Stealing copper has become a major problem in my part of the country.

Man charged with stealing copper pipes : Latest Local News : The Buffalo News

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

It is called being desperately poor and probably homeless.

But the law is equal. It is equally against the law for the incredibly rich and the desperately poor to steal cooper. Or sleep under bridges.

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Not really. The price of copper has skyrocketed.

Of course, the purpose of starting this thread was to point out the phenomenon of stealing copper.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

And all the guys I know stealing copper in my life were homeless.

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National Debt =

We had a construction crane, one of the large ones have all of the wire stripped out of it. Man hole covers are another good one for folks to steal.

It's one of the signs we are on our way to becoming a poor country. Bush and Cheney are sending us spiraling downhill with their out of control spending more than we have. We need a president who knows what it's like to live in the real world. Bush grew up a rich kid and has no idea what it means to live on a budget. McCain married a billionaire heiress and has no idea what it means to live on a budget. Obama came from a regular family. He's the one who understands that we can't keep spending 20 billion dollars a month in Iraq, money we have to borrow from China and Saudi Arabia. Everything is made from petroleum. The cost of everything is going up 20%. The middle class is dying off and the rich are getting richer with the Bush top 1% tax cuts and the price of oil out of control.

That may be all the people you know but around here it isn't a phenomenon restricted to homeless people; in fact, all the prior stories I've read about copper thefts have involved people that were not homeless.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Copper theft is a common occurance in East Texas. The people are poor but they are not homeless. As for being one of the signs that we are becoming a poor country...I agree. Remember the looting after the Baghdad invasion and we said, "Tsk! Tsk! How could those people do that?" But if we can get the war stopped and get the blood suckers off us, we may recover....but we will never be god the way we were after WWII.

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Follow your own path.

In addition to stealing copper, apparently some folks are hoarding pennies and selling them in bulk to be smelted.

There are some who'd like to do away with the penny all together. Not a bad idea.

For what it's worth though, my former home, Chile (among other countries) is reaping huge benefits from the high price of copper, so I don't feel entirely bad about this situation.

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