Man arrested for plugging rice cooker into neighbor's house
I like this cute cartoon explaining how a man allegedly stole electricity from his neighbor.
A 49-year-old unemployed man was arrested for entering a neighbor’s house and stealing electricity to power a rice cooker. The electricity in the man’s house had been recently shut off due to nonpayment, so he resorted to electricity theft to cook a meal for himself.Electricity theft in Japan (Japan Probe)
the latest
latest episodes
"I like this cute cartoon explaining how a man allegedly stole electricity from his neighbor."
Remember, when you leave your vault, the customs of the outsiders will seems strange or incomprehensible. But war... War never changes.
Sorry - the animation was just too close to Fallout. Back to Vault 13 for me.
Sounds familiar..... my first year in college, I worked as a secretary for a property management company. Now, in SoCal, all these companies do is follow the bidding of HOA's. Well at one neighborhood, this nice old lady rented her house to a family who ended up justifying the existence of HOA's. First thing they did was rig the entire exterior of the house (which was a townhouse, so it had a shared wall with another house) with webcams. The cables going back inside had either been drilled messily back into the house, or secured to the stucco with tape and nails back to the front door and through a neat little hole in the door.
Then they decided, why bother paying for water or electricity when the community pool was only yards away?! So, they took gardening hoses and electrical extension cables, duct taped them to the sidewalk, down the curb, across the street, back up the curb, under the pools security fence, and attached them to the water and electrical outlets at the pool's clubhouse. When the property manager confronted them, with me trailing behind, they said they had every right to take the water and electricity as it was for the community and they paid rent anyways. (No, actually, they weren't paying their rent. The checks they gave that old woman kept bouncing.)
Sounds familiar..... my first year in college, I worked as a secretary for a property management company. Now, in SoCal, all these companies do is follow the bidding of HOA's. Well at one neighborhood, this nice old lady rented her house to a family who ended up justifying the existence of HOA's. First thing they did was rig the entire exterior of the house (which was a townhouse, so it had a shared wall with another house) with webcams. The cables going back inside had either been drilled messily back into the house, or secured to the stucco with tape and nails back to the front door and through a neat little hole in the door.
Then they decided, why bother paying for water or electricity when the community pool was only yards away?! So, they took several gardening hoses and electrical extension cables, duct taped them to the sidewalk, down the curb, across the street, back up the curb, under the pools security fence, and attached them to the water and electrical outlets at the pool's clubhouse. When the property manager confronted them, with me trailing behind, they said they had every right to take the water and electricity as it was for the community and they paid rent anyways. (No, actually, they weren't paying their rent. The checks they gave that old woman kept bouncing.)
I wonder if a neighbour would have let him run an extension cord for a little while if he'd have asked?
is that all they have to report about? stolen electricity for rice?
I'm disappointed. I was expecting a more high tech method of electricity banditry. i.e., installing a AC to DC converter at the mark's house, sending the DC electricity from one rooftop to another using a Tesla coil, and reconverting the current to AC for use at the pilferer's home base to plug in the appliances.
It's nice to see that the US is not the only country that decides to report utter frivolities as "news"... even "super news" in this case!
i've gone for weeks sometimes running an extension cord into the hallway or laundry room of various apts i stopped paying for. the trick is knowing when the landlord will most probably come round. but i'm much more responsible now. the company i work for takes care of me better than sweden.
Is it just me, or do the cartoon guys look Occidental? Or is it inadvertent? (a softball for ya')
That said, the trick to siphoning resources, should your life ever depend on it, and you don't happen to be a farmer who can use a buried Tesla coil to wirelessly suckle from high-tension wires running over your land, is to.... "bury" the line! As long as you're using slightly above-average shielded cable, you can run an AC extension cord, RG-6Q or RG-11 coaxial, or CAT-6 networking cable, through all manner of hidden passages: disused ducts, sewer lines, etc. -- particularly in older and/or retrofit buildings.
I've also heard tell of people stripping copper wiring from abandoned / squatted buildings while the wire was still hot. I'm guessing the trick is finding ways to make sure that you're not the ground... either by keeping the line grounded to something else that's the "shortest distance" or otherwise keeping yourself insulated and careful. Likewise, you can take a cue from the HotPlug computer forensic tool and splice vampire tap style into live wires.
My personal favorite are the community "christmas lights" or rope lights that run off of AC power fixtures conveniently added to street lights. Often they're thrown into the branches of trees that are right outside your apartment window.
Stealing is wrong. (Copyright infringement is still ok though.)
Frankie,
Accidental Occidental?
Japan has a much more shame and honor based society than most western nations, I could not see a neighbor walking next door and admitting that he is unable to afford electricity and begging for an extension cord to cook dinner. Even in the US or Europe this would be difficult to immagine, your neighbor would remember this forever, and you would be the looser in his mind. So is stealing the power OK? No, but I can see why.
I used to live in a quadraplex, and one night after pulling into the back driveway, I noticed that there were only three electric meters in place, while all four places had electricity. Turns out that the latest new people had moved in, found a working socket in the attic, and then proceeded to wire themselves up with electricity. It wasn't mine they were stealing, it was the guy upstairs to me. This had only been going on for like four or five months.
I never did hear what the final result was, as both parties moved out shortly thereafter.
I saw a very similar story on Mainichi Daily News via Tokyomango blog but it was a fan not a rice maker:
Man arrested for beating the heat with fan powered by neighbor's electricity
NAGASAKI -- How do you survive Kyushu's hot summer nights when your electricity has been cut off? For one Nagasaki resident, the answer was simple: steal some juice from your neighbor.
"I just borrowed some electricity to run a fan," Shigeru Yamauchi, 51, told police when he was arrested for trespassing.
According to police, Yamauchi sneaked onto his neighbor's property Friday evening and hooked up an extension cord to an outside wall socket.
His neighbor called police at around 6 a.m. the following morning, after spotting the cable.
"I just borrowed some electricity to run a fan,"
Hey neighbour, could I borrow some electricity from you tonight? I'll pay you back tomorrow when the sun comes up and my solar cells start making some juice.
FINALLY, cracking down on those pesky unemployed people and their sickening compulsion to eat warm meals.
if only ALL news was converted into animation, that'd be something.