5 ms·
No more theft than putting a solar panel under a street light that's shining on your property.
by 127361 3y ago
No more theft than putting a solar panel under a street light that's shining on your property.
- agsnu 3y agoNot true, either physically or legally.
- 127361 3y agoThe line losses are so huge anyway, this would barely even register. Heck a few large trees close to the power line would drain more energy than this. Considering such a trivial act as "theft" is completely ridiculous.
- speff 3y agoIt’s interesting how confidently they asserted something plain wrong.
- defrost 3y agoA more accurate analogy would be old style overhead drive shafts that powered many machines in large early industrial revolution factories. This is equivilant to throwing an extra belt over the shift to power your own machine. There's only so much power available and as more and more machines are driven there's less and less ommph to power more. This is literally adding "drag" to the overhead power line and decreasing what reaches the end point of transmission. It's not equivilant to scooping up photons that were being thrown on the ground anyway.
- 127361 3y agoIt's not possible to abstract any sizable amount of energy this way, unless the line is kilometers long. It's the scale of the "theft" that matters, which is so trivial compared to the inherent losses in the transmission line.
- idiotsecant 3y agoIs it OK to eat a grape for free in the grocery? Why or why not?
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y agoYes, when done in good faith. This is customary like trying tastes of beer from a bartender when selecting the beer one wants a pint of. Draining electricity with an antenna is neither customary nor done in good faith… Your analogy would be better if it were asking if it’s okay to walk through the store daily and take a couple grapes to add to my fruit basket at home.
- Ekaros 3y agoYou mean it is customary to place your mouth on beer tap and take a sip? Strange customs over there...
- maxerickson 3y agoThe more interesting legal analogy is probably water rights. If the state decides to protect the power line, it will be illegal to draw power without permission, regardless of the physical circumstances.
- 127361 3y agoBut again he is barely even abstracting a single watt of energy. To take legal action for such a trivial "offense" is beyond ridiculous.
- hiddencost 3y agoYou're very confused. And posting incorrect statements all over this thread. If you're excited about questions of legality, maybe you'd be interested in attending law school to learn more about the topic? Enforcement and legality are separate things. Many people break the law under the assumption they will not be prosecuted. They're still breaking the law. That's OK. But it's worth knowing because eventually enough of those small choices add up to something that does trigger the laws attention. There's another reason this behavior might elicit enforcement: in many cases, failure to enforce property rights can become grounds for losing rights or being unable to enforce them in other contexts. So a large company may have an incentive to go after someone like this just to make sure that other people don't start doing more ambitious versions of this.
- 127361 3y agoYour stance here is ridiculous. Common sense says it's wrong to arrest and/or prosecute people over such a trivial matter. So much for all your supposed "justifications" for doing so. Have you completely lost all sense of proportionality here? Or has the legal system gone completely bonkers, then? Or are you trying to gaslight me? We're talking about 0.1 watts of electricity being "stolen" at most.