Can't throw me off the scent

The crack pipe is a wonderful touch.
- That is a methpipe...a straight glass tube filled with steel wool would be a crack pipe... don't want that awkward silence and judgement from addicts when you call it the wrong name!!!
  
  Damn. I wrote meth and changed it to crack at the last second. I have let my addict heritage down. My father would be disappointed if he wasn't so high right now. :(
  
  I'm NOT a fucking METHHEAD!
  ...I'm a crackhead. Get it right!

They are starting to rip out the cables used in car chargers. It's only 2m long, costs £300 to replace and the thief strips out £4 worth of copper.
- In turkey there are a lot of people who gather cardboard for recycling for a wage of about 30-40 dollars a day
  Is the USA version of this just pulling copper?
  
  Stealing copper, getting under older cars and cutting out catalytic converters, yes. Copper is not a big money maker but it's better than collecting aluminum cans.
  The problem with 90% of crime is poverty. They do hundreds of dollars of damage to make a few bucks. If we had universal basic income or better safety nets these crimes would nearly vanish overnight.
  
  Well, except that it's nearly always super damaging.
  The US version would be more like collecting cans back when they had a 5 or 10 cent deposit. Today I can't really think of anything like that. Maybe driving Uber/Lyft. Or just panhandling/begging.
  
  We have recyclers too
- If this is how the Western world arrives at harm reduction and UBI for everyone - that it's just good business - I'm not even gonna be mad.
  
  Like that would happen when they can sell £4 cables for £300.
- That will be great when I'm on a long trip looking to charge in the middle of nowhere lol.
  I have actually been stranded a couple of times already. Still love electric though
- TBF they do have a large gauge wire in them
  
  It's not a long distance and they don't have super large gauge. I'd have expected 0 or 2/0 but apparently 2-4 is common.
- 1: Why's it $300 then?
  2: All theft from Tesla owners is valid in 2025
  3: Why do people assume they aren't selling the expensive cables whole?
  
  Because the damage also includes labor and overhead, not just material.
  We're not talking about Tesla specifically.
  Even if the stolen cable was left undamaged, who are you gonna sell it to? The company that owns the charging station?
  
  1: Labor & Equipment.
  2: Tesla owners don't necessarily own the Charging stations.
  3: They are icing wire cutters to remove the cables, destroying the cable in the process.
  
  You know there's more to it than just raw copper, right?
  The cable itself, insulation, active cooling, labor, complicated build process, specialized installation, etc.
  Don't be daft.
  
  £300 is about $375, yankee doodle.

Never trust a copper.

We have crackheads in Aus, maybe we need to steer them towards our copper cable so they can rip it up and our government will actually give us the NBN we were promised, with full fiber all the way.
- Honestly not a bad idea, I approve.
  
  Modern day problems require modern day solutions
- I haven't played netrunner in ages, but I still love the shitty australian internet corp is the evil surveilance corp from netrunner
  https://ancur.fandom.com/wiki/NBN
- I'm still surprised that Australia didn't do more with the HFC network. Seems like a missed opportunity. Some ISPs in the USA are trialing 2Gbps symmetric (2Gbps up and down) over coax using DOCSIS 4.0, and even DOCSIS 3.1 can get you 2Gbps down and ~400Mbps up.

Crackhead gonna crackhead.
- It's typically meth heads that are stealing all of the copper.

I want like 1 ft of carrier bundle fiber optic, because I think it's cool as shit.
Every time I see one of the spools I want to go up and hack a foot off of it but I wouldn't want to come off as a tweaker.
- Never heard of these?
  
  those are boring, i want hunks of cable, undersea cable, backbone cable, local telco.
  what can I say, I probably have issues :)
- If you live in the UK I'll send you some. 864f OK?
  
  864f
  Aww, that's awesome—you're awesome! And that's a wicked-looking cable. Sadly, I'm in the US.
  It made me ponder, though. It looks like several different product manufacturers sell affordable samples of some of the larger cables.
- Where the hell are you hanging out, that you regularly run into spools of fiber optic cable? I've never seen one in my life!
  
  I'm not who you responded to but my answer is all the time due to my job.
  
  there's a lot of construction near me, it was all wilderness, now they're putting in housing developments.

How valuable is optic fiber "cables" anyway? 🤔
- It's very valuable as a cable, but as material, it's worthless. Pull on it to hard, give it a rough bend, cute it anywhere, and it isn't a cable anymore.
  
  cute it anywhere
  Resist the urge to put kitty stickers on fiber optic cables. Got it.
  
  Now I'm curious, how DO they cut it to size?
- Only the connectors and the skill to weld them on are expensive.
  The cable itself is just glass and plastic with some shielding.
- Extremely
  
  So instead of copper cable theft, they'll just steal the optic fiber cables then... 🤔
  The sign isn't helping lol

"Come out, copper, I know you're in there!"
- "I hate crackheads I hate crackheads"

Me when I keep moving a super strong monster magnet of 10¹⁰ >!(I forgor the unit of measurement for magnetic strength)!< near the copper wire:
(Suddenly the copper shits itself)
- The unit is Tesla. For reference, the earths magnetic field is around 50 μT on the surface (depending on latitude), and MRI machines have 1.5 T or 3 T. So your 10¹⁰ T might just nail you to the earth's iron core 😂
  
  Nail me harder down to the core, magnet daddy.
  
  Given that even 3 T is already considered a large amount of flux, would it be even possible for an object with 10 billion Tesla to even exist? And if so, what would it take to achieve that amount of flux? Does a neutron star or a pulsar* get even remotely close?
  pulling these examples kinda out of my ass – while i'm sure neutron stars have extreme magnetic fields i'm not so sure about pulsars
  
  I didn't remember the scale, I just picked a number from my head
- Are you trying to melt the copper by induction? Not much else can be done with a magnet, since copper isn't ferromagnetic...
  
  I meant induce so much unwanted voltage that the voltage regulators can't even handle, killing all electrical supplies
  As some pointed out, 10¹⁰ T is too much, I think 10 T will do