Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.
bArray 27 minutes ago [-]
I'm surprised nothing more serious happened. There was obviously a serious electrocution risk, but I think that is the easiest bit to deal with. 100kW of radio waves, whilst non-ironising, can still microwave you. With 100kW there could have also been a serious reflection back to the transmitter. This guy cutting the cable is far luckier than he will ever know.
Working backwards from clues in the article, thief maybe stole 200-400 ft of wire.
Assuming between 3-1/8″ - 6-1/8″ diameter.
Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value. $70k-$100k to repair...
Absurd.
sowbug 20 hours ago [-]
That's the usual car stereo theft economics: cause $1,000 of damage to sell a $100 radio for $10.
m463 20 hours ago [-]
probably $10 of meth to harm a body so that it eventually needs $50k of medical work, or $100k of dental work
cevn 20 hours ago [-]
10 dollars? Who's your meth guy?
trympet 19 hours ago [-]
GP is talking out of his ass - he’s probably not up to speed on meth economics like you and me.
NewJazz 19 hours ago [-]
Methenomics say that you can step on product however much you need to reach the demanded price point.
shrubble 15 hours ago [-]
You may need to revise your methematical model.
18 hours ago [-]
DetroitThrow 18 hours ago [-]
HN constantly undervalues meth and this has been called out since at least 2009. Horrible.
15 hours ago [-]
johanvts 19 hours ago [-]
Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
NewJazz 19 hours ago [-]
The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.
themafia 17 hours ago [-]
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
razakel 16 hours ago [-]
>That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
The UK does that - a scrap dealer can only pay by bank transfer or cheque. That way there's a paper trail.
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.
NewJazz 18 minutes ago [-]
Yeah you really need to make sure there is a high chance folks are caught in the act.
freeopinion 8 hours ago [-]
I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.
johanvts 10 hours ago [-]
I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.
zeafoamrun 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jcgrillo 19 hours ago [-]
Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
overfeed 14 hours ago [-]
> Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
tshaddox 18 hours ago [-]
Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
jmward01 18 hours ago [-]
I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.
tshaddox 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.
NoMoreNicksLeft 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
swiftcoder 16 hours ago [-]
> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
47282847 16 hours ago [-]
Criminal punishment research consistently shows that reality does not follow initial intuition here.
"Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse.”
(“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”)
close04 16 hours ago [-]
That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
hiddencost 18 hours ago [-]
There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.
alexgieg 13 hours ago [-]
Those are pre-requisites, but not enough.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
jeffrallen 17 hours ago [-]
It's not a theory. It's socialism and it works fine in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places.
johanvts 15 hours ago [-]
Im Danish, and I approve of the welfare state system, but we still have people cutting down EV charger cables etc here.
apelapan 15 hours ago [-]
Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
intended 16 hours ago [-]
Nope.
The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.
If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?
freeopinion 8 hours ago [-]
Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
xp84 20 hours ago [-]
Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
bandofthehawk 20 hours ago [-]
In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night.
Our society has failed these people in many ways.
hyperhello 20 hours ago [-]
I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.
bandofthehawk 20 hours ago [-]
Lack of healthcare, limited job opportunities, growing income inequality, are just a few reasons off the top of my head.
bigbuppo 20 hours ago [-]
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
peddling-brink 19 hours ago [-]
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
zdragnar 33 minutes ago [-]
Look at sibling comments on copper theft in Scandinavian countries.
The idea that humans only commit crime out of necessity and wouldn't do it if they could just get a 9-5 job is extremely naive.
stickfigure 40 minutes ago [-]
Some people just want drugs.
paleotrope 20 hours ago [-]
Drugs. It's usually drugs.
esikich 20 hours ago [-]
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
TurdF3rguson 20 hours ago [-]
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
esikich 19 hours ago [-]
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
gonight 17 hours ago [-]
As someone who grew up on food stamps, I'd fully believe the mean and median income on hackernews are six figure numbers.
esikich 16 hours ago [-]
At least. And also living in a metropolis, in a burrough where SaaS is the only way of life and all of the benefits of society come from NPCs.
georgemcbay 18 hours ago [-]
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
freeopinion 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
Terr_ 16 hours ago [-]
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
> We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
Is that blameworthy?
esikich 19 hours ago [-]
Yes.
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
freeopinion 7 hours ago [-]
Incarcerating people is not free.
And the more people you incarcerate the more you normalize incarceration and it loses its power of dissuasion.
Surely it is worthwhile to encourage other ideas. We might have to experiment with a lot of ideas to find some game changers.
esikich 16 hours ago [-]
If this is sarcasm, fine.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
hyperhello 20 hours ago [-]
My general rule for posting sarcasm is to phrase it seriously first and see if it's something I still want to post.
esikich 19 hours ago [-]
How did it go for this one?
19 hours ago [-]
vostrocity 19 hours ago [-]
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
dylan604 19 hours ago [-]
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
themafia 17 hours ago [-]
They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.
