Justice is self-vending

[r-18]

high voltage installations are very well booby trapped as it is and any fool who goes in there ...well lets just say that their sacrifice to protect the gene pool is it's own reward...

[BrainBlow]

If you're going to get copper illegally, why not just melt pennies? (a practice that should be legal in the first place)

[r-18]

pennies aren't copper anymore....they are copper plated zinc....

[BrainBlow]

... melt them!

[r-18]

yeah that is why they started to make them out of zinc ...because a penny was worth more than a penny ...and why they don't make coins from silver either....

[BrainBlow]

Pennies still are worth more than pennies.
Leeches on the economy.

[r-18]

yeah there is a continuing debate about doing away with them...i think the should just make 1 penny worth 2 cents...it would instantly double the supply...and no one would even loose more than 1 cent in a deal....

[gin]

I'm disappointed, this still hasn't degraded into a hurricane of puns.

On a sidenote, I don't get the title. Is it alluding to something? Maybe some nuance of the english language that is completely lost on me?

As for the pennies, only due to the process of coining them, the material value of them is worth less...I think. Used to be anyway...

[Drahken]

I've long felt that they should start making pennies plastic. Plastic is cheap enough that they would have virtually no intrinsic value at all. While it would make them easier to counterfeit, who would bother?

The problem with melting pennies vs stealing wire is about a combination of quantity and cost. Pennies cost 1 cent each. Even if they have enough metal in them to be worth 1.5 or 2 cents each, that's still a small profit margin vs something which you take at no cost.
Quantity is the other issue. The pieces of wire that people steal usually weigh in the realm of 20~50lbs or even more. Where would one even FIND 50lbs of pennies??


re the thread title: Vending, as in vending machines (soda/snack machines, cheapo toy machines, sticker machines, etc, etc). The title is supposed to invoke an image of the power station being a vending machine, *cha-chunk*ing out a soda can of doom upon the unsuspecting theif. Something like you might see in a "spy vs spy" comic, with the spy hitting the button for copper wire & getting a can labelled "34,500 volts" which fries him upon contact.

[gin]

Well, to me it had made more sense if he was one of them famous Darwin award winners, you know the ones, that got crushed by vending machines. Here the image of a vending machine seems a bit far fetched...maybe, I haven't actually read the article.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation.