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Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system
- schiffern 8mo agoI realize there's near zero probability, but the mention of mysterious Japanese gold made my mind immediately go to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita%27s_gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita%27s_gold
- userbinator 8mo agoMy mind went to the founder of Bitcoin.
- argee 8mo agoThe actual founder of Bitcoin cannot touch their money without causing a lot of panic in the market. I believe Coinbase's 2021 S-1 prospectus explicitly listed "the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto... or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins" as a business risk factor.
- yreg 8mo agoI would expect Satoshi to make a lot of money on later wallets that are not identified as theirs.
- bparsons 8mo agoNot sure why the NSA would pay for a Japanese water system.
- idontwantthis 8mo agoI didn’t know the gold in cryptomomicon was inspired by a real thing!
- quote 8mo agoThere‘s also the Awa Maru: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Awa_Maru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Awa_Maru
- tmaly 8mo agoThere is a great book on this topic. My in-laws gave me a sword that supposedly had a map to one the gold locations. But today it is quite a bit of myth. I do believe the explorer did find a gold statue as there were pictures. But the rest of the claims of gold I am skeptical about. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson does a good fictional take on it.
- throwaway5752 8mo agoThat is a bad idea. Hydrocarbon polymers like PEX, ferrous alloys, and concrete would be much more practical.
- bombcar 8mo agoI think people are missing the joke, but gold sewer pipes is amusing to consider.
- throw_gold 8mo agoWell played.
- moi2388 8mo agoIn fairness, after hundreds of years of people trying to turn lead into gold, this might be one of the more practical attempts.
- serf 8mo ago45lbs of gold would get you a ten foot-ish 1 in ID plumbing pipe. ... and we already have a problem with copper theft.
- Animats 8mo agoAnd that's Osaka. Osaka's population peaked around 2017.[1] The only major city in Japan not on a downtrend is Yokohama, which is in the Greater Tokyo area. Keeping up all the infrastructure as the population declines is tough. That's one of the challenges of this century for the developed world. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/japan/osaka https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/japan/osaka
- Pay08 8mo agoWhy is it difficult? I assume the proportion of infrastructure experts would stay the same.
- chmod775 8mo agoBecause you now have more infrastructure than people to pay for and maintain it. As population density decreases, the people that remain are using oversized infrastructure. The relationship between required maintenance and amount of usage is far from linear. For a lot of infrastructure being underused means additional maintenance procedures become necessary. A way to combat this is to move people and condense the population again, abandoning areas in the process and pretty much writing them off. Not optimal, but it'll help.
- Pay08 8mo agoI've assumed that moving people in order to consolidate infrastructure use was already modus operandi in countries that need to worry about these things in the short term, but it makes sense that it doesn't work that way.
- zulban 8mo agoIf your roommates leave your rent doesn't go down. Infrastructure can't be trivially cut in half.
- userbinator 8mo agoMore than 20% of Japan's water pipes have passed their legal service life of 40 years, according to local media That is rather low. The US still has some wooden(!) water pipes in use, as well as other plumbing installed in the late 19th/early 20th century.
- skirge 8mo agowood is better than lead
- dcrazy 8mo agoThis is the reason that installing a 2-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco took several years. They took advantage of the opportunity to replace the hollowed out logs that had served as one of the city’s most critical water mains since the 1906 quake.
- AdamN 8mo agoAnd people will still say 'Just painting a bus lane for a few miles cost $20MM!!! Uggah duggah' :-/
- avadodin 8mo agogoing straight from mycotoxins to microplastics without going through lead speedrun
- doublerabbit 8mo agoYou owe me a coffee, cheers for the fountain of liquid out my nose. How much for a water feature?
- RupertSalt 8mo agoWhen the sections are stored above ground, they can make for some really gnarly skate parks. You've heard of the half-pipe, now see the attempts at full-pipe!
- sharkjacobs 8mo ago
- worthless-trash 8mo agoI mean, the mitsubishi logo, makes it pretty obvious who the donor is. Edit: i mean, we can't possibly figure out who donated, thank you kind donor.
- jogu 8mo agoMitsubishi Group has a lot of companies, including a bank, so no the logo doesn't say anything about who donated it.
- Hamuko 8mo agoDoesn’t that just mean that they’ve been manufactured by Mitsubishi Materials Corporation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Materials
- worthless-trash 8mo agoAnd I imagine they could trivially track them, like most modern gold bars sold/collected in this volume.
- yreg 8mo agoThere is no mystery, the donor just donated the money anonymously. All that means is that the city won't publish the name of the donor. It doesn't mean "no one knows who has paid for this".
- worthless-trash 8mo agoAh, thanks for the correction.
