It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no? The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap. Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field. You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.

Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper. The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.

The best reasoning they give is that California has insane permitting requirements, and it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.

Or better yet, invest in pipes.

Canal sized pipes?

According to AI, that pipe would only need to be 43 Feet in diameter, only 43 feet wide. Pretty sure they have that at Home Depot.

I'm sure it could be done, but it would cost a fortune. My understanding is the canals were built to distribute water to farmers, and conservation/evaporation wasn't really much of a consideration because California had plenty of water back then.

BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.

What's the lifetime of a "cheap shade"? And the cost to renew it over the same lifetime? And the cost of paying for other land?

... likely less than the ~$13/W this cost to install, but that included NRE for three different styles of panel mounting. Standardizing would cut costs significantly.

There are solutions like this to most of Californias big intractable problems, and they're not done because some California laws and/or regulations make it impossible.

This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...

The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap. Large PV panels make very good sails. The trusses look basically the same as you'd see in a large agricultural barn, horse riding arena, etc. Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.

I would very much like to see a total dollar figure for the example "roof trusses over the canel" structure vs. how many panels it can hold.

It's already true that the ground mounting costs and labor to assemble the ground mount are a huge part of building a large scale PV system.

Putting the PV panels on empty bare land at a height people can walk around and work with would be considerably less costly.

What empty, bare land?

If its really empty and bare, there is a reason for it and that reason is probably a problem for building and maintaining PV, and otherwise you have to add the loss of the alternative uses of the land to the cost.

What empty, bare land?

Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.

Have you been to Death Valley, my friend?

Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)

In the context of California, land that is not suitable for agriculture because it can't be irrigated, even though it's flat and somewhat accessible by road. California has plenty of it, go drive around near Twenty Nine Palms and you'll see it...

And the moment you start building large structures on it everyone and their dog is going to show up and NIMBY it.

Spoken like someone who has never been to the mojave. This is the home to the largest wind turbine installation in the country. But again, if the worry is the solar panels acting like sails, probably not a great site given that wind.

You know where the wind blows really damn hard in California? Virtually any open field you can imagine putting these otherwise. Mojave for example is damn windy. That is why they currently host massive wind installations there.

I'm well aware of that, thanks. Ground mount PV is still going to be considerably less costly than this. Partly because it's easier to build, partly because it has many competing companies that sell the basic aluminum rail/hot dip galvanized steel mounting pieces, partly because you can use relatively low cost contractors to do work like install its footings and bolt it together.

Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.

Having stuff at ground level that can be reached by people on foot or on a 6 foot step ladder also makes doing the electrical work a lot less costly.

I mean sure, but compared to say having that technician in a dingy boat, its more costly in the sense you need a dingy boat. But this doesn't seem insurmountable. Maybe you don't even need a dingy boat. Maybe just a long 2x12 would be fine or some other scaffold platform you can just drag around. There's also something to be said about this solar array being where the land is already being used, and some greenfield solar array going in, well, greenfield areas that might be ecologically more sensitive.

    > The cost of building that steel structure that will hold up against maximum in 100 year wind forces isn't cheap.

I'm surprised by this comment. (Is this area known for strong winds?) If your comment is true, wouldn't all warehouses using the same type of standard "bents" also be very expensive? I doubt it.

    > Large PV panels make very good sails.

A quick Google search tells me:[1] "Most modern solar panels can withstand winds of up to 140 miles per hour." For all of the things I have read about large commercial solar panel installations, never once did I read anything about the risk of wind tearing off PV panels. If this were really a serious threat, wouldn't we see regularly local news stories about large PV panels "flying" away in big wind storms? And, yet, I never saw one.

[1] https://www.makemyhousegreen.com/green-guides/can-solar-pane...

I'm surprised by this comment. (Is this area known for strong winds?)

Areas of the central valley are legendary for strong winds. A large stretch of the aqueduct (200km?) runs along the valley's West edge. So does the interstate highway I5.

The I5 has frequent high wind advisories. In the area around Pacheco Pass there are frequently gusting cross winds between 55 and 70km per hour. I use the I5 as my reference here, because I have spent many hours of my life driving it in these conditions.

If your comment is true, wouldn't all warehouses using the same type of standard "bents" also be very expensive?

What makes you think building a warehouse in earthquake country is cheap?

For all of the things I have read about large commercial solar panel installations, never once did I read anything about the risk of wind tearing off PV panels. If this were really a serious threat, wouldn't we see regularly local news stories about large PV panels "flying" away in big wind storms? And, yet, I never saw one.

The statement about solar panels making very good sails obviously true. Everything thin and flat makes a good sail.

PV panels don't go flying away because people spend a lot of money attaching them to the ground. They're expensive systems, and any installer that didn't make sure they were bolted down effectively, would be sued out of business after the first windstorm.

My understanding is that "The best reasoning they give" is the entire point. It such a huge issue that it drowns out all of the valid but smaller issues you are pointing out. And, the benefit to the water is just a bonus.

Exactly, that is hundreds of miles over which no NIMBY holds sway. The state can do what they want.

Power lines are made of aluminum and steel.

I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.

Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?

Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?

Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?

"Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon."

In a typical string of solar panels design, you'll get tons of volts but not a lot in amps - current cell maximums top out at ~11A and the connective MC4 wiring can't handle too much more current than that, so what you end up with is like a 1,000V 10A string on one MPPT connection into the inverter.

A solar panel is 4 feet or so on the long side. Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. even if it's topped out at 10A thats still 120KW... you need a hefty cable to carry that panel to panel. Which is the core of the point I was making.

Amps determine how hefty a cable needs to be, not volts. Volts mostly determine how thick the insulation needs to be.

14 gauge wire is basically all you need to carry 10A safely for an extended period of time regardless the voltage. It doesn't matter that you are carrying 120KW.

The proof of this is in EV charge cables. Those bad boys can carry up to 350kW. Yet the cables are often thinner than you might expect. How do they do this? It's by using high voltages (around 900V) which cuts back the amps to around 300->400.

Tesla's chargers peak (or used to) around 600V which has required them to have much beefier cables to handle the high current.

I get that. I'm pretty skeptical that 120 KW going through the last panel doesn't cause damage, and in the "multiple miles chained together" (to quote op) many MW going through the panel at the end of the chain doesn't run into some sort of issue in the real world. Even small percentage losses turn into a lot of heat or other issues at that scale.

If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?

It won't! That's the amazing thing about electricity.

While having 12kV going through panels is not safe for many reasons, having 300V at 10-20A is completely normal.

12kV is impractical because these voltages can jump quite far, and you need a lot of insulation for them to be safe.

Anecdotally speaking, I have heard of a massive California solar farm in an undeveloped area that has serious vandalism problems. 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.

Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals, so there it is a challenging cost-benefit balance. At least panels in parking lots and other developed spaces have the benefit of witnesses. I'm sure a 20 foot climb up a steel beam over running water is a decent deterrent as well.

Anecdotally speaking

First hand experience here - worked with a non-profit that has a tiny solar and battery installation for a light display, and we have had constant theft and vandalism problems with it. It's not even easy to get to - those meth-heads had to work to steal the lead acid batteries and copper wire...

Several years ago one of the local youth sports complex was limited to daylight use because the copper would get stolen from the light poles. This was a large complex with many light poles. Within a week of them being fixed, they'd come and steal the new copper. I never did follow up to see what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.

There are large, large stretches of highway near me that’re all but pitch black at night because people have stolen copper from the light poles. It’s only getting worse.

Is this in California? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in Texas.

In a just society the penalties for that behavior would be commiserate with the societal costs. Even if the single act is relatively low cost, the societal-wide implication means no one can reasonably do this at a small scale without losing their investment. Therefore the penalties should be harsh, widely publicized, and extreme

This I believe is part of why forgery is dealt with so harshly, copying a few thousand bucks isn’t a big deal but destroying the integrity of hard currency is.

I always thought the same logic should be applied to corruption by any kind of official. No matter if politician, judge or police officer - their crimes should be punished 10- or even 100-fold because the real damaged is undermining the entire system.

