Word: cheapness
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Property owners, it turns out, do not watch the commodities market as keenly as druggies do. "People think of copper as cheap, like sand," says OneBeacon Insurance Group executive Charlie Sidoti. "But now you have to think of it like gold. You would never leave gold sitting out in the yard." OneBeacon estimates that it has seen a 300% increase in claims of copper theft in the past 18 months. Home foreclosures have worsened the trend, as empty buildings are easy targets for the time-consuming task of ripping out pipes and wiring. In California, theft of copper irrigation systems...
...next two minutes or you're going to get fired. (A website called ThinkGeek.com sells a T shirt with a battery-powered wi-fi detector that displays the ambient signal strength wherever you happen to be standing. It's supercool, though if I'm too cheap to pay for broadband, I'm definitely too cheap to spend $30 on a T shirt...
This isn't supposed to be a problem anyway. A couple of years ago, some starry-eyed technology pundits--myself included--announced the dawning of the age of free municipal wi-fi networks, when every American city would have its own city-size hot spot. It would be too cheap to meter! But the legal, technological, financial and political practicalities of municipal wi-fi have been much harder to work out than anyone expected. Even mighty Google had to back down from its plan to flood all of San Francisco with free wi-fi. Downtown Spokane, Wash., is online, though...
...renewed interest? One word: Vélib. Paris launched the Vélib program a year ago, and while très cheap (its name is French shorthand for "free bike"), it's actually not free. Although places like Copenhagen, Lyons and Barcelona are big on bike-sharing, the City of Lights boasts the crème de la crème, with 20,600 bikes and about 1,450 stations--four times the number of Parisian metro stops. It's hard to walk more than two blocks without running into a bike rack, which helps explain why the program has already yielded...
...players in the Nascent electric-car industry are taking different routes to market. Tesla Motors is building its $109,000 Roadster for the Hollywood set. Moving down market, Phoenix is building a $47,500 workaday pickup truck. For those looking for a cheap commuter car, Aptera, Tango, Think City and Zenn are all trying to meet that need with small, inexpensive electric vehicles that can be charged to cover enough miles to handle the daily commute...