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Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

But why was the hospital throwing away what was essentially new high end systems that can run all the latest SW and operating systems? For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?

Are you by any chance in some super-rich part of the US? Because then no wonder your healthcare is so expensive when hospitals treat high end PCs as single use disposables. Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid-2000s.

Regardless, I'd love to just run into high end PCs being thrown away here and pick them up for free, but where I live I see people barely throwing away their value-line Dell/HP Core 2 Duo towers with audacity to ask for 25+ Euros for their e-waste with the classic "no lowballs, I know what I got" attitude.

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> For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?

I don't understand it either. Two scenarios make sense to me:

Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.' (There were about 100 i5 9th gen mini PCs (still OK), and 500 t640 thin clients in that same load.)

Less probable: some department got closed and cleaned out.

> Are you in some rich part of the US?

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Not particularly rich (rust belt), but healthcare is a significant part of the local economy. About 90% of healthcare here seems to run on HP, but Dells can appear.

> Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid 2000s.

My stomach turns seeing the dozens of 24" probably 1080p monitors we scrap every day. Pretty much all are significantly scratched when they come off the truck, otherwise reselling them might be good business.

>Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.'

Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe due to much lower purchasing power making the resale efforts of ~5 year old HW economically viable. I check the local "craigslist" often and I notice when a business is clearing house due to a flood of used HPs/Dells/Lenovos from a single user. However the list prices aren't remotely palpable to be good deals. I assume the person/business hired for clearing the house is marking them up significantly hoping to squeeze a big win from a mark.

Some of the tech companies I worked for here would first auction their older HW internally at every upgrade cycle to the employees before selling what was left to a clearing company, which makes me feel we're being robbed to be offered by employers to bid for their e-waste when in the US people find better stuff in the trash for free. Europoor indeed.

>otherwise reselling them might be good business

I assume those businesses don't bother reselling 1080p monitors and 2 year old PCs, and instead just throw them away, because the price of labor is so high in those parts of the US, that paying a full-time employee to take care of such resale tasks will cost them more money than they expect to make from the sale, so it's assumed to be cheaper and less hassle to just throw everything in the trash instead of wasting time on the used market dealing with tire-kickers just to gain what is essentially peanuts money for those businesses' bottom line.

Am I close with my assessment?

If an intern did it (or even a low paid full-time employee), one could easily turn a profit selling used equipment. (I work in the refurb department, reselling used stuff is literally my job!) 5 minutes per monitor @ $25/each = $300 per hour. You could sell to wholesalers for much less per unit, in exchange for not wasting time with random people.

I'm not sure how prevalent this practice is, but IT equipment is sometimes on a depreciation schedule. If an employee starts selling the company's PCs and monitors, an accountant will get very angry, because he told the government that the stuff is literally worthless, but it apparently isn't because it was sold for something. IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that's tax fraud. Once it's turned over to someone else (my company) for free, the valuation resets, or something.

Oh come on, stop felling sorry for yourself. I'm from one of those countries compared to which even Eastern Europe you offload hardware to is a paradise.

None of what you're describing is available here at all. I sometimes see Europeans willing to ship here (already very few) offer heavily used and scratched ThinkPads and Dells for money they weren't worth when they were new. Add at least $80 on top for shipping, and no warranty, you get what you get.

On the local market, you will find those Core 2 Duo with precisely the attitude you're describing, but at 2-4 times the cost.

So I buy everything new, which is expensive with our salaries, but we have no choice. At least new hardware is available now thanks to selling over the internet and improved logistics.

10 years ago you could only buy what was offered by local shops, which was always at least two generations behind, and at least twice as expensive as it was in the EU (forget the US).

For example, if things continued like this to this day, I'd estimate the newest CPU you could buy right now would be something like Ryzen 3600, at twice the cost it was in your country when it just came out. If we're lucky, maybe 7600 would already appear at a similar overprice.

I'm sure many parts of the planet are even in a worse position than we are.

Can you clarify how a 3600 is worth 2x its original cost and no one is already arbitraging the profit differential?

I fully believe you, but I want to _understand_ you.

> Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe

My company's policy is that retired laptops are destroyed. (I suppose properly wiping them or removing storage devices should be enough but for some reason it's not considered sufficient.)

There are indeed lots of second-hand former company laptops being sold, and some companies even specialize in refurbishing and selling them. I don't know what percentage ends up being recycled but it's definitely not 100 %. I'd assume the more security-oriented the organization gets, the more likely it might be to avoid recycling devices intact.

With that said, I haven't seen two-year-old high-end devices getting retired. But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.

> But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.

I suspect that had something to do with it. The Core Ultras came out of Dells, and as mentioned, the industry around here uses HP almost exclusively. (The rest of that load was HP, only about 1% were those Dells.) Some dogmatic system administrator probably said "We we are only supposed to use HP, get those Dells out of here!"

>For what reason? It just makes no sense to me.

They probably got some new garbage software where because of modern terrible programming practices, the requirements are very high.

Thus they need to replace the "old" hardware.

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