a moral compass or are so poor that the benefit is significant. There's a reasonable line of thinking that 0 fares are best for society as a whole and I've heard this promoted among PNW urbanites so it wouldn't surprise me if enforcement is intentionally low to make it a sort of sliding scale farebox recovery, in which case a high fare evasion is not evidence of low trust, just of a highly progressive political culture, and something opposing propaganda will not hesitate to harp on.

Theft rings are pretty common in bad neighborhoods throughout north american cities. The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.

And here is some data counter to your thesis https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on... It seems to me that Seattle is an especially high trust society by US standards (largely due to high income I suspect), and the things you're pointing at are evidence of the opposite of your thesis - more likely to be symptoms of high trust than low trust.

From first cite: "Last fall it was down to 14%."

> The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.

Grocery stores in Seattle are shutting down, and looting is a major contributing factor to it.

That 14% describes farebox recovery which is mostly low due to subsidized transit, not evasion. They say that number is "funded x% by riders paying fares" which is not the same as "y% of riders pay fares" that you interpret it as. The former is called farebox recovery while the latter describes fare evasion. 14% farebox recovery is not out of the ordinary in north america where we need to subsidize transit more than other countries due to car oriented development. If you subtract 33% fare evasion (from the article) from that 14% recovery you will still be at about 21% farebox recovery and that's on the low side but not out of the ordinary for western North America (it's better than most California systems for example where we usually get 10%). 20% farebox recovery is just fundamental to our transit and urban planning, nothing to do with fare evasion or trust level. Whereas 90% fare evasion would be highly highly unusual, which is why I wanted a source and now I can see where your misunderstanding comes from. In your defense I do think that article is intentionally eliding the two by not explicitly defining terms - maybe deceiving the reader makes the article hit harder. Anyway very few places have fare evasion over 50% since the majority of people will pay based on morals (and their income level) even against zero enforcement whatsoever.

I'm open to the claim that looting -> grocery store shutdowns, especially in bad areas, I just dispute it being "rampant" based on my lived experience, and I dispute that there's a causal link instead of correlation with a low income/low traffic/low staffing death spiral. I did not feel your source adequately supported this claim, and what you say here is a walked back claim from "rampant" to at least one store? I am not convinced Seattle has it worse than other metros (similar things happen where I live in California in bad areas too, and it's been shown to be stores that were underperforming and due to be closed regardless of looting), and I am not convinced this supports your thesis that Seattle has become a low trust society against my counter evidence from Pew.

BTW, in the Bellevue area across the lake from Seattle, walk into a bank. There will be ordinary counters which the tellers are behind.

Now go to a bank in downtown Seattle. The tellers are behind thick bulletproof glass.

This is how VTA light rail works in San José.

My daily commute is by open air rail in Chicago.

Me and my fellow commuters know snd like our conductors.

The Netherlands is phasing out open air transit because it doesn’t work. Aggression towards public transit service workers is at an all time high. Most stations have moved from no barriers to barriers over 2 meters tall. Refugees have their own bus lines.

Society is going backwards in rapid pace I’m afraid.

From high-trust homogeneous populations to low-trust heterogeneous populations.

That is factually incorrect. The Netherlands is not phasing out open air transit (barriers are only a thing at the high-volume stations) and the barriers are rarely 2 meters tall (at most stations they are waist-high).

The "refugee bus line" is a single ferrying route between a rather awkwardly-placed arrival center and its nearest train station. The main issues were caused by refugees being unable or unwilling to pay the bus fare, and considering all of those refugees are living off an allowance anyways, having the arrival center itself pay for the buses and making them "free" really is a no-brainer solution.

The Netherlands used to have open air-transit. But in the last years, barriers have been installed at nearly every train station. There are 1700 barriers according to Thales. 90% of travelers encounter at least one barrier during their trip. A lot of them are two meters tall. Some are only waist high.

Segregating refugees onto their own bus because they are aggressive is what South Africa did during apartheid. Even the United States isn't doing that anymore. It is a disgrace. Just give the refugees a card that you load with €50 every month. You can automate that and they can pay for the bus with that card.

And no, it is not a single route. I guess you are referring to the Ter Apel to Emmen line. That is indeed one of the segregated bus lines. There is also the line from the DISA building to the night shelter. There are taxi services for underage refugees. There is arranged bus transport between locations.

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/07/13/extra...

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/site/binaries/site-content/coll...

Caltrain does exactly this.

There seem to be a fair number of commuter train lines that do this, but I don’t really consider a train to be the same as an urban tram/bus system. The latter has orders of magnitude more daily passengers, and it’s a far wider breadth of people compared to the typically better-off suburban commuter lines.

And as someone that’s ridden the bus in LA many times: the culture of acceptable behavior there is infinitely lower than the typical Central European bus.

To be fair I did have NYC in mind when writing the comment though, and I should have looked into west coast systems more.

Seattle's light rail system uses that exact model.

It's also how the San Diego trolley works (it's called a trolley, but it is almost a heavy rail with respect to how separated the tracks are everywhere except downtown). One of the cleanest, most effective rail systems I've seen in the US (though there are a lot of security in the wagons)

That's how both the SBS buses in NYC used to work (before tap to pay), and how the NJ Transit light rail still works.

Portland’s light rail works this way.

I find it interesting to see how often criticisms are leveled at the US confidently based on ignorance.

Yes, I should have looked into West Coast systems, as they seem to have this more. I had the East Coast/NYC more in mind.

However, I wouldn't be so confident about Portland's working well:

> The transit agency has identified a significant increase in fare evasion, prompting the introduction of new technology to control access at train stations...The report said TriMet has the third highest amount of fare evaders in the country, trailing only San Diego and Los Angeles.

https://katu.com/news/local/trimet-considers-adding-gates-to...

I made no claim that it worked well ;-). But it has been in place since the beginning of the Portland light rail effort in 1986 (now I feel old; I took a ride during the rollout celebration...). Much like other transit systems, fares are mostly for show (IMO, obviously) -- less than 10% of the operating expenses are covered by fares. I wonder, but do not have the data to make an argument, whether it would be basically a wash if we just abandoned fares altogether along with the cost of the equipment and enforcement personnel.

There was a time when the downtown area was fareless. The main argument in favor of ending it was that fares provided an enforcement mechanism for keeping undesirables (read: homeless) off the train. That is the main opposition argument, as well, from communities on the edge of the metro area who do not want any lines extended to them.

That's exactly how light rail in Denver works (or, at least how it did a decade ago when I lived there). To a rough approximation everyone paid, the light rail worked fine everywhere it ran, and I never saw an inspector treated with anything less than politeness. I rode it in to work regularly for years, and irregularly for another few years, over about a decade. The biggest problem was that sometimes it was very crowded.

Copper theft is definitely an issue in Ireland.

> This feels like one of those USA problems

In the uk rail industry we have people stealing copper all the time. They cut a live cable, attach it to the back of a truck and drive off. Sometimes this can yield them kms of cable.

We also had issues where people would jump over fences into depots, use scaffold boards to build a ramp over the 2.5m fence, and then use forklifts to roll big reels of cable up the ramps and over the fence on to the back of a waiting truck the other side.

Copper cable theft is 100% a massive issue in the UK.

> In the uk rail industry we have people stealing copper all the time.

The elephant in the room is naming the group almost exclusively responsible for this crime.

Does it matter? Because if it does, it's advocating for (racial?) profiling and/or singling one demographic out, which is both illegal (maybe not in the UK since it doesn't have a constitution?), amoral, and contrary to one of the core principles of current-day law, i.e. "innocent until proven guilty".

But do tell, what do you think is the group and what do you think should happen?

I'm sure this is exactly the sort of group they meant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39n19dw1ggo

Or maybe him: https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/cable-thief-ja...

