the collapse continues

[mellowtigger]

For more than a decade now, I've been warning about this particular predictor of societal collapse: the cannibalization of infrastructure. It happens when people find more value in the material of a thing than in the function of that thing, especially functions that benefit the community as a whole. Besides the examples I provided in the link above, the problem continues with people stealing catalytic converters.

Today, I saw this Ring video on a NextDoor post. It's located north of downtown Minneapolis, and the camera owner said he didn't learn until the next day that police said someone stole the copper from water/sewer pipes that night. You can see people hauling something big that looks like "hose" in the background of that video. It's not just here in the Twin Cities. Throughout the USA, people are even stealing electric cables right from the utility poles.

Cannibalization of infrastructure is a warning sign of societal collapse. I keep ringing that same warning bell, but nothing changes. I warned in the 2020 USA election that this was our last chance to elect a president who could change our course, but somebody insisted that we elect Mr. Nothing-Will-Fundamentally-Change instead.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. The collapse continues. The beginning is near.

Comments

[armiphlage]

I was walking on the streets of Tirana, Albania one dark rainy night when I fell into a sewer opening. Someone had taken all the cast-iron sewer grate covers, possibly to sell for scrap. I didn't see it in time as there were no streetlights left.

[mellowtigger]

Yikes! It's almost funny how the USA seemed in the past to promote terminology like "first world" and "third world", but when you look at an actual explanation of third world counties, it just seems like a checklist for the USA. Poverty, poor governance, political instability, colonialism (or our version, slavery). Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Then we see articles that tout the great USA GDP and its global market share, and I just... I don't understand what's keeping the immense inequality here afloat. I expected it to collapse a decade ago during Occupy, and I know I keep repeating myself. :(

[mallorys_camera]

This had never occurred to me before, but yes, you're absolutely correct.

[mellowtigger]

Right? Various news organizations do good jobs covering different parts of this problem with one-off stories of particular theft examples, but I've never seen anything "pull it all together" to explain why it's such a bad sign of instability. When I was young, the stereotypical theft was of car wheels in New York City, with a car left sitting on top of cinder blocks. That kind of theft, though, was still practical because the thieves were then selling the items to be used again as car tires. Now, though... the core materials (as in catalytic converter theft) themselves are more valuable than the finished product. It's bizarre to me that nobody talks about it that way.

[kathmandu]

I wonder if it's not " the materials are more valuable than their function" so much as "the function is collective, and we have some individuals who have resigned from society completely and value $20 of scrap-income to themselves above water service to a whole neighborhood that they don't personally
live in". That seems different from the whole community tearing down the infrastructure because it is no longer valued by society at large. (I guess an example of that would be the Southern whites destroying their own school systems and closing public pools rather than share with The Blacks.)