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What do you steal from a city that has nothing worth stealing? The answer in the failed disaster area that is Detroit is you just break down and steal the everyday infrastructure of the city.
Remember all the stories about freeway lights getting stolen?
The Michigan Department of Transportation says one-fifth of the lights along freeways in Metro Detroit aren’t working — and copper thieves are mainly to blame.
MDOT spokesman Rob Morosi said roughly 20 percent of the lights on poles and beneath overpasses on freeways in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and St. Clair counties are dark.
The main reason for many of the outages, according to Morosi, is copper thieves — who are stripping metal from the transformer cabinets.
Now they’ve moved on to stealing fire hydrants.
Thieves have destroyed nearly 75 fire hydrants on the west side of Detroit in the last 48 hours, stealing parts and putting lives at risk.
Crews with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department are racing to repair the broken hydrants along Southfield Road and across the west side after thieves tore through dozens in about two days.
Detroit is being stripped for parts. Literally. This is how you know a city is in its end stage of barbarism.
Obviously there must be a market for fire hydrants or this wouldn’t be happening. Local recyclers would know something about this Most tend to be on the “shady” side.
I talked to a recycler in my hometown. They were hardnosed. Scrap prices must be low, Very brusque and dismissive and then immediately back to work. Margins must be thin.
Perhaps you should’ve asked about scrap copper. Prices are not low on scrap copper.. And old electronic hardware is a lucrative business if you’re adept at chemistry and learn how to strip copper, silver and gold from electronic parts and wiring.
Most metals can be recycled for a profit if one has the motivation and patience.
Yeah, been warning about that for decades, since I saw it become endemic in the SF Bay Area.
In time, they will start stealing manhole covers. Wait for it……..!
They were doing that 35+ years ago in the East San Francisco Bay. I bid and managed a sewer rehab job at the Oakland Army Base. We had to prove that our old manhole frames and covers were those replaced on the project.
Mafia owned scrap yards recycle?, No, …fence, everything stolen, no questions asked.
I confess that eons ago when I was a young college student, I bought a slightly used set of tires from a fence I knew for $150 dollars. Were they stolen? Probably. Did I care? No.
When you don’t have a lot of money,and you gotta keep your raggedy POS car on the road, ,you do what you gotta do, capeesh?
Nice rationalization…asshole
I think the thieves in Stockton, Cal. topped Detroit. I saw an article a few years ago where homeless thieves were stealing the parking meters, where many of the meters were right next to gov’t buildings. The thieves were very clever – they got an empty baby stroller, put metal cutting tools in the stroller, went down a street with lots of parking meters in broad daylight, cut the metal pipe holding the parking meter, put the whole meter into the stroller, covered the meter with a blanket, and then pushed the stroller back to their homeless camp where they proceeded to break open the meter. A picture showed one street in Stockton where there was a row of about 15 metal pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk with not one parking meter left attached to the pipes. Police recovered some of the meters at a homeless camp. Some of the meters still had coins in them; must have been very difficult to crack open a parking meter!
If I remember correctly, that act was the genesis of the “Cool Hand Luke” movie, when the Paul Newman character cut off a parking meter as a drunken, nihilistic gesture that got him sent to prison. One wonders if any of these folks will pay a price?
I have compared city populations to stress strain curves for metals.
City starts out small.Pop increases, then it goes exponential, but soon thereafter there is a linear upward climb.
Then it knees over. then the pop does not increase it decreases slowly with some up and down. A lot of large cities fit this profile.
Stress strain curves has been found in lots of phenomena. I asked Grok, which confirmed it and then I learned a whole bunch of other people thought the same thing 1st.
Here is the point, When you make that kind of analogy, the fact that cities have small upticks in population is not a cause for optimism. The city is still sick and still terminal
They can have taken all the masters in public policy or public admin they want. They are still clueless and maladroit.
And scheming liars feathering their nests.
It is a bit hard to look up the analgies, but they exist. Below is a new one… to me
www.linkedin dot com/pulse/new-job-role-stress-strain-curve-analogy-sandeep-patil-nywof/
Go to Wikipedia and put the population data for some cities in Excel and graph it. You will see it.
At this point on time stress in cities are not going up (Papering over with $$$). We are past the yield point. We are in the plastic region.
Fracxture point is right around the corner.
Liberal mayors will update their c.v.’s and blame everyone but thermselves…. Get out of Dodge …. move somewhere else and rinse and repeat.
A once powerhouse city elected idiot DEI Democrats to run it – and they ran it right into the ground.
Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013 because dumbass politicians are over-generous with other people’s money (never their own money).
After squandering huge amounts on buying votes via bloated projects, & inflating their salaries (& pocketing under the table), blue states demand more from Washington.
Baltimore looks like Berlin circa 1946 with uncollected trash piled 6 feet high.
Bell, CA Democrats were drawing salaries far above the President.
(Press didn’t bother to mention party affiliation. AG Jerry Brown vowed to investigate Bell, but, of course, never did.)
NY & Chicago are currently causing investors to stampede elsewhere.
Red states like Texas have “rainy day” surpluses.
No need to hand it over to teacher’s unions or more blue state bail-outs.
In Detroit’s case, the decline began with the 1967 riot. Mayor “Soulman” Young then put the city into hospice.
Was he the punk who wore the cap “CMFIC”?
That mayor was in charge alright. And the results speak loudly (except in the NY Times).
Don’t know about that. He was the mayor who told Detroit’s criminals to “hit 8 Mile Road” meaning to take their out of control crime to the suburbs. In the 70s I worked with a woman whose brother was a Detroit LEO on his protective detail. Said he was a vulgar, vile, illiterate. But, hey, why not the best?
But . . . but . . . Detroit is coming back! Downtown is thriving now! The MSM said so!
Yeah — so much better that the city has to offer $$$ for people to move there.
Get back to me when Axel Foley is named police chief. Then things *might* improve.
All of this is because of DemonRats, they have screwed up the entire country, this is what low life criminals do, Detroit is a blue craphole, it’s full of worthless criminals and muslims, what do you expect will happen when everyone in charge is a DemonRat and everyone is on the take. DEMONRATS CAUSED THIS.
Have a friend who was born in Shanghai, China….I like to ask him what they do to people like this in China…He said, that ‘this does not happen in China’…..
Hmmmnn….wonder why?
It doesn’t happen because the people who do it usually disappear and are never seen or heard from again. Problem solved.
Those white people should be arrested for stealing.
They’re “livin’ it up” in Coontown.