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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

#271

Post by picofarad »

pjc50 wrote: post #201
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…

> people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k. Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m... I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural…

Didn't we use to hang cattle rustlers?

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

#272

Post by casey2 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #245
testing22321 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...

Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.

Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.

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

#273

Post by khafra »

rayiner wrote: post #216
khafra wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief. Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy phila…

That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more r…

> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.

Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.

> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.

That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.

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

#276

Post by btreecat »

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…

I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes.

Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.

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

#277

Post by ErroneousBosh »

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…

> However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario

Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.

It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.

Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.

Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.

Imagine if we just did something that worked.

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

#278

Post by ErroneousBosh »

geerlingguy wrote: post #45

Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection. I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it…

I know a guy who works for a major broadcast site company here in the UK, who caught some people up at a remote transmitter site by blocking their pickup in with his van. They admitted they were there to steal copper scrap. He gave them about 100kg of scrap aluminium (decommissioned aerials) that had been subject to the usual "We'll come and get it next week, next week, oh so busy this week, how about next week, maybe the week after?" from the people that were supposed to pick them up.

Then he offered to give them a tour of the transmission building.

"See that?" he said, pointing to some nice thick copper cabling, "if you touched that you'd die, instantly. And see that over there? Yeah, if you touch that, you'd die. That stuff there, too, kill you if you even went near it."

Then he pointed out the big polished copper waveguide going up to the main TX stack, think in terms of a thick copper 4" sewer pipe leading out through the building.

"See that, know what would happen if you touched *that*?"

"We'd die?"

"Naaaaaw, of course you wouldn't die! Your arms would vapourise looooong before your heart stopped!"

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

#279

Post by onemoresoop »

j-bos wrote: post #187
onemoresoop wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by color coordinated the closet?

Not op, but meth is like, amphetamines the thing that drives people to do boring pointless work, like organizing clothes by color.

Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.

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

#280

Post by onemoresoop »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #186
Insanity wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, and how does that relate to meth?

It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.

>excessively brushing their teeth Is that in spite of why their teeth decay so badly?
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