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.
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.
Yes, I'd like to see the "cheap shade" that could span as far as shown in the pics as well as survive strong gales. It wouldn't be like a cheap shade in your back yard.
As mentioned in the article, we heavy in Europe a good source of shade that's rather self sustaining and even helps replace the concrete lining of the canals.
It's a wonderful technology called trees
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.
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.)
If you look at the city of Mojave, Calif. on Google Maps (satellite view) you can see massive solar farms all around it. There is plenty of space for expansion. There is no need to use a national or state park. (To be clear: Mojave Desert is far away from the city of Mojave!)
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...
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.
To my eye if you were putting up a few hundred or more of those steel structures, and it didn't require a redesign of the canal retainment around it, it could be built quite economically.
Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.
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.
The UK has covered some water reservoir with floating PV panels.
The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:
Project Nexus tests not one, but three different solar canal models.
... accordion-like retractable panels are positioned low across the narrow canal, ready to roll up at a moment’s notice.
might come close.
Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.
> 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.
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.
High level, I agree with your comment. In the case of this experiment, it was built by the Turlock Irrigation District, which was "financed by issuing public general obligation bonds. The debt was systematically paid back over decades through local property taxes and water delivery fees collected from the farmers." However, there are lots of canals that are directly owned by the state, so they are good candidates also.
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 solar panel 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.
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?
And so ultimately, despite my details being wrong about currents, the notion of stringing miles of panels together is probably not a good basis for rejecting the panels over the canals.
His point, which I directly responded to, is that these panels need giant cables due to the transported power (wattage).
Watts don't matter when talking about cable sizing. Power loss from a cable is equal to the current^2 on the cable multiplied by the resistance of the cable (P = I^2 * R).
Power delivered is equal to the voltage * current (P = E * I). What these two facts mean is that if you raise the voltage, you can have a cable with a higher resistance (smaller cable) without worrying about the heat from power loss causing the cable to melt. How "hefty" a cable needs to be isn't related to power transported by the cable, but rather the current on the cable.
This isn't "nitpicking". It's correcting a (common) misunderstanding about how electricity works. It's a direct refute because he said
> 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.
The cable sizing was his "core" point. Which is why these "nitpicks" on cable sizing and energy distribution are directly responsive and refute his point.
Also, a nitpick for you, wattage measures power, not energy.
"Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. "
And they're never installed in config chains that high voltage - cell spacing between cells is typically very low and only capable of withstanding ~5kV before internal arcing occurs.
Also, your typical 72-cell solar panel is only 32V.
The obvious answer is a cheap inverter ever few meters - this is typical practice with solar panels - and then a cheap transformer scattered around to get the voltage to whatever the line is. This is the common cheap practice for solar installs everywhere.
Microinverters where there is an inverter on every panel are also common - they are more expensive, but reduce some labor.
Either way the inverter is connected to a network and then get remote monitoring of each section and in turn can plan maintenance as needed.
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.
I do not consider being a reasonably well adjusted member of society, and enforcing that, to be the responsibility of businesses and do not agree that we are all subsidizing a business’ ability to have nice things without people destroying them.
> I do not consider being a reasonably well adjusted member of society, and enforcing that, to be the responsibility of businesses
The correct read of “Corporations are people, my friend.” is that people are indeed responsible for individual corporate humanism - being moral in how they operate even inside a company - or expect social repercussions at minimum in return.
Having said that: I’m not 100% sure who should pay (and at what portions) for what’s being debated.
Brilliant idea! We should just privatize everything! By doing so, we’ll make companies foot the bill for every public service they rely on!
Come to think of it, who needs communally regulated safety services like jails, prisons, and law enforcement? In addition to having a private guard, every company should have their own in-house holding pen and justice system :)
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Grandmaster Flash on “Birth of a Culture” | The New Yorker Radio Hour
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based o...
I know you are being facetious but the community Jurerê Internacional in Florianópolis has done exactly that to great success: https://youtu.be/dA_UYNGvDxc
That company and all those who work there are taxpayers. The justice system should stop the theif and jail them.
I don't know what kind of hellscape you want to live in where you need private security to keep anything you own from being stolen, especially something as mundane as some wires.
Not sure if you realize it but you’re actually arguing that the government should employ potential criminals as it’s cheaper, for them. The problem with that is people will find ways to appear like a potential criminal and then we have a huge welfare state that cost much more than the prison system. Also, people with jobs sometimes still do crime, so it’s not a fully baked solution.
The company wouldn’t employ the guard unless it saved them money, reducing losses by more than $80k. For Many businesses that’s not going to make sense. Even larger businesses, have larger risk footprint, needing more security guards, needing more loss savings to justify.
> As the 5 p.m. cutoff to pass bills approached Tuesday, Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, launched an unusual bid to bog down the Senate process. She demanded Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, a Democrat, to have the chamber’s secretary read all 39 pages of a bill focused on electrical transmission infrastructure. Usually, the clerk reads the first and last line of legislation into the record. Heck agreed.
> This maneuver killed the transmission bill, as well as several others Senate Democrats were hoping to vote on before the deadline. One of those looked to address surging theft of copper wiring. Senate Bill 6190 would’ve imposed new recordkeeping requirements on scrap metal businesses and made destroying “critical communications infrastructure” a felony.
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.
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.
Ya know, you'd think if these guys are willing to do these crimes for a couple hundred bucks they might also be willing to turn their "friends" in for a couple hundred bucks.
Like the guys who pick up cans and bottles for recycling, people who need the money can do a lot of useful work with the right incentives.
If you set up a system like "turn in video of someone stripping copper that leads to an arrest and we reward you with $1,000" or something you could probably enlist the help of a lot of these people.
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 would be 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. Unless they confessed, they’d probably only ever risk getting caught doing one of these jobs and face a tiny fraction of the consequences. 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?
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.
the same thing happens in my area where there's a lot of car/RV homeless. If you take a look and think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that they're definitely not driving a decrepit 1980s winnebago to a gas station and paying $5/gal for gas to run their heat and generators.
> 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?
There is a strong link between lower prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.
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.
At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else because the repeat players resent having 30 days worth of interest stolen from them every month and the one-time sellers don't trust an IOU from a company they've never done business with before.
Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.
You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.
> At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else
Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).
Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions, but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.
> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs
Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.
The engine block in an old car blew up so I ripped it completely apart and sold the parts online and in person to various people. I tried to sell my own catalytic converter to a shop I found online that was some kind of on-the-up-and-up licensed buyer.
What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.
I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.
Some states (Alabama, for instance, as I'm told by a contractor business operator friend who lives in it), requires you to either have a receipt from a licensed contractor who replaced whatever you're scrapping, or a business license to sell scrap copper.
I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.
FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.
requiring some kind of license doesn't really fix the problem of theft at all. it just adds layers of middlemen to collect up the copper from the layer below and further legitimize it. so it does reduce the street price for stolen copper, but since copper and stolen bikes (which also have almost no value now) are one of the few income sources available, it could conceivably increase the volume of stolen copper.
> And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.
> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product
The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?
99,999% of people won't pull their car apart to sell the parts individually. We just take the whole car to the scrap yard.
So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.
> Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else.
So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.
> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.
Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular type of theft, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.
This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.
> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.
They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?
And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.
In CA we had a clothes dryer motor replaced. As a result we were left with the old part.
I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.
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.
My state used a few undercover cops to start fencing (not actually) stolen cats to scrapyards, identified scrapyards that would knowingly take stolen property, and then turned a few of the employees / owners of such places into CIs. Eventually a large nationwide ring was found.
No way. Was this is Canada? Specifically in the upper interior of BC, during ski season? Either we know each other, or drilling holes in gasoline tanks is way more widespread.
I have never heard of another instance of this happening, ever.
Aluminum has a lot of weird strict rules. It is cheaper, but the labor is more expensive. You can slap copper together quick and it will be safe and work perfectly fine for decades - there is no real world advantage to doing any better. For Al you need to take a lot more care to follow the rules or you have a fire in a few years.
Al is typically used for the large wires - the cost of the wires makes it worth the extra labor. For your typical house though the cost of labor is more than the wires, so Al is more expensive than copper.
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
Bulbs get taken from stairwells, because someone needed them. Sand, gravel, slabs, pipes disappear from construction storage and when you look around a neighbour's yard looks a lil snazzier than it did the week before.
It's a mix between culture and poverty. In high trust society much fewer people would consider taking that material fair.
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 money than the unemployed alcoholic to get their fix. That's why the parent comment highlighted "illegality of the drugs" as the cause.
I think you missed the posters point. I just checked prices on a store nearby and for the cheap Vodka you can buy a handle which is ~40 drinks for $12. So basically no matter how extreme for $20 you can buy more alcohol than pretty much any human could consume in a day.
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?
> 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?
This can be done by going after suppliers.
There's non-trivial elements to this, otherwise we'd have already done it. Off the top of my head (and it will go much deeper): if all vendors are punished then the price remains high ("the iron law of prohibition") -> so you need the government to supply it to avoid dealers getting dollar signs in their eyes at the potential income -> the government must not promote it as part of this -> I'd say "medical prescriptions", but that's from a bias to my experience growing up in the UK where we don't have all the "talk to your doctor about ${pharmaceutical_brand}" ads I hear about in the USA -> would the USA even be able to pass laws preventing this, or is that a 1st Amendment problem?
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.
> 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.
I follow what you're saying, that the downsides of drug addiction outside of the user's own body is imposed by the people around them. I suppose that's almost definitionally true. I and many people do in fact find it unpleasant to be around people who are high out of their minds. I do not wish to associate with such people while they're in that state. I do not think that society would be better off with more of them, so I would prefer that society actively disincentivize such behavior. And you could certainly make the argument that this is the same thing as wanting punishment.
But if you're making the argument that being high on drugs might lead a user to job loss organically, I find that hard to believe. What if I didn't even know what heroin was, and saw that an employee was nodding off on the job? Wouldn't I be inclined to fire him?
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 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.
[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?
Red v. Blue is not the issue here. Neither of those parties is doing much to combat inequality. You should be comparing the USA to countries that actually try (or have historically tried) to combat inequality and social precarity, like Switzerland, or the Scandinavian countries.
> 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?
> Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts.
IMO, prison makes it worse. Once an addict gets out, it is much harder to go back into regular society. Getting a job, etc., after prison is harder which leads to despair and back to drugs.
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.
There are downsides though, alu wiring breaks over time when exposed to any kind of stress and the connections loosen and have to be re-checked periodically.
Not really. The 1960s used small-gauge aluminum wire with inappropriate alloys and inappropriate connectors. The modern stuff doesn’t have the same problems.
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.
> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.
I agree with your general point, but be a bit careful here.
> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.
It’s true that, for a little over 50 years, the UL has regulated what devices may “accept” Al wire. But devices have had markings suggesting use of Al wire for longer than that, and it was quite unwise:
Don’t get caught up in all the discussion of repair devices — AIUI this article is mostly about “repair” of old pre-8000-series Al wire. You can’t buy that stuff any more. As far as I know, modern Al listed building wire is only sold in 8 AWG and up, and this stuff doesn’t need “repair”: it’s perfectly fine in any appropriately listed connector.
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.
America locks up more people per capita than basically any country on earth, so your theory that this is easily prevented by harsh penalties doesn’t make sense.
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.
* 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
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
We have to address the root causes of drug use and addiction and ultimately accept that current addicts may stay that way, but over time we have fewer people becoming addicts.
You'd think reducing crime and saving money in the process would be enough incentive, but it turns out that can be a hard sell on a public that's been trained to relish in seeing violence applied to people presented as bad. I've found that there are people so keenly keyed to said relish that they'll just dead refuse to believe that supportive approaches to drug addiction can be cheaper than coercive approaches with better results to boot, and that's kind of tragic honestly.
Is there any country where this works? AFAIK the safest countries have consistent but not draconical enforcement. The US has pretty harsh enforcement for a western country but it's very inconsistent and not timely enforced.
Studies show that the severity of the expected punishment has a relatively small impact on crime (and in some cases, more severe punishments can lead to more severe crimes). The probability of getting caught has a much bigger impact.
The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, so maybe that is not the solution? Sounds easy and direct, but it does not seem to work.
… Ah, yes, why not emulate peaceful crime-free utopias like, er, Iran and Somalia. The only developed country which does this is Singapore, and these days it doesn’t do it much; about 1000 cases of judicial corporal punishment per year.
The US has the highest large-country rate of incarceration in the world (besides likely North Korea, for which reliable data is not available); not sure what makes you think “more punishment” would be the way to go tbh.
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.
Yeah, there are other root causes. I'm just saying that we should focus on those. Much of this conversation is focused on enforcement. Getting enforcement right is like having the right sized bucket for bailing out your sinking boat: some answers are better than others, but none change the fact that your vessle wasn't seaworthy to begin with.
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.
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.
I think is a very unfair allegation to make against homeless people. Most are not drug addicts.
Drug addicts, however, have a hard time holding on to a house, apartment, etc and will often decide to exchange a stable living situation for another drug fix.
Giving houses to drug addicts means:
- a non drug addict doesn’t get to get that house
- the drug addict now has a house to use drugs in, not take care of, and generally destroy
The answer is for drug addicts to be placed in a rehab program until they aren’t an addict anymore.
The issue in the US is that punishment is comparatively harsh but relatively few criminals are punished and punishment is usually quite delayed. Studies show that timely, consistent punishment is much more effective.
> 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.
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?
I think you have to start with increase policing so that there’s a high chance of being caught. In the US, 2x is nowhere near enough given the size and number of street lights available to vandalize.
We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement
Neither. The US has a problem with incompetency in policing. Part of that stems from the prevalence of far-right ideology that is common among US police but not common in peer developed countries. Far-right officers are ideologically disposed to not being effective, either because they prefer punishment to procedure, or because it's in their interest to keep crime high.
Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.
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.)
4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.
with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
That’s already been done in my area and really doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people are so antisocial they are difficult to house (causing fights with neighbours, burning buildings down and so forth). But yes, it does help to have both abundant inexpensive housing and also programs for people who can’t afford it.
It does have to be paired with police enforcement that doesn’t tolerate living on the street or in a park when housing is available.
It also becomes a problem when people who live in such housing abuse it, such as operating drug dealing out of it.
>4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
We tried that too. It’s great for people like me. Some people refuse to access mental health or addiction rehab services. So the access is there.
>5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
There is zero public support to give drug addicts extra cash to go buy more drugs.
Other than that, benefits are generous - I can say definitively nobody is going hungry. Some people will still refuse to apply for benefits. I stayed a few days in a hospital and my hospital roommate refused to apply for any benefits because he didn’t want to give the government info they could use to try to get the child support he owes. (The hospital sent a social worker in every few hours to try to persuade him.) Should such a person be given benefits including cash benefits?
>6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
We have that too. You need staff to clean them and it’s not fun to clean up after an antisocial person.
>7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
There is no public support for a heroin dispensary.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.
with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
Well, around here drugs are so cheap it’s not a big deal to pay for them. Now we just have loads of drug addicts who are strung out all the time, and in addition they can’t earn income with small time drug dealing like they used to. A fentanyl habit is cheap (maybe $10 a day) which is easily financed by selling eg your children’s food stamps card.
The public is not going to support the government paying people to shoot up drugs all day.
- 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?
> 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
Doesn't do anything unless you also get consistent about catching people
>Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on.
Really? If so, that's amazing. What state in the US has actually given all people access to mental health services and addiction help.
> Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere.
Fentanyl is a thing because strict enforcement necessitates drugs that are more compact/easier to hide. Many other countries still have heroine.
>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?
I would suggest focusing on impounding vehicles rather than chasing people.
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.
Yeah, as a human race, we've clearly reached the technological era where deep, ubiquitous surveillance is both technologically and economically feasible. For a few years now, I've been thinking we need a constitutional amendment to restrict the mechanisms, deployment, and use of mass automated surveillance.
Human beings don't empathize well with situations nor people they never have to personally face. That's a well-lit path to fascism. We're one step closer to 1984.
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.
Wow. Your single anecdote showing humans have created an imperfect system, and/or sometimes some people just don't want to live in society with others no matter what, once again has really shown me that we should only ever go after the symptoms instead of working on the real problems. More police! More jail time for everyone! Death penalty for minor offenses! More jails need to be built! Surely that will fix it this time!
See Mark Kleiman's - When Brute Force Fails. The book mentions the Hawaiian HOPE project. The dealt with parolees by punishing violations with immediate mild punishment (i.e. you're back in jail over this weekend)instead of allowing violations to accumulate over time and then coming down on the person like a ton of bricks ( on your 10th positive urine test you go back to jail for a month).
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.
I personally advocate evidence-based approaches to reducing gun crimes, yes. However even if we exclude guns, when I’ve previously looked at knife crime rates between US and UK, US was still was higher.
The non-gun murder rate in the US is about double that of the UK.
I think the difference in the gun murder rate reflects other legal differences, such as those around carrying and storing guns more than the level of ownership. If you have to go home and unlock a safe to get a gun it gives you lots of time to cool down.
Crime rates are not independent of incarceration rates and durations (bbviously, since incarceration is a mechanism to deter crime). We could say 'the incarceration required to reduce crime rate to x is much higher/lower in country y'.
The prisons here have programs where people who want to can complete high school and college degrees. I met a guy who had two degrees (he was in for life since he, well, killed several people.)
The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.
Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.
Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.
Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.
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.
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.
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.
>Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.
Europe has been rather damn homogenous.
The attempts to reframe that by putting a magnifying glass on the exceptions just end up standing out and sometimes being weird.
Here in Belgium i can get you a municipal census list from 300 years ago that just happens to feature almost all the same family names that i went to school with. One kid on that school was and looked african among hundreds. It is not the same today.
At the next school i went to there were only 2 Russian kids and my generation already saw manifold more of this than there once was.
On the other hand in the capital in living memory different parts had different dialects tied into socioeconomics. Today it speaks mostly a different language, has different ethnic zones and belgians make up 20% or less of the population.
yes there's exceptions in the balkans and among other ethnic borders but many people today wouldn't even call that diverse.
