• Obinice@lemmy.world
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    49 minutes ago

    How can a simple doorbell camera have… let me convert from ye oldie measurements… almost a KILOGRAM of copper in it?!

    Does it have a big heatsink for some reason?

    Or is someone just trying to trick thieves into trying to steal them? Which is pointless, at best it would only work once, maybe.

  • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    20 hours ago

    I thought, this couldn’t be true, because surely, one of those cameras doesn’t cost more than like $200. There’s no official price list, but I’m finding numbers online of $2500 per year. This includes maintenance, footage hosting and cell service, which is likely the bulk of the cost. Either way, jeebus, that’s a lot of money.

    • CountVon@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      Government contracting is a grift with a long, long history. I bet if you travelled back in time to ancient Egypt, you’d find military leaders overcharging the pharaohs for security services.

      • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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        19 hours ago

        “Akanatun… who’s got all the bronze gladiuses? let’s say you pay us our share of your stolen grain and we won’t overthrow you.”

  • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    The coppers probably easy enough to get most of it. The gold will mosty be thin bits on the circuitry and you’d need extensive work to remove it and process into a sellable product.

    • bagsy@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      True, but if you had 1000 circuit boards, i’ll bet you could find an interested buyer that knows how to do the complicated bits.

      • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Most of them only take stuff for free. Unless you have a lot of high quality boards. I thought about doing it myself years ago but it wasn’t worth the investment and time for me even with me getting free appliance circuitry from work.

      • BygoneNeutrino@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Once you have a 1000 circuit boards, it makes sense to extract it on your own. These sort of procedures scale well. The more circuit boards you have, the less time it takes per gram of gold.

    • Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
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      19 hours ago

      You mean there’s more copper in them, right? Just, like, hypothetically if people needed money for their entertainment budget and had several of these spare in their neighborhood basement they could dismantle them and sell the metals?