Remember: if you see someone stealing from a data center, no you didn't!
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Thieves? Or redistrubtors of natural resources?
It's the inverse of the children yearning for the mines, it's the copper yearning for the thieves.
Look I'm not a scientist but I think it's basically 2 of the stages of the water cycle, for copper.
Honestly given how much copper may have been recycled since the Copper Age I'm gonna hazard a guess that your joke isn't even all that wrong. There's a bronze statue in I want to say Germany that was made back in the 1600s that we're pretty sure a good bit of the copper and bronze was stolen from ancient graves.
The modern Robin Hood does not give to any poor but themselves, yet do us all a great service in stifling more harm.
Bless them all.
It's funny to see this happening to data centres but if we all are honest with ourselves, copper thieves are one of the biggest scourges of the 21st century. I mean, there's a reason why internet companies write "FIBRE OPTIC NO COPPER" on their equipment.
That sounds like something nice shiny copper would have on its sleeve to deter theft.
One of the engineers I used to work with started his career in South Africa 80s/90s building microwave bearer sites, he said if they didn't finish the site lock down and liven up the wave guide before they left for the weekend then when they got back on Monday all of the copper waveguide would have been stripped from the tower.
In a totally unrelated case, when they were building a new extension to the rail system here in my home town they also had to liven up each section of the overhead power feeder each day or a member of one of the local outlaw motorcycle gangs would turn up in the middle of the night, cut the weights and haul the cable onto the back of a ute.
A data center is getting built near me. I was taking my dogs to walk on a local trail and they’ve completely shut down the public road with private security guards to keep people away from their data center. Had to find an alternate route to the trail.
What a timeline. Palantir deploying AI missiles to prevent copper theft while water warriors plant bamboo next to data centers.
How do I support these endeavors?
I honestly didn’t know the worth of copper had gone up so much.

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