Like Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union when people stole power lines.

Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when every crook is out to steal catalytic converters from cars at people's homes, that's pretty bad.

Macroeconomic and microeconomic cannibalism are further signs of a trend towards decay and decline. Oh and school shootings and mass shootings. And a lack of functional, universal healthcare. It will take far more, like the garbage not being picked up, for major reforms, but it will also take a charismatic leader really on the side of the ordinary people for that to manifest. Another "FDR".

It turns out society-wide prosperity doesn't naturally arise from maximization of individual egoism. Who knew…

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> This is how you turn dollars into pennies.

It seems important to note, as the article you link does but you do not, that there is no allegation she was trying to steal or damage the cable in use. She was digging for unused cables buried long ago.

That may not be a high-value activity in most contexts, but it is a value-added activity.

To my understanding, stolen catalytic converters move through criminal channels until they get out of the country, are recycled, and then come back in as raw materials. At some point in the chain, they're turned from catalytic converters into bulk metal-containing ceramic powder for easier transport.

I don't understand how the yards will take nearly-new AC condensers and things like that. The building next door had three installed, on the ground. They were gone the first weekend. The next 3 they installed were put on the roof, and had razor wire around them.

see my handle so where the fuck to start go to a bunch of scrap yards, someones "door yard", like mine, where as a matter of course, bits and chunks of most metals end up as part of building and repairing, to larger operations that are huge, fast paced with prices and markets changing by the hour, and cash is used as the entisement to get people to bring metal in on everything from bicycles to the biggest rigs on the road, a cacophany of heavy equipment like car shredders, that reduce a full sized car to hand sized bits, and seperate out the more valuable metals, and waste plastic, grrrrrank!, done it's a wild, dangerous madhouse populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers. then there are hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses that generate several hundred tons of scrap per year in acompletly normal, organized, boring fashion, except for when it gets dropped, and the expected and tolerated losses to dumpster diving. I could go into much greater detail as to how it works, the safeguards to prevent theft that are in place, but as in the case of guardrails say, the problem is that, legitimatly scrapped guardrails come in every day, or hyway crews just leave crash damaged ones lay beside the hyway when they fix the rails, 1 they are too busy, and 2 they know the bent ones spontainoiusly disapear, the scraped one is worth $17.26......nobody is doing extra paper work for that, right we are talking millions of tons pe anum of material moved in a completly random ad hock manner, dont take it the wrong way, but... go the fuck ahead bub, you fix it I'll watch

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Similarly, in Seattle, a bronze statue was sawed off at the base and stolen about a year ago: https://southseattleemerald.org/news/2024/08/01/healing-hate...

why would Dutch people steal graveyard statuettes? Are things that bad in Holland right now?

We have alleys where I am in the US and I sort out all the things thst could be useful and leave them in the alley and they all get picked up by folks before the day is over

Hopefully they aren't just picking out the good bits and dumping the remainder of the box somewhere else.

Do you really think that deters metal theft? "We've cashed in enough today boys, let's not be greedy." C'mon.

A temporary powerline was installed to keep a small industrial area in Amsterdam powered up while there was a new substation built. Step up and step down transformers on either side of the link took care of not having to use a massive diameter cable which amongst other obstacles had to be strung underneath a bridge. After a week or so the power failed. A hacksaw blade was found embedded in the cable. The police declined to investigate because the people from the power company told them that whoever did that had already been punished sufficiently.

They do that here with the ISP wires and it takes out internet and cell service all over the county and beyond for usually two days straight each time. All the providers here run off the same infrastructure, so the only people with internet are those with satellite internet when it happens. I started driving in a direction to see how long it would take me cell service during it once and I had to drive about 40 miles.

At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.

Not just meth heads, but junkies too. Only around here, they climb the poles to cut the cables. Unfortunately for all involved, they are cutting the fiber lines so not only do customers loose signal, the junkies don't actually get any copper.

Alcoholics in Poland steal live train and tram traction. Once in a while, they die.

How do you know they haven't?

wait until it becomes widely known how much copper is in one of those EV super chargers. Although witnessing a bug zapper effect may deter some thieves.

Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.

Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.

People that steal almost anything off the street aren't making a successful career out of it, they're addicts.

A second hand iPhone is only worth a few tens of dollars on the black market, but that's enough for the next hit.

People willing and able to do this probably have a few things going on at a time. Plus they're not necessarily at the high end of living expenses. A couple grand haul for a couple hours work is pretty good.

Your cost of living is pretty low if you live in a nylon tent

Well, they're freelancers, so they probably have another half-dozen things going on.

Presumably multi-causal (economic desperation, rising metal costs, perception that the crime won't be punished, getting the idea from others, etc.) but at least one component is probably the rise of high-powered, battery-operated tools. Battery tools are so much better today than they were even 10 years ago. In the picture from the article you can see the guy using a battery-powered reciprocating saw. Not long ago, an approach like that wouldn't have been feasible.

> I wonder what the impetus has been these days that wasn’t there in the past?

Fentanyl and cheap battery powered tools

Im wondering of regulatory enforcement on the metals dealers has gone down. The last time Southern California had problems like this they added required identification and thumbprints for any seller at the dealers. Presumably there have been workarounds since that allow stolen metals to be moved

Demand is up and supply is increasingly getting more costly. Ripe conditions for this kind of behavior.

When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.

Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.

In my area, we've taken to replacing brass hydrant fixtures with hardened resin covers and such, because they were constantly being stolen.

And as much as that is an issue in itself, gotta love the scrap metal dealers who see someone show up with a shopping trolley full of brass hydrant covers and "sure, no problem here".

Social media hyping it? Stupid kids get an idea? I'm speculating.

Is brass more expensive than it used to be?

I'll need a source for that claim since it sounds blatantly made up. Aggregate/gravel costs $10/t., So, to get enough money for a snack, an addict would need to do an ungodly amount of work, digging up large stretches of highway and breaking it up hundreds of meters, or even a few kilometers.

The cost-to-benefit ratio just breaks down. You spend more calories making just $10. That's why vandals go for catalytic converters, copper, and aluminum. These are expensive metals that have an attractive labor-to-payoff ratio. Gravel is abundant in the countryside and no matter how poor or addicted a person is, the labor-to-payoff ratio makes no sense.

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But the police are paid for with the taxation of normal people, not the ultra wealthy class. Which is who would need to be taxed to redistribute wealth and opportunity. Our politicians have zero interest in properly taxing themselves and their friends. So easier to just keep taxing the middle and over funding policing.

> he was still able to walk and talk normally until emergency services arrived.

While I know that's not what you meant, it sounds like he was fine until emergency services decided to teach him a lesson ;)

Brazil is the end state

Enough for the next hit of meth or fentanyl, which is all they care about.

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They're intended to save lives by slowing down a car careening out of control or bouncing it out of oncoming traffic at least.

Galvanized steel would increase the hazard by having a higher likelihood of piercing through the shell of the vehicle and striking the passengers than the softer and more bendy aluminum would. It also corrodes over time, so barring an accident aluminum despite its higher initial cost is a better choice of material for guardrails.

Tradeoff is that they would need to make the fines for recyclers so onerous that they would knowingly never accept guardrail material since the only truly effective deterrent is removing the profit motive.

Yeah, I’m rather surprised rather they’re AL.

Related: I recently had a few hundred lbs of clean galvanized steel to dispose of and looked into selling to scrap yard. I would have spent more on gas, one way, taking it up there than I’d have gotten for it. Luckily my local recycling yard (2-3mi away) was happy to take it for free. Ironically, I also took a few half-full trash bags of AL cans and got ~$35 for them.

In a state with no road salt to speak of no less.

I'd be interested to see what the alleged reason for this is.

With cordless tools from Chi…, I mean Harbor Freight.

Same idea as birds not getting fried on uninsulated overhead lines, I reckon. Depending on voltage, shoes on the earth wouldn't be nearly as good as a huge air gap, but maybe a tall fiberglass ladder is decent.

You stole Freenode. Give it back.

Look at the bottom. That's a discarded light post. The arm and light at the top has been removed and it was broken off by the bottom. The construction crew likely left it where it was and these guys came along.

There's one in the woods near me that I keep meaning to grab but I don't really have a use for aa tapered pole and it's kinked pretty high up so....

Cop math, aka lying.

It's like when they say they found a bajillion bucks of coke by lying and projecting wholesale quantity of coke down to what it would retail for as nickle bags of crack.

Literally every stat institution does this sort of math slight of hand by default in situations like this.

They're probably using the most unfavorable triple OT, gotta close a lane, lots of people involved assumptions for labor rate.

I'd try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're quoting the base material cost but that math don't math. $36 probably only just barely covers a 6ft section of 6" I beam pounded into the ground for guardrail and certainly wouldn't cover a section of guard rail let alone a 3"+ pipe of steel say nothing of aluminum

I work with a lot of scrap and scrappers. they did this at the local scrapyard, and indeed they stopped accepting anything from anyone without a city-issued business license.

now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.

That's how it works in the UK, following too many thefts of copper cables for railways which are at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude more expensive to repair than highway barriers.

You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.

Don’t worry, the police definitely aren’t trying to catch thieves.

In addition to basically no consequences for US police breaking the law, there are actually zero consequences to them not doing their jobs.

The numbers just don't seem big enough. Repair costs of $62,000 over two years in LA and Ventura counties - an area with 10 million people. The savings from 100% enforcement at the scrapyard level would pay for what, one full time employee inspector for the state of California?

It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.

That's all there is to it. All these scum know they are buying stolen items, but they do it anyway. Same thing for catalytic converters and copper stolen from just about anywhere.

Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.

And some how he still struggled to cut through it apparently. Must have been the cheapest used recip saw blade he could buy.

Yeah, paying people to not be poor is actually not a bad idea.

It's really sad some people can't find employment more gainful than scrapping highway guardrails.

I think this is more about institutional collapse. What's the mechanism by which I see jeff bezos and then want to go and rob someone? Keeping in mind that the typical criminal is a moron who literally can't understand delayed consequences

This is not an issue for those very very few, no-one is stealing their jets.

Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...

Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.

About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.

What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.

In the third world, people gang up against criminals and police comes and beats them too. After a few manhole covers were stolen by the typical group, half the village went to their "neighborhood" until they got the covers back.

My wife said in South Africa, growing up in the 1980s, everything metal was harvested like old growth forest. I guess people are as destitute everywhere now.

LAist went out of business and the local public radio station bought it and kept it going, it's a great public service. https://laist.com/shows/airtalk/kpcc-will-now-be-known-as-la...

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s/live/buy recreational illegal narcotics/

Failed central planning, excessive barriers to commerce, rent seeking bureaucrats and other anti-market forces. Paradoxically, poverty as an outcome of economic mismanagement is used to rationalize further interventions.

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What makes you think it is desperation as opposed to just thril seeking.

You think that scrap metal thieves read their news? That they are also so stupid that the idea of stealing metal has never occurred to them?