> Junkies will find ways through the fencing at night, strip copper and other materials from panels, and cause thousands in damages and lost energy just to extract enough scrap for a fix
I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it
This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).
California already has those social services; that doesn’t stop antisocial people from doing antisocial things. A tiny fraction of people can cause a lot of damage.
There is a part of California that still has ancient telegraph lines complete with weathered copper with the blueish colour. Nobody has come by to scrap it yet. So it’s really a matter of proximity to wherever antisocial people choose to live.
Copper price more than proximity. People don't strip wires for shits and giggles, they do it to sell the metal.
Bet you if copper price suddenly went up 10x, those ancient telegraph lines would disappear very quickly, one way or another (turns out, "criminals" and "junkies" and "entrepreneurs" are driven by similar incentives, they just sit at different points of the cost/risk tradeoff spectrum).
California has those services but they tend to be only funded to a fraction of the need. And the gap between the need vs help is a deep gulf due to how inequality lands on all other public and private areas of society
In rural UK where phone lines are sometimes laid in a shallow ditch by the road, my relative's village loses their landline phone wiring every once in a while because someone stripped the whole roads-length of wire. They tie off to a trailer hitch and drive away.
Been happening occasionally for at least a decade.
In the uk rail industry we have people stealing copper all the time. They cut a live cable, attach it to the back of a truck and drive off. Sometimes this can yield them kms of cable.
We also had issues where people would jump over fences into depots, use scaffold boards to build a ramp over the 2.5m fence, and then use forklifts to roll big reels of cable up the ramps and over the fence on to the back of a waiting truck the other side.
Copper cable theft is 100% a massive issue in the UK.
Does it matter? Because if it does, it's advocating for (racial?) profiling and/or singling one demographic out, which is both illegal (maybe not in the UK since it doesn't have a constitution?), amoral, and contrary to one of the core principles of current-day law, i.e. "innocent until proven guilty".
But do tell, what do you think is the group and what do you think should happen?
> I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it
Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out? There's not that many telecoms engineers and if they spend tons of time removing the old, that slows down the new.
Europe has plenty of copper theft problems though, but they go for e.g. train lines because they don't know you've got copper phone lines running past your house.
I was traveling in Europe about 15 years ago, I was going from Paris to Barcelona and the train stopped for seven hours. Turns out a whole copper cable was stolen (live wire) so yeah Europe does have this problem too apparently.
America is an entirely different cultural universe and simple things like this seem logical but just wouldn’t really solve the entire problem, IMO, as an American that’s lived in Europe for a decade+.
Another great example are the “open air” transit systems in Germany, Poland, etc. where you can freely enter trams and buses, with inspectors patrolling infrequently to check if you bought a ticket. That kind of system would absolutely never work in America, no one would pay, and the ticket inspectors would be hated as some kind of secret police.
It's also how the San Diego trolley works (it's called a trolley, but it is almost a heavy rail with respect to how separated the tracks are everywhere except downtown). One of the cleanest, most effective rail systems I've seen in the US (though there are a lot of security in the wagons)
> Another great example are the “open air” transit systems in Germany, Poland, etc. where you can freely enter trams and buses, with inspectors patrolling infrequently to check if you bought a ticket. That kind of system would absolutely never work in America
This is exactly how Seattle's light rail worked for years. You could just walk on and off, and I saw an inspector maybe 1-in-10 trips at best
Yeah, the system was tiny originally - just a single line from the airport to downtown. I left right before the big system expansion started, I wouldn't be surprised if scale has exposed more issues with the system
There seem to be a fair number of commuter train lines that do this, but I don’t really consider a train to be the same as an urban tram/bus system. The latter has orders of magnitude more daily passengers, and it’s a far wider breadth of people compared to the typically better-off suburban commuter lines.
And as someone that’s ridden the bus in LA many times: the culture of acceptable behavior there is infinitely lower than the typical Central European bus.
To be fair I did have NYC in mind when writing the comment though, and I should have looked into west coast systems more.
The Netherlands is phasing out open air transit because it doesn’t work. Aggression towards public transit service workers is at an all time high. Most stations have moved from no barriers to barriers over 2 meters tall. Refugees have their own bus lines.
Society is going backwards in rapid pace I’m afraid.
I live in a European country as well (Spain) and there are probably in the order of 10+ railways incidents per year causing serious issues to mobility due to copper theft.
Buy yet, the old copper phone lines are still there...
The Netherlands has one of the best healthcare systems in the EU, 30% social housing, treatment programs, one of the best drug policies...
And still has a yearly 6 to 8 million euro in damages from copper thieves just on the rail system alone. And that doesn't include economic damages from people being late for work.