JuniperMesos 13 hours ago [-]
No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.
themafia 12 hours ago [-]
That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
mslt 20 hours ago [-]
I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.
jdross 20 hours ago [-]
The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.
Blackthorn 19 hours ago [-]
Compassionate care does not exist for people like this.
alphager 8 hours ago [-]
*in the US
Blackthorn 4 hours ago [-]
Which, notably, is the place where this happened and therefore the place we're discussing.
19 hours ago [-]
laughing_man 20 hours ago [-]
The villains are those of us who tolerate this kind of behavior in the name of compassion.
TurdF3rguson 19 hours ago [-]
You shouldn't tolerate the behavior, but announcing disgust for people who are struggling is just not helpful.
laughing_man 18 hours ago [-]
Lots of people who are struggling don't become thieves.
TurdF3rguson 17 hours ago [-]
Right, like I said don't tolerate the behavior, but that doesn't mean every thief is an irredeemable piece of shit who doesn't deserve help or empathy.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
19 hours ago [-]
NoMoreNicksLeft 16 hours ago [-]
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
general1465 12 hours ago [-]
The bigger absurdity is when thief mistakes bunch of fiber for copper wires and then whole countries can go offline
If it's a "normal" wire specification that someone else can use it was likely sold for ~50% of retail.
tonyarkles 20 hours ago [-]
It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.
dylan604 19 hours ago [-]
I doubt they would attempt to sell it as is. They'd break out the copper portion and trade on that alone
9 hours ago [-]
bragr 20 hours ago [-]
Thieves typically burn off the insulation so it's not likely to be easily reused.
rmason 21 hours ago [-]
In Detroit copper theft was an epidemic a few years back. Once the easy stuff in abandoned houses was gone thieves went further afield. .
A few brave thieves went after power substations. For some thieves a lack of knowledge was fatal.
An example shown when I worked around a 7000A rail was also two men. One formed a circuit and the other tried to pry him off.
legitronics 21 hours ago [-]
How is this person alive? That’s a terrifying amount of relatively high frequency energy. And pressurized gasses of some sort.
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
My first thought also .. possibly pulled a breaker rendering cable inert, or perhaps rigged a remote cutting tool - drop saw poised to cut on a long extension cord ready to be turn on ... (problematic).
I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.
cucumber3732842 20 hours ago [-]
You can buy high voltage gear online cheap. Just this one job would pay for the complete setup if you're buying cheap brands.
CamperBob2 21 hours ago [-]
The transmitter will have a VSWR trip for just this sort of eventuality. It would likely be damaged severely if allowed to operate into an open circuit for more than a brief moment.
The criminal will be out in a few months to strike again I'm sure.
grahamburger 21 hours ago [-]
Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.
asdefghyk 21 hours ago [-]
The photo shows a cable ( with insulation ) that looks at least 4 inches thick ... (from a distance )
CamperBob2 21 hours ago [-]
The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp
Nominative determinism in action.
fwipsy 20 hours ago [-]
Or subverted in this case, I suppose. Can't have been very crisped if he could flee from the police.
arthurcolle 20 hours ago [-]
any paulcrisp on HN want to discuss?
helterskelter 21 hours ago [-]
Darwin awards should give this guy an honorable mention.
trick-or-treat 21 hours ago [-]
Reads like a super-villain origin story. Welp, I guess he doesn't have to worry about getting the electric chair.
dylan604 21 hours ago [-]
I'm looking for a Kalshi bet that the perp is a tweaker.
They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.
ben-gy 20 hours ago [-]
This feels like force majeur from a contract perspective…
AndrewKemendo 21 hours ago [-]
That’s wild. Radio transmission power is no joke.
I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.
I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper
7402 17 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised.
Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.
Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.
How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.
AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe like 1-2 feet away i was manually adjusting something on the top of a 8 foot radio tower on vandenburg hall at USAFA.
sidewndr46 20 hours ago [-]
You think exposure to 100 watts at ~100 MHz is going to cause your head to ring?
fc417fc802 19 hours ago [-]
Are you saying it won't? What sort of RF power density in the FM range can the human body tolerate without noticeable effect?
sidewndr46 5 hours ago [-]
100 watts at 100 MHz is so low that if you spent an entire lifetime in proximity to it, you would never notice.
At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.
The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.
AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago [-]
Call Dave West who is still a radio engineer in CO and was with me on the roof in 2006 if you care so much about it
asdefghyk 21 hours ago [-]
Very lucky not to have been killed by the high voltages or intense RF energy and or suffer severe burns / blindness ....
AndrewKemendo 21 hours ago [-]
Come to think of it it wasn’t even 10 seconds, more like 2 or 3 before my ears and eyes were burning
MBCook 20 hours ago [-]
Literally.
CamperBob2 21 hours ago [-]
Is it too soon to talk about regulating the $#@* out of scrap-metal dealers?
SoftTalker 21 hours ago [-]
They already are. You need to show ID to sell scrap metal. The thieves use a fence.
gacgacgac 20 hours ago [-]
Furthermore, going after scrap metal sites makes an important business harder and fails to be inquisitive enough about the reasons why the thefts happen at all. Maybe we should try to understand why people are stealing copper. (Presumably poverty, drug addiction, lack of opportunity)
CamperBob2 6 hours ago [-]
Sorry, buy we can't build a civilization around people like that, or sustain our existing one by indulging them.
bigyabai 6 hours ago [-]
But we can build a society around periodically replacing catalytic converters?
I feel like you end up indulging them either way.
xp84 20 hours ago [-]
If you believe we can just fix poverty and drug addiction with some government program, I have a bridge to sell you. So far, no one has, anywhere in the world.
Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.
gacgacgac 19 hours ago [-]
If you think most people "are just terrible", I think you've let cynicism corrupt your thinking, and I don't think we're going to get very far by talking.
I believe the opposite -- people fundamentally want to help each other, and we've structurally set up our society to force people out of that mode and into a competitive mode. Read "A Paradise Built in Hell", when push comes to shove, communities care for each other.
If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
We do this. We have programs for all those things. Anyone who is willing to go through the "process" can get free or reduced housing, food, and medical care. Education through 12th grade has always been free.
I think the GP was talking about addicts and those who for other reasons refuse to go through the "process" to get help. They are content living a life of begging, petty crime, getting high, and rejecting any help that comes with expectations of changing problematic behaviors.
konmok 20 hours ago [-]
The USA opioid epidemic was caused by gross government negligence and corruption. Is it really a stretch to think that a policy solution could have prevented the majority of the harm? And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
NoMoreNicksLeft 16 hours ago [-]
The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
CamperBob2 20 hours ago [-]
Where does the fence sell the scrap? Somebody is buying it.
MBCook 20 hours ago [-]
Same as stolen TVs, catalytic converters, and anything else.
There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
cucumber3732842 20 hours ago [-]
>There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
That's every scrap yard and most small businesses. Nothing makes you hate the law and it's enforcers, peddlers and proponents like being on the business end of regulations and a scrap yard probably has at least half a dozen agencies they are subject to.
Heck, I bet half of these guys would aerosolize radioactive waste out of spite if they thought the wind would blow it into a "good school district".
julian_sark 18 hours ago [-]
Didn't know fences contained copper ;)
BobbyTables2 20 hours ago [-]
Wonder if they steal the fence too!
quickthrowman 11 hours ago [-]
You need a license to sell more than $25 of copper in my state. You won’t be issued a copper selling license without holding something like a journeyman electrical worker license or similar.
In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.
Vaslo 21 hours ago [-]
The trash thief will never be able to replace that. I guess insurance will help but that’s just another excuse for them to raise rates.
That thief should be indentured until he pays it back in full.
mikeweiss 21 hours ago [-]
Wait a second, I just realized something... how much would the station be paying in electricity to transmit at 100,000 watts 24/7 ? Their electric bill must be like $200,000 per year??
RF_Enthusiast 9 hours ago [-]
It’s 100,000 watts ERP with a 6 bay antenna. The higher gain antenna means the transmitter output power would be much less (about 35 kw), although at still extremely dangerous levels to mess with.
20 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 23:05:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.
This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).
But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.
Assuming between 3-1/8″ - 6-1/8″ diameter.
Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value. $70k-$100k to repair...
Absurd.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
The UK does that - a scrap dealer can only pay by bank transfer or cheque. That way there's a paper trail.
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
"Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse.”
(“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”)
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.
If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
The idea that humans only commit crime out of necessity and wouldn't do it if they could just get a 9-5 job is extremely naive.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
Is that blameworthy?
And the more people you incarcerate the more you normalize incarceration and it loses its power of dissuasion.
Surely it is worthwhile to encourage other ideas. We might have to experiment with a lot of ideas to find some game changers.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12985082
If it's a "normal" wire specification that someone else can use it was likely sold for ~50% of retail.
A few brave thieves went after power substations. For some thieves a lack of knowledge was fatal.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017...
I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Hard_line
Nominative determinism in action.
They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.
I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.
I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper
Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.
Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.
How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.
At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.
The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.
I feel like you end up indulging them either way.
Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.
I believe the opposite -- people fundamentally want to help each other, and we've structurally set up our society to force people out of that mode and into a competitive mode. Read "A Paradise Built in Hell", when push comes to shove, communities care for each other.
If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.
I think the GP was talking about addicts and those who for other reasons refuse to go through the "process" to get help. They are content living a life of begging, petty crime, getting high, and rejecting any help that comes with expectations of changing problematic behaviors.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.
That's every scrap yard and most small businesses. Nothing makes you hate the law and it's enforcers, peddlers and proponents like being on the business end of regulations and a scrap yard probably has at least half a dozen agencies they are subject to.
Heck, I bet half of these guys would aerosolize radioactive waste out of spite if they thought the wind would blow it into a "good school district".
In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.
That thief should be indentured until he pays it back in full.