Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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