"Almost exclusively" would seem to point in a very home-grown direction.

Thieves. People are afraid to say it but thieves are responsible for almost all theft.

If a certain group of people are the ones constantly causing the majority of the same specific societal issues, why shouldnt they be called out?

You can call out a person. What does it mean to call out a group? That's guilt by association.

OK cool, I look forward to everybody stopping targeting rich white men as the main problem in the world.

There is a difference between punching up and punching down

Oh there are clauses and exceptions to prejudice are there?

So who gets to decide the definition of 'punching up'? When is it ok for me to be prejudice towards a group of people?

Im looking forward to learning where the line is so I can feel safe in my bigotry /s.

Yes, just one, and it's defined in this excerpt:

Don't be a dick.

If you're being a dick, you're at fault, if you're not being a dick, you get a pass.

Excerpt from what?

Its a shame the meaning of language is subjective, or we could all happily live under this banner forevermore.

>When is it ok for me to be prejudice towards a group of people?

When a group acts as a coordinated group. A political party for instance. This is not rocket science. You must link the individual(s) directly to the act, or you’re just stereotyping and making assumptions.

You are asking a lot of baiting questions. We know this isn't an attempt at dialogue, so just state your mind and be done with it instead of continuing of this silly bread crumb game man.

Targeting rich people for being rich is targeting an attribute, not a group. The equivalent would be targeting black people for having dark skin, as opposed to targeting black people for doing crime.

Right, but targeting rich white men is a very specific group. The equivalent would be poor black women, but I'm not really sure why thats important here.

Most rich people in the USA happen to be white men.

Is "everybody" doing that, seems like a stretch? In fact, the current US President explicitly blames immigrants for many of our problems.

The Economy - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/trump-somalis...

Affordability - https://www.pbs.org/video/trump-s-message-1765403127/

Crime - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/29/trumps-hate-...

Benefits - https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/10/24/fact-check-tru...

Its interesting that to argue against my point you use an example of somebody from the very specific group I mentioned.

Of course Donald Trump isnt going to blame rich white men for anything, he is one!

If that's the case, you shouldn't use words like everybody, because you don't mean everybody

The rest of your response can be answered in your own words: Oh there are clauses and exceptions to prejudice are there?

EDITED

Lol you literally have no idea what you are arguing against here.

I didnt think any sensible person would take the word everybody to mean literally every single person in existence. If I could go back and edit the post now I would happily change the word 'everybody' into 'lots of people' to satisfy the semantic pedants.

I dont think I have the energy to correct a random on the internet about exactly what my opinion is, other than to say I very much dont blame rich white men for anything and no I dont think there are exceptions to prejudice. But thats it, you can have the last word I'm out.

No, it was perfectly clear that you simply meant "everybody" that disagrees with you. That said, we know a large percentage of the population agrees with the President's immigrant framing because he was elected President based largely on that premise.

So, lots and lots of people are blaming immigrants for all our problems. I'm not sure rich white men need you to defend them to a random on the internet, they are doing just fine.

No I'm pretty sure by "everybody" he meant a loose quantity as in a large number of people. Of course such a quantity could be constrained e.g. to what can be seen on the news or maybe the local neighbourhood.

When someone says "everyone and their dog", they don't mean that the dogs are also participating.

Basically you failed to charitably interpret the person you are responding to and are now insisting on a reinterpretation that makes you look silly.

I mean think about what he wrote before that. "I look forward to", he is talking about the future in a sarcastic tone so the president being a counter example is his point. You're pinning him down onto the present and that is a strategic mistake.

I think most people would charitably interpret that "everybody" means at least a majority of people. That is what I questioned.

I don't really view internet comments as "strategic" like you. I was simply clarifying that this person's world (social media, news, friends, etc.) may give them the impression that "everybody" is blaming this group, but in reality that isn't true.

You don't need to correct anything, to me your point came across very clearly.

Some cultures are better than others

Arbitrary classification does not make a functional group. There is a distinct difference between a coordinated group and an abstract group that is the result of external parties adding people into named buckets for their own purposes.

Care to give some examples of what you consider to be coordinated groups, functional groups, and abstract groups?

I am assuming that your point is that prejudice is ok to some type of group but not other, but I am inferring that from your answer. Feel free to correct me.

> I am assuming that your point is that prejudice is ok to some type of group but not other

That's a bad inference. I was explaining the distinction that seems to be confusing the issue.

> Care to give some examples of what you consider to be coordinated groups, functional groups, and abstract groups?

You understand plain English well enough.

That's a word salad.

The first sentence is plain English. The second is clarification through example.

Someone who doesn't know what arbitrary or abstract means, or has trouble with context, I'm sure it can seem confusing.

It's an interesting coincidence that in these situations, the same people always blame %vulnerable group%, often going as far as making up evidence. Why do that? I suspect the reason is the vulnerability.

Why would you throw an accusation out like this without providing any evidence of your own?

Who are these people making up evidence about %vulnerable groups% and what are they saying?

Obviously, because then you can focus your attention to that specific group.IE, if cable theft is exclusively carried out by white people from kensington then whenever something is stolen, you can just go there and catch the criminals.

Criminals should be locked up in jail.

men?

It would appear not:

https://www.facebook.com/GladstoneObserver/posts/a-woman-put...

https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/two-arrested-over-copper...

The Regan Administration??

> The elephant in the room

People may or may not find it interesting to research the history of this phrase and what it replaced.

Is "800 pound gorilla" the competing phrase? May I ask what you found noteworthy about this?

Copper and various other kind of metal theft has been on a rise lately in Japan too.

https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14933216

> This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).

What are you going to suggest next? Hot lunches for kids and a justice system focused on reform?

California already has those social services; that doesn’t stop antisocial people from doing antisocial things. A tiny fraction of people can cause a lot of damage.

There is a part of California that still has ancient telegraph lines complete with weathered copper with the blueish colour. Nobody has come by to scrap it yet. So it’s really a matter of proximity to wherever antisocial people choose to live.

Copper price more than proximity. People don't strip wires for shits and giggles, they do it to sell the metal.

Bet you if copper price suddenly went up 10x, those ancient telegraph lines would disappear very quickly, one way or another (turns out, "criminals" and "junkies" and "entrepreneurs" are driven by similar incentives, they just sit at different points of the cost/risk tradeoff spectrum).

> wherever antisocial people choose to live.

Are we going to discover that, by some striking surprise, antisocial people choose to live in places with weaker social support?

Seattle/Portland/San Francisco. I think you're on to something.

California has those services but they tend to be only funded to a fraction of the need. And the gap between the need vs help is a deep gulf due to how inequality lands on all other public and private areas of society

California's 2025-26 budget for health and human services was $307 billion for 39 million people. Compared with France at $370 billion for 67 million people.

There is a certain gulf in the efficiency of spending for sure

The high cost of housing makes the needs much higher

> The high cost of housing makes the needs much higher

I mean, this is pretty solvable if the political will was there to upzone large areas of low-density housing around the Bay and LA...

There's plenty of affordable housing outside of areas like the Bay area (or Hong Kong, Vienna, London, etc.). Why in the world would someone want to destroy what makes those areas desirable in the name of "affordability"?

The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.

When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.

> Why in the world would someone want to destroy what makes those areas desirable

If low density is the crucial factor in determining desirability, why aren't Manhattan apartments basically free and tiny houses in rural Montana being sold for tens of millions?

There is a vocal slice of Americans who are convinced that any dense urban area is some crime-ridden hellscape.

> When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.

Did you commute into the Bay?

Because by my count, Stockton to SF or Stockton to Menlo Park is a 3-hours/day commute. 3 hours/day on the highway may be surviving, but it sure as shit isn't living (just in case anyone from outside the US thinks this is an extreme outlier, I worked with a number of QA folks in the Bay who had commutes this bad, or worse)

Stockton to Cupertino... Tracy to SF and Cupertino. I also commuted to Sacremento for a while.

I made about half as much as my co-workers (I was contract) but I took home more due to the difference in living expenses. Also, I had a house instead of an apartment.

I'm glad it worked out for you, but I wouldn't wish that commute on my worst enemy (this is one of the primary reasons I never moved to work in Cali)

Well when I was much younger (19) and lived in North Hollywood but worked in downtown LA, I walked as I didn't own a car. I was considered a freak because everyone in LA at that time drove everywhere... even to the end of the block.

Now, decades later, I have no desire to be anywhere "trendy" or "hip". I want affordability, stability, space, and quiet.

We are working on it. There has been a lot of progress in legislation, and some construction. But it’s a change.

I wonder how much of that per-person cost difference is due to government-run versus private-industry-run.

Providing healthcare alone under the US system as the state of CA vs the French system could account for a large amount of the difference.

"California has those services but they tend to be only funded to a fraction of the need."

Sometimes it feels like they are well funded but the people running the programs live in a (very expensive) dream world that has no connection to the actual need.

California claims to have those social services. Does it actually, or are they impossible to actually get?

We do, but they tend to be clustered around urban areas. There’s vast swaths of CA that lean much more conservative and more economically challenged that are under served.

I think a lot of people don’t realize you can go 2-2.5 hours out side of SF and be in CA MAGA country.

California is teeming with homelessness, whatever they call "cheap housing" isn't helping. They have the highest poverty rate in the nation (or close to it https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-has-highest-poverty-rat...). Nearly half of California's population can't afford even the basic costs of living and millions struggle to afford food (https://www.kcra.com/article/new-hunger-research-shows-milli...) so while the state has done well in some areas (health care coverage for example) you can be sure that there are plenty of very desperate people who might end up resorting to crime in order to meet their basic needs.

It’s functionally a small nation, and frankly many of its “bad numbers” aren’t far off parity with the nation as a whole.

If anywhere near half the people in America can't afford to cover their basic needs now we're in for a very dark future.

I’m assuming you’re referring to the article you linked.

40% is not “near half” - it’s closer to 33% than it is 50% and I think we would both (rightfully) object to me saying “near 1/3rd.” 50% and 40% are very different numbers.

Also, that 40% figure is based on their own definition, not something that is broadly accepted.

> California already has those social services

California has social services. They are not sufficient for the scale of the problem. On top of this there's little incentive for states to build out full social nets when there's open borders between states. This is a job for the federal government and nothing else will be sufficient.

Yes. California is famous for cheap housing. Excellent point.

Europe has plenty of copper theft problems though, but they go for e.g. train lines because they don't know you've got copper phone lines running past your house.

I was traveling in Europe about 15 years ago, I was going from Paris to Barcelona and the train stopped for seven hours. Turns out a whole copper cable was stolen (live wire) so yeah Europe does have this problem too apparently.

People tend to notice when there are some shady-looking people digging up wiring outside their homes - especially when it coincides with them losing power or connectivity. And it's not like there is much copper inside them, either.

A huge part of the train lines are fairly isolated, and there's an easily-available schedule of when people (trains) will be there - often even with real-time GPS tracking. And there's a lot of wiring buried there.

I live in a European country as well (Spain) and there are probably in the order of 10+ railways incidents per year causing serious issues to mobility due to copper theft. Buy yet, the old copper phone lines are still there...

One can dream but your solution is wildly unrealistic.

Its actually not just junkies, you get organized criminals who are stripping solar assets of $ value items.

Uh copper theft was quite a problem along Belgian train lines for a while.

it's possible that your line is simply isn't known enough to close enough junkie population

> I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it

Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out? There's not that many telecoms engineers and if they spend tons of time removing the old, that slows down the new.

> Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out?

Spain's rollout is up in the last few percentage points (>95%) of fibre coverage, in this particular region we reached saturation of the entire rural area 5 years ago.

Plenty of time for those disconnected copper cables to go walkabout if anyone were so inclined. Realistically, in a region where the population skews older and most everyone owns property, it's probably not worth the risk to fence it

We're still quite some way off that in the UK. Copper lines still working though due to shut down by next year I think. Lots of older people with no internet left in the lurch with phone lines with that of course.

How much cable are we talking about here and can you go into more detail about where your house is located...?

Joking aside, I'm not sure that metal thefts can totally be blamed on addiction.

I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.

They would do things like hack phone cables from telephone polls, attach them to an SUV and attempt to rip them out of the ground, with varying levels of success.

A week later the same people would break into a works yard in another part of the country after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found in a field somewhere after they'd used petrol to burn the casing off.

I don't think the people involved were doing it for want of housing, healthcare or addiction treatment, as we have all of that in the UK. They just saw it as a source of money.

Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

> Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

Yeah, that seems like a pretty reasonable solution, all things considered

There are people who will give you that paper trail, for a price.

Of course. But the fact that it has a price reduces the size of the market and hence the amount of theft.

Catalytic converters can't be sold for scrap at all by individuals, yet theft is still a huge problem.

Seems like the problem would be bigger, if they could be sold by individuals

related: Crosswalks don't stop cars from hitting pedestrians crossing on them. Perfect is the enemy of good.

And that is well into anti-social, intentional criminality territory, so you can have harsh punishment for those crimes and investigate and make examples of people if it remains a problem.

>I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.

I cannot imagine which entities you could possibly be alluding to;)

>Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

No, you don't understand, it's free healthcare and housing they really need.

Seriously, I remember it being an epidemic about 13 years ago or so, I wondered what happened. Banning people from buying stolen metal is such an obvious step that I wonder how the UK government ever thought of it.

There is an argument to be made, albeit an absurd one, that the introduction of copper seeking junkies into this Euro country would help recycling and improve the carbon footprint.

Not a serious argument, but an argument.

What footprint are we talking about? Is it emitting carbon into the atmosphere?

It's not the abandoned copper is emitting carbon.

It's that recycling has a smaller carbon footprint than making new copper from scratch. I think this claim is true for copper, recycling v. manufacturing.

At the very least this would increase cash flow in your economy. The cash flow coming from junkies and their newly acquired "free" copper are better off and more likely to spend some of their money on goods other than dope.

Also not a serious argument, but an argument.

It would be better addressed by jailing the thieves.

The USA has gone from 90% white -> 50% in one generation. Social trust is rapidly declining as a result. Just like South Africa, which is the global epicenter of low-trust crimes like copper theft, we are seeing a rise in these types of crimes.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...

The poorest Americans do actually have free healthcare (medicaid). It currently covers 40% of all children in the US and generally covers the bottom 25% of Americans. In places like California and New York the state level benefits are even better and apply regardless of immigration status (illegals get free healthcare).

Free addiction care: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/free

Most Americans live in a state that has excellent free addiction care, especially in the major population centers like California and New York.

Housing via emergency housing and subsidized section 8 housing:

https://www.usa.gov/emergency-housing

https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/housing-choice-voucher...

Heck they even get free/cheap subsidized cell phones and internet service: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/

> The USA has gone from 90% white -> 50% in one generation.

This is factually incorrect. The USA hasn't been "90% white" since the 1950s (and even then, you have to count hispanic as white to make the numbers work). It is also still >50% white by pretty much any definition (the 50% claim is based only on children under 18, and requires excluding hispanic from the category).

That is, if I'm being incredibly generous, 75 years (nearly 4 generations) to go from ~90% to ~50%. Not one generation.

Yeah, but that would require billionaires to pay taxes, and that's simply unacceptable.

California is as socialist as many European countries. It has _extensive_ social services along the lines of what you describe.

These make the problem worse, rather than better, by enabling.

Junkies get a free apartment from the city, free food, free healthcare, free clothes... and now have unlimited free time to go scam cash for a fix.

Free taxpayer-funded rehab? Exists, but almost none take it. That would reduce their drugs time. Forcing treatment would be cruel and oppressive, according to the left. So the cycle continues.

Let set diameter of your European (signal!) telephone cable to 0.5 mm and diameter of copper (power!) bus cable in the US to 5 mm. They has 10x linear difference and 100x difference in copper. I am sure that 5 mm cables will be stolen in Europe as fast as in California.

Stripping out copper... the USA has joined the ranks of post-Soviet Europe, where such thefts are (or have been at some point) routine. Infra-harvesting.

its called recruitment. You deteriorate your surrounding, creating more deprecated areas and taxes on industries, who close shop not paying taxes, thus creating more economic zombies. Who then crate black outs, deteriorating power lines, thus allowing for more copper theft.

They may hide the bitemark, but this future has a been biten. Its going to turn.

Face to face, or razor wire. Barriers do work, but only if you pay for something more than chainlink. And the math is interesting as the bigger the field the less barrier is needed proportionally.

Everyone is replying to my comment to talk about social nets and failures in the justice system, but I agree that the math is a more interesting challenge. The site I was talking about is thousands of acres in an undeveloped area, and while you accurately note the barrier is more cost effective, the number of patrols and response time for incidents (including false alarms) grows with scale. The owner could lock down the site like a fortress from a James Bond movie, but let's not forget that those thousands of acres are just gathering sunlight, so at some point it stops being cost-effective.

And I mostly introduce this issue as a contrast to panels on developed land like the canals, which serve other functions and are less likely to have the risks associated with such a single-purpose site.

Another option is height. Put them high enough and getting at the copper is too difficult. Streetlights rarely have their wires ripped out.

I don't really love how this completely imaginary, totally made-up, unsupported anecdote has caused 40% of the posts on this HN story.

It wasn't junkies. It was probably stemming from local opposition to the project.

https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/antelope-valley-solar-ranc...

Pointing junkies at new data centres might be the socio-economic uplift of the decade!

(Only sort of joking)

> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

No because now you're using land that could be used for other things, which is exactly what this avoids. This takes existing land that loses water and costs money, and makes it lose less water and make money.

That’s true of everything you build. The cost of land has to be taken into account, but land is much cheaper in some areas than others.

In California most of the land around the aquaduct is valuable cropland. The other side of it is at risk of wildfire.

That's true in general, but California aqueduct land is mostly valuable cropland, and the other side is at wildfire risk

Did anyone else get weird deja vu from the sibling comment? And I can't figure out which one is the clone. cryptolobster posted about 1 hour after zdp7, but they both have good posting history.

The land over a canal is free to the state. And shades the water.

You are assuming that land is expensive and forgetting that building and maintaining panels over long a canal is harder than building over a large plot.

Harder but obviously not physically impossible either. From the image I can't imagine what the showstopper would possibly be. Technician on a little dinghy instead of a stepladder doesn't seem like a big deal. Presumably they make it where you can pull the panel off easily if you need to.

You're talking about something that is probably at least 10x the cost to build and maintain. You're making something simple, like swapping a single solar panel, from a ground-level one-man job into now a multi-person job with specialized equipment and water hazards.

Thats 10x the cost somehow? I doubt it. They put solar in all kinds of awkward areas where a technican can't just show up and turn a screwdriver from ground level. Seems it works somehow. Chances are if they go with this, they will have some maintenance craft like a barge platform I'd guess, where the job would be made effectively no different than a ground level job (aside from bringing over the barge which could be quite simple in design, e.g. wood platform raft made from drums and a cheap outboard motor on one end, it's only in the aqueduct after all not in any open water or current.)

Many of those installations end up abandoned when the cost to repair them exceeds the value of the output of the panel.

You just typically don’t notice it because unless the panel is severely damaged, a non-functional panel doesn’t look much different than a functional one.

The showstopper is spending $1,000 of tax payer money for what could be accomplished with $10.

We are just making up numbers now

I haven't seen anyone cite the project costs, so I think we all are

No I'm not. I'm assuming that existing unused land should be reserved for better projects when we have currently used land that both can do more and where this helps save water. My comment had absolutely nothing to do with the price of land. Everyone else is missing the "water conservation" part because they're distracted by the solar panels and are getting nerd sniped. This isn't a solar first project, it's a water first project.

You're also not getting the free cooling capacity of the water which makes the panels more efficient - though that probably only drops the total cost 5% or so, but how much extra the heavier supports cost may not be much more...

In Switzerland, which is quite densely populated, they even have a pilot project with putting solar panels between rail road tracks:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energ...

Of all the ideas ever tried, this one seems to be the worst

Yeah, feels worse that solar roadways.

Why?

The concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics still sounds more promising than putting solar panels on top of the canal.

Not if the goal is preventing evaporation. Vertical panels in farmland solve a different problem than this does.

Yes, you are right. There's a comment further above to cover the canal but not with solar panels and have the panels in a solar park. The covered area in that solar park could then be used for agriculture - and maybe irrigated with the water from the covered canal.

Yes, we could also put the canal underground in a tunnel and build a nuclear plant, but none of that is relevant either. The article isa bout what we learned by putting panels on canals, not looking for alternatives.

The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.

They look like ordinary “bents” for prefabricated metal buildings which are about the cheapest kind of building per square foot. Made out of steel, they are typically sold at a cost per ton like other steel shapes.

The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.

So I agree it is a dumb idea but not because of the cost of steel but for the lack of modularity and abundance of inaccessibility.

> No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof

Cherry pickers like they’re used for every other type of infrastructure.

Those cherry pickers are used to access things above them, and a little to the side.

In this case, it is a ton to the side, and only a little above. And the cherry picker would be on dirt, which is not a very stable platform

Not going to work.

Construction already uses cranes for longer spans than this. They already know how to brace them on dirt as well. There is nothing large about this - they need slightly larger machines than you would expect at first because they can't be right next to the ditch, but nothing that construction doesn't already deal with in other situations.

And you think that’s cheap or easy in the middle of nowhere?

Almost anything is possible with enough money.

It is routine all over. Construction is always a game of moving people and equipment where the work is. There are a lot of people in construction who never work in the same city for more than a year, they just live in a local hotel and move the crane as needed.

I suspect this is cheaper than many projects just because the work is consistent - once you have the canals covered you keep a crew around to repair/replace them. That is you will need one crew full time within 2 hours of some small town so you hire someone who is willing to live in that small town (they get to go home to their family every night unlike the construction crew above working in a different city every year)

Maintenance, not construction. Can you not read?

Makes no difference. You schedule the crane when you need it. Just make sure there's enough to do that it's worthwhile for the crane to come out for the day's work.

Ho boy, the finance boys must love you.

What day is the earthquake?

Yes and this project is an example.

Jordan Harris, once a Virgin Records executive who had a hand in turning acts like Paula Abdul and The Smashing Pumpkins into household names, now serves as co-founder and CEO of Solar Aquagrid. He says the $20 million Project Nexus has done much more than serve as simple proof of concept.

https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...

A band promoter? Boy, I’m sold.

Cranes are expensive, even small ones. And you need a bigger crane quickly when you have a horizontal reach.

And keep in mind all that reach is over live electrical panels.

Cranes are expensive yes. However they are common, and the needed horizontal reach isn't that much. (I've been in construction where we needed cranes that big - generally a house will use a larger crane than a commercial building - the house a large crane can reach the back corner and so you don't need to move it, commercial you have to move the crane anyway so you save with a cheaper one). Note that I'm not talking about tower cranes which are very big but a whole different beast that I don't know.