I can't confidently refute your claims, but all of those socialist policies have backslid over time; social housing (i.e. affordable housing with eligiblity for government support to pay rent) has a 10+ year wait list in a lot of places, because there's not enough. Non-social housing is unaffordable and unobtainable for a lot of people with housing prices having gone up 2x or more since 2010.
And the social systems don't reach everyone, in part thanks to 20+ years of conservative governments. People can't find jobs, if they're entitled to one (i.e. are nationalized) they can apply for government subsidies, but those come with strict conditions including a requirement to apply to jobs on the regular (and provide evidence, and you get cut on your subsidies if you don't).
On paper it still looks good ish, but in practice it sucks if you're in the system. Health care is becoming unaffordable (creeping to 200/month just for the insurance, plus 375 or so copay which the new government wants to increase even further, which means poor people will avoid seeking health support because who can afford up to 375 on top of 200 / month, and that's not even the essentials?)
I can only imagine what it would be without that! I was told once that in said country (and probably other lands) police tolerates some kind of small petty crimes so that things do not escalate to bigger things
Swiftcoder, I don't think we Europeans have a recipe for treating fentanyl addiction.
We are just lucky that this horrible drug isn't as accessible here as it is in Cali.
BTW recently I spent eight hours in a stopped train because a family of career criminals decided to steal cables from the railway. They didn't even escape, they were immediately caught with their loot, but the damage was done and thousands were stranded on the main rail corridor in Moravia deep into the night. I was home at 3 AM instead of 7 PM.
There is no treatment for this sort of stupidity where people do damage to themselves and to everyone else because of a really bad judgment.
My friend was in prison for causing a serious road accident. Some six months. When he came back, he commented that most of the repeat offenders are just stupid as f*ck, unable to put two and two together, getting repeatedly caught over crimes done impulsively and without due preparation.
> There is no treatment for this sort of stupidity where people do damage to themselves and to everyone else because of a really bad judgment.
I'd argue there is; why do people steal stuff? Because it's easier and more profitable than jobs they can do. What's the solution? Meaningful employment for everyone. People generally don't steal if they earn a living wage that doesn't kill them. (some still would because they get a kick out of it though but there's therapy available for them if they want to change)
> This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).
What are you going to suggest next? Hot lunches for kids and a justice system focused on reform?
I assume the bigger problem is the cache expiring while you wait for the tool call to complete. A bunch of hosted providers only keep the cache alive for ~5 minutes - if you sit there waiting for a 5 minute tool call, you get to pay to reload the entire context into cache
If I'm reading correctly, this is one of those theoretical improvements that doesn't put a whole lot of practical speedup on the table. But I do wonder how many other algorithms in computer science are going to see their bounds fall in the next few months
Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage
I doubt it would be practical to pump fuel to another rocket. The obvious thing to do is store the fuel in orbit with its own rocket engine. Then you only have to dock with it and turn on the engine.
A number of prominent corporations used to embed these in the background images of their internal webpages, so that leakers could be identified from the screenshots they shared. Caused a whole fun adversarial loop where journalists had to transcribed and/or redraw screenshots before publishing to avoid exposing the identity of leakers...
Digital Rights Management isn't just about restricting what you can do with the content, which is often futile anyway. Another way companies can manage their rights is by making sure pirates are properly identified and caught.
It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. I know a few people who are in a sort of "late stage icloud" moment with their iPhone. Their phone started filling up with photos and videos years ago. So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones. Eventually those got full too, so they had to go to icloud and a few have basically maxed out their icloud 2tb plans, because these phones are now producing huge files and recording in 4k I guess even though you are still just looking at it on a 5 inch diagonal screen like in the 5mp phone era. The damn icloud previews can fill up your phones internal storage even with everything technically shoved off to icloud.
Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
> It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. […] So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones.
It is not "entrapping", it's providing a service.
My senior-aged mom does have the skill, nor the desire, to figure out local image storage/backup, and I have no interest in running self-hosted solution (even for myself). Apple providing iCloud for backups is not "entrapping" her.
> The complaint here is about the tier pricing model, not the service
If you use more storage why shouldn't you pay more? A 1000 sq. ft. (100 sq.m.) apartment costs more than 500. Is there a cloud storage provider that does not charge per usage? E.g.,
I don't think I've seen a French-Canadian keyboard before, that is so much less cursed than the AZERTY monstrosity I have from France (hold shift to type numbers! hold shift to type period and comma!)
I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it
This feels like one of those USA problems that would be better addressed by funding decent social services (free healthcare, cheap housing, addiction treatment programs, etc).
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