Originally published at: Watch a bulldozer smash hundreds of NYC dirt bikes into scrap metal | Boing Boing
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I hate this kind of performative waste.
Load the bikes into semi trailers. Drive them several states away. Auction them. Add tens of thousands of dollars to the city’s budget while NOT wasting the time and materials that went into producing these bikes.
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The city only sells them to people with proof of insurance, would be a better performance and might get state laws changed.
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How very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very American. 
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Lame.
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I’d be interested to see some comparative research on people who read or were told about such an event taking place; people who saw pictures with captions; and people who either personally witnessed or saw tape on a sufficiently competent AV setup.
I’m not impressed by the policy rational; but it would not at all surprise me if Leader Man Strong Machine Smash Nuisance Enemy is something that grabs onto the part of our monkey brain that dissolves into blissful onenness while chanting idiocy at sporting events and concerts more strongly than one might expect if one is exposed to it in a sufficiently stimulating way.
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Agreed. Dirtbikes and ATVs don’t have a place in the city but there are plenty of places in the country where they do.
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There appear to be a lot of normal street bikes in there. What’s the rationale for destroying them?
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I wonder if part of the crushing is due to the high likelihood that many of these are stolen. Would the city get caught up in legal trouble for selling stolen property?
Definitely some kind of law enforcement fetishization in there either way.
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Apparently easier to get, carry and use a gun than a dirtbike in NYC. No insurance required.
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I am torn between my strong dislike for what @MononymousSean aptly calls performative waste, and my love of seeing an awesome D9R Cat doin’ stuff. Those machines are the size of a small building and chock full of amazing engineering. A shame to use it for this, though.
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Certainly seems resources could have been allocated better.
Also, checkered flag is for the END of the race…
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The track-layout is wonderful; very 40k.
Well, for those bikes, it certainly was the end of their racing days.
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Performative destruction is very common throughout the world
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<nerd> That’s Caterpillar’s patented High Drive. By moving the drive sprocket up like that, it no longer has to carry the weight of the machine, nor move with the suspension. That allows more torque and more reliability from the mechanism. It also gives more space for bigger planetary gears, which again increases reliability. It also improves serviceability, as many drive train repairs can be made without removing outboard hydraulics, blades, or sometimes even the track chain. Overall a very clever design. </nerd>
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The screaming you hear is the computer gaming people who can’t find reasonably priced GPUs.
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[impressed by nerd knowledge] Thank you for sharing that. [/impressed by nerd knowledge]
Indeed. That is a sad vision of techecution.
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At risk of pedantry that rectangular aluminum extrusion with a fan on each end and a small box clinging to one side, with external 12v PSU is very likely to be one of the older model Bitmain Antminer products. With the exception of a lightweight Xilinx Zynq(ARM core plus some FPGA gates) on the control board that handles basic housekeeping and network configuration the whole thing is nothing but SHA-256 ASICs.
A waste that it was ever built and operated; but almost wholly bereft of any use outside its original application(and, unless it’s one of the latest models, probably negative value even there). Since bitcoin mining doesn’t require particularly high data rates to/from the hashing units it isn’t even a good fit for (niche; but not nonexistent) applications like offloading ZFS checksums, since those would require high throughput of actual data to the ASICs.
Given low enough labor costs it might have made sense to separate the fans, boards, and aluminum before crushing(I am not familiar with most of their models; but on the S9i specimens I’ve seen the fans are surprisingly nice Avvid Thermalloy units, albeit ones that have had a hard life); but overall those things make the Irish Elk look like a versatile generalist.
Etherium miners, on the other hand…
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It was cool when Jerry Reed did it. The cops? Not so much.
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