I don't know the details of their plan, but I wouldn't design the reach over live electrical panels myself. The obvious thing is not lift individual panels, it is to lift a whole string of panels already wired up and connected to the frame.You have somebody on each end (which is on land) to put the bolts in, connect the last wires (which are live, but nothing electricians don't work on live all the time). Even if the worst disaster happens - nobody is ever under something falling and the live wires fall to the ground without harming anyone.

The above is not difficult. Well there are a few more details that need to be figured out, but they all fit in the above plan and are obvious to anyone who has been in construction.

My AEC experience has been that cranes are expensive enough that “everyone” does whatever they can to avoid needing them and when they need one they rent one.

Because cranes are expensive crane operators are expensive and crane insurance is high (because cranes kill people), crane companies only work economically because crane companies can stay busy.

But when you rent, your schedule is dependent on every other crane customer’s schedule. You get a crane only when one is available and odds are you are not the crane company’s best customer nor the customer with the deepest pockets to pay priority service rates.

In my AEC experience cranes get “surprisingly bigger” as horizontal reach increases…levers work that way. By “surprisingly bigger” I mean without actual experience with crane tables…my first AEC job involved cranes and prestressed concrete in a business culture where employees had been killed with cranes. And I spent time in the yard where driveable gantries were handling big chunks of concrete “overhead”…by “overhead” I mean you could wind up under twenty kips if you weren’t careful and Carl didn’t know you were there.

You seem to be trying to refute me, but everything you said exactly matches my experience and what I'm trying to say. Your project managers and design should be such that you minimize your crane costs, and when it comes you get as much done as you can. Even though a crane is expensive, when used well their portion of the cost is tiny.

There are enough canals in CA that I would expect to be an important customer of the cranes. You don't get a crane on demand, but you can always plan such that when you get the crane there is plenty of work.

Project management is a construction function.

My comment way up thread criticized serviceability.

Electrical infrastructure needs to be serviceable during disaster recovery. You can plan for it can’t schedule for it.

And the worst time to need a crane is for disaster recovery.

Yes, you can just use a crane but “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I don't understand what problem you're worrying about though. Others have already brought up the data center example where Google often will leave a server rack in place for five years even if some of the individual computers in it have failed. That is, it's easy to replace an entire rack at once than to replace just parts.

Similarly, for a system like this, I would expect they would build in components, let's call them racks of panels, however many that are connected together. If one of these so-called racks fails, leave it up until whenever and then replace the whole thing.

Possibly you'd have to remove a bunch of panels from the canal if the support's collapsed, but you should be designing them for the highest possible wind roll, but so that's unlikely to happen. Well, earthquakes are a problem, and I'm not sure how much you can design for that, but once again, you design for that. In any case, if something happens in a disaster, well, you may have to remove some panels from the water, but that's a labor job that needs a little bit of safety training. But otherwise, no crane. You just remove it and throw it away. You come back with the cranes later to repair the system back to where it should be. I'd be thinking using a tow truck for disaster recovery, not a crane.

Public utilities are regulated.

Their capacity is sized for peak demand.

Their infrastructure is financed through bonds.

Alphabet is an advertising company.

>> And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.

No. Lots of voltage (potential) but current only if you tap it. Panels will charge to a slightly high voltage state but do not become a problem.

While yes, these are cheap for steel structures, calling them cheap overall is silly. They literally cost more than the canal under them to make (assuming basic earthmoving and concrete formwork), especially when you include the cost for the footers.

As a way to save water, maybe. But it makes no sense as a way to make electricity. Someone else did the math, and it was approx $10/watt, which is silly.

The steel and concrete have the same materials cost as steel and concrete for ground mounted panels.

The large scale members usually mean there is less labor cost and mobilization time, and hence overhead (insurance, fencing, trailer, etc.). Like I said pre-engineered metal buildings are about the cheapest cost per square foot you can get at scale.

This is simply not true. I-beam's 4 ft deep, arched over a 100 ft wide canal would not be the same cost as a ground Mount system.

No commercial solar farms use large members to save on labor costs.

Standard ground mount equipment also uses pre-engineered metal, just of much lighter weight due to supporting a small fraction of the load.

The raw material cost for steel is by the ton. Barring unusual circumstances. And metal bents are very very structurally efficient.

Incidentally, they are not “I beams” and technically I-Beams are Wide Flange Shapes and used vertically as well as horizontally, and designated with as W(n)x(m) where W means wide flange, n is the depth in inches, and m is the weight in pounds per lineal foot. W shapes are rolled in rolling mills.

Bents are fabricated from steel plates to a design specific to the structure.

Solar panels are cheap these days; wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they take the data center approach (if a few machines die, well, who cares, deal with it next time a major overhaul is required).

I would expect a middle ground. They collect statistics from the inverters and when one doesn't report, or reports lower than expected levels they schedule maintenance for next time somebody is there anyway. But yeah, they probably replace a whole string of panels at once. I expect someone will design a crane for this purpose so the whole string can be done quickly - most of the work is at ground level.

I'd also expect that they have a crew to wash them off once in a while (I'm guessing yearly), but this is cheap labor not electricians.

    > The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.

This is classic HN "armchair critic" comment. Yeah, I'm sure the designers didn't think about any of these issues. If they need to clean the panels, they can use a cherry picker. If they need to service the electrical components underneath, they can wait until the canal is drained (usually once per year for cleaning), and, again, use a cherry picker.

I don’t even trust California to remember where they put these solar panels

For clarity I was using “service” in a technical sense.

Ground mounted panels can be serviced from a bucket truck right after a hail storm or other disaster. Disaster recovery is a critical design criterion for electrical infrastructure and the bucket truck is the standard electric utility service vehicle. Electrical utilities depend on each other and dispatch their fleets of bucket trucks across the country to aid in disaster recovery. If you drive much across the country, you might come across convoys of bucket trucks deploying down an interstate.

Which is to say cherry pickers don’t easily scale to handle the kind of critical events that need to be handled with electric utility infrastructure (and as an aside, in a pinch ground mounted solar panels can probably be serviced from a half ton pickup).

For context, in a former life I was an architect and one of my clients was an electrical co-operative. I also know a lineman socially.

You can read more about this project and the players in this article and draw your own conclusions:

https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...

Having to rent a cherry picker and being able to do maintenance only during a limited time per year significantly increases the cost of maintenance compared to an installation you can trivially access from ground level year-round. Canals being long and narrow don't exactly help either.

Sure, it can be done, but strictly from the PV perspective it doesn't make any economic sense compared to a regular solar farm when there's still plenty of land available. Similarly, from a "preventing evaporation" perspective going for a plain corrugated metal roof might not be much cheaper in installation, but it will be significantly easier to maintain.

Just because two thing can technically be combined, doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.

This is a classic HN “armchair critic” comment. Running a cherry picker team along a whole canal is far more expensive than maintenance would be on a field of solar panels.

With a pickup truck.

Except getting permission to build your "field of solar panels" costs X times as much as a local/state controlled area to build. Is that you, Brandolini calling?

> construct a cheap shade over the entire canal

That aint' gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel. And don't even think about fabric shade sail types of things, nobody is going to want to replace those every 3 years.

>it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.

This is not something you can just ignore

> That ain't gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel

Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the people who worked on this project must be stupid".

Looking at cahsr it is clear that some of the people in charge of infra in California are stupid. They made bad decisions and now I question the new ones they make.

To be fair, there are fabrics that last a long time. ETFE is an example. A fair comparison should price the solar cover against fabric.

That being said, solar panels are not that heavy, and fabric is every bit as subject to wind loading as solar panels.

Shade structure is not required at all. California has also been experimenting with floating plastic "shade balls" in the water.

The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap. Large PV panels make very good sails. The trusses look basically the same as you'd see in a large agricultural barn, horse riding arena, etc. Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.

I would very much like to see a total dollar figure for the example "roof trusses over the canel" structure vs. how many panels it can hold.

It's already true that the ground mounting costs and labor to assemble the ground mount are a huge part of building a large scale PV system.

> Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.

What empty, bare land?

If its really empty and bare, there is a reason for it and that reason is probably a problem for building and maintaining PV, and otherwise you have to add the loss of the alternative uses of the land to the cost.

> What empty, bare land?

Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.

Guess how fast the wind blows across the surfaces. There's a reason why these places currently host massive wind turbine farms.

> Have you been to Death Valley, my friend?

Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)

If you look at the city of Mojave, Calif. on Google Maps (satellite view) you can see massive solar farms all around it. There is plenty of space for expansion. There is no need to use a national or state park. (To be clear: Mojave Desert is far away from the city of Mojave!)

The wind and blown sand is something to behold. But large stretches are getting solar panels, yes.

In the context of California, land that is not suitable for agriculture because it can't be irrigated, even though it's flat and somewhat accessible by road. California has plenty of it, go drive around near Twenty Nine Palms and you'll see it...

And the moment you start building large structures on it everyone and their dog is going to show up and NIMBY it.

Spoken like someone who has never been to the mojave. This is the home to the largest wind turbine installation in the country. But again, if the worry is the solar panels acting like sails, probably not a great site given that wind.

And nonetheless, people show up and NIMBY projects in the Mojave desert! https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-06/califor...

Sorry, the largest wind power installation in the western hemisphere, not just the US, is SunZia in New Mexico (5.3MW).

Now measure the wind at twenty nine palms

Ok, now ask yourself why that area hasn’t been covered with solar panels yet…

To my eye if you were putting up a few hundred or more of those steel structures, and it didn't require a redesign of the canal retainment around it, it could be built quite economically.

Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.

You know where the wind blows really damn hard in California? Virtually any open field you can imagine putting these otherwise. Mojave for example is damn windy. That is why they currently host massive wind installations there.

I'm well aware of that, thanks. Ground mount PV is still going to be considerably less costly than this. Partly because it's easier to build, partly because it has many competing companies that sell the basic aluminum rail/hot dip galvanized steel mounting pieces, partly because you can use relatively low cost contractors to do work like install its footings and bolt it together.

Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.

>Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.

I mean sure, but compared to say having that technician in a dingy boat, its more costly in the sense you need a dingy boat. But this doesn't seem insurmountable. Maybe you don't even need a dingy boat. Maybe just a long 2x12 would be fine or some other scaffold platform you can just drag around. There's also something to be said about this solar array being where the land is already being used, and some greenfield solar array going in, well, greenfield areas that might be ecologically more sensitive.

Tell me you've never built a ground or roof mount PV system without coming right out any saying it... Wow. You took a look at the photos in the original URL and think that a person can stand in a small boat and wire up the backside of the panels? I'd love to obtain some of what you're smoking because it must be some incredible stuff.

You tell me one reply up a ground based system can be repaired by a technician with a stepladder and somehow a longer step ladder with a solid platform doesn't work for what is effectively just a slightly taller ground based system? Please explain.

Have you ever put a stepladder in the center of a dinghy and tried standing on it? I don't think you'd like the results.

Part of the point is reducing evaporation.

The UK has covered some water reservoir with floating PV panels.

The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:

  Project Nexus tests not one, but three different solar canal models. 

  ... accordion-like retractable panels are positioned low across the narrow canal, ready to roll up at a moment’s notice.

might come close.

Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.

It’s not empty or bare - there is a water canal right in the middle of it.

    > The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap.

I'm surprised by this comment. (Is this area known for strong winds?) If your comment is true, wouldn't all warehouses using the same type of standard "bents" also be very expensive? I doubt it.

    > Large PV panels make very good sails.

A quick Google search tells me:[1] "Most modern solar panels can withstand winds of up to 140 miles per hour." For all of the things I have read about large commercial solar panel installations, never once did I read anything about the risk of wind tearing off PV panels. If this were really a serious threat, wouldn't we see regularly local news stories about large PV panels "flying" away in big wind storms? And, yet, I never saw one.

[1] https://www.makemyhousegreen.com/green-guides/can-solar-pane...

> I'm surprised by this comment. (Is this area known for strong winds?)

Areas of the central valley are legendary for strong winds. A large stretch of the aqueduct (200km?) runs along the valley's West edge. So does the interstate highway I5.

The I5 has frequent high wind advisories. In the area around Pacheco Pass there are frequently gusting cross winds between 55 and 70km per hour. I use the I5 as my reference here, because I have spent many hours of my life driving it in these conditions.

> If your comment is true, wouldn't all warehouses using the same type of standard "bents" also be very expensive?

What makes you think building a warehouse in earthquake country is cheap?

> For all of the things I have read about large commercial solar panel installations, never once did I read anything about the risk of wind tearing off PV panels. If this were really a serious threat, wouldn't we see regularly local news stories about large PV panels "flying" away in big wind storms? And, yet, I never saw one.

The statement about solar panels making very good sails obviously true. Everything thin and flat makes a good sail.

PV panels don't go flying away because people spend a lot of money attaching them to the ground. They're expensive systems, and any installer that didn't make sure they were bolted down effectively, would be sued out of business after the first windstorm.

You can meet code requirements on rocky ground with relatively small concrete block anchoring systems. The cost of the blocks plus the metal pipe structure for a ground mount system is typically 10% or so of the total system install.

If you're on excavatable ground, the cost goes up a little (paradoxically, way more concrete is required to meet code).

There are also companies do this sort of thing with earth anchors/helical ground screws, which are VERY fast to install, but tend to cost more than the concrete. Nice that they can be (re)moved, though.

    > The I5 has frequent high wind advisories. In the area around Pacheco Pass there are frequently gusting cross winds between 55 and 70km per hour. I use the I5 as my reference here, because I have spent many hours of my life driving it in these conditions.

This is a classic bullshit HN reply. Literally, Brandolli law rules here!

My original post said that most panels with installation are good up to 140 mph (or 225 kmph). Your example is less than half my examplle.

    > The statement about solar panels making very good sails obviously true.

Ok, please provide five+ example from local news that shows poorly tied solar panels flying away in a wind storm. The "obvious" thruth: You cannot.

My understanding is that "The best reasoning they give" is the entire point. It such a huge issue that it drowns out all of the valid but smaller issues you are pointing out. And, the benefit to the water is just a bonus.

Exactly, that is hundreds of miles over which no NIMBY holds sway. The state can do what they want.

High level, I agree with your comment. In the case of this experiment, it was built by the Turlock Irrigation District, which was "financed by issuing public general obligation bonds. The debt was systematically paid back over decades through local property taxes and water delivery fees collected from the farmers." However, there are lots of canals that are directly owned by the state, so they are good candidates also.

> The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.

If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.

putting tarp over the canal might be an even cheaper solution? You dont need metal to make shade.

PV itself (not the inverters etc., the panels) is really really cheap.

Tarp is about the only opaque covering I've found that's cheaper than PV, per square meter.

However, even for a balcony PV system the frame is about 25% the price of the panel, and balcony systems are tiny frames; I don't want to even guess about those huge steel I-beams and concrete pads. For big things like this, the cost of the frame is unlikely to go away because you need to care about wind load.

That really leaves maintenance costs (how often do you need to replace the tarp?) and revenue (PV makes money, a tarp does not).

A Concrete slab is usually even cheaper.

not if you want to suspend it above the water.

Tarp, and pitch it across the canal like how you might do a hammock - you just need two anchor points on each side (or 4, at most).

We’re discussing permanent cover. A tarp barely lasts a year (or 3 if using very heavy duty fabric).

That sounds like a huge maintenance headache.

Based on my experience in NM (higher elevation, similar insolation), the expected life of tarp-like materials in open sunshine here would be 2-3 years.

Sunshade material could be more like 5-8 years, but is significantly more expensive.

I think someone made the mistake of calculating that the canals cover an absurd area, usually mapped by easement area instead of actual geometry. They’re absolutely right that permitting would be easier, without accounting for the fact that the majority of the canals run through the Sierras*, and that the California Water Project is the biggest consumer of power in the entire state (to pump water over the mountains).

Yeah sure, let’s put solar panels over the last section in Bakersfield where all the canals merge. More power, less evaporation. That’s great! But it’s not going to move the needle in California.

* if you go backpacking in the Sierras you’ll often run into one of the canals. They’re both cool and scary. It takes hours to get to them and every time I see one i have to wonder how they managed to build it (it’s been decades so any construction damage has mostly grown over)

There isn't a need for more copper. The canal already has electrical transmission lines.

Almost all the fields in the area is being used for valuable crops. It would be difficult to harvest them if solar panels were installed.

The wind on the valley side of the coastal range is intense. A cheap shade will need considerable maintenance.

There is little chance two separate projects would be cheaper than a combined project.

Not from USA so forgive my ignorance.

Shouldn't the obvious solution be to fix the "permitting requirements" rather than spend 6x on building kn undeveloped land?

Should the purpose of laws to serve the people rather than to tiptoe around laws and claiming "be we have strict zoning laws"?

Why is there a law that you yourself call "insane"?

Changing permitting laws can take ages if it works at all.

Easy to say, but nobody will agree to changes. People know how things are and don't like change, even if it would be for the better. In many cases things would be better overall, but the voters who care are the ones that would be worse off.

How about hanging solar panel vertically on tall buildings covering every floor except the first few to prevent vandalism

As the earth moves the sun would only hit one side and lose efficiency but right now it's "free space" not being used otherwise

They even make flexible solar panels now that can bend and move with the wind and don't need a stiff frame, slightly less efficient but volume makes up for that

Clean them the same way automated window washers work on skyscrapers

Shame they never came up with the solar paint solution, yet

> How about hanging solar panel vertically

The best explanation I've heard is from a PV installer. He said, "Every try to get a suntan standing up?" Seems you lose too much sun exposure to make it worthwhile.

> "Every try to get a suntan standing up?"

I didn't try to get a suntan, but I have gotten tans while standing up. It's called working outdoors (and not properly covering up, which I'm paying for now).

That said, the economics of vertical installations have changed. The cost of panels keeps going down, and as it does it's starting to make sense depending on your location and how you're orienting your vertical panels. Remember, almost all solar panel installations will be suboptimal unless they include a mechanism for tracking the sun. The question is how bad is suboptimal, what's the cost of the panels and what's their energy yield?

Distance from the equator helps. As does if it snows where the panels are, then vertical simply not having snow on them plus the reflection of the snow helps quite a bit in winter.

I've got many a sun burn standing as has anyone else who's toiled away outdoors doing something while shirtless and white...

I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.

Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.

I'll assume that installer is not near as Irish as I am.

Vertical mounted bifacial panels are more efficient than horizontal mounted panels.

? So everyone around the Mediterranean has a tan because they're sunbathing?

Wouldn't the rooms inside need more lighting then? I wonder about where the break even point is on those differences. I'm not educated in this area enough to even guess.

I assume they mean on the bits that don't have windows. Though caution would be required there; you have to be very careful about tall building cladding material (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire).

Lighting, incidentally, is practically _free_ these days. An EU 'A' rated LED bulb has to do 210 lumens per watt. So the equiv of an old-fashioned 100W incandescent uses 7.5W.

It’s hard to retrofit that on existing buildings for reasons of structural integrity.

I see a lot of vertical solar here in Finland. Particularly on newer and/or industrial buildings. I think it's mostly a cost/effort/ROI issue plus sheer unwillingness to do new things.

I'm really confused by this whole thread. How is this project fundamentally different from the solar shades used in parking lots, or even rooftop solar? You have existing land that's already productive, and you're making it more productive by installing solar panels. Building a new solar plant on new land is a completely orthogonal project.

The fundamental difference is that suspending something heavy over a waterway incurs significant cost - more structure needed to hold it up, harder to clean, etc. No idea how that cost balances out against benefits, but looking at the photos it's clearly a much more expensive structure than parking lots or rooftop due to the long span required and more specialized construction. Solar in a field plus a cheaper lighter shade structure is a pretty natural comparison to decide if this is economical isn't it?

Put the solar panels in a field

They paved paradise, put up a solar array.

The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.

They're load-bearing.

A desert isn’t exactly paradise. A whole lotta desert in California.

Using solar to generate electricity uses far less land per unit that growing corn ethanol

Yes! Technology Connections YouTube channel made a ninety minute video about this topic: "You are being misled about renewable energy technology." [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

There are a lot of places in the country that are putting up solar panels on what is otherwise arable land (eg New York). And... it's a problem. With climate change in mind, you should be using land that is otherwise not usable for anything else productive because there's plenty of it.

In the Southwest for example (eg NM, AZ), you have plenty of desert and sunshine-hours. Solar panels also tend to get less effective the hotter it is so it's a balancing act. But those states should be plastered with solar and they should be exporting it to neighbouring states. Colorado is actually kind of ideal for this too. In that case, it's mountainous terrain.

Also, IMHO there shouldn't be a parking lot in the country that isn't covered in solar. But that's a separate issue.

The land can be compact: shaped like a square with minimal perimeter. For the same area along a canal, with winding corners, it would seem like a far longer run. This is especially worse depending how inverters are since DC along long transmission is less efficient.

From what I read and watched on this topic, not all of the canals are all gravity fed and there are sections that require pumping. This gives a great local source of power to use in all operations in processing and moving this water.

All those pumping stations are already connected to a grid that provides consistent power sourced from dozens of power plants.

And water evaporation… and using land makes the land unusable for other purposes… But your comment raises a good question. What are we looking for? The best solution or the cheapest solution?, is the chepeast solution the best?

> construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no

Unless you can provide concrete numbers and do a side-by-side comparison, you have already lost the argument.

Plus I am sure you are not the first person to come up with the idea.

I think it's the exact opposite. If someone is going to propose a project with costs of hundreds if not billions of taxpayer dollars, the burden is on them to provide concrete numbers.

Solar panels don’t weigh very much at all. I would think the difference in weight between building a durable shade system that can weather the elements, and something that can hold solar panels is not very big at all.

It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

Not if you already own the canal but would have to buy or rent the fields.

I like to point out once you leave urban areas land is really cheap. And land without water rights or with poor soil is really cheap.

Acquiring a lot of cheap land can still be expensive if it takes you a lot of time to process everything.

Plus the people selling it to you will simply play you off each other since you're publicly committed to buying it. Like with that train they're building.

I wouldn't touch fields or canals. The US has incredible amounts of parking lots. They are also mostly built in very developed parts of the land with a lot of users for electric power in close proximity. And a parking lot is already "sealed ground". Might be less problematic to get a permit there?

Additional plus: cars don't heat up in the sun. And at some point you might even charge EVs there.

So, how many fields are there that cannot be used for other things? It seems reasonable to position solar panels over things that are already serving some purpose and the quality of that service will not be negatively affected by a solar panel placement above it.

I read about a canal built in Arizona, they decided the 3% (iirc) losses due to evaporation weren't worth pursuing. Pretty hot and dry climate. So, this may make the solar panels cheaper but doesn't justify maintaining an awning.

In this case they have to build an expensive structure to cover the canal anyway. The span is large. Putting solar panels on it increases the loading and requires a slightly stronger structure, but might improve the financials of the project enough to make sense.

21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026

https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/

In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar. As of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA

Is this enough solar? Just keep building. Enough sunlight falls on Earth every ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...

Land is expensive you are not counting the cost of land itself.

That massive structure is unnecessary. Just add vertical solar panels on either side and that will add 4 hours of additional solar production.

That won't reduce evaporation from the canal.

The article + linked study also point out that performance of solar is higher around water bodies.

It would be far easier to build solar on highways. The median strip on interstates is quite wide.

Those are oftentimes safety features designed for cars to survive entering without anything to hit.

And anything near a road (including rail) will be pelted with rocks and dust full of metals and organic compounds. Anything sensitive to those needs some clearance from traffic.

Putting solar panels on a field doesn't reduce evaporation from the canal.

yeah there's no shortage of land, but with canals you've got multiple layers of infra, maintenance, and permitting happening in the same place so you've got some advantages

There are solutions like this to most of Californias big intractable problems, and they're not done because some California laws and/or regulations make it impossible.

This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...

A lot of things get easier when everyone basically lives in one city, yes.

What's the lifetime of a "cheap shade"? And the cost to renew it over the same lifetime? And the cost of paying for other land?

... likely less than the ~$13/W this cost to install, but that included NRE for three different styles of panel mounting. Standardizing would cut costs significantly.

Yes, I'd like to see the "cheap shade" that could span as far as shown in the pics as well as survive strong gales. It wouldn't be like a cheap shade in your back yard.

As mentioned in the article, we heavy in Europe a good source of shade that's rather self sustaining and even helps replace the concrete lining of the canals. It's a wonderful technology called trees

This is directly addressed in the article.

mind that you treat land as free, tho

You didn't read the article, did you?

There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.

Or better yet, invest in pipes.

Canal sized pipes?

I'm pretty sure those are called tunnels

I'm being a bit filp, I don't literally mean to do it.

400+ miles of 20m tunnels. How much cheaper is that going to be?

According to AI, that pipe would only need to be 43 Feet in diameter, only 43 feet wide. Pretty sure they have that at Home Depot.

You wouldn't do it that way. You would have several 10 foot diameter pipes (which they already make, and are small enough to fit on a truck). That way when one pipe has a problem you can shut it off an still get most of your flow. A lot more expensive than an open canal though.

https://wonderfulengineering.com/world-record-underwater-shi...

Congratulations for their stunt. That doesn't mean anyone else should follow that though. There are lots of disadvantages to large tunnels and large pipes and so I would still recommend for most that a different path should be taken.

As an engineer and expert on this though, I'm not an expert. I've looked into it just enough to know that I would expect that it would just not be worth it, but maybe I'm wrong for your case

> it would just not be worth it

That is my entire point. Even with many smaller pipes it has not been worth it. A big trench is just more affordable and covering it is probably a better option than replacing it.

I'm sure it could be done, but it would cost a fortune. My understanding is the canals were built to distribute water to farmers, and conservation/evaporation wasn't really much of a consideration because California had plenty of water back then.

BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.

At least $16 billion for 45 miles. See https://www.deltaconveyanceproject.com/about-the-delta-conve... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Conveyance_Project

And suddenly you can build something else on those pipelines?

Literally in the article.

>It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.

But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.

Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?

One of the first things I do with the top comment of any topic on any platform is to question it with great scrutiny before choosing whether to send it up, or down, or leave it as it is... or to comment about that comment myself.

Your comment, which I found at the top of the stack here, did not survive the first pass of that scrutiny.

> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field,

Yeah, sounds nice. But the desert surrounding popular parts of California does have natural life. It has life whether it is owned by someone (who can make a stand to say "No"), or it is owned by the public. The life there doesn't know.

But that desert life, even when it it seems insignificant, still needs light in order for it to survive. It has a very narrow ecosystem in which it can survive.

> and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

This is what a cheap shade over an artificial canal tends to look like when it is meant to survive the elements. (This particular shade under discussion just happens to also to produce electricity from solar energy.)

> The supports in the picture are massive

As they would also be for a shade

> and don't look cheap.

None of these activities are ever cheap.

> Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field.

It's good that you can imagine things. Some people are not so-blessed.

> You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.

Oh. So, you caught everyone with their pants down! So clever. Big Copper should be very ashamed of themselves right now because, by way of your plan, the gigantic expense of copper for a large solar farm has been increased to a slightly-larger expense! The entire ploy to cover the canals was a sham all along that was motivated by selling more copper!

Please, tell me: Would you want to receive the Nobel prize directly, or would you rather be seclusive and receive it by proxy?

> Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper.

You're free to spearhead a movement to do that yourself, if you're so-inclined.

And hey! When you do, then at least some of the water supply canals will be already covered! That hard part will have already been done. Win-win!

Power lines are made of aluminum and steel.

I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.

Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?

Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?

Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?

"Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon."

In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.

A solar panel is 4 feet or so on the long side. Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. even if it's topped out at 10A thats still 120KW... you need a hefty cable to carry that panel to panel. Which is the core of the point I was making.

Amps determine how hefty a cable needs to be, not volts. Volts mostly determine how thick the insulation needs to be.

14 gauge wire is basically all you need to carry 10A safely for an extended period of time regardless the voltage. It doesn't matter that you are carrying 120KW.

The proof of this is in EV charge cables. Those bad boys can carry up to 350kW. Yet the cables are often thinner than you might expect. How do they do this? It's by using high voltages (around 900V) which cuts back the amps to around 300->400.

Tesla's chargers peak (or used to) around 600V which has required them to have much beefier cables to handle the high current.

I get that. I'm pretty skeptical that 120 KW going through the last panel doesn't cause damage, and in the "multiple miles chained together" (to quote op) many MW going through the panel at the end of the chain doesn't run into some sort of issue in the real world. Even small percentage losses turn into a lot of heat or other issues at that scale.

If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?

It won't! That's the amazing thing about electricity.

While having 12kV going through panels is not safe for many reasons, having 300V at 10-20A is completely normal.

12kV is impractical because these voltages can jump quite far, and you need a lot of insulation for them to be safe.

And so ultimately, despite my details being wrong about currents, the notion of stringing miles of panels together is probably not a good basis for rejecting the panels over the canals.

In reality, you shouldn't string a lot of panels together for other reasons. An obstructed panel doesn't just not produce energy. It acts as a resistor, _wasting_ energy that flows through it.

You would have short strings of panels and small string inverters built every ~100 meters along the channel. Inverters will also connect to the high-voltage bus cable, likely buried in a trench along the channel. And most channels in California are not gravity-fed, so they already need pump stations along the way and have power distribution systems for them.

Just imagine that GP stated wattage, or better yet energy. Nitpicking the details of how electricity is distributed does not refute his point.

"Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. "

And they're never installed in config chains that high voltage - cell spacing between cells is typically very low and only capable of withstanding ~5kV before internal arcing occurs.

Also, your typical 72-cell solar panel is only 32V.

Why would you chain a quarter mile of panels?

The obvious answer is a cheap inverter ever few meters - this is typical practice with solar panels - and then a cheap transformer scattered around to get the voltage to whatever the line is. This is the common cheap practice for solar installs everywhere.

Microinverters where there is an inverter on every panel are also common - they are more expensive, but reduce some labor.

Either way the inverter is connected to a network and then get remote monitoring of each section and in turn can plan maintenance as needed.

I wouldn't. I was responding to the GP comment talking about how utterly awful and wasteful this design is because you need some extra wire instead of just making "miles long chains" of solar panels. My 1/4 mile example was just to point out that a tiny fraction of those miles is itself insane.

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