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

Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore

Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.

I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification.

This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.

In the US you typically have to give identification to sell scrap, so it sets up a chain of evidence against you. Still doesn't stop methheads.

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.

My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)

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.

Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?

10 dollars? Who's your meth guy?

>Because the only solutions that work are social.

This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."

I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."

These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.

If that was the easy solution then the US would have solved it in the 1990s during the war on drugs.

The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).

If prison solved a society's problems, the USA would be a utopia.

Putting people in prison has substantial costs.

I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.

Criminal punishment research consistently shows that reality does not follow initial intuition here.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...

"Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse.”

(“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result”)

> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher

Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...

The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.

That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.

If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.

When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.

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.

Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.

Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.

Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.

Nope.

The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.

If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?

Yep. Meth costs pennies to make. Sell it cheap in liquor stores and nobody would do this any more.

> 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.

$0.20 isn't enough to cover good self-defense 9mm rounds, and no you shouldn't just use FMJ.

>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.

The UK does that - a scrap dealer can only pay by bank transfer or cheque. That way there's a paper trail.

I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.

> They have. It's called insurance.

In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.

> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.

That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.

I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.

I license doesn't stop someone from doing something illegal. It doesn't cost much for the equipment to turn scrap copper into billet.

>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.

So then they'll just sell to middle men.

And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)

Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.

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 relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.

Russian(?) scientists during the siege of... Leningrad? starved to death while surrounded by seed potatoes.

The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.

I don’t see how to blame our society for copper thieves.

I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.

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

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.

The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.

The villains are those of us who tolerate this kind of behavior in the name of compassion.

I doubt they would attempt to sell it as is. They'd break out the copper portion and trade on that alone

I bet it's Vevor. They make everything.

100 watts at 100 MHz is so low that if you spent an entire lifetime in proximity to it, you would never notice.

At 100 MHz I am unsure if transmitter even exists that can could cause harm indirectly via RF exposure. The FCC has very tight guidelines for FM transmitters at this frequency. This is just an abundance of caution.

The actual story as presented here is obviously fake: "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". It's unlikely, but possible that the transmitter is mounted on the tower. In practice, no one does this. They use coax at ~100 MHz since it is so cheap and easy. Let's just assume the transmitter is mounted on the tower. The power cutoff is going to be at the bottom of the tower. You turn it off beforehand because you don't want to get electrocuted inadvertently. You don't disconnect equipment while energized. The phrase 'emitter beam' is also a dead giveaway. That phrase is only used in particle accelerator and other radiation sources.

Literally.

Sorry, buy we can't build a civilization around people like that, or sustain our existing one by indulging them.

If you believe we can just fix poverty and drug addiction with some government program, I have a bridge to sell you. So far, no one has, anywhere in the world.

Many people (and once they get themselves addicted to something bad, that rises to "most") are just terrible and care only about their own short-term gain. They'd do any amount of destruction to others for some small temporary profit or fix.

Same as stolen TVs, catalytic converters, and anything else.

There’s always someone who likes the money/discount more than morals/the law at the next step in the chain. Somewhere.