Disregarding exceptions the average people were not quite as mobile. 32andme and the like would have been out of business from the start if that weren't the case. My grandmother cried when she took 2 busses for her first job. It was such a shocking distance to her and everyone she knew down her family line had been farmers in that area. She can also still describe ever old person in the wider area if not trough name then trough very extended family ties.
The US has always been much more diverse and the people more mobile from my understanding but it's not like it did not have major demographic shifts either in places like new york.
>The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
There was an underclass but when there's no sectarianism and everyone essentially self identifies as the same "tribe" i dare say it's easier to tackle. From easier unionisation to no influx of distinct people without little generational wealth earning less on average and doing less attractive jobs by design. The US and anglo world in general actually do better on this front. Trough distance and other factors they attract wealthier, more educated and less religious migrants who more easily assimilate in a larger cultural sphere and in the case of the US can't really lean on a social safety net. Comparatively here there's muti generational issues.
>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.
What? I can see, have a memory and there's plenty of demographic data?
Hell the original comment that got my one line response is particularly contrasting:
Most of our new cars are SUV's and crossovers now.
There's now a more easily visible demographic difference in who uses which mode of transportation.
(we have a company car system so incentivise car use for the upper middle class too whilst the poor can get cheaper or free public transport)
It should be no suprise then that ublic transport is very gradually getting less coverage as it's being defunded whilst there's an entire growing issue with violence towards personel.
Whilst gated communities are indeed not a thing i'd dispute that we don't have an equivalent among the richest.
Go to Knokke or the south of Brussels,etc
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.
I imagine they actually do, in that pay is just meth with extra steps. But for some reason a lot of the hiring isn't happening. Would be interesting to know where the barriers are.
> 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?)
Healthcare is €145 a month with a €385 deductible and can be lower if you raise your deductible voluntarily. If you are low income you get €129 a month in allowance towards your health insurance. Various municipalities have their own allowances for low income people to help them pay for healthcare. The deductible is for all healthcare in the entire year, not per procedure. It has not gone up with inflation for years hence why government is talking about raising it.
Healthcare is already income based in The Netherlands. I used to pay €5000 a year as a high earner. My neighbor paid €0 per year as he didn't have a job. If poor people avoid seeking healthcare over cost they are doing things very wrong as they can seek financial help and get it.
Also I think it is good that you need to actively look for a new job in order to get unemployment benefits. It's a safety net not a hammock.
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)
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
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.
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.
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)
Yes, I should have looked into West Coast systems, as they seem to have this more. I had the East Coast/NYC more in mind.
However, I wouldn't be so confident about Portland's working well:
> The transit agency has identified a significant increase in fare evasion, prompting the introduction of new technology to control access at train stations...The report said TriMet has the third highest amount of fare evaders in the country, trailing only San Diego and Los Angeles.
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?
If you step in human shit right next to a community with a very strict rule that you're not allow to use the toilet inside your dwelling then it's probably very likely to have been left by them.
I'm not joking about that rule either, they have penalties for breaking it. FYI they're the same families that control metal theft in the UK.
> 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?
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
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's plenty of affordable housing outside of areas like the Bay area (or Hong Kong, Vienna, London, etc.). Why in the world would someone want to destroy what makes those areas desirable in the name of "affordability"?
The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.
When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
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.
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...
> 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.
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 somewhere after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found 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.
Stripping out copper... the USA has joined the ranks of post-Soviet Europe, where such thefts are (or have been at some point) routine. Infra-harvesting.
its called recruitment. You deteriorate your surrounding, creating more deprecated areas and taxes on industries, who close shop not paying taxes, thus creating more economic zombies. Who then crate black outs, deteriorating power lines, thus allowing for more copper theft.
They may hide the bitemark, but this future has a been biten. Its going to turn.
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.
Everyone is replying to my comment to talk about social nets and failures in the justice system, but I agree that the math is a more interesting challenge. The site I was talking about is thousands of acres in an undeveloped area, and while you accurately note the barrier is more cost effective, the number of patrols and response time for incidents (including false alarms) grows with scale. The owner could lock down the site like a fortress from a James Bond movie, but let's not forget that those thousands of acres are just gathering sunlight, so at some point it stops being cost-effective.
And I mostly introduce this issue as a contrast to panels on developed land like the canals, which serve other functions and are less likely to have the risks associated with such a single-purpose site.
> 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.
Did anyone else get weird deja vu from the sibling comment? And I can't figure out which one is the clone. cryptolobster posted about 1 hour after zdp7, but they both have good posting history.
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.)
Many of those installations end up abandoned when the cost to repair them exceeds the value of the output of the panel.
You just typically don’t notice it because unless the panel is severely damaged, a non-functional panel doesn’t look much different than a functional one.
No I'm not. I'm assuming that existing unused land should be reserved for better projects when we have currently used land that both can do more and where this helps save water. My comment had absolutely nothing to do with the price of land. Everyone else is missing the "water conservation" part because they're distracted by the solar panels and are getting nerd sniped. This isn't a solar first project, it's a water first project.
You're also not getting the free cooling capacity of the water which makes the panels more efficient - though that probably only drops the total cost 5% or so, but how much extra the heavier supports cost may not be much more...
How about hanging solar panel vertically on tall buildings covering every floor except the first few to prevent vandalism
As the earth moves the sun would only hit one side and lose efficiency but right now it's "free space" not being used otherwise
They even make flexible solar panels now that can bend and move with the wind and don't need a stiff frame, slightly less efficient but volume makes up for that
Clean them the same way automated window washers work on skyscrapers
Shame they never came up with the solar paint solution, yet
The best explanation I've heard is from a PV installer. He said, "Every try to get a suntan standing up?" Seems you lose too much sun exposure to make it worthwhile.
Wouldn't the rooms inside need more lighting then? I wonder about where the break even point is on those differences. I'm not educated in this area enough to even guess.
I assume they mean on the bits that don't have windows. Though caution would be required there; you have to be very careful about tall building cladding material (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire).
Lighting, incidentally, is practically _free_ these days. An EU 'A' rated LED bulb has to do 210 lumens per watt. So the equiv of an old-fashioned 100W incandescent uses 7.5W.
I see a lot of vertical solar here in Finland. Particularly on newer and/or industrial buildings. I think it's mostly a cost/effort/ROI issue plus sheer unwillingness to do new things.
>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?
Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels this land?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.
But if you cover the canal with solar panels you get a lot less of that bullshit.
Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?
That aint' gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel. And don't even think about fabric shade sail types of things, nobody is going to want to replace those every 3 years.
>it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.
> That ain't gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the engineers who worked on this project must be stupid" kind of drive by comment.
In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar; as of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA
Solar panels don’t weigh very much at all. I would think the difference in weight between building a durable shade system that can weather the elements, and something that can hold solar panels is not very big at all.
In this case they have to build an expensive structure to cover the canal anyway. The span is large. Putting solar panels on it increases the loading and requires a slightly stronger structure, but might improve the financials of the project enough to make sense.
I think someone made the mistake of calculating that the canals cover an absurd area, usually mapped by easement area instead of actual geometry. They’re absolutely right that permitting would be easier, without accounting for the fact that the majority of the canals run through the Sierras*, and that the California Water Project is the biggest consumer of power in the entire state (to pump water over the mountains).
Yeah sure, let’s put solar panels over the last section in Bakersfield where all the canals merge. More power, less evaporation. That’s great! But it’s not going to move the needle in California.
* if you go backpacking in the Sierras you’ll often run into one of the canals. They’re both cool and scary. It takes hours to get to them and every time I see one i have to wonder how they managed to build it (it’s been decades so any construction damage has mostly grown over)
Construction already uses cranes for longer spans than this. They already know how to brace them on dirt as well. There is nothing large about this - they need slightly larger machines than you would expect at first because they can't be right next to the ditch, but nothing that construction doesn't already deal with in other situations.
It is routine all over. Construction is always a game of moving people and equipment where the work is. There are a lot of people in construction who never work in the same city for more than a year, they just live in a local hotel and move the crane as needed.
I suspect this is cheaper than many projects just because the work is consistent - once you have the canals covered you keep a crew around to repair/replace them. That is you will need one crew full time within 2 hours of some small town so you hire someone who is willing to live in that small town (they get to go home to their family every night unlike the construction crew above working in a different city every year)
While yes, these are cheap for steel structures, calling them cheap overall is silly. They literally cost more than the canal under them to make (assuming basic earthmoving and concrete formwork), especially when you include the cost for the footers.
As a way to save water, maybe. But it makes no sense as a way to make electricity. Someone else did the math, and it was approx $10/watt, which is silly.
The steel and concrete have the same materials cost as steel and concrete for ground mounted panels.
The large scale members usually mean there is less labor cost and mobilization time, and hence overhead (insurance, fencing, trailer, etc.). Like I said pre-engineered metal buildings are about the cheapest cost per square foot you can get at scale.
Solar panels are cheap these days; wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they take the data center approach (if a few machines die, well, who cares, deal with it next time a major overhaul is required).
I would expect a middle ground. They collect statistics from the inverters and when one doesn't report, or reports lower than expected levels they schedule maintenance for next time somebody is there anyway. But yeah, they probably replace a whole string of panels at once. I expect someone will design a crane for this purpose so the whole string can be done quickly - most of the work is at ground level.
