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Comment by benjamir | Hacker News Reader

Tank, or something like this: https://youtu.be/cD5dIyI7AoY

Done. Who says the tires have to be treated nicely?

Wondering about the legality of this. Police routinely destroy property of protestors and homeless people, but trucks are worth serious money.

Curious if the value of a truck exceeds the value of a human life that police routinely extinguish.

My understanding is that more extreme measures like this aren’t possible because the city has been left to deal with it, and all they have are towing trucks and towing contractors. The federal government would have to step in to make tanks or other heavy equipment available.

But at the point a commercial of licensed vehicle is illegally blocking downtown traffic for days, if they want to make it hard to remove there is no reason to gently remove the truck. Hell they can get a few acetylene torches and just start cutting.

Would a plasma cutter be able to permanently destroy the engines in each truck rapidly beyond repairability, so that they’re “disarmed” and can be relocated safely without malicious driver interference? I assume these are going to be taken out by demolition crane anyways, and it would provide a simple and immediate on-site tool to turn them into worthless scrap metal.

Destroying them out of spite sounds like a very effective way of turning a civil protest into an insurgency.

Let alone destroying the engine would have no effect on the air brakes

Not out of spite, but to protect the workers as they remove the trucks, which the article cited as a specific concern. It will have obvious ramifications in decreased value of the truck, but that’s an expected side effect of deploying it as a paramilitary blockade in a large city anyways.

Maybe I missed something, but the way I read it is that the danger is from the drivers and other protestors, not the trucks themselves. Disabling the engines would make it more difficult to move the trucks, not less.

No it wouldn't work. You'd have trucks with no engines and the brakes still locked. With that many trucks, your "worthless scrap metal" would be millions of dollars in damages.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-air-brake-handbook/...

Have you considered that in the US and in Canada, approximately 80% of all goods are transported by heavy trucks? With the supply chain crippled and broken in so many ways already, these people are simply standing up for their right to CHOOSE if they want to vaccinated or not. They don't want to cripple the economy. They aren't anti-vax; they are anti-mandate. They can stay home, unvaccinated, and lose their homes, trucks, and jobs, further shutting down the supply chain. Or they can stand for freedom, and limit government overreach. And go to work delivering food, medical supplies, building materials, fuel, and other products.

Yeah, and that's a reason to swing swastika flags... Maybe a lot of them are -- rightfully! -- frustrated by the working conditions, that doesn't mean it's all right to side with populists and fascists.

> Yeah, and that's a reason to swing swastika flags...

What percentage of protesters is swinging swastika flags?

I've not seen those. BTW, which ones are the fascists?

If you don't want the drivers storming away for relocation, you could just empty the fuel tanks

That would also remove essentially all potential for attacking workers. I like it far better than my idea. Good call.

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