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

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

#261

Post by trehalose »

MisterTea wrote: post #244
testing22321 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.

Some nonzero percentage of these people could have been helped cheaper and more easily earlier on to prevent them from getting to this point in the first place.

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

#262

Post by WorldPeas »

ncr100 wrote: post #253
silisili wrote: post #139

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of. I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are…

Anecdotes, observation, and a wish: 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…

The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.

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

#263

Post by browsingonly »

pixl97 wrote: post #252
browsingonly wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings. To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.

I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container. The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative. For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix. Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.

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.

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

#264

Post by xp84 »

kube-system wrote: post #239
vitalyan1234 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't move the goalpost. "raising" is expensive, sure, but that was not what I replied to, I replied to the image you tried to evoke with "mother stealing food from a chain store", and I'm telling you that it doesn't make any sense. US wages - even the minimum wage - are incredibly high compared to your very low prices of food. "share of household income spent on food" is a common metric, and it is very low in the US…

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 p…

Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs.

The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.

Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.

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

#265

Post by xp84 »

freeopinion wrote: post #120
georgemcbay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad…

A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved ev…

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.

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

#266

Post by xp84 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #95
xp84 wrote: 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.

This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole. Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.

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

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

#267

Post by xp84 »

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #89
laughing_man wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> not a homicidal...

Even murderers also get the same assumption, from the same liberal voices, that it's really due to their lack of opportunity.

> but that doesn't mean every thief...

Sure maybe, but I think a lot of the blowback that people who advocate for this more compassionate view of criminals are starting to see, is because it seems that they won't admit that any thief is an irredeemable POS, which reads as gaslighting to everyone (poor or not, even including other criminals) who has spent time around actual criminals.

By doing things like California's Prop 47, which had the very real result of making it virtually impossible for most thieves to ever go to prison (at least the ones who can do math), we've codified into law that all thieves are just nice people who apparently had some kind of "misunderstanding" about property.

So when someone has their work truck burgled or their business robbed for the 6th time, and the police won't even come because it was an "under $950" misdemeanor, they would rather see all theft dealt with harshly than keep the status quo.

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

#268

Post by kube-system »

xp84 wrote: post #264
kube-system wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs. The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to b…

I'm well aware that people with drug issues exist -- that doesn't mean that there are zero poor people who struggle to afford food.

SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)

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

#269

Post by LorenPechtel »

ncr100 wrote: post #253
silisili wrote: post #139

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of. I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are…

Anecdotes, observation, and a wish: 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…

Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much.

Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.

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

#270

Post by pixl97 »

browsingonly wrote: post #263
pixl97 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container. The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative. For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix. Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.

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 us…

See, I imagine you live in a black and white world where people are good and bad. Bad people do things like steal from walgreens and should be punished with death. Good people simply make mistakes, like steal hundreds of thousands via wage theft from their employees, and when they are caught they should be forced to pay 1% of that as a fine.
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