Is it too soon to talk about regulating the $#@* out of scrap-metal dealers?
They already are. You need to show ID to sell scrap metal. The thieves use a fence.
Didn't know fences contained copper ;)
An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
81–90 of 286 posts
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#82This isn't just any regular copper cable:
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#83In 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. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017...
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.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#84That’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
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.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
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.
As someone who grew up on food stamps, I'd fully believe the mean and median income on hackernews are six figure numbers.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.
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.
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.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ir…
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.
It's not a theory. It's socialism and it works fine in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#88Working 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.
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.
> 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.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
You shouldn't tolerate the behavior, but announcing disgust for people who are struggling is just not helpful.
Lots of people who are struggling don't become thieves.
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.
Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
#90Working 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.
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.
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.