The price of copper?

[talmacapt]

Two chaps, an off road capable cherry picker, and an empty cable drum on a lorry turned up on my drive this morning.

They proceeded to remove the obsolete (Finland does not use fixed line telephones any more, maybe in towns?) overhead telephone cabling, wound it onto the drum and took it away.

The, now redundant, poles were put ready to be taken away.

This process has been going on, around the local area, for about two weeks.

I can only imagine that the price of copper makes this exercise worthwhile.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/copper

Oh yes. Copper is very stealable, worldwide. Quite a lot of thieves will steal it whilst it's live.
Not all of them have insulating gloves.

EVs, data centres and AI will only increase demand in the future.

[jimtherev]

Some five years ago we had what we thought must have been a pre-emptive theft on our preserved railway, of signal cable.
Forty-eight pair.
One metre taken.
We can only assume that the scrotes cut out a bit to examine and see if it was worthwhile stealing the whole km length - concluded not worth it as the copper content was relatively small.
But it shut the railway down. No signals, no phone, no point-locking, no section security, no nuffin.

So guess what. We had to splice in a metre of cable. Forty-eight pairs. Two ends. 192 insulated joints. In February. In sleet. So when, after three hours, the Duty Manager called us up to ask when he would get his railway back he got a very short but inventive answer.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I believe that Dante would have had a Platform/Level 9-3/4 for scrotes who steal copper from railways