I'd also expect that they have a crew to wash them off once in a while (I'm guessing yearly), but this is cheap labor not electricians.
> The cost of the scheme is in maintenance. No ground level access. No easy way to service panels in the middle of the roof. And lots of electrical current if you need to do something during day light because solar panels don’t turn off.
This is classic HN "armchair critic" comment. Yeah, I'm sure the designers didn't think about any of these issues. If they need to clean the panels, they can use a cherry picker. If they need to service the electrical components underneath, they can wait until the canal is drained (usually once per year for cleaning), and, again, use a cherry picker.
For clarity I was using “service” in a technical sense.
Ground mounted panels can be serviced from a bucket truck right after a hail storm or other disaster. Disaster recovery is a critical design criterion for electrical infrastructure and the bucket truck is the standard electric utility service vehicle.
Electrical utilities depend on each other and dispatch their fleets of bucket trucks across the country to aid in disaster recovery. If you drive much across the country, you might come across convoys of bucket trucks deploying down an interstate.
Which is to say cherry pickers don’t easily scale to handle the kind of critical events that need to be handled with electric utility infrastructure (and as an aside, in a pinch ground mounted solar panels can probably be serviced from a half ton pickup).
For context, in a former life I was an architect and one of my clients was an electrical co-operative. I also know a lineman.
You can read more about this project and the players in this article and draw your own conclusions:
One of the first things I do with the top comment of any topic on any platform is to question it with great scrutiny before choosing whether to send it up, or down, or leave it as it is... or to comment about that comment myself.
Your comment, which I found at the top of the stack here, did not survive the first pass of that scrutiny.
> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field,
Yeah, sounds nice. But the desert surrounding popular parts of California does have natural life. It has life whether it is owned by someone (who can make a stand to say "No"), or it is owned by the public. The life there doesn't know.
But that desert life, even when it it seems insignificant, still needs light in order for it to survive. It has a very narrow ecosystem in which it can survive.
> and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?
This is what a cheap shade over an artificial canal tends to look like when it is meant to survive the elements. (This particular shade under discussion just happens to also to produce electricity from solar energy.)
> The supports in the picture are massive
As they would be for a shade
> and don't look cheap.
None of these activities are ever cheap.
> Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field.
It's good that you can imagine things. Some people are not so-blessed.
> You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.
Oh. So, you caught everyone with their pants down! So clever. Big Copper should be very ashamed of themselves right now because the gigantic expense of copper for a large solar farm has been reduced to a slightly-lesser expense! The entire ploy to cover the canals was a sham all along!
Please, tell me: Would you want to receive the Nobel prize directly, or would you rather be seclusive and receive it by proxy?
> Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper.
You're free to spearhead a movement to do that yourself, if you're so-inclined.
And hey! At least some of the water supply canals will be already covered! Win-win!
There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.
So, how many fields are there that cannot be used for other things? It seems reasonable to position solar panels over things that are already serving some purpose and the quality of that service will not be negatively affected by a solar panel placement above it.
> The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.
If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.
PV itself (not the inverters etc., the panels) is really really cheap.
Tarp is about the only opaque covering I've found that's cheaper than PV, per square meter.
However, even for a balcony PV system the frame is about 25% the price of the panel, and balcony systems are tiny frames; I don't want to even guess about those huge steel I-beams and concrete pads. For big things like this, the cost of the frame is unlikely to go away because you need to care about wind load.
That really leaves maintenance costs (how often do you need to replace the tarp?) and revenue (PV makes money, a tarp does not).
Easy to say, but nobody will agree to changes. People know how things are and don't like change, even if it would be for the better. In many cases things would be better overall, but the voters who care are the ones that would be worse off.
And water evaporation… and using land makes the land unusable for other purposes… But your comment raises a good question. What are we looking for? The best solution or the cheapest solution?, is the chepeast solution the best?
The land can be compact: shaped like a square with minimal perimeter. For the same area along a canal, with winding corners, it would seem like a far longer run. This is especially worse depending how inverters are since DC along long transmission is less efficient.
yeah there's no shortage of land, but with canals you've got multiple layers of infra, maintenance, and permitting happening in the same place so you've got some advantages
There are a lot of places in the country that are putting up solar panels on what is otherwise arable land (eg New York). And... it's a problem. With climate change in mind, you should be using land that is otherwise not usable for anything else productive because there's plenty of it.
In the Southwest for example (eg NM, AZ), you have plenty of desert and sunshine-hours. Solar panels also tend to get less effective the hotter it is so it's a balancing act. But those states should be plastered with solar and they should be exporting it to neighbouring states. Colorado is actually kind of ideal for this too. In that case, it's mountainous terrain.
Also, IMHO there shouldn't be a parking lot in the country that isn't covered in solar. But that's a separate issue.
oof, that is a crap ton of steel. I doubt those panels will ever harvest enough energy to offset the energy use to produce both the cells and supports.
I imagine with cells in that configuration, lifting wind loads are significant which is why it's overbuilt like that.
Perhaps some laminate timber for the cross supports?
Lastly, the US has got to start eating seasonally. The water problem in the southwest is all agriculture: people want to grow baby spinach in January. Unless we figure out a way to create a crap ton of energy cheaply so we can supply industrial sized flows without worrying about the energy cost, we use far more water than we should in California and Arizona.
According to my searches, steel production is something like 6-8 MWh/ton to extract, refine, and shape. A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% effiency. This thing produces 1.7MW at peak. so call it 3 MWh/day average to account for a lot of adverse conditions over the lifetime. Thats 27000 MWh... so unless we are looking at more than 3000 tons of steel (we aren't) the steel production is accounted for. A panel takes something like 1.9 MWh equivalent in energy.... and again we aren't looking at 13K solar panels in this pilot.
So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.
Steel takes about 4.750 kw-hours to produce per kg.[1]
A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]
So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.
Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.
Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.
A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).
Furthermore at the end of the steel structures lifespan it will be recycled in a manner that is far more energy efficient, requiring only 25% of the total energy. And that's in the case it wasn't from recycled materials in the first place.
HN is kinda ground-zero for i-am-very-smart contrarians, so it's not _that_ surprising.
(Also, in the US, "solar panels take more energy to make than they produce" is a popular, although entirely false, talking point in right-wing media, so propaganda plays a part too. This claim has also been made about wind, and, bafflingly, _nuclear_.)
It’s fair, but telling people what they should prefer is a bad way of doing business
The proper solution would be to have the farmers pay for the externalities somehow so that they are priced into the decision to consume a-seasonal products
When you read lines like "California’s extensive network of canals and aqueducts is the lifeblood of the state, providing clean water to populous cities and expansive farms that wouldn’t otherwise have it." you have to ask how we ended up with these canal systems, what the tradeoffs are in a landscape setup this way rather than one where water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated, and who owns water rights in California.
(note: I'm not trying to totally bash the solar panel project nor some of the key figures involved who've done great work like Dustin Mulvaney, but do think we should think about how we ended up here)
That and investing in better rainwater management -- those muddy torrents of water that pour into ocean would be much better if slowed down upstream and allowed to percolate into the aquifers.
Sure do! But people die in a few days without potable water, crops are usually more drought resistant.
And yes, I do get the point that if you suggested we build $6B desalination plants to grow lettuce people would balk and say, "That's not worth the money!". We should use less water on crops.
People also die in a few weeks without access to agriculture. We could be growing less water hungry crops and raising drought resistant livestock, though.
It's bad but one thing not often pointed out in this conversation is that about 50% of water used in irrigation for agriculture returns as groundwater. In most other cases, used water ends up in sewers or evaporating
Most desalination plants (at least the ones that are economically viable) focus on brackish groundwater, not ocean water. This contributes to the problem GP is pointing out. California already does more desalination than any US state other than Florida.
But there's a million environmental restoration projects we could be doing right now to increase the water holding capacities of our environments that are simply not being sufficiently funded. The science is pretty well done on most of these strategies while desalination of ocean water is still mostly an experimental technology that is not economically viable.
>you have to ask how we ended up with these canal systems, what the tradeoffs are in a landscape setup this way rather than one where water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated
Good questions I guess but what more specifically are you saying would happen if we delete the canals? What does "the water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated" mean?
Presumably deleting the canals means water will still be relatively scarce and the distribution will simply by different and not controlled by the state.
I think they're trying to point out how little effort is put into environmental restoration that would allow our environment to hold more water instead of having most of our rainwater wash out into sewers. Some of the loss in the environment's ability to hold water is due to large infrastructure projects in the first place. We are heavily draining the landscape and its causing us to lose critical topsoils (some of which took thousands of years to make).
Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.
What bothers me the most as a consumer is the fact that this is paid for with a grant, yet my daytime energy rates are still more expensive than at night. Combined with the fact that PG&E will pay me 1/4 for feeding the same kWH back into the grid on top of a cost-of-service fee, it sours my view of projects like this.
Maybe, but ideas like that are what you all will use to eventually turn against solar and seek to ban going off grid as you see a disparity between those who can afford to buy solar and those who can't. Why's that a problem? Those who can will go off grid and those who can't will be left on a grid that they can't pay for, and it will crumble. We are already seeing the beginnings of this in California.
Australia is leading the world in rooftop solar adoption. By June 2025, 4.2 million rooftop solar systems had been installed nationwide representing 26.8 gigawatts of clean power generation capacity connected directly to local electricity networks that serve homes and businesses.
“In the evenings homes typically consume power, which flows from large power generation plants, such as wind farms, hydroelectric, coal and gas-fired power plants. Let’s call this the ‘low-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation,” he said.
“In the middle of a sunny day, however, today about 40% of Australian homes generate their own power from rooftop solar panels. When the rooftop solar generation exceeds the power consumption in the houses, the excess power is ‘exported’, flowing back to the grid, supplying other homes and beyond. Let’s call this the ‘high-tide’ time in local electricity grid operation.”
Are there any risks of mercury settling into the water system over time from coal power plants?
Are there risks of heavy metal and tire contaminates from vehicles leaking into the water system over time?
Are there risks of dust blown contamination from the megatons of shit humans leave everywhere we go leaking into the water system?
The answer is everything has risks, the risks from solar panels are unbelievably tiny in relation to all other pollution sources and I have to deal with a bunch of redneck solar panel haters that have bought in to massively overblown risks around them.
It's definitely brought up by anti-solar crowds. It's more accurate to point out that the risk is small rather than to dismiss the genuine concern. Solar panels can actually increase water quality because they replace diesel generators according to this nature article
> Because over-canal systems are subject to a more humid environment than ground-mounted systems, over-canal PV panels might have increased reliability problems45. In tropical conditions, the water content in the encapsulant can exceed solubility, which can lead to the formation of droplets of water in the modules, sometimes causing corrosion or other problems
But overall "field experiments have shown that CdTe semiconductors can withstand hot and humid environments."
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
Amazing what California can achieve when they don't have to deal with constant cease-and-desist lawsuits, eminent domain battles, environmental review challenges, etc (crying in high speed rail)
It’s definitely respectable, I was surprised it’s such a high percentage.
Unfortunately it’s the reason California has the highest price for electricity in the country as well (not counting Hawaii). Looks lone they are paying ~$0.34/kWh, ouch. The average is ~$0.15/kWh in my state.
As someone who isn't in California, it's understandable that you might think this. It is, fortunately, wrong.
The biggest driver of costs of electricity in CA are (1) paying for damages caused by grid-initiated wildfires, and (2) paying to upgrade the grid to prevent future cases of (1).
This information comes directly from the government who approves rate increases for regulated utilities, and who has to publish their spending. PG&E, the primary power company, is also a public company and their financials are therefore public.
Rooftop solar specifically (and not general grid-scale renewables) do shift the cost balance of fixed-cost infra and consumption based usage, but the wildfire issues dwarf this.
Everything has a big upfront Capex. However you finance it and because renewables are cheap fuel they come out cheap in the long run.
A large part of the Capex of renewables is land costs - which are high, but once you have the land you keep it. This cost is generally all financed as part of the initial build, so in 30 years everything is paid for - but you have to finance to replace only the renewables while keeping the land and so the second round is a lot cheaper.
A 1 square meter solar panel that weighs around 10kg contains under half a kg of actual doped silicon photovoltaic cells, with the remaining >95% being mainly aluminium framing, glass to cover the cells, and some backing material and wiring, all of which are trivially recyclable. So even if the doped silicon wasn't recyclable (which it is with a little more effort than the other materials) that's hardly the majority of the material that goes into making a solar panel.
The solar cells are tightly glued to the glass. Glass is easily recyclable but obtaining it and cleaning it is nearly impossible. It's also treated with antimony to increase its durability which limits how you can handle it. About 90% of all glass in solar panels has been landfilled.
A minor point anyways. Glass is not exactly a precious resource.
The most valuable parts are obviously the silver (about 50% of a panel's scrap value despite being 0.1% by weight), aluminum (about 20% of value), silicon (about 15%), and copper wiring (about 10%).
We are only just beginning to figure out techniques to reclaim the silver using thermal heating and chemical leaching techniques
> Even though the canal is fenced in, “we have instances where we have cars go into the canal — we’ll have people go into the canal, and animals go into the canal,” Allen said, describing some of the challenges they faced as an urban water district.
>“What Turlock is doing with their projects is very impressive, but we have a different-looking canal system going through our service area,” Allen said. They are looking to put their canals into pipes to avoid evaporation, instead.
Umm, if you can completely enclose it in a pipe then why in the heck couldn't you put an 8-10' tall roof over it?
Typical local government (and I worked for one): "We didn't do it that way when I got here and it sounds like a lot of work and will be a change so let's rationalize doing nothing"
roofs aren't as good at preventing evaporation as pipes, so if that is the point why roof it?
Theres a very narrow balance where canals covered in solar panels make sense.
It needs to have enough evaporation that its a problem, but not enough where it justifies piping it.
That's a very narrow market, and so unlikely to be scalable or prevalent.
Personally i don't think this makes much sense, it's not like there is no room to place solar panels, and the added costs of putting it over water makes it not as efficient. I suppose the main benefit is easy access to water for cleaning (which can then be dumped back into the canal).
They took the second current cheapest source of power over 8 years, and green-washed it into a fragile public-works project in an area known for earthquakes.
The ROI will almost certainly be a liability given solar is most cost-effective near or on the place of energy use. =3
The interstate highway system in the US has to straighten out every so often so that a plane can land on it. Otherwise I like the idea, except that you'd need more pylons per panel since a continuous run of panels might shade the road too much. Maybe run them in a strip over all of the existing light poles?
> Harris said he spent a lot of his life in France, where he noticed how trees lined the canals and protected their precious water from the wind and sun
I guess global warming will be solved through lots of different actions and changes, even though none of them will make a measurable difference on its own.
CA is already at 40% electric from green sources. I don't know their plans, but in general I would expect by 2035 they will be at 95%. However that last 5% will be the long tail of weird/hard things.
So thats a pilot project - and the benefits aren't supposed to be your 1$/W its comparing the collective of all the goals for the project. So include the water savings and the cleaning costs - then comparing the two of them.
Its also not comparing against utility projects because it isn't utility scale.
The idea of covering irrigation canals has been around probably for thousands of years. Only recently I have seen this being done in Xinjiang in towns right next to the desert. The canals which have river water often flow under streets and through little caves and such, enabling them to grow grapes and such. The grapes are then also providing shade on paths and roads.
I was wondering, but "earthquakes" perhaps. It's much easier to fix a canal, even with some of the water flowing.
There's a cost to pipes, but at least part of that would be offset by the structural support for the solar panels and the fact that you need to pipe less waters. Also I assume that the canals are lined in some way. I don't know, maybe the canals are just prettier to look at?
A similar problem is plaguing the Aral sea. The Amu Darya river is being drained by ineffective and leaky canals.
In Venezuela, currently in an unprecedented electricity crisis with daily rationing up to six hours, 10 billion dollars supposed to replace turbines in the main dam that supplies power to the country were stolen with no accountability. With that money you could have installed solar roofs in a million homes serving five million people approximately
Solutions are easy, money exists, political will doesn't
Puerto Rico has this problem too and that's US territory. Not as bad for sure. But it has expensive fossil fuel power generation and unreliable infrastructure. It's screaming out for renewable energy.
The key to all this though is that fossil fuels exist to induce demand for weapons. Once you realize that it all makes (depressing) sense.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 13.0 ms ] threadPut 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.
BTW, I used to swim in those same canals around Modesto and Turlock as a kid. So gross.
... 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.
This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...
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.
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.
Have you been to Death Valley, my friend? All of Southeastern California is empty, barren land. Death Valley, Mojave Desert, etc.
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.)
Every extra pylon structure built, especially the first dozen, will be cheaper and easy to produce and install.
The article mentioned trialling several systems for covering California canals, I didn't see "floating" mentioned, although:
might come close.Floating panels have the issue of having to flex and perhaps bottom out (if water diverts to parallel canal for maintenance) on a dry canal - but there's less need for heavy steel trusses and a lower wind profile.
[1] https://www.makemyhousegreen.com/green-guides/can-solar-pane...
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?
In a typical solar panel 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.
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.
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?
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.
His point, which I directly responded to, is that these panels need giant cables due to the transported power (wattage).
Watts don't matter when talking about cable sizing. Power loss from a cable is equal to the current^2 on the cable multiplied by the resistance of the cable (P = I^2 * R).
Power delivered is equal to the voltage * current (P = E * I). What these two facts mean is that if you raise the voltage, you can have a cable with a higher resistance (smaller cable) without worrying about the heat from power loss causing the cable to melt. How "hefty" a cable needs to be isn't related to power transported by the cable, but rather the current on the cable.
This isn't "nitpicking". It's correcting a (common) misunderstanding about how electricity works. It's a direct refute because he said
> 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.
The cable sizing was his "core" point. Which is why these "nitpicks" on cable sizing and energy distribution are directly responsive and refute his point.
Also, a nitpick for you, wattage measures power, not energy.
And they're never installed in config chains that high voltage - cell spacing between cells is typically very low and only capable of withstanding ~5kV before internal arcing occurs.
Also, your typical 72-cell solar panel is only 32V.
The obvious answer is a cheap inverter ever few meters - this is typical practice with solar panels - and then a cheap transformer scattered around to get the voltage to whatever the line is. This is the common cheap practice for solar installs everywhere.
Microinverters where there is an inverter on every panel are also common - they are more expensive, but reduce some labor.
Either way the inverter is connected to a network and then get remote monitoring of each section and in turn can plan maintenance as needed.
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.
One prisoner costs the California taxpayer $125k, all in.
Maybe the company should foot the bill for a security guard instead of asking the taxpayers to subsidize their business.
Looks like the vandals will have to move along to somewhere else to score some copper.
https://wallethub.com/edu/drug-use-by-state/35150
It's a big problem in Texas too. Quick google search returned several hundred articles.
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2026/09/16/affidavit-man-pos...
Why would a company spend their own money when they can have someone else spend their money instead?
The correct read of “Corporations are people, my friend.” is that people are indeed responsible for individual corporate humanism - being moral in how they operate even inside a company - or expect social repercussions at minimum in return.
Having said that: I’m not 100% sure who should pay (and at what portions) for what’s being debated.
Come to think of it, who needs communally regulated safety services like jails, prisons, and law enforcement? In addition to having a private guard, every company should have their own in-house holding pen and justice system :)
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Grandmaster Flash on “Birth of a Culture” | The New Yorker Radio Hour
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based o...
I don't know what kind of hellscape you want to live in where you need private security to keep anything you own from being stolen, especially something as mundane as some wires.
The company wouldn’t employ the guard unless it saved them money, reducing losses by more than $80k. For Many businesses that’s not going to make sense. Even larger businesses, have larger risk footprint, needing more security guards, needing more loss savings to justify.
Someone came (during the day) and stole it using a sawzall.
Do you expect homeowners to hire security guards?
> As the 5 p.m. cutoff to pass bills approached Tuesday, Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, launched an unusual bid to bog down the Senate process. She demanded Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, a Democrat, to have the chamber’s secretary read all 39 pages of a bill focused on electrical transmission infrastructure. Usually, the clerk reads the first and last line of legislation into the record. Heck agreed.
> This maneuver killed the transmission bill, as well as several others Senate Democrats were hoping to vote on before the deadline. One of those looked to address surging theft of copper wiring. Senate Bill 6190 would’ve imposed new recordkeeping requirements on scrap metal businesses and made destroying “critical communications infrastructure” a felony.
Better luck next year, I guess.
It's only 10% below the rest of the US.
https://youtu.be/PfHu-UJaK0Q?is=bp0HygfjqBJBDpoO
not “do the right thing for society”.
Like the guys who pick up cans and bottles for recycling, people who need the money can do a lot of useful work with the right incentives.
If you set up a system like "turn in video of someone stripping copper that leads to an arrest and we reward you with $1,000" or something you could probably enlist the help of a lot of these people.
I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.
You in a decent spot now?
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.
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?
There is a strong link between lower prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.
Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.
You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.
Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).
Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions, but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.
> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs
Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.
What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.
I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.
I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.
FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.
Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.
> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product
The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?
In my state, if you do, you can present your car title for the vehicle it came from to an auto dealer who can take it off your hands.
So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.
So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.
> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.
Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular type of theft, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.
This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.
> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.
They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?
And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.
I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.
I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.
Al is typically used for the large wires - the cost of the wires makes it worth the extra labor. For your typical house though the cost of labor is more than the wires, so Al is more expensive than copper.
It's a mix between culture and poverty. In high trust society much fewer people would consider taking that material fair.
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.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-014-0016-8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
If we ended the War on Drugs we would be doing exactly this thing and saving billions of dollars doing it.
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.
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.
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?
This can be done by going after suppliers.
There's non-trivial elements to this, otherwise we'd have already done it. Off the top of my head (and it will go much deeper): if all vendors are punished then the price remains high ("the iron law of prohibition") -> so you need the government to supply it to avoid dealers getting dollar signs in their eyes at the potential income -> the government must not promote it as part of this -> I'd say "medical prescriptions", but that's from a bias to my experience growing up in the UK where we don't have all the "talk to your doctor about ${pharmaceutical_brand}" ads I hear about in the USA -> would the USA even be able to pass laws preventing this, or is that a 1st Amendment problem?
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.
I follow what you're saying, that the downsides of drug addiction outside of the user's own body is imposed by the people around them. I suppose that's almost definitionally true. I and many people do in fact find it unpleasant to be around people who are high out of their minds. I do not wish to associate with such people while they're in that state. I do not think that society would be better off with more of them, so I would prefer that society actively disincentivize such behavior. And you could certainly make the argument that this is the same thing as wanting punishment.
But if you're making the argument that being high on drugs might lead a user to job loss organically, I find that hard to believe. What if I didn't even know what heroin was, and saw that an employee was nodding off on the job? Wouldn't I be inclined to fire him?
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 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.
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...
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?
IMO, prison makes it worse. Once an addict gets out, it is much harder to go back into regular society. Getting a job, etc., after prison is harder which leads to despair and back to drugs.
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.
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.
I agree with your general point, but be a bit careful here.
> Wiring devices and breakers have accepted both Cu/Al wire for the last 50 years.
It’s true that, for a little over 50 years, the UL has regulated what devices may “accept” Al wire. But devices have had markings suggesting use of Al wire for longer than that, and it was quite unwise:
https://inspectapedia.com/aluminum/Aluminum_Wiring_Repair_CO...
Don’t get caught up in all the discussion of repair devices — AIUI this article is mostly about “repair” of old pre-8000-series Al wire. You can’t buy that stuff any more. As far as I know, modern Al listed building wire is only sold in 8 AWG and up, and this stuff doesn’t need “repair”: it’s perfectly fine in any appropriately listed connector.
Is this one of those, "US only First World country that has this sort of problem" problems?
I can only imagine why?
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...
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.
* 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.
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
And dont think about any kind of social support net and caring for people that would be girly and a socialism. Can't have that.
The US has the highest large-country rate of incarceration in the world (besides likely North Korea, for which reliable data is not available); not sure what makes you think “more punishment” would be the way to go tbh.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Drug addicts, however, have a hard time holding on to a house, apartment, etc and will often decide to exchange a stable living situation for another drug fix.
Giving houses to drug addicts means: - a non drug addict doesn’t get to get that house - the drug addict now has a house to use drugs in, not take care of, and generally destroy
The answer is for drug addicts to be placed in a rehab program until they aren’t an addict anymore.
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.
We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement
Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.
That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.
1. Give people housing.
2. Give people housing.
3. Give people housing.
4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.
with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
That’s already been done in my area and really doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people are so antisocial they are difficult to house (causing fights with neighbours, burning buildings down and so forth). But yes, it does help to have both abundant inexpensive housing and also programs for people who can’t afford it.
It does have to be paired with police enforcement that doesn’t tolerate living on the street or in a park when housing is available.
It also becomes a problem when people who live in such housing abuse it, such as operating drug dealing out of it.
>4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
We tried that too. It’s great for people like me. Some people refuse to access mental health or addiction rehab services. So the access is there.
>5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
There is zero public support to give drug addicts extra cash to go buy more drugs.
Other than that, benefits are generous - I can say definitively nobody is going hungry. Some people will still refuse to apply for benefits. I stayed a few days in a hospital and my hospital roommate refused to apply for any benefits because he didn’t want to give the government info they could use to try to get the child support he owes. (The hospital sent a social worker in every few hours to try to persuade him.) Should such a person be given benefits including cash benefits?
>6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
We have that too. You need staff to clean them and it’s not fun to clean up after an antisocial person.
>7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
There is no public support for a heroin dispensary.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes. with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
Well, around here drugs are so cheap it’s not a big deal to pay for them. Now we just have loads of drug addicts who are strung out all the time, and in addition they can’t earn income with small time drug dealing like they used to. A fentanyl habit is cheap (maybe $10 a day) which is easily financed by selling eg your children’s food stamps card.
The public is not going to support the government paying people to shoot up drugs all day.
- 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.
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.
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?
Doesn't do anything unless you also get consistent about catching people
>Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on.
Really? If so, that's amazing. What state in the US has actually given all people access to mental health services and addiction help.
> Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere.
Fentanyl is a thing because strict enforcement necessitates drugs that are more compact/easier to hide. Many other countries still have heroine.
>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?
I would suggest focusing on impounding vehicles rather than chasing people.
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.
Human beings don't empathize well with situations nor people they never have to personally face. That's a well-lit path to fascism. We're one step closer to 1984.
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.
That was sarcastic in case you couldn't tell.
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.
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.
A general comparison of crimes in SK vs US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore...
Interestingly, embezzlement rate seems way higher in SK.
I think the difference in the gun murder rate reflects other legal differences, such as those around carrying and storing guns more than the level of ownership. If you have to go home and unlock a safe to get a gun it gives you lots of time to cool down.
That would be an interesting statistic in any country discussing number of jailed people, repeat crime, and jail time.
Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.
“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”
Friedman replied:
“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Europe has been rather damn homogenous. The attempts to reframe that by putting a magnifying glass on the exceptions just end up standing out and sometimes being weird. Here in Belgium i can get you a municipal census list from 300 years ago that just happens to feature almost all the same family names that i went to school with. One kid on that school was and looked african among hundreds. It is not the same today. At the next school i went to there were only 2 Russian kids and my generation already saw manifold more of this than there once was. On the other hand in the capital in living memory different parts had different dialects tied into socioeconomics. Today it speaks mostly a different language, has different ethnic zones and belgians make up 20% or less of the population.
yes there's exceptions in the balkans and among other ethnic borders but many people today wouldn't even call that diverse. Disregarding exceptions the average people were not quite as mobile. 32andme and the like would have been out of business from the start if that weren't the case. My grandmother cried when she took 2 busses for her first job. It was such a shocking distance to her and everyone she knew down her family line had been farmers in that area. She can also still describe ever old person in the wider area if not trough name then trough very extended family ties.
The US has always been much more diverse and the people more mobile from my understanding but it's not like it did not have major demographic shifts either in places like new york.
>The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
There was an underclass but when there's no sectarianism and everyone essentially self identifies as the same "tribe" i dare say it's easier to tackle. From easier unionisation to no influx of distinct people without little generational wealth earning less on average and doing less attractive jobs by design. The US and anglo world in general actually do better on this front. Trough distance and other factors they attract wealthier, more educated and less religious migrants who more easily assimilate in a larger cultural sphere and in the case of the US can't really lean on a social safety net. Comparatively here there's muti generational issues.
>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.
What? I can see, have a memory and there's plenty of demographic data?
Hell the original comment that got my one line response is particularly contrasting: Most of our new cars are SUV's and crossovers now. There's now a more easily visible demographic difference in who uses which mode of transportation. (we have a company car system so incentivise car use for the upper middle class too whilst the poor can get cheaper or free public transport) It should be no suprise then that ublic transport is very gradually getting less coverage as it's being defunded whilst there's an entire growing issue with violence towards personel. Whilst gated communities are indeed not a thing i'd dispute that we don't have an equivalent among the richest. Go to Knokke or the south of Brussels,etc
Yes.
But California.
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.
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).
Been happening occasionally for at least a decade.
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.
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?)
Healthcare is already income based in The Netherlands. I used to pay €5000 a year as a high earner. My neighbor paid €0 per year as he didn't have a job. If poor people avoid seeking healthcare over cost they are doing things very wrong as they can seek financial help and get it.
Also I think it is good that you need to actively look for a new job in order to get unemployment benefits. It's a safety net not a hammock.
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'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)
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.
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
Me and my fellow commuters know snd like our conductors.
Society is going backwards in rapid pace I’m afraid.
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.
However, I wouldn't be so confident about Portland's working well:
> The transit agency has identified a significant increase in fare evasion, prompting the introduction of new technology to control access at train stations...The report said TriMet has the third highest amount of fare evaders in the country, trailing only San Diego and Los Angeles.
https://katu.com/news/local/trimet-considers-adding-gates-to...
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.
The elephant in the room is naming the group almost exclusively responsible for this crime.
But do tell, what do you think is the group and what do you think should happen?
Or maybe him: https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/cable-thief-ja...
"Almost exclusively" would seem to point in a very home-grown direction.
So who gets to decide the definition of 'punching up'? When is it ok for me to be prejudice towards a group of people?
Im looking forward to learning where the line is so I can feel safe in my bigotry /s.
If you step in human shit right next to a community with a very strict rule that you're not allow to use the toilet inside your dwelling then it's probably very likely to have been left by them.
I'm not joking about that rule either, they have penalties for breaking it. FYI they're the same families that control metal theft in the UK.
https://www.facebook.com/GladstoneObserver/posts/a-woman-put...
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/two-arrested-over-copper...
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14933216
What are you going to suggest next? Hot lunches for kids and a justice system focused on reform?
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.
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).
Are we going to discover that, by some striking surprise, antisocial people choose to live in places with weaker social support?
I mean, this is pretty solvable if the political will was there to upzone large areas of low-density housing around the Bay and LA...
The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.
When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
Its actually not just junkies, you get organized criminals who are stripping solar assets of $ value items.
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.
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 somewhere after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found 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.
Yeah, that seems like a pretty reasonable solution, all things considered
They may hide the bitemark, but this future has a been biten. Its going to turn.
And I mostly introduce this issue as a contrast to panels on developed land like the canals, which serve other functions and are less likely to have the risks associated with such a single-purpose site.
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.
You just typically don’t notice it because unless the panel is severely damaged, a non-functional panel doesn’t look much different than a functional one.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energ...
As the earth moves the sun would only hit one side and lose efficiency but right now it's "free space" not being used otherwise
They even make flexible solar panels now that can bend and move with the wind and don't need a stiff frame, slightly less efficient but volume makes up for that
Clean them the same way automated window washers work on skyscrapers
Shame they never came up with the solar paint solution, yet
The best explanation I've heard is from a PV installer. He said, "Every try to get a suntan standing up?" Seems you lose too much sun exposure to make it worthwhile.
Lighting, incidentally, is practically _free_ these days. An EU 'A' rated LED bulb has to do 210 lumens per watt. So the equiv of an old-fashioned 100W incandescent uses 7.5W.
Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels this land?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.
But if you cover the canal with solar panels you get a lot less of that bullshit.
Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?
That aint' gonna fly - you're going to have engineering requirements for a 100' span wither it's a shade structure or a solar panel. And don't even think about fabric shade sail types of things, nobody is going to want to replace those every 3 years.
>it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.
This is not something you can just ignore
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the engineers who worked on this project must be stupid" kind of drive by comment.
That being said, solar panels are not that heavy, and fabric is every bit as subject to wind loading as solar panels.
Almost all the fields in the area is being used for valuable crops. It would be difficult to harvest them if solar panels were installed.
The wind on the valley side of the coastal range is intense. A cheap shade will need considerable maintenance.
There is little chance two separate projects would be cheaper than a combined project.
https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
In this context, covering canals reduces evaporation in addition to effectively being free space for solar PV; if the labor and material costs are reasonable, the land is free forever versus a land lease for ground mount utility solar; as of this comment, there is ~101GW of solar in California’s grid queue pipeline per https://www.interconnection.fyi/?state=CA
They paved paradise, put up a solar array.
The supports in the picture are massive and don't look cheap.
They're load-bearing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Yeah sure, let’s put solar panels over the last section in Bakersfield where all the canals merge. More power, less evaporation. That’s great! But it’s not going to move the needle in California.
* if you go backpacking in the Sierras you’ll often run into one of the canals. They’re both cool and scary. It takes hours to get to them and every time I see one i have to wonder how they managed to build it (it’s been decades so any construction damage has mostly grown over)
Cherry pickers like they’re used for every other type of infrastructure.
In this case, it is a ton to the side, and only a little above. And the cherry picker would be on dirt.
Not going to work.
Almost anything is possible with enough money.
I suspect this is cheaper than many projects just because the work is consistent - once you have the canals covered you keep a crew around to repair/replace them. That is you will need one crew full time within 2 hours of some small town so you hire someone who is willing to live in that small town (they get to go home to their family every night unlike the construction crew above working in a different city every year)
And keep in mind all that reach is over live electrical panels.
No. Lots of voltage (potential) but current only if you tap it. Panels will charge to a slightly high voltage state but do not become a problem.
As a way to save water, maybe. But it makes no sense as a way to make electricity. Someone else did the math, and it was approx $10/watt, which is silly.
The large scale members usually mean there is less labor cost and mobilization time, and hence overhead (insurance, fencing, trailer, etc.). Like I said pre-engineered metal buildings are about the cheapest cost per square foot you can get at scale.
I'd also expect that they have a crew to wash them off once in a while (I'm guessing yearly), but this is cheap labor not electricians.
Ground mounted panels can be serviced from a bucket truck right after a hail storm or other disaster. Disaster recovery is a critical design criterion for electrical infrastructure and the bucket truck is the standard electric utility service vehicle. Electrical utilities depend on each other and dispatch their fleets of bucket trucks across the country to aid in disaster recovery. If you drive much across the country, you might come across convoys of bucket trucks deploying down an interstate.
Which is to say cherry pickers don’t easily scale to handle the kind of critical events that need to be handled with electric utility infrastructure (and as an aside, in a pinch ground mounted solar panels can probably be serviced from a half ton pickup).
For context, in a former life I was an architect and one of my clients was an electrical co-operative. I also know a lineman.
You can read more about this project and the players in this article and draw your own conclusions:
https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...
Your comment, which I found at the top of the stack here, did not survive the first pass of that scrutiny.
> It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field,
Yeah, sounds nice. But the desert surrounding popular parts of California does have natural life. It has life whether it is owned by someone (who can make a stand to say "No"), or it is owned by the public. The life there doesn't know.
But that desert life, even when it it seems insignificant, still needs light in order for it to survive. It has a very narrow ecosystem in which it can survive.
> and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?
This is what a cheap shade over an artificial canal tends to look like when it is meant to survive the elements. (This particular shade under discussion just happens to also to produce electricity from solar energy.)
> The supports in the picture are massive
As they would be for a shade
> and don't look cheap.
None of these activities are ever cheap.
> Also I would imagine the solar array uses more copper than a similar capacity array just built in a field.
It's good that you can imagine things. Some people are not so-blessed.
> You can't daisy chain multiple miles of solar panels together, so you need an extra power line to run alongside the whole thing.
Oh. So, you caught everyone with their pants down! So clever. Big Copper should be very ashamed of themselves right now because the gigantic expense of copper for a large solar farm has been reduced to a slightly-lesser expense! The entire ploy to cover the canals was a sham all along!
Please, tell me: Would you want to receive the Nobel prize directly, or would you rather be seclusive and receive it by proxy?
> Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper.
You're free to spearhead a movement to do that yourself, if you're so-inclined.
And hey! At least some of the water supply canals will be already covered! Win-win!
There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.
Not if you already own the canal but would have to buy or rent the field.
If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.
Tarp is about the only opaque covering I've found that's cheaper than PV, per square meter.
However, even for a balcony PV system the frame is about 25% the price of the panel, and balcony systems are tiny frames; I don't want to even guess about those huge steel I-beams and concrete pads. For big things like this, the cost of the frame is unlikely to go away because you need to care about wind load.
That really leaves maintenance costs (how often do you need to replace the tarp?) and revenue (PV makes money, a tarp does not).
Tarp, and pitch it across the canal like how you might do a hammock - you just need two anchor points on each side (or 4, at most).
Shouldn't the obvious solution be to fix the "permitting requirements" rather than spend 6x on building kn undeveloped land?
Should the purpose of laws to serve the people rather than to tiptoe around laws and claiming "be we have strict zoning laws"?
Why is there a law that you yourself call "insane"?
In the Southwest for example (eg NM, AZ), you have plenty of desert and sunshine-hours. Solar panels also tend to get less effective the hotter it is so it's a balancing act. But those states should be plastered with solar and they should be exporting it to neighbouring states. Colorado is actually kind of ideal for this too. In that case, it's mountainous terrain.
Also, IMHO there shouldn't be a parking lot in the country that isn't covered in solar. But that's a separate issue.
Unless you can provide concrete numbers and do a side-by-side comparison, you have already lost the argument.
Plus I am sure you are not the first person to come up with the idea.
I imagine with cells in that configuration, lifting wind loads are significant which is why it's overbuilt like that.
Perhaps some laminate timber for the cross supports?
Lastly, the US has got to start eating seasonally. The water problem in the southwest is all agriculture: people want to grow baby spinach in January. Unless we figure out a way to create a crap ton of energy cheaply so we can supply industrial sized flows without worrying about the energy cost, we use far more water than we should in California and Arizona.
So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.
Just a nit, that should be:
A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% of its original effiency.
A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]
So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.
Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.
Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.
A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-do...
[2] https://www.cahomesolar.com/feeds/blog/solar-panel-energy-pr...
[3] https://www.mascotsteel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/st...
Yo! Wake up sheep! Solar and wind energy are the two cheapest and least polluting ways we have of producing energy!
(Also, in the US, "solar panels take more energy to make than they produce" is a popular, although entirely false, talking point in right-wing media, so propaganda plays a part too. This claim has also been made about wind, and, bafflingly, _nuclear_.)
Fair. But the almonds and alfalfa would like a word, especially since the alfalfa is shipped around the world for others to consume in some way.
So while it's definitely agriculture as a serious source, it's not just the US as the driver of that source.
The proper solution would be to have the farmers pay for the externalities somehow so that they are priced into the decision to consume a-seasonal products
No thanks
Build Soil has some interesting threads on this:
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3lmeddjd...
- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3mkzybkk...
(note: I'm not trying to totally bash the solar panel project nor some of the key figures involved who've done great work like Dustin Mulvaney, but do think we should think about how we ended up here)
Every plant built would give us a much needed buffer and in the good times could even let us refill ground water (we'd never do that, I know).
That's true of basically all of the West and the Colorado River, too.
And yes, I do get the point that if you suggested we build $6B desalination plants to grow lettuce people would balk and say, "That's not worth the money!". We should use less water on crops.
But there's a million environmental restoration projects we could be doing right now to increase the water holding capacities of our environments that are simply not being sufficiently funded. The science is pretty well done on most of these strategies while desalination of ocean water is still mostly an experimental technology that is not economically viable.
Good questions I guess but what more specifically are you saying would happen if we delete the canals? What does "the water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated" mean?
Presumably deleting the canals means water will still be relatively scarce and the distribution will simply by different and not controlled by the state.
Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.
Anyone know how this supposedly makes sense?
Grids are useful to balance out sources and sinks, make battery farms economical at scale. You do need smarter grids to deal with phase imbalances.
Are there risks of heavy metal and tire contaminates from vehicles leaking into the water system over time?
Are there risks of dust blown contamination from the megatons of shit humans leave everywhere we go leaking into the water system?
The answer is everything has risks, the risks from solar panels are unbelievably tiny in relation to all other pollution sources and I have to deal with a bunch of redneck solar panel haters that have bought in to massively overblown risks around them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
The concern is not completely unwarranted:
> Because over-canal systems are subject to a more humid environment than ground-mounted systems, over-canal PV panels might have increased reliability problems45. In tropical conditions, the water content in the encapsulant can exceed solubility, which can lead to the formation of droplets of water in the modules, sometimes causing corrosion or other problems
But overall "field experiments have shown that CdTe semiconductors can withstand hot and humid environments."
Of course, if a solar panel is broken, ground up and falls into a canal, it would put some heavy metals into the water.
The risk is basically zero and far lower than any other power generation source. It is a nonsense, bad faith "concern".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41893-021-00693-8
But more importantly it found that these solar panels are replacing diesel generators that pose a much larger pollution risk so water quality actually improved.
[1] https://www.autonocion.com/us/arizona-solar-panels-irrigatio...
62% is pretty respectable for the size of California (same electricity consumption as Spain). I did not know this.
this part of the claim is carrying a ton of weight here... Zero-carbon sources could include carbon dependent sources with paper offsets.
[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
if only California didn't ban cultural burns in the first place
I was shocked when I saw how much batteries contribute, honestly don't hear about them much but they have scaled a lot in recent years.
Flattening the Duck Curve: batteries reach 44% of evening demand in California - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633698 - April 2026 (5 comments)
Unfortunately it’s the reason California has the highest price for electricity in the country as well (not counting Hawaii). Looks lone they are paying ~$0.34/kWh, ouch. The average is ~$0.15/kWh in my state.
The biggest driver of costs of electricity in CA are (1) paying for damages caused by grid-initiated wildfires, and (2) paying to upgrade the grid to prevent future cases of (1).
This information comes directly from the government who approves rate increases for regulated utilities, and who has to publish their spending. PG&E, the primary power company, is also a public company and their financials are therefore public.
Rooftop solar specifically (and not general grid-scale renewables) do shift the cost balance of fixed-cost infra and consumption based usage, but the wildfire issues dwarf this.
A large part of the Capex of renewables is land costs - which are high, but once you have the land you keep it. This cost is generally all financed as part of the initial build, so in 30 years everything is paid for - but you have to finance to replace only the renewables while keeping the land and so the second round is a lot cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
A minor point anyways. Glass is not exactly a precious resource.
The most valuable parts are obviously the silver (about 50% of a panel's scrap value despite being 0.1% by weight), aluminum (about 20% of value), silicon (about 15%), and copper wiring (about 10%).
We are only just beginning to figure out techniques to reclaim the silver using thermal heating and chemical leaching techniques
>“What Turlock is doing with their projects is very impressive, but we have a different-looking canal system going through our service area,” Allen said. They are looking to put their canals into pipes to avoid evaporation, instead.
Umm, if you can completely enclose it in a pipe then why in the heck couldn't you put an 8-10' tall roof over it?
Typical local government (and I worked for one): "We didn't do it that way when I got here and it sounds like a lot of work and will be a change so let's rationalize doing nothing"
Theres a very narrow balance where canals covered in solar panels make sense.
It needs to have enough evaporation that its a problem, but not enough where it justifies piping it.
That's a very narrow market, and so unlikely to be scalable or prevalent.
Personally i don't think this makes much sense, it's not like there is no room to place solar panels, and the added costs of putting it over water makes it not as efficient. I suppose the main benefit is easy access to water for cleaning (which can then be dumped back into the canal).
Well I guess I won't be reading your article then.
The way so many web sites are now banning whole parts of the world is killing the Internet.
The ROI will almost certainly be a liability given solar is most cost-effective near or on the place of energy use. =3
https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/were-u-s...
So why not plant the trees?
Well moving to sustainable energy is good, but California being on 100% clean electricity won't have any measurable effect on its warming.
There'd be some cost reduction from scaling up, but 10x is a huge gap to close. This is a waste of money.
Its also not comparing against utility projects because it isn't utility scale.
But I would be interested to see how a solar panel covering compares economically to some other, cheaper setup.
There's a cost to pipes, but at least part of that would be offset by the structural support for the solar panels and the fact that you need to pipe less waters. Also I assume that the canals are lined in some way. I don't know, maybe the canals are just prettier to look at?
A similar problem is plaguing the Aral sea. The Amu Darya river is being drained by ineffective and leaky canals.
Solutions are easy, money exists, political will doesn't
The key to all this though is that fossil fuels exist to induce demand for weapons. Once you realize that it all makes (depressing) sense.