Blessed by the Potato

I have to wonder just how dumb thieves really are. I mean, in my own life we have lots of evidence of mean, spiteful, stupid thieves: the ones who did over a thousand dollars of damage to my car just to take it out for a joy ride (or commit another crime), who had the car for a week and couldn’t get the radio out (though obviously not for lack of trying), and the ones who broke into my house and left behind the American money. Now in the news we have several reports of thieves stealing copper for the scrap metal. From the London Free Press a report about thieves risking their lives to get the copper from live wires. Wow, copper must be worth a fortune for someone to risk their own life, the life of the power worker who will have to come by to fix the damage, and to be spiteful enough to plunge a whole neighbourhood into darkness for hours (not to mention stealing from a public utility)! And the going rate, according to the LFP?

Scrap dealers are offering about $2.80 a pound for copper.

The price is down from the high of $4 last year but still worth a thief’s effort.

“Don’t forget, their profit is 100 per cent,” Kummer said.

$2.80 a pound! Geez, even if you haul a hundred pounds of wire out of a substation (which is about as much as I could see a thief taking out on foot), and assume it’s pure copper and not wasted weight on insulation, you’re looking at $280, and that’s probably a pretty generous estimate. Possibly worth the time since it is, as the person quoted says, all profit, but there is a lot of risk associated with that, and the dickheadery that goes along with stealing from a utility, and putting others into a blackout and at risk. Nearly everyone has a price at which they’d sell their own mother, but I can’t believe these guys place such a low price on their respect for other human beings. And hey, here’s another similar story from the CBC.

“What they do is they take this and they wrap it around a trailer hitch of a four-by-four and drive away. And they take probably 1,200 feet, ripping that up.”

Wow, 1200 feet. Since I’m a science geek, let’s figure out just how much copper that is. Of course, we’ll need to know how thick the wire was, which wasn’t reported in the story, but let’s assume it’s pretty hefty wire with a diameter of 1 cm [r=0.5cm] (not quite as thick as the wire carrying bulk power in your neighbourhood, but a fair bit thicker than even an outdoor extension cord). 1200 feet ~ 400 meters. Density of copper = 8.9 g/cm^3. Volume = pi*(0.5 cm)^2 * 40000 cm = 31400 cm^3. Mass = 279 kg, or 615 pounds. Hey, not too shabby, but that’s assuming something that’s more of a copper rod than a wire. If it was 8-gauge wire (still pretty hefty), we’d have a cross-sectional area of 0.08 cm^2, for a mass of 89 kg, or 197 lbs. Hey, still nearly double my earlier estimate, but hardly mess-with-the-power grid money.

Speaking of putting people at risk for selfish bone-headed copper thieving, how about this story from the CBC in Nova Scotia?

A thief stripping propane tanks of copper lines is putting people at risk, Halifax police warn.

Someone stole the copper lines from two propane tanks outside residences in central Halifax on Monday. In both cases, the highly combustible fuel leaked.

“The person is literally playing with fire,” said Const. Jeff Carr, spokesman for Halifax Regional Police.

It was only a few weeks ago when police reported that someone had cut copper from several oil tanks in north-end Dartmouth, resulting in oil spills and expensive cleanups.

All of this of course doesn’t mention the disparity between the cost to the victim and the gain to the thief. Ignoring the issue of the insane risks the thieves are taking and forcing upon others, the people who have to replace their propane lines or power connections don’t pay the scrap price for their copper. Their lines cost much more than that. Similarly, people who get a laptop, iPod, car stereo or catalytic converter stolen usually have to pay much more to replace it than the thief will ever get for it, and that’s not counting any repairs from a break-in that might be necessary, or intangibles lost (such as data on a laptop). Whatever happened to the days of holding up a bank, or swiping the cash out of a till, or pickpocketing a person? In other words, the days of stealing money? It still sucked to be a victim, but at least the thief would get as much utility out of the money as the victim lost, rather than this stupid, spiteful gap.

Well, with the Canadian dollar being high there is a lot of talk in the media about buying a car in the states and importing it. There are a lot of cases where that can save you a lot of money, sometimes as much as a quarter of the cost of the car. There are all kinds of artificial trade barriers put up (so much for NAFTA) to try to prevent people from doing this. Some manufacturer’s won’t honour the warranty if a car is bought across the border. Toyota for one does honour the warranty, but makes it difficult by threatening to close down any dealers that sell to Canadians, so finding one is difficult (often, I’ve heard that finding one in a border state is nearly impossible, but if you’re willing to drive a few states further south, that there is a chance of finding a dealer who will take the chance, or not even know about the prohibition). The government also puts up a few barriers, such as making sure that the car is suitable for use in Canada, with daytime running lights, an metric instrumentation (or a sticker indicating to the driver and potential future buyers that the instruments are not metric).

Now another barrier has been put up with a recent rule about engine immobilizers. When I first heard about this, I actually thought it was a decent rule, since my car had been stolen twice. However, after seeing what thieves will do to get at cars with immobilizers I have second thoughts. Doubly so after seeing that the RIV is using the “lack” of immobilizers as a reason to prevent cars bought in the States from crossing the border. Note that these cars don’t actually lack immobilizers — the Prius system, for instance, is supposed to be nigh-impossible to start without the key or a sophisticated RF-cryptographic system. It’s just that it doesn’t have exactly the right type of immobilizer, so it can’t enter the country.

And it boggles my mind why the government would force auto makers to produce unique models for the Canadian market for things like engine immobilizers, but be unwilling to do so for emissions control (and even then it wouldn’t be different than California and the other CARB states, just the dirty states!).

Update: Another story about this in the Globe: drivers can bring their cars across the border to park them at home until this is worked out, but they can’t get them plated.

There were two articles in the Free Press today that I found kind of interesting, especially put together. The first was on those payday loan services, and the ridiculous annual rate that their fees work out to (over 700%).

“If we’re not there, what’s going to happen? The power is going to be cut off. The kids are not going to eat,” he told the board.

Critics scoffed at the idea, saying payday loans can often trap low income-earners in a cycle of poverty.

“They’re trading off essential things, like buying medication or paying their rent, for trying to eventually pay off their loans,” said Gloria Desorcy, head of the Manitoba branch of the Consumers Association of Canada.

“How do you ever catch up?”

The second was related to the massive sinkhole that hit downtown London on Halloween. It knocked out power for the whole day, and many people weren’t able to work in the downtown core. As a result, two guys who work in a call centre are trying to recover their lost wages for the day. I don’t really know whether these guys have a case or not, and I don’t really care (though I think it’s pretty damned ballsy to try to recover lost wages for the day spent navigating the red tape at city hall). What caught my eye was this quote:

The loss of the wages hurts, said Underhill, a father of four.

“It doesn’t seem a lot to the city,” Pinnell said. “But this bill gets cut and this bill gets cut. Everybody lives paycheque to paycheque.”

[emphasis mine]

Now, maybe this was just innocent hyperbole on the part of Pinnell, but I find that kind of disturbing nonetheless, that not only are there so many people out there living paycheque-to-paycheque, but that some people perceive that to be the norm, to be an acceptable way to carry on your life. I just couldn’t imagine not having some kind of buffer in savings or overtime options or something to make up for potential lost wages or surprise expenses. And the thought that everyone lives paycheque to paycheque makes getting ahead of the payday loan places even more difficult: how can you make sacrifices to save if you don’t even believe that saving is a virtue (or at least normal)?

Or at least it would if it happened in London with people in underwear and capes…

Luckily, I have a cool Jedi cloak and have mastered force persuasion (aka: the Jedi Mind Trick). “These aren’t the hooligans we’re looking for. Carry on.”

So one country pretty much unilaterally changed the way we implement the dubious daylight savings time system.

Yes, the Americans broke time.

The effects were felt this Halloween as it didn’t get dark until a full hour after it usually did, so we didn’t get any really cute, really little kids (who are usually tuckered out and ready for bed by 7:30, when our first trick-or-treater came around this year). Of course, this was also our first Halloween in this house, so we couldn’t say for sure that the screwy change in when it gets dark was responsible for that, or if it’s just a characteristic of the neighbourhood.

I like daylight savings time — that is, summer time. If it didn’t screw with Halloween, I wouldn’t mind it running late. Since I’m not much of a morning person, I much prefer to have daylight in the afternoon. I dislike waking up in the dark, and imagine most people do too, but I also dislike being stuck at work until after dark. The few times I do wake up early in the winter, an hour here or there often wouldn’t make a difference: it’s dark. The energy saving rationale, while hard to ascertain for certain, doesn’t seem to hold water any more. Air conditioning use accounts for way more energy than lighting in the summer, and while heating/cooling is closer to neutral in the fall (so lighting might be a factor), it’s also a period of very low energy demand in general for that reason. So, there isn’t as much of a benefit to screwing with schedules this year to save energy in the fall, since that’s one of the few times of the year when most of the generating is baseline (hydroelectric, nuclear, etc).

And I hate the return to “standard time” (odd that it’s named that, since the majority of the year falls under DST). The extra hour one night in the fall, ok, I like that. And it’s a much easier shift to work into the sleep schedule. But I just don’t like it getting dark so early!

Maybe Saskatchewan has it right after all: year-long DST.