- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
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Oh so that’s why you can’t buy them anymore, people are using them as microcontrollers.
Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They’re not the best thing for those use cases, but they’re far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).
When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.
It wasn’t just that they placed orders in advance. The pi foundation literally told people it was prioritizing those customers over anyone else. Kinda shitty IMO, considering the reason the pi was built in the first place.
I’m not well versed on the details surrounding this, but it sounds like Pi pivoted to supply businesses during the chip shortage, instead of direct to consumer in the more hobbyist space.
That seems like a win win, well within moral business practice.
Yes, Pi was founded (afaik) as a cheap minimalist PC. No thrills or bullshit, with a strong moral stance on making a barebones PC available to all.
Pivoting to help keep a global chip shortage from causing a global collapse of anything needing simple circuit boards isn’t evil. It’s helping everyone get through potentially a lot worse than not having access to a mostly hobbyist device. And it probably meant they could use their own impacted supply line in the most efficient way possible.
Hopefully the consumer Pi isn’t lost for good, but this seems far from corporate greed, but a necessary concession during a global disaster.
“When there were”, implying you can find a pi4 in stock right now that isn’t from a scalper
I bought one from a microcenter two months ago. They were out of 4gb but had dozens of 8gb
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
Corporations be like:
🐰
👉👉
Companies can just dump shit wherever when they’re done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?
🌎👨🚀🔫👩🚀
It’s not abandoned property unless the finder doesn’t know who it belongs to.
If the name of the company is on the scooter, it is mislaid property, not abandoned property.
The classic bar exam question on this involves the finder of a bag of money. In one hypothetical, it’s a plain canvas bag. In another, it has the name of a bank on the bag.
When the name is there, you have to give it back. The finder only gets to keep it if after legal notice and a waiting period, the owner fails to reclaim it. In most states there is a statute on this, and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.
honestly, I would too. even though supplies are starting to bounce back (mainly in the USA, and I’m not in the USA), a free Pi is a free Pi. I generally can find uses for more pi’s…
When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it’s a win win for the police.
What if the “bag of money” didn’t have any money in it at all, and the cost of recovering and properly disposing of the “bag of money” cost the legal owners more than what the bag and it’s contents are worth?
Oh, sure, it comes down to knowledge of the facts. If the owner manifests an intention not to recover it, then it is abandoned. But if you just find the scooter, or even if the company has said it’s going out of business, that’s not the same as having knowledge that the owner has no intent to retrieve the property.
Counterpoint: all of that is irrelevant if the legal owners don’t care enough to sue you.
and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like “oh yeah… yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period”.
Official protocols aside; this is exactly what would happen lmao
Oh yeah, I don’t know firsthand but I’d bet it’s pretty common.
It’s a legitimate salvage.
Remember the Cant!
I am that guy
Edit: someone doesn’t know the best quote: https://youtu.be/4dn76ZPt_Y0
Let’s go shuck some scoots, boys!
That was my first thought, get a few of them and create yourself a scootermox cluster 😂
Can we just rip the software out and have a free electric scooter?
Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?
Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.
deleted by creator
in Germany it would count as theft and destroying of property of others even if it’s abandoned.
Technically it’s theft in the US too, but the owner doesn’t exist anymore so no one’s going after you (assuming cops don’t see you)
What oppressed society do you live in where an item abandoned in the streets isn’t fair game? Does your realm not know the law of “finders keepers”??
Back in the day when we used to be able to just leave our bikes anywhere around town and expect them to still be there, the one token black kid got accused by an adult I didn’t know of stealing my essentially abandoned bike that I told him he could borrow and what it looked like and where I left it. That kinda just stuck with me for the rest of my life. It also clearly stuck with some of the other kids because a bunch of them kept saying shit about Tyrone stealing my bike and that wasn’t even his name…
Self-hosted scooter!
So that’s where all the damn Pi4s went.
Well, they sure as fuck didn’t go to the hobbyist market, we’ve been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.