Such a society would pay a whole lot more attention to white-collar financial and environmental crimes than to anything all the motivated junkies in the country could wreak.

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.

Maybe I'm missing context from your locality, but you think the meth heads tried to sell gasoline on the sidewalk, and not that the shadiest shop in town paid some people to drum up business?

Never attribute to malice… etc.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply to acts of clear malice.

There used to be a house opposite me in Chicago that was a big crack/meth dealer. They would accept literally anything as payment. People would turn up there all day long with storage totes filled with random crap. The crap would be picked through, narcotics exchanged and then the rest thrown out the back. It was an excellent source for storage totes, though I sometimes had to retrieve my trash can from there as they would steal half a dozen of them every week to put all their leftover crap into.

Good to see your comment as always.

I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.

You in a decent spot now?

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns.

We do. Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

The problem will solve itself in a few weeks. Hang the fences, and the thieves will starve. It's both way easier to go after them, and they have something to lose if they don't follow the law.

Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?

How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?

Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?

If it's a scrapper willing to buy sketchy sourced copper, they'll be the type that pays the least for it.

They don't need to know if something was stolen. All they need to do is require an ID, not pay in cash, and pay 30 days after receiving the merchandise.

California’s tried cracking down on catalytic converter theft with significant measures. (I think a legitimate scrapyard would have to do a bunch of paperwork to buy a cat.) Anyone know the outcomes?

There was a nationwide catalytic converter theft ring for the first few years of the pandemic. Junkies around the country would steal cats and ship them off to New Jersey. The ringleader pleaded guilty last year: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...

I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.

why not switch to aluminum? I believe most building codes allow aluminum conductors.

Why can't we aim these meth supervillians at the surveillance cameras then?

they're hitting those too to be fair. In South America its a big problem in communities that are really poor. The components of even CCTV cameras are so valuable that surveillance cameras get taken down almost immediately

I’ve heard in some places it’s hard to keep light bulbs in stairwells.

I’m willing to bet if we gave them their fix they wouldn’t steal a thing. But because their fix is illegal they have to steal to get their fix.

Seems to me like the root cause is the illegality of the drugs. I hope you never have to deal with substance abuse problems yourself. You won’t like being on the dehumanizing end of the stick that you’re presently poking with.

If you're going to give junkies their fix, are you going to buy my alcohol too? What about my gambling debts? What about my escort bill for my sex addiction? Shy are you differentiating addiction to drugs?

Someone with heavy, habitual alcohol use can still get drunk on $20 of alcohol. Someone with a heavy opiate habit may spend hundreds of dollars a day on drugs just to maintain. A habituated opiate user could also get through the day with $20 worth of drugs if we allowed opiates to be produced and sold like alcohol, but we don't. So the unemployed junkie needs to beg or steal a lot more than the unemployed alcoholic to get their fix. That's why the parent comment highlighted "illegality of the drugs" as the cause.

If you think an alcoholic stops drinking when they get drunk, then it sounds to me like you don't really understand alcoholism

Junkies and meth-heads are a different kind of animal from your average drunk, and the reality of the proposal that you responded to is a simple economic analysis of investing in keeping them placated or paying for the damage they cause. It's far cheaper to prevent rather than react and repair.

If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.

Ending the war on drugs doesn't mean making all drugs legal. It means removing the stigma and jail time for people who use drugs.

Some drugs are genuinely dangerous. Many are addictive and will damage the quality of one's life, even if buying and using the drug isn't illegal. Normalizing addiction to drugs as a regular, normal, accepted part of everyday life is not the answer.

No, you misunderstand, which means I didn't communicate it well: The problem is that the drugs are illegal. I would make them legal so they could be purchased from a pharmacy. The problem with junkies stealing to get their fix is that they're already criminals for the addiction and already people without support in society. So straight up stealing copper from wherever isn't really a big deal. You're already a criminal. You're already halfway down that slippery slope.

But there was a world in which junkies existed when the junk wasn't criminal. People had serious addictions, but kept normal lives, because their addiction wasn't criminal. I'm not trying to solve addiction. I'm trying to end the criminality for substance abuse.

And to answer, no, buy your own booze. Cover your own debts, gambling or otherwise. Sex addiction is made up bullshit. I don't need to differentiate because I am not trying to solve that problem.

I suppose you'd agree that some drugs will actually hamper one's ability to function as a productive member of society, whether or not it is illegal; for example, heroin. So if heroin was legal and you could buy it at the pharmacy, and you become addicted and you lose your job and alienate your friends and family, why wouldn't you also end up stealing copper? Maybe heroin being illegal would have made that trajectory one step shorter, but I don't see the story changing fundamentally.

Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?

Fundamentally I disagree. Specifically about heroin, because that is the junk I am referring to specifically. It does not follow that legal heroin leads to job loss, alienation, etc. Because those are social penalties applied by pious douchebags who wish to punish the addicted.

Perhaps give the book “Chasing the Scream” a read. It is eye opening and respectfully, you seem to need that.

We do have a legitimate interest in making sure people don’t ever take that hit. BUT .. in the USA punishments take precedent over everything. Because we’re cunts from what I can tell.

No differentiation here, alcohol is widely available from legal sources and very affordable compared to illegal drugs.

I come from a country with social healthcare, and here we also heavily subsidize drugs for people who need them because of their own lifestyle choices, e.g. diabetes medicine due to obesity. Why do people who have become addicted to psychoactive drugs not deserve the same compassion?

Obesity is a bit more complicated than "lifestyle choice"; I don't think it's worth engaging with your question without you understanding that.

So is drug addiction, and that's my point.

You can become addicted if you're mom is a junkie. You can become addicted from scripts given to you by Dr.Feelgood. There are many ways of becoming an addict without waking up one day and deciding "I'm going to become an addict today".

The root cause is all the people addicted to drugs. We are never going to entirely stamp out addiction, but certainly there are structural things we can do with our society to make it less common, and make it easier for people to get out of that situation.

I don't think dangerous, addictive drugs should be legalized, or available to buy at pharmacies. People who traffic in these sorts of drugs should be jailed.

But possession and use should be decriminalized. People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

Ultimately, a healthy society that actually takes care of the people who live in it will have fewer people getting into addictive drugs in the first place. That's a huge lift, though, unfortunately: fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way.

fixing income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, housing insecurity, etc. is not trivial, and our political leaders (especially those on the right) generally do not want to fix society in this way

On food insecurity: the five states that are the least food-insecure are a swing state, two solid red states, and two solid blue states[0].

On housing insecurity: the states with the most affordable homes (median house price to median income ratio, or share of income spent on housing) are for the most part solid red states[1]. I would wager this is largely due to stronger private property rights in red states that make it easier for supply to rise to meet demand and establish a better-functioning rental market[2].

Let's not make the mistake of judging politicians and government programs by their stated intent and not their factual outcomes. Whether someone "wants to" fix society in one way or another is very, very far removed from whether it actually gets fixed under their leadership. Plenty of times in history, the problem actually got worse!

On income and wealth inequality: unfortunately, these things cannot be fixed except by fixing the fact that different people have different abilities, talents, preferences, and tastes, and some of those differences include the ability to make money and build wealth. Nobody would look at me and think I have an equal chance of making it in the NBA as, say, the guys in this picture[3], but for some reason we're supposed to believe that when it comes to the skills of moneymaking and wealth-building, anyone is about as good as anyone else.

[0]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/food...

[1]: https://www.affordabilityindex.org/rankings/states/, https://www.businessinsider.com/every-state-ranked-by-housin...

[2]: In parts of California, tenancy laws are so insane that it could take a landlord over a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to evict a nonpaying tenant. There's a whole cottage industry of landlords paying those same nonpaying tenants good money to just leave quietly. If you had property to rent, how much extra money would you charge to compensate for this risk?

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft#/media/File:NBA_Draf...

People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

I agree with you, but it's worth spelling out exactly why. Philosophically, prison has one of three purposes: protecting society, rehabilitation, or punishment.

If the sentence for use is anything less than spending the rest of your life in jail, then society isn't really protected from addicts; the recidivist rate is too high. Get out, steal again for the next high, rinse and repeat through the revolving door.

Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts. Leaving aside drug smuggling into prisons, getting people past the withdrawal period is the "easy" part of rehab, the real work is in therapy, developing better relationship models, better boundaries, better strategies for the triggers that drove people to look for a high. It's very, very difficult to facilitate that in prison.

Finally, it's debatable whether prison is actually punishment for addicts. If they keep access to drugs through the people who smuggle them into prisons, and the prison pays for meals and a roof that were often lacking for the addict on the street, then, is it really a punishment?

I would love to see more project specs call for aluminum cable. For a given ampacity, it’s lighter, cheaper and more flexible than copper.

The major downsides are that the exposed wire is much less corrosion resistant underground (which is irrelevant) and that you need appropriate lugs. But standard lugs can easily be purchased in aluminum-compatible variants at no additional cost.

The 1960s called; they want their trailer fires back.

Aluminum wire is completely safe these days. Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.

There was an issue with aluminum wire and terminations, the wiring devices and breakers used for copper only wire didn’t work with aluminum (wrong coefficient of expansion of the metal where the terminations were made) and caused arcing and fires. Once the termination points were made out of an alloy that worked with both Cu/Al, it’s been safe to use.

Nothing short of a face-to-face security response will deter these criminals

Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?

I can only imagine why?

It’s only US states that don’t arrest people for stealing that have this issue

Not true that it's limited to certain states. It's a nationwide problem, according to AT&T.

https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention

Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...

You violently punish a few of the thieves and problem solved. Why have other countries solved this problem yet america pretends there isn't a gigantic Solve Problem button that is yet to be pressed? Just cane thieves! Imagine how beautiful our country could be.

These thieves are probably drug addicts and have mental health problems. The “violent punishment” (I think you mean capital punishment) is not going to be a deterrent for them, unlike for normal people who can still think with normal risk-reward calculus.

Ah man, I guess we can’t do anything then.

Or, you view them as human beings who are desperate and try to help them instead, and probably save money in the process? People who find themselves addicted to opioids or other drugs would not have to steal copper in the first place if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave.

if they had a safe and affordable/free supply of the drugs they crave

What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?

probably save money in the process

That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.

This is a good question. Off the top of my head:

* Less crime because people who are addicted to drugs do not have to raise instant money for their next fix,

* Getting open, visible drug use off the streets and into a controlled supervised setting (this is not strictly part of safe supply though, but an orthogonal related service),

* Making drug use safer for the users by ensuring quality and consistent strength. Fentanyl, orphines and nitazenes are killing lots of people, and they exist on the market not because of demand from the users but because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture and smuggle than heroin.

* Making it easier to help the drug user by removing the burden and stress of obtaining the drugs. This is often an endless cycle of stress which leaves no room for getting help.

* Making it possible for drug users to be functional members of society. Not all people who are addicted to drugs need to stop, for some the safer choice is to accept that they are dependent and work around it. Taking opioids to prevent withdrawal is not incompatible with holding a job and contributing to society, committing crimes to get money for the next fix is. For many people who are addicted to opioids, abstinence programs are not the best option because the rate of falling back to using is very high, and once that happens the risk of fatal overdose is also very high due to decreased tolerance. I won't quote concrete numbers because I cannot remember them right now, but last I heard the rate of failure in abstinence programs was well above 70%.

* By supplying the drugs from sources that have no financial incentive in keeping the drug users on the drugs, you can ensure that users are exposed to all public offers to get help with their addiction or any underlying socioeconomic factors that are probably contributing to why they have become addicted in the first place.

Most criminologists will tell you that punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate. I believe that to be true, and I think that a much better way is to address the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime. It doesn't mean that we should stop at the safe supply, because that would indeed be the cynical approach, we of course also have to help people overcome all the problems that are probably keeping them in their drug addiction, such as mental health issues and homelessness.

But shouldn't that be coupled with mandatory de-addiction program participation? Otherwise, how does the problem end?

We can't have nice things until we migrate away from desperation-based economics.

That does still leave many things like malice (or ignorance that's as good as), organized crime (including political), and possibly neighbours that still have desperation. Lots of things are in the way of having nice things. But nice things are also a spectrum.

A few years ago, some foreigners entered a subway depot in South Korea, drew graffiti, and left the country before they were caught.

South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.

A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.

The U.S. locks up a far, far, far higher rate of people than any other advanced economy. The U.S. locks up people at 5x the rate of South Korea. Whatever the difference is, it’s not because the U.S. is unwilling to punish people.

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

The issue is that the US perceives poverty as personal issue rather than public issue. If my neighbor has no housing their likelihood of becoming addicted is way higher than if we simply gave them a house to live in, and far cheaper than constantly policing them.

The U.S. locks up people at 5x the rate of South Korea. Whatever the difference is, it’s not because the U.S. is unwilling to punish people.

The difference is in consistency in enforcement and general background crime rate.

If you have a nearly guaranteed chance of getting caught doing something, the punishment almost doesn't matter. If every single time you went over the speed limit you got a $500 fine 100% guaranteed, there would be effectively zero speeders ever. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting caught but the punishment is 10 years in prison - there will still be plenty of speeders all over the place.

Humans do not do well with estimating risk on low probability events. We are all just big children in the end. Consistency in consequences are what actually matters, not overly harsh punishment.

Yes, this is why “death penalty for everything“ wouldn’t suddenly eliminate crime.

Depends how effective the enforcement is; but anyone who wants to repeat Pol Pot is someone to run from quickly, if they get anywhere near a position of power.

What would that look like - increasing the number of US police officers by 2x etc. to ensure they catch every person who commits any crime? Reducing the rights of those accused of a crime to ensure they don't skate?

Or maybe what constitutes a crime should be rethought (e.g. there is no reason at all to keep the "war on drugs" going, it clearly has failed), and instead focus on prevention?

That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.

What would ‘prevention’ look like? (As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.)

My thoughts:

- Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?

- After setting up safeguards to enforce privacy protections, vastly increase the use of camera-based traffic enforcement. For example, create separate traffic enforcement agencies so that police don't have access to camera data. Use trajectcontroles (Dutch word for a system where multiple cameras on highway entrances/exits track your license plate and ensure your average speed was below the limit), cameras that detect texting while driving (pioneered by the UK), microphone-linked cameras in residential areas that detect modified exhausts (pioneered by Taiwan), and HOV-lane enforcement cameras. Keep traffic officers focused on ensuring that everyone has a valid/viewable license plate. The result should be a system where committing small traffic violations is not normalized.

- Reduce the punishments for most crimes. Large punishments are cruel, expensive to dole out, and less effective than consistent enforcement + small punishments.

- Set high expectations for police officers and create a culture of accountability. Fire those who are playing on their phones and arrest those who are committing crimes. You probably need independent oversight agencies to be able to do this.

- Make police highly visible - bright yellow high-vis vests and cars (pioneered by Antwerp) ensure that police are there to deter crime rather than hide and catch it.

- Provide actual public services so that people have a chance to succeed. A variety of unpleasant behaviors (e.g. public defecation, being disruptive/yelling in public, public drug use/intoxication) are things that no one wants to do - they are driven by a lack of, for example, homeless services, mental health services, and drug treatment services.

- Reprioritize enforcement (looking at you, drug task forces). Expand the legal definition of entrapment and stop doing so many B.S. sting operations.

Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?

Yeah bro, your average diseased junkie is definitely watching MSNBC and reading the WSJ in between rounds of fentanyl and shitting on the side walk.

My state has tried this (very low sentences, often just a few days in jail, if that) and it doesn’t help the repeat offender rate at all.

Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on. That doesn’t do any good for people who refuse to use it. Sometimes a court orders someone to attend their mental health provider appointments, drug rehab, etc as terms of a sentence.

Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere. It turns out some drugs are actually bad.

As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?

It would look like an AI-driven surveillance state, combined with near-immediate consequences which are individually slap-on-the-wrist penalties and only become severe if they are repeated.

AI, not human, because the actual incidence rate for a lot of crimes is much much higher than most people realise, including for extremely severe cases:

• Statistically speaking I think it's something like most Americans commit three felonies per day*, but that's probably mostly drugs which IMO should be liberalised anyway.

