The collapse will be fun in part because the money to maintain our infrastructure will not be there. Even now bridges collapse every now and then. Hurricanes devastate areas, and “rebuilding” fails to repair the damage years later. But there will be another source of our society’s decrepidation, and it will probably dwarf all of that.
r-strategists are fundamentally about taking the easy resources. When resources are not freely available, they will look for resources laying around that can simply be taken. Everywhere I go, I see copper wire. It is on telephone poles, in houses, and even spooled in the backs of industrial buildings, but it has never drifted into my mind to come back in the middle of the night and just take it. It would especially not enter my mind if that copper wire were electrified with enough energy to power a locomotive. But to an r-strategist, you just have to kill the juice, and carry it away. Free resources. It is as instinctual to them as loyalty is to us.
This is happening now. It is a harbinger of resource restriction, occurring when resource availability is still as high as we have ever seen in history. Can you imagine what it will be like when all the EBT cards are empty, nobody has a job, and families look at how gaunt their children are and feel real fear?
As each such theft further deteriorates our infrastructure, it will further impact our economy, further impact resource distribution and generation, and make the economic conditions even worse. That is called a tipping point. What is on the other side will be like nothing we can imagine.
Be ready. We will actually live the history that our descendants will marvel at. It will be surreal.
I saw this all the time at my previous job working on telecom towers. Of particular value to copper thieves are the solid copper grounding plates that all the RF feedlines and radio equipment are grounded to. As towers are often the tallest structures in an area and are made of conductive steel, they act as giant lightning rods and so special measures must be taken to protect the equipment installed on them. Here is a pic of a site I worked at about two years ago. I hope this link works:
This particular spot took a lightning hit that fried the AC mains wiring, as well as fried the guts of the light box that runs the strobes and beacons that illuminate the tower at night so pilots in low flying aircraft don’t fly into it.
A lot of these sites are in remote areas and infrequently inspected, so a compromised grounding system can sometimes go unnoticed until a lightning strikes destroys thousands of dollars worth of equipment. The scum that steal these ground bars to sell as scrap don’t even realize that the ground bars are worth more on the market as what they were made for rather than as scrap.
Interesting. You can bet those will be big targets when the collapse comes, destroying thousands fo dollars for every ten the thieves make.
Thanks for the input,
If things get bad enough I can see thieves knocking down whole towers and stripping the actual coax cable off them. Then you’d be looking at possibly having millions of dollars lost for every few hundred or thousand taken. It would be very easy with guyed towers, just cut all the guy lines on the most windward side and let it get blown over. Right now most scrap dealers won’t even touch coax unless it comes from a legit tower or telecom company, but who knows what could happen in the future.
That’s interesting, because when we look back on the last depression, there really wasn’t this much disbursed technology to be destroyed by scavengers. Whether you are looking at it from an investment perspective, or a prepping perspective, it is possible that the collapse will be really crazy in ways we haven’t foreseen.
It seems the comments section doesn’t work for posting images. Here is the raw URL:
I still have a shred of optimism that we might be able to avoid having a real collapse if we elect the right people into office who get us out of debt, drastically shrink the government, and uphold the Bill of Rights. Things would certainly be easier that way but ultimately we should be better off going though a collapse because the r’s would be largely if not entirely eliminated at which point I guess the whole cycle would gradually repeat itself.
Increasingly, I think anything short of the collapse and pain is just pushing more pain off to be experienced later down the road. Already I think we are heading for something really bad. What comes of it will be good, but until we get past the pain, it will be horrible.