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

Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.

People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.

It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.

They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.

I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.

Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.

I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.

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.

https://smartdrugpolicy.org/decriminalization-the-portuguese...

The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.

And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.

Read my comment again. Many = more than a few people. Nowhere near most people. Most people are great.

However, yes, most addicts who are in the grips of addiction - not in treatment or recovery - I stand by that.

> If we covered everyone's basic food, housing, education, and medical needs, I guarantee you'd see crime and addiction plummet.

We don't agree on this point. Addiction itself is a huge barrier to the people who need help getting help, and a huge barrier to that help making any medium or long-term difference. We do not have a reliable way to fix addiction.

I admit I can't prove this, but I think it's more common that addiction causes complete collapse of everything else (job, housing, and relationships) than the other way around ("Gee, I lost my job, home, and my family and friends abandoned me -- I guess I'll just take up an expensive substance addiction").

Addiction can fixed by either:

1. An incredibly dedicated solo effort, hitting rock bottom and somehow having the personal strength left -- in a body and mind damaged by poison -- to fight it off through sheer force of will, or

2. An incredibly resource-intensive labor of love: Many people coming together to intervene, to help the addict through the most horrible experience of their life (withdrawal), and to monitor them, ideally indefinitely.

The extreme addicts I'm talking about are the ones who have generally driven their families and friends away by their behavior (frequently by lying and stealing to get money for drugs, basically proving too many times that they can't be trusted.) There aren't ever going to be enough government-funded 'surrogate friends' to help every addict in the absence of them having their own support system, which limits them to Option 1, which is wildly difficult and uncommon to happen or succeed.