> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"

just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.

The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.

The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.

Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.

Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.

It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".

The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.

There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.

Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.

My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.

> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper

It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).

Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.

Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.

One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?

> ~$5/lb

Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper