But why not just install solar panels on your house? Or legally, in some remote property? On top of the mountain is probably one of the most expensive places to deploy infrastructure. The elevation is almost certainly to provide radio reception coverage.

There's networks like Helium that are based around LoraWAN mesh IoT minders. Assuming there's some financial advantage to having maximal connectivity to other miners, putting a few on the mountains above a major metro area seems like a very straightforward idea.

It's not above a major metro area though, it's above Salt Lake City.

The Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area is #24 as ranked by population, so it depends what one would consider "major".

To me, top 25 seems major, but to someone else top 20 would be major. I don't think "major" in the context of metro areas is an official term.

I’ve heard major metro area as roughly being top 100 cities in the world which Salt Lake City is nowhere close to.

If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city.

Yeah, let's just derail into a subthread bickering about what threshold counts as a major metro area, vs meaningfully engaging with the actual topic at hand.

This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.

Talking about metro size is actually relevant because if it was a major metro area like say LA they could actually use the cellphone network that would blanket the area. Instead it’s a modest city in basically the middle of nowhere thus the problem.

Complaining, on the other hand is a complete waste of everyone’s time.

This conversation is indeed a distraction, but for posterity and those curious the population for the SLC area is slightly confusing because of the population proportion of the central city itself with the legal name "Salt Lake City" is small relative to all the adjoining municipalities that basically blend together into one city (even including street addresses, grid system, public transit), and the way the metro areas for Provo, SLC, and Ogden are reported in the census separately even though people commute between them in the same way people travel between SF and San Jose.

The numbers are more like: 1) Salt Lake City: 200K people 2) Salt Lake City Metro Area (MSA): 1.25-1.3 million 3) Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area (CSA): ~2.7 Million. FYI this region is also called the "Wasatch Front"

To understand these levels of breakdown the equivalent for Bay Area naming would be: 1) San Francisco itself (the 49 square miles): ~800K people 2) San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA: ~4.6 million 3) San Jose-SF-Oakland CSA (think the whole "Bay Area"): ~9.5 Million

It's the Combined Statistical Area of SLC (the "Wasatch Front") which is now ~22nd-24th in the nation, not the MSA itself.

It's similar in size to Charlotte or Sacramento, and larger than the respective CSAs of eg Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Kansas City, Nashville, or Las Vegas

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area)

That’s true enough, but missing the major difference. Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area is effectively in the middle of nowhere surrounded by desert not rings of exurbs that blend into new cities the way you normally see around major cities.

Which is why it isn’t surrounded by a great cellphone network, and thus why they are setting up a independent radio network.

The I-80 and I-15 both intersect in SLC and are major routes. Cell coverage is just fine until it gets a little sketchy up by Idaho but still (close enough to) 100%.

Good enough where you wouldn’t need to set up your own system. Or be stupid enough to make them noticeable and have the Forest Service confiscate them. I mean, come on, a little black paint and a cryptic “Property of US Government” sticker would go a long way.

Or, if you want to be super sneaky just throw them up on a telephone pole because it’s well known that the companies only mess with their own equipment so you can hide stuff in plain sight.

That’s not really useful if you want to make use of the other 90+% of land in the area such as by having people fly over it in paragliders and possibly make an emergency landings.

Sure, but the argument was cartels building a shadow cell network because the existing one was too iffy for them.

And these seem to be right outside SLC proper.

That was one idea tossed out, but there isn’t a cellphone network coverage in most areas covered by this network.

Suggesting it’s useful in places that overlapped ignores the utility in areas where it would be the only option. I doubt drug dealers are meeting up in the desert outside of cellphone range with their suppliers, but it isn’t a crazy idea.

Having lived there 2016-2022, it certainly does not feel anything like a major metro to me.

1.2 million people. And probably geographically the closest metro area to the people who did this; I assume whoever did it lives in or around Utah.

Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.

You vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are.

They want total control, not bribes.

One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube.

And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member.

These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.

How do you know all this? Were you a former member?

There's a number of brave journalists that cover this stuff locally, but a lot of what I'm talking about has been covered in national media in the US, it just doesn't get much traction.

I have friends that live in Mexico so we talk about it fairly often as well. One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.

>One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.

...and you just doxxed him?

I clearly did not.

Can you try to put more effort into participating here? This is actually a material conversation to me so I don't in the slightest appreciate some rando on the internet is trying to say I'm risking my friends life with sharing very innocuous general information as a zero effort rhetorical dunk.

Worth it for the upvotes tho

I don't think organizations like this have any former members.

they do, they just might be... in a non-talkative mood ;-)

Adding to this, they are growing fast [1] and rumor has it they are moving into Texas. Curious what the U.S. will do to try to stop them. Military perhaps?

[1] - https://es.insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mexic...

Username is factual with references like RNCResearch, how meta of you. I would recommend a more appropriate audience a for your content, Twitter.

I mean what they are setting up is entirely legal systems it may not be legal to set them up in certain places but nothing illegal. They don't have to kidnap anyone to achieve this goal unless they are too poor to pay someone to help them. However drugs that is bad, mmm kay?

>One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

This sounds like:

1. Just a rehash of the original Hashashin tale.

2. A spooky story cartel members might tell.

HNews never fails to be the place where people who know not even the basics of a topic are confidently contrarian.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP-TMArlV0

This is far from the only source you can find that supports what I'm saying. Search for CJNG to find more about them. They're sort of the Phoenix that rose from the infamous Los Zetas.

Why would they pay someone when they could kidnap them, like they've done to many others?

> Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them?

Why would an engineer willfully take a cartel job, when there is a high risk of them killing you instead of paying you, and killing you by cutting off your face just because they were bored and disturbed? If a cartel even offered me a job, I'd fear for my life.

I have no interest of watching it myself, but there's an infamous video that's been talked about so much I'm reasonably confident it is more or less as described, and yes, it involves skinning someone's face off while they're alive, and using amphetamine injection to ensure they don't pass out.

These people really are as bad as it gets. You don't want to be anywhere close to involved with them.

Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of. I've only seen the first second of it before turning it off. Truly awful.

The video is often re-posted on 4chan and is not the worst of their behavior.

Man I came in here curious about some solar-powered antennas and shit just escalated bigtime. Wow. :(

Yeah torture description is not appropriate for HN IMO.

Why then is so much HN discussion centered around installing and running Windows 11?

That is why I left it out. I would not even begin to describe their activities. I merely pointed out it is not even permitted on the other site.