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.

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.

I bet it's Vevor. They make everything.

Literally.

Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful.

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

Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.

Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.

Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.

These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.

If that was the easy solution then the US would have solved it in the 1990s during the war on drugs.

If prison solved a society's problems, the USA would be a utopia.

The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).

Putting people in prison has substantial costs.

Yep. Meth costs pennies to make. Sell it cheap in liquor stores and nobody would do this any more.

That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.

This is why Islamic countries have more severe punishments for thieves. At worst, they never commit a third offense.

10 dollars? Who's your meth guy?

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.

Your body builds up a tolerance to opioids. If you can receive a constant dose of heroin every day, your body will eventually want more of it to chase the high. For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.

Methadone (and Suboxone) is slow releasing so your brain is kept satisfied but without the massive high that a needle of heroin gives you. And because of that, taking other opioids at the same time blunts their effects. Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.

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.

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.

> 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.

$0.20 isn't enough to cover good self-defense 9mm rounds, and no you shouldn't just use FMJ.

I doubt they would attempt to sell it as is. They'd break out the copper portion and trade on that alone

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.

So what IS a current price of meth in some locale?

>Because the only solutions that work are social.

This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."

I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."

I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification.

This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.

In the US you typically have to give identification to sell scrap, so it sets up a chain of evidence against you. Still doesn't stop methheads.

Should we police the scrap yards, or help the fellow citizens who are “skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine”

What a place to live.

Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?

My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)

Russian(?) scientists during the siege of... Leningrad? starved to death while surrounded by seed potatoes.

The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.

I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.

>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.

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.

>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.

So then they'll just sell to middle men.

And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)

Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.

> They have. It's called insurance.

In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.

> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.

That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.

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.

I license doesn't stop someone from doing something illegal. It doesn't cost much for the equipment to turn scrap copper into billet.

Oh sorry, we're calling them "forced disappearances" now.

Can't be an execution if the body is never found.

Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.

Sorry, buy we can't build a civilization around people like that, or sustain our existing one by indulging them.

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.

How did it go for this one?

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.

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.

I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.

The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.

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.

The villains are those of us who tolerate this kind of behavior in the name of compassion.

It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.

In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts.

I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.

Which, notably, is the place where this happened and therefore the place we're discussing.

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.

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.

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.

Criminal punishment research consistently shows that reality does not follow initial intuition here.

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”)

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.

Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.

Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.

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.

> 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)?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy

> 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?

Insightful and nuanced comment.

The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.

I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.

The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."

Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.

Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.

The answer is, you still do socialism, and you also pay someone to go around busting scrap yards that buy obviously-stolen material.

Just focusing on the demand-side dramatically reduced incidences of catalytic converter theft in the US. You still get the occasional attempt, but basically no scrap yard will take catalytic converters without a title to the vehicle with matching VIN, and most will want to see the vehicle.

Yes, requiring paperwork to scrap wiring is bureaucracy manifest. But legitimate people just do not roll up to scrap yards with a van full of tangled 4/0.

The big catalytic converter buyer was so brazen, he had a mobile app. Free markets for stolen scrap is just beyond tolerable at this point.

They are less likely to reoffend if harmed, most crimes are done by repeat offenders.

>a mother stealing food from a chain store

oh come on now, how can that Dickensian scenario happen in a country where even a McJob pays, per hour, more than enough to feed for a week?

Moving the goalpost? Every household has expenses other than food.

People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.

> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.

Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.