• For an example of extremely serious crimes, and again statistically speaking, your first day in highschool, your first class on that day, you likely met someone who had been sexually assaulted by a family member.

Increasing a human police force to the scale needed to catch all crimes is theoretically possible (the Stasi basically operated at this scale even if they only thing they cared about was sedition) but is a terrible idea.

If all crimes keep their current penalties, a fully automated surveillance state bankrupts everyone almost immediately.

Note: I'm not suggesting this is a good future. I don't think it's a stable equilibrium, I think there's too high a risk of a leadership using such a surveillance capability to hold power, and they may even not care too much about non-state crimes once they do seize power, so this could easily become Stasi 2.0 or worse.

* Or the mean felonies per day is 3, which is a very different claim. I've not read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Silverglate

An acquaintance of mine experienced severe domestic violence (trying to choke him to death with an accomplice in front of his children + another witness).

She got arrested for that since the law requires it for domestic violence and turned out she had skipped bail for a grand theft auto conviction. She served 3 days then got released because the county jail was full.

Her conviction for domestic violence ended up being 6 days in another county jail.

She has since been running around committing more crimes, including stealing her children’s IDs, birth certificates, social security cards, and using them commit welfare benefits fraud. Police took a report and won’t go pick her up since it’s a nonviolent crime despite her violent history.

I’m not sure what’s needed (more police to say sorry, we can’t help you isn’t what’s needed), but having an antisocial person selling her children’s food benefits is not a good thing. Before anyone says she needs “services”, she already gets a guaranteed disability income, free housing, and her own food and free medical benefits including addiction rehab services.

Your point only stands if you assume that Americans and Koreans commit crime at the same rate, which is eminently false. The high rate of incarceration in the US is directly downstream of higher criminality compared to other advanced economies.

In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.

US has massively lomger sentences. It does not have that much higher ceime rates, but it loves to lock people.

It does not have that much higher ceime rates

This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.

That's just due to issues in regulating gun ownership, though.

How easy can you learn a skill while in jail? How easy do you find a job when you get out of jail?

That would be an interesting statistic in any country discussing number of jailed people, repeat crime, and jail time.

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore... puts US crime rate at 27% higher than SK.

Let's use a metric immune to over-policing and different definitions of "crime": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... puts the US homicide rate at 11.8x higher than SK.

You think that was a good use of resources and not something deeply dystopian and authoritarian?

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.

This definition of “Rich” is referring to the people who pay most of the taxes. The government hasn’t prioritized using those tax dollars for this purpose. It’s likely being utilized more so to benefit the poor and needy more than you think in other ways though, education and healthcare come to mind and are quite big ticket items.

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Or you can give poor people some sort of support so they don't have to ride in public transit just to have a place to sleep without being exposed to the elements?

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized.

Come to Europe. Sure, the truly rich still drive in SUVs, but in general, people of all backgrounds take public transit, and "gated communities" are not a thing here.

Come to Europe.

I find increasing evidence that we're heading the same way as migration is used in a way that creates an underclass and the previously homogenous high trust society dismantles ever so slowly as resource constraints (graying of the population) puts pressure.

the previously homogenous high trust society

Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.

migration is used in a way that creates an underclass

The underclass always existed, especially in the US.

Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.

Or maybe, you know, create conditions so that we don’t have as many drug addicts? And homeless ppl starving? Not arguing against the rule of law, just saying that maybe, the “drug addict” didn’t have the choices in life others non-drug-addicts had? Maybe? Maybe not though, who knows…

Homeless people aren’t starving in America. (I volunteer at our nearby homeless facilities, where I’m proud my region maintains a 100% service rate - nobody who needs a place to stay is turned away, through a network of shelters, halfway houses, group homes, and subsidised market vouchers.)

In addition, they’re all eligible for government food assistance which is quite generous. In my experience, though, many people sell off their food benefits for drugs. So that’s a problem.

Imagine if companies could pay meth addicts in meth the amount of work they could get out of them would be incredible.

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).

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.

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 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

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?)

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.

I really hope we don't get a California situation. If you look at the addicts at the Frankfurt train station, that is starting to look like Skid Row.

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)

We also have ample evidence that you can solve this sort of problem via UBI. As politically inconvenient as that result has proven to be...

UBI is not the panacea imo. We need UBS, and not the bank - universal basic services. Whether that's healthcare, education, unemployment, free transportation, food stamps for the needy, housing loans, more government jobs, etc.

UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.

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.

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

Interesting, I’ve never been to Seattle. But it looks like they are adding fare gates, so apparently it isn’t working.

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

This is still the way it works in San Francisco on the buses and light rail.

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.

Caltrain does exactly this.

Portland’s light rail works this way.

I find it interesting to see how often criticisms are leveled at the US confidently based on ignorance.

This feels like one of those USA problems

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.

In the uk rail industry we have people stealing copper all the time.

The elephant in the room is naming the group almost exclusively responsible for this crime.

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?

If a certain group of people are the ones constantly causing the majority of the same specific societal issues, why shouldnt they be called out?

You can call out a person. What does it mean to call out a group? That's guilt by association.

men?

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.

wherever antisocial people choose to live.

Are we going to discover that, by some striking surprise, antisocial people choose to live in places with weaker social support?

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

California's 2025-26 budget for health and human services was $307 billion for 39 million people. Compared with France at $370 billion for 67 million people.

There is a certain gulf in the efficiency of spending for sure

The high cost of housing makes the needs much higher

California claims to have those social services. Does it actually, or are they impossible to actually get?

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 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.

Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out?

Spain's rollout is up in the last few percentage points (>95%) of fibre coverage, in this particular region we reached saturation of the entire rural area 5 years ago.

Plenty of time for those disconnected copper cables to go walkabout if anyone were so inclined. Realistically, in a region where the population skews older and most everyone owns property, it's probably not worth the risk to fence it

How much cable are we talking about here and can you go into more detail about where your house is located...?

Joking aside, I'm not sure that metal thefts can totally be blamed on addiction.

I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.

They would do things like hack phone cables from telephone polls, attach them to an SUV and attempt to rip them out of the ground, with varying levels of success.

A week later the same people would break into a works yard in another part of the country after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found in a field somewhere after they'd used petrol to burn the casing off.

I don't think the people involved were doing it for want of housing, healthcare or addiction treatment, as we have all of that in the UK. They just saw it as a source of money.

Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

Yeah, that seems like a pretty reasonable solution, all things considered

Face to face, or razor wire. Barriers do work, but only if you pay for something more than chainlink. And the math is interesting as the bigger the field the less barrier is needed proportionally.

It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

No because now you're using land that could be used for other things, which is exactly what this avoids. This takes existing land that loses water and costs money, and makes it lose less water and make money.

That’s true of everything you build. The cost of land has to be taken into account, but land is much cheaper in some areas than others.

That's true in general, but California aqueduct land is mostly valuable cropland, and the other side is at wildfire risk

You are assuming that land is expensive and forgetting that building and maintaining panels over long a canal is harder than building over a large plot.

Harder but obviously not physically impossible either. From the image I can't imagine what the showstopper would possibly be. Technician on a little dinghy instead of a stepladder doesn't seem like a big deal. Presumably they make it where you can pull the panel off easily if you need to.

You're talking about something that is probably at least 10x the cost to build and maintain. You're making something simple, like swapping a single solar panel, from a ground-level one-man job into now a multi-person job with specialized equipment and water hazards.

Thats 10x the cost somehow? I doubt it. They put solar in all kinds of awkward areas where a technican can't just show up and turn a screwdriver from ground level. Seems it works somehow. Chances are if they go with this, they will have some maintenance craft like a barge platform I'd guess, where the job would be made effectively no different than a ground level job (aside from bringing over the barge which could be quite simple in design, e.g. wood platform raft made from drums and a cheap outboard motor on one end, it's only in the aqueduct after all not in any open water or current.)

In Switzerland, which is quite densely populated, they even have a pilot project with putting solar panels between rail road tracks:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energ...