Can't throw me off the scent

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I didn't remember the scale, I just picked a number from my head

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Heh, It was a piece of coax cable but it was really thick and bright yellow. I was about the same thickness as an average sized thumb. The whole thing ran at ten megabit.

It had a crap ton of shielding in it. It wasn't the kind of cable you could just bend around a corner you had to give it room to bend. Because of the shielding and relatively low speed, it could run a very long distance (500 meters)

The vampire taps were these beige metal boxes with a stainless steel cradle on top that locked the cable in.

You used a tool to cut the hole in the cable, it was this screwdriver looking thing with a tiny little nub of a drill bit in the end. The nub of drill bit was the exact right length to drill down to the core of the cable and expose the center conductor. All you had to do was make sure that the hole was clear and then none of the ground mesh touched the center conductor or the pin that would have to slide into the hole.

After you drilled the hole you put the coax down into the cradle and turned a screw on the top, It would bite into the ground on one side and a little metal needle would touch the center conductor and the other side.

The coolest part was, shit was coming out all the time, and every time it was something amazing and futuristic. When the technology could barely do anything and all of a sudden you could do something new It was just magical. The advance is all seem kind of boring these days in comparison.

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That does sound cool, it must have been pretty labor intensive. How long do you remember these things being used before they were phased out?

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In a world where correlation does not equal causation, crime would pre-date capitalism.

Oh. Wait.

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So you think the people who do this shit do it for fun? If they had ubi they'd still be crawling under cars to cut cats?

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By the time I was doing the work the tech was already starting to get old. That particular job was kind of amazing. It was a giant distribution center with something like 3 miles of conveyor belts and the distributed Linux operating system worth one OS ran across 20 nodes.

We hired a contractor to come in and put fiber. But it was back when fiber was very unforgiving the project took forever to get turned up. They broke about as much as they ran. To be honest I'm not really sure why they bothered with the fiber, All the long distance runs in the warehouse we're already overkill at 10 megabit.

For the most part they were just talking to an HP 3000 at serial speeds. All the office PCs and printers that needed better than 100 meg work condensed up in the front and could easily run on Ethernet.

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Only the connectors and the skill to weld them on are expensive.

The cable itself is just glass and plastic with some shielding.

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1: Why's it $300 then?

2: All theft from Tesla owners is valid in 2025

3: Why do people assume they aren't selling the expensive cables whole?

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Yes, cutting cats pays extra on top of the ubi.

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1: Labor & Equipment.

2: Tesla owners don't necessarily own the Charging stations.

3: They are icing wire cutters to remove the cables, destroying the cable in the process.

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Because the damage also includes labor and overhead, not just Material.
We're not talking about Tesla specifically.
Even if the stolen cable was left undamaged, who are you gonna sell it to? The company that owns the charging station?

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We have crackheads in Aus, maybe we need to stear them towards our copper cable so they can rip it up and our government will actually give us the NBN we were promised, will full fiber all the way.

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So are you a dragon/wyvern? I saw an infographic earlier. You might be a raccoon/crow.

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1: Sure it does. Where's the other $250 from?

2: Might as well be.

3: LoL

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1: Sure it does. What's the other $250 then?

2: Fair

3: That makes sense. I wonder if the solution might be for the stations to just have ports car owners to provide the cables?

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Honestly not a bad idea, I approve.

lazynooblet

The cables are capable of 100kw and are thick and heavy

Roflmasterbigpimp

Someone needs to place half a Bagel in Trumps and Putins pockets!

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An electrician isn't gonna charge a tenner for his time. He's not your nephew who mows your lawn after school.

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Yes I got that, wasn't trying to poke fun at you. It was just a funny mental image to me that I wanted to share.