Don't Buy Motor Boats, Sail Instead. Motor Boats Are Expensive to Operate. What Happens to Abandoned Boats in New York?

 

"A Parks Department official scours the shoreline looking for vessels that owners left behind. There are hundreds of them.

The city’s shipwreck hunter, Nate Grove, described his finds like this: “No pirate ships, no treasure chests, no doubloons, no corpses.”

He has found what he expected to find, pleasure boats, 78 in the last 12 months, mostly 20- to 30-footers whose owners probably couldn’t afford them anymore. The owners left them where they ran aground or sank in not-very-deep water, and simply walked away.

Grove is the Parks Department official behind a push to clear abandoned boats from around the city — vessels that have been left on or near the shoreline.

There are a lot of derelict boats — more than 800, the city says. There is also a lot of shoreline, 520 miles in all, which Grove likes to point out is more than the shorelines of Boston, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle combined.

Almost a third of the city’s long shoreline is parkland, which means that Grove has jurisdiction through the Parks Department office responsible for marine debris disposal. And because 12 public marinas are on city parkland, the department started a vessel turn-in program for people to surrender their unwanted boats before they become derelict.

Partially submerged wrecks pose obvious risks to navigation and to what the Parks Department calls “waterfront enjoyers” like swimmers and surfers. But Parks Department officials say that the vessels are also environmental hazards. Most pleasure boats have fiberglass hulls, which can break down and release microplastics into the water. And oil and fuel can leak out of tanks as they rust, upsetting sensitive marine ecosystems.

Grove isn’t expecting to find the likes of the General Slocum or Captain Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley. “I don’t want to make this sound more romantic than it is,” Grove said. “Rare is the really interesting craft.”

But when it comes to recreational vessels, “I see the life cycle” of the boat, he said.

Someone probably bought a boat at a discount, perhaps from a neighbor who wanted to unload it, he said. “Then they find out gas costs a lot,” he explained before repeating the nautical quip that the word “boat” is an acronym for “bust out another thousand.”

As a pleasure boat ages, he said, “You can’t just find a cheap mechanic — these things are costly.” And a boat is “the first thing that gets cut when their budget gets tight.”

Worse, if the engine has conked out, “there’s no resale value,” he said. The fiberglass hull means that there’s no scrap metal to salvage and sell.

“People can scratch the identification off their boat,” hoping to keep the vessel from being traced back, and then abandon it, he said. That is a crime, but one that is not often prosecuted. The Army Corps of Engineers can haul away abandoned vessels that block major navigation channels like the East and Hudson Rivers, and the United States Coast Guard can move recreational boats that leak fuel or obstruct rights of way.

The city began cleaning up marine burial grounds after Hurricane Sandy, first with a $2 million federal grant that focused on the removal of more than 50 boats in places like Eastchester Bay in the Bronx and College Point in Queens. Grove brought an urgency to the effort that included updating city regulations on when and how abandoned eyesores could be removed.

“We’re a maritime city — that’s what made Manhattan Manhattan back in the day,” Grove said. “Yet what I found was a woefully behind-the-times set of regulations and procedures for dealing with recreational craft. We’re stuck in the 1800s, when wrecks were referred to as something worth something, when it was presumed they had valuable cargo, rather than reflecting the current reality, when it’s recreational craft that litter our shorelines.”

In January, the city hauled away a boat that was half-buried off Breezy Point in Queens. “Everyone knew about it, coming into the channel, a sailboat almost completely covered in sand,” Grove said. “We had to get heavy equipment on the beach. It was more of an on-land removal than in the water.” [1]

1. What Happens to Abandoned Boats in New York?: New York Today. Barron, James.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 23, 2025.

Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams

 

"In “More Everything Forever,” the science journalist Adam Becker subjects Silicon Valley’s “ideology of technological salvation” to critical scrutiny.

MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, by Adam Becker

Elon Musk predicts that a million Earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years — not just for the exciting adventure but as a matter of survival: “We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a space-faring civilization & extending life to other planets.”

Not so fast, says the science journalist Adam Becker. As he puts it in his smart and wonderfully readable new book, “More Everything Forever,” life on Mars is bound to be worse than life on our own planet, however much ecological havoc we have wreaked.

Becker, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is the author of a previous (equally readable) book about quantum theory, clearly lays out the many problems of getting to, and surviving on, the Red Planet. There is the not insignificant issue of enormous amounts of surface radiation. There is also the not insignificant issue of the toxic dust. Exposure to Martian air will boil the saliva off your tongue before it asphyxiates you.

And even if astronauts manage to build a system of pressurized tunnels for living underground — a very big if, given the difficulties of getting astronauts there, let alone construction materials — the number of people living in such bunkers would have to be pretty small. They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth, presumably via Musk’s company SpaceX. “Even the air the Mars residents breathe would cost money,” Becker writes. It sounds like a miserable way to live. “Mars would make Antarctica look like Tahiti.”

The plan to colonize Mars is just one of the fantastical scenarios Becker writes about in “More Everything Forever,” which traces the various plans advanced by billionaire tech entrepreneurs in their grand bids to “save humanity.” From artificial intelligence to colonizing outer space, the animating force behind such projects is what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation.” The ideas it propagates have three main features, he says. First, they are reductive. Second, they are profitable, aligning neatly with the tech industry’s imperative of perpetual growth. Third, and most important, they offer transcendence — the promise of an imagined end that justifies blowing through any actual limits, including conventional morality.

The futuristic visions that flow from this ideology are binary: paradise or annihilation. Becker draws an incisive portrait of the debates over artificial intelligence, showing how A.I.’s champions and doomsayers occupy two sides of the same coin. On one side are techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil, who predicts a day when all-powerful machines will eliminate poverty and disease and allow us to “live as long as we want.” The doomsayers, by contrast, worry about “A.I. alignment,” or the prospect that such machines will one day take our jobs or even kill us all. An influential thought experiment among the doomsayers involves a “superintelligence” whose sole goal is to manufacture as many paper clips as possible; eventually this creature turns everything into paper clips.

Toggling between dystopian warnings and promises of deliverance are the tech entrepreneurs. Becker cites Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, who has proposed that his company capture the wealth created by A.I. and ameliorate the socioeconomic fallout by redistributing part of that wealth to the public. “The changes coming are unstoppable,” Altman once wrote, yet “the future can be almost unimaginably great.”

Becker argues that Silicon Valley’s preoccupations have created their own kind of warped ethics. “The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more — to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify nearly any action they might want to take — all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.”

While tech moguls make passing mention of how A.I. will bring untold abundance, the grubbier problems of the here and now typically get less attention in Silicon Valley than spectacular thought experiments on “existential risk,” however far-fetched. If you’re a billionaire who has been richly rewarded for your contrarian moonshots, why waste time analyzing stubbornly ordinary problems, like poverty and inequality, when you could be dreaming about colonizing the galaxy and thwarting runaway paper-clip machines?

And so Silicon Valley has given a lot of money to the effective altruism community, which has provided scholarly legitimacy to tech billionaires’ hobbyhorses. Effective altruists encourage the use of reason and data for making philanthropic decisions, but Becker highlights how some of their most influential thinkers have come up with truly bizarre “longtermist” calculations by multiplying minuscule probabilities of averting a hypothetical cataclysm with gargantuan estimates of “future humans” saved.

One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it “far more” valuable “than the near-future benefits” of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. “For a strong longtermist,” Becker writes, “investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.”

Tech billionaires’ pet projects can sound deliriously futuristic, but lurking underneath them all is an obsession that is very old. It’s the primal fear of death, encased in a shiny new rocket ship. Becker quotes other writers who have noticed how Silicon Valley, with its omnivorous appetite, has turned existential angst into yet another input. “Space has become the ultimate imperial ambition,” the scholar Kate Crawford writes in “Atlas of A.I.,” “symbolizing an escape from the limits of Earth, bodies and regulation.” In “God, Human, Animal, Machine” (2021), Meghan O’Gieblyn describes how technology took over the domain of religion and philosophy: “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”

The “ideology of technological salvation” that Becker identifies can therefore be understood, too, as a desperate attempt to deal with despair. Amid his sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion. He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.

“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” Becker writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.” [1]

1.  Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams: Nonfiction. Szalai, Jennifer.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 23, 2025.

Elonas Muskas perspėja, kad dėl retųjų žemių magnetų trūkumo gali užtrukti Teslos robotų pristatymas

“Šį mėnesį Kinijos sustabdytas magnetų, kurių sudėtyje yra sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų, eksportas paveikė Tesla planus gaminti Optimus robotus.

Elonas Muskas, Tesla generalinis direktorius, antradienį pareiškė, kad Kinijos sustabdytas tam tikrų magnetų eksportas turėjo įtakos jo planams kurti humanoidinius robotus, o tai yra aiškiausias ženklas, kad Kinijos veiksmai pradeda daryti įtaką stambioms Amerikos įmonėms.

Kinija šį mėnesį sustabdė vadinamųjų sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų ir iš jų pagamintų magnetų eksportą į bet kurią šalį, atsakydama už prezidento Trumpo padidintus muitus kiniškoms prekėms iš JAV. Kinijos vyriausybė nustojo leisti siuntas tol, kol nebus sukurta eksporto licencijų sistema.

Kinija gamina visą pasaulio sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų atsargas iš rūdos, kasamos Kinijoje ir Mianmare, ir 90 procentų magnetų, pagamintų iš šių metalų. Japonija gamina likusius magnetus, tačiau naudoja žaliavas iš Kinijos.

Retų žemių magnetai naudojami elektros varikliuose, kurie turi tilpti kompaktiškose erdvėse. Robotai turi daug mažų elektros variklių, paprastai po vieną ar daugiau kiekvienai jungčiai, kurių kiekvienam reikia magneto. Sunkieji retųjų žemių metalai daugumoje šių magnetų apsaugo juos nuo perkaitimo ir veikimo sutrikimų, kai varikliai yra mažose erdvėse.

Retųjų žemių magnetai yra iki 15 kartų galingesni už įprastinius tokio pat dydžio geležinius magnetus. Jei magneto medžiagoje yra sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų pėdsakų, jis gali išlaikyti savo magnetinę jėgą, net esant vandens virinimo temperatūrai.

Ponas Muskas antradienį per „Tesla“ uždarbio pokalbį sakė, kad bendrovės „Optimus“ humanoidiniai robotai savo rankose turi elektrinius variklius, kurie veikia uždaroje erdvėje ir reikalauja specialių magnetų.

„Daugiau įtakos tam turi tiekimo grandinė, iš esmės Kinija reikