Thieves targeting highway signs in Seguin

[douglas9]

Source: San Antonio Express-News

First it was copper, now it's aluminum. The new targets for thieves in Seguin are large highway signs.

The Guadalupe County Sheriff's Department is stumped, and deputies are asking for your help to corner these crooks. The signs are worth thousands of dollars.

They're not hard to miss, unless they're missing.

"It doesn't take but probably 10 minutes to drop the sign," said Russell Beck, with the Texas Department of Transportation's maintenance department.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA012208.seguinsigns.KENS.476029f2.html

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Sign(s) of the Time?

[gratuitous]

1. The meth heads around here are cutting phone lines

Several coastal towns were deprived of 9-1-1 service over the weekend because the phone lines had been cut by meth heads looking for copper. Of course being meth heads they weren't very bright, and didn't realize they were cutting fiber optic cables, not copper cables.

[TheCowsCameHome]

4. Maybe they'll cut into some 25,000 volt lines next time

and end up as a heap of ashes.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. You'll be seeing more of this type of stuff.

It's a consequence of Peak Everything:

Note: This issue is an edited version of the Introduction to Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.

SNIP

Petroleum is not the only important resource quickly depleting. Readers already acquainted with the Peak Oil literature know that regional production peaks for natural gas have already occurred, and that, over the short term, the economic consequences of gas shortages are likely to be even worse for Europeans and North Americans than those for oil. And while coal is often referred to as being an abundant fossil fuel, with reserves capable of supplying the world at current rates of usage for two hundred years into the future, a recent study updating global reserves and production forecasts concludes that global coal production will peak and begin to decline in ten to twenty years.4 Because fossil fuels supply about 85 percent of the world's total energy, peaks in these fuels virtually ensure that the world's energy supply will begin to shrink within a few years regardless of any efforts that are made to develop other energy sources.

Nor does the matter end with natural gas and coal. Once one lifts one's eyes from the narrow path of daily survival activities and starts scanning the horizon, a frightening array of peaks comes into view. In the course of the present century we will see an end to growth and a commencement of decline in all of these parameters:

* Population
* Grain production (total and per capita)
* Uranium production
* Climate stability
* Fresh water availability per capita
* Arable land in agricultural production
* Wild fish harvests
* Yearly extraction of some metals and minerals (including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc)

The point of this book is not systematically to go through these peak-and-decline scenarios one by one, offering evidence and pointing out the consequences - though that is a worthwhile exercise. Some of these peaks are more speculative than others: fish harvests are already in decline, so this one is hardly arguable; however, projecting extraction peaks and declines for some metals requires extrapolating current rising rates of usage many decades into the future.5 The problem of uranium supply beyond mid-century is well attested by studies, but has not received sufficient public attention.6

Nevertheless, the general picture is inescapable; it is one of mutually interacting instances of over-consumption and emerging scarcity.

Our starting point, then, is the realization that we are today living at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history - an abundance based on temporary sources of cheap energy that made all else possible. Now that the most important of those sources are entering their inevitable sunset phase, we are at the beginning of a period of overall societal contraction.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_peak_everything

[The Stranger]

3. OVERPOPULATION.

Too many people for the planet to support, but the religious cults still preach against birth control.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. Exponential growth and resource consumption

Everyone needs to watch the presentation by retired physics professor Albert Bartlett on exponential growth and its implications for resource consumption.

Link to video is here (video in Real Player format only) along with transcripts and downloadable audio MP3s:

The retired Professor of Physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder examines the arithmetic of steady growth, continued over modest periods of time, in a finite environment. These concepts are applied to populations and to fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/dr_albert_bartlett_arithmetic_population_and_energy

[Lone_Star_Dem]

6. Where I live they're taking the copper insides out of the central ac/heat units

They're doing this while people are at work and you get home and your unit has been gutted.

I saw someone messing around one of my neighbors units on my street and called the home owner to ask if there was any reason for the person to be there. It was a brand new, never yet used unit in a newly built home and it seemed odd to have a handyman messing with it when it should still be under warranty. The owner told me to call the police.

When they caught the guy he had already ruined unit and he had the guts from two other units in his vehicle. I guess it had been a busy day.

[Javaman]

7. Ugh, what part of Texas are you in? I'm in Austin. nt

[w8liftinglady]

9. my area,too..the DFW area

[MadMaddie]

8. TLU Graduate Here..

Those highway signs are huge signs....traffic accidents and fatalities will follow...

[truthisfreedom]

10. The answer is simple. Put police into the recycling yards. Get photos, check IDs, take fingerprints

of every single person that comes in with anything fishy.