- arjie 8mo agoIt is an outrageously cool thing to give money for an infrastructure project. They must have some faith that the government can deliver on something with $3.5 million. That would be two public toilets in SF, one toilet of which actually cost $300k in paperwork and so on despite two local businessmen signing up to have the work done.
- shswkna 8mo agoI do not understand the downvotes. It is a rational response to bureaucratic excesses worldwide in public procurement. It is a plea to more common sense, to more down to earth thinking and decisive action in the public sphere. This is not a call to ignore processes. But it is a call for civil servants to respect that they are exactly that. In service, and their ambition should be to do it well and efficiently. The downvotes are an expression of those that think civil servants should be protected from such sentiment.
- vasco 8mo agoYou went from not understanding them to knowing exactly what they were an expression of pretty quickly!
- huflungdung 8mo ago[dead]
- zaptheimpaler 8mo agoHere is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] : ---- I want to both be polite about the fact and be honest about it. We, the United States of America, through our elected representatives and through civil servants who represent our interests, committed monstrous crimes in 2021, which are against the laws, traditions, and constitution of the United States of America, including aggressively redlining the provision of life-saving medical care in a way which was designed to cause racially discriminatory outcomes with the provision of medical care. Just throwing that out there as a statement. With that caveat, one of the things that we spent tens of millions of dollars on was that we want your consultancy to write a website which will enforce residency restrictions. A residency restriction is essentially, when we are under a supply constraint, there must be some method to decide which people get it, and some people don’t. We have, in our infinite wisdom as the government, decided that equity, equity, equity is one primary thing that we are focusing on. A thing that we think would be contrary to equity is allowing anyone who shows up at the clinic to receive the life-saving medication. The thing that we are specifically worried about is relatively well-resourced people from advantaged demographics will use their superior access to transportation and information to travel to clinics which have the vaccine available and take that instead of that vaccine being used by someone in the local community who we intend the vaccine to go to. Therefore, to get an appointment to go to the vaccine, you will need to go to the county’s website, which is delivered by Accenture or similar, and prove to the website that you reside within one of the zip codes that we have allocated for those vaccine doses. Only then will you get the ticket, virtual or otherwise, which allows you to go to the pharmacy and get the vaccine. We spent tens of millions of dollars on that, targeting essentially a four-month window where we were acutely supply constrained. But we did not turn off residency restrictions on the websites after that four month window because we physically had no way to do that because that was not in the bid documents in some cases. ... ---- Just one of the many ways that rigid institutions that behave more like stupid robots than things capable of dynamic decision-making cause immense harm. This is not a rant against equity btw, only against insanity. [1] https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca
- anonymous344 8mo ago25 gold bars ..20 gold bars 100 yens we received would be un any other country, but not japan
- NedF 8mo ago[dead]
- ehnto 8mo ago> Osaka recorded more than 90 cases of water pipe leaks under its roads in the 2024 fiscal year, according to the city's waterworks bureau. I must admit, that seems pretty small given how many roads and many people said infrastructure supports. Still a good idea to get ahead of maintenance, but I am pretty impressed. I wonder if Japan is suffering the same issue many western countries are facing, where regulation and wages are becoming too high to get much done with that amount of money. In my country, I would be surprised if you could replace a single roads water pipes for 3.6million.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago$3.6m given to an outsourcing contractor whose cousin is on the council, would get you a couple of miles of pipe in the UK, by the time you have paid off all the consultants
- stevezsa8 8mo agoThe city has 3m people according to the article. Even if only 10% are tax payers... all they need is a little over $10 per tax payer to equal the donation. I mean the donation is cool. And will hopefully get the residents thinking about how they can also help their city. But I can't help thinking how it's just a small band-aid on a city that can't manage it's infrastructure budget as needed.
- thenthenthen 8mo agoWow! Thats wild, I thought Osaka was on par with Tokyo? It certainly feels so. Im very confused. Im just returning from a 1.8 million city in China, thats considered a village.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoEven the Yakuza are sick of shitty infrastructure.
- linhns 8mo agoSatoshi, is that you?
- prewett 8mo agoA pile of gold always reminds me of an Asimov short story, which began by a guy offering 100k credits of gold bars to a respected movie producer to make a film of questionable artist merit. "He didn't need the credits. He wasn't sure he didn't need the gold."
- m463 8mo agoReminds me of Harris Rosen, who sponsored kids in florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangelo_Park,_Florida#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangelo_Park,_Florida#Educatio... But it had all kinds of positive unexpected consequences. Wonder what other positive things will happen in osaka?
- HardwareLust 8mo agoI wonder why gold and not crypto? I guess the Yakuza is still pretty old-school.
- bdangubic 8mo agocause gold has real value and crypto has imaginary value?