Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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