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An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

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101–110 of 286 posts

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#101
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#102
post #60
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 dollars? Who's your meth guy?

GP is talking out of his ass - he’s probably not up to speed on meth economics like you and me.

You may need to revise your methematical model.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im Danish, and I approve of the welfare state system, but we still have people cutting down EV charger cables etc here.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#104
post #15

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.

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.

I prefer the 9mm solution

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#108
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#109

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

#110
post #15

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.

The bigger absurdity is when thief mistakes bunch of fiber for copper wires and then whole countries can go offline

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12985082

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