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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

What a waste, they destroyed ~1000 perfectly good 1KW PC power supplies :(

Exactly. Whenever I see something like this (e.g. Philippines police has also bulldozed some expensive cars recently) I always wonder if they actually are idiots or have extracted the valuable internal parts first.

I suspect big conspicuous destructions like this are the reverse of US asset confiscation; destroying the thing is a signal that you're really serious about stopping it, rather than just confiscating it and letting the police keep the proceeds.

It also prevents those machines from magically "appearing" in a new mining op.

Perhaps there are reasons beyond my understanding why this is a wrong idea but if I were the head of the government I would rather officially sell the machines to a legitimate tax-paying mining operation or (if we are low on electricity and don't want any mining in the country) sell them on eBay to whatever a foreign party interested to get the funds for the budget. If the hardware would appear at an illegal mining facility in the country again I would just confiscate and sell them again making even more funds for the budget.

"Hello, Dear Sir! I am most foreign of foreigners, wishing to buy your Bitcoin Printing Mint Equipment, paid in your local currency, for export out of your fine country."

"... really? You're the guy we seized these from, holding your finger under your nose like a mustache. To cover your mustache."

If you object to the entire principle (or, at least, need to be seen objecting to the entire principle), destroying the assets in a visible public spectacle is the way to go.

California had at least some high profile "street racer" destruction back in the day, and I don't believe any western government, upon seizing a big load of cocaine, goes about trying to figure out how they can unload it to someone else. At least, in easily tracked ways...

Cocaine does have SOME medicinal use but corruption of the product by being mixed destroys any possibility of legit use. This isn't true of computers.

> really? You're the guy we seized these from

Ok, let them buy it again and seize it from them again if they use it unlawfully. Double profit.

> seizing a big load of cocaine, goes about trying to figure out how they can unload it to someone else

Because there is an internationally agreed war on drugs. Cocaine (unlike meth which can be officially prescribed as Desoxyn in the US and heroine which also is used medically in some cases e.g. in the UK) is officially considered pure evil with no legitimate medical use (it can be used for good but in practice 99.9% of its use is abuse and even the 0.1% who use it for good also do that illegally).

AFAIK there is no international agreement on fighting cryptocurrencies mining so far, the mining equipment (let alone the power supply units) are perfectly legal to manufacture, sell, buy, own and use (unless you actually steal electricity to power them) in many countries.

Even such a totalitarian and unreasonably conservative country as Iran officially allowed (and taxed) mining until they found out they are running low on electricity.

> Cocaine (unlike meth which can be officially prescribed as Desoxyn in the US and heroin which also is used medically in some cases e.g. in the UK) is officially considered pure evil with no legitimate medical use

This isn't true at all; cocaine is a Schedule II drug, not a Schedule I like marijuana. It has historically had plenty of medical use.

I know it had medical use historically but had no idea it still has today.

Did I say it does? It might. But what you said was that it is "officially considered pure evil with no legitimate medical use". There is an official schedule of drugs organized by how evil they are and whether they have a medical use. Cocaine is listed as having medical use. This is, to the maximum possible extent, the official opinion of the United States. Where are you getting your official statements from?

This is why you’re not a head of government. Heads of government realize that a public display of power and consequence is much more valuable than a few hundred K revenue that you can shake down out of anyone.

The goal of a government isn't to make a big profit.

It is the goal of the gov't contractors that the gov't has hired to do the actual work of the gov't

Not sure what your point is with this.

I'm personally glad contractors aren't handling things like this, and would like to see their role diminshed in general.

My point was things seem to be going the opposite of what you're wanting. More and more things seem to be contracted out to different companies. Warfare/mercinaries is a big area, however, jails are another.

I’m sure by the end of your paragraph you began to see how this can be gamed to not help the country.

We do this here in the US too. Grey market cars that are imported and don't meet US emissions get crushed. People caught street racing have had their cars impounded and crushed. It's just to make a show.

Don’t some clothing stores also destroy all the clothes they discard so that they can’t be resold?

Yep. I have a buddy who works at $BIG_US_RETAILER and he weekly has to go into the stock room with a box cutter and scissors to destroy unsold clothing.

I have also heard big box retailers (i.e. Best Buy) will destroy unsold items to discourage employees from purposefully hiding or down-selling things in the hope they can grab it for cheap or free.

Though a lot of places will unload these items to wholesalers or discount retailers, and some gets donated to clothing charities. It goes through a few steps first.

This feels like such a waste. Yeah, let's destroy electronics (when there is a silicone shortage) and let's destroy clothing (when a large percentage of the people in the world walk around in rags).

Makes me unbearably sad we're such a wasteful species.

I wonder if this is also the case in Singapore - the only known good dictatorship in the world where the leader could have easily banned this behaviour.

Yeah, but this is the equivalent of bulldozing a house because someone committed a crime in it. Sure, I get you're serious, but I also get you're being wasteful.

Buildings built without permit often need to be destroyed, even if perfectly safe/usable.

Israeli government policy. Hence the armoured bulldozers. In that case it's more of a scorched earth policy.

I think they also said that they knock down houses that have illegal electricity connections to steal electricity - this punishment is probably just the equivalent

Maybe also to prevent the equipment from falling into corrupt hands again.

On the other hand big destructive displays like this are big signals that it’s not police corruption and theft (like with the perverse incentives “civil forfeiture” creates in the US)

My personal view is that the government should never be able to profit from prosecuting a crime. Law enforcement should never be a money making venture, and it would never be possible to implement a system that overcomes the perverse incentives so long as it is.

I don't think the financial disincentive is necessarily corrupt, in the form of fines or asset forfeiture, but I think that they should never be allowed to contribute to government revenue in any way.

If the government has any incentive to prosecute somebody, other than a well founded and provable basis for believing they committed a crime, then the justice system just becomes a weapon to turn against the citizens it's supposed to be protecting. If the government has a financial incentive to prosecute certain crimes over others, then how the law is enforced is not going to align with community needs. For instance, that's why there's never enough police to attend burglaries, but always enough police for handing out speeding tickets.

This. In a corrupt country, not destroying the seized equipment in theatrical fashion makes everybody assume cops/government just took it and used or re-sold it themselves, individually.

Similar reason why drugs are destroyed with a lot of fanfare in most Latin American countries (er, when they are). Surely it'd be easier and cleaner to bury it somewhere after soaking it or something, but no, they need to make a pyramid of drugs and have someone throw a pyre at it to create a big symbolic bonfire that is a toxic mess to clean up.

They can just as easily be signals of corruption. I have a friend who owns a bar on a beach in Malaysia. He isn't willing to pay the requested bribes to the local cops, so every winter they douse it in gasoline and burn it to the ground. He rebuilds every year; it costs less than the bribes.

Why do they charge so much?

They are 100% idiots. In Russia, the government even destroys sanctioned food from the West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06TZrP5Vg0s They just don't give a f

It made me physically ill to see the amount of perfectly serviceable hardware they wantonly destroyed in the video.

Maybe they salvaged parts and only destroyed cases to make a show of things?

Haha, at any rate, my reaction surprised me.

If you think that's bad, consider that many companies go out of their way to wantonly destroy perfectly serviceable hardware that they produce and/or distribute every day as a matter of routine, all in an effort to mitigate storage costs and, in some cases, artificially prop up demand.

Amazon[1] is probably the most prominent example of this practice when it comes to hardware, but the routine destruction of unsold products remains common across industries, especially the food industry[2][3][4].

I, too, felt ill watching that video, and I felt ill reading these articles. But how do we fix this? How do we avoid letting so much production go to waste, especially when there are still so many people around the world who could really benefit from it? Is it the product of greed, or is it merely a hard-to-solve supply chain problem?

[1] https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millio...

[2] https://www.dailydot.com/irl/dunkin-employee-who-exposed-was...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/perspectives/cabot-dairy-farm...

[4] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

Only a couple of months back I saw what seemed to be perfectly good solar panels (I'd estimate an 8kw system) having a backhoe rip through them (and the roof they were attached to) to make way for a future apartment block.

I'm sure someone would've been willing to salvage those at no cost to the developers, but time is money to those guys. Sad to see such waste.

In the Bay, I more than once saw developers spend months trying to get people to salvage old houses whole. Surely there was someone who would take them! How hard could it be?

Each time they wound up bulldozing them after zero takers were found.

Could they have tried to get rid of them piecemeal, as people came to salvage one useful thing at a time? Definitely possible! Though it likely would have meant managing a bunch of different people looking for specific things, after which they would have had to spend just as much time and money bulldozing the things anyway.

Delays in construction are also waste but not so visceral or visible. It might have turned out that it was cheaper to destroy them than have them salvaged, including the labor cost of managing the salvage.

"free solar panels on CraigsList. Must be gone in 1.5 days. Must sign a liability waiver before removing--via email."

Gone.

That requires someone to put in a conscious effort to manage and people are lazy when it's not their money.

Also (thanks in large part to internet commenters, many of whom on HN fit this archetype) people are afraid that a liability waver doesn't cover them when in reality unless there are aggravating circumstances a liability waver pretty much always caps your loss at the consult fee required to get your lawyer to tell the ambulance chaser to f off.

Hard (or impossible) to that as company... way way more paperwork.

I feel like there should be laws preventing anyone from destroying something someone else could use

We can't just throw everything away, no matter if it's cheaper, we will run out of resources if we don't recycle

What was the last thing you threw away that couldn't be used by someone else? Anyone at all?

Recycling can only slow the loss of raw materials, not prevent it. So we'll either run out eventually anyway or we won't run out anyway. Your argument doesn't work.

You know they didn't. This is just stupid government officials doing what they do best. Bet they patted themselves on the back afterwards for protecting their community. While in reality by restricting the supply they only increased the incentive for new miners to be built. So all this waste is for nothing and anyway it doesn't solve the problem that theft can be lucrative.

>wantonly destroyed

Normally these kinds of seized goods wind up at auction.

You'll have a hard time getting anyone to fess up to it for the same reasons you'll have a hard time getting MBA types to fess up to systematically working employees to the bone but there's schools of management theory that say government should engage in conspicuous waste and/or bad behavior as a way to project power.

Remember this next time you see five cop cars blocking three lanes for a fender bender with two cars parked on the shoulder.

I see most of them have the PSU cables hanging out and I doubt miners would by modular for extra expense.

As someone who ran miners like these, I'll just say that the PCI-E rails on these PSUs don't last - especially when they've been run in hot conditions that places like Malaysia are known for.

If we assume that cryptocurrency mining is bad and alternatives like PoS are better then the act of building 1000 cryptocurrency miners wasted those resources way before they were destroyed.

That's exactly what I was thinking - I wish they'd repurposed those power supplies and heatsinks into something more productive...

Now the poor Chinese kids who will likely end up salvaging the bits have an even harder time...

Making e-waste recycling harder doesn't really help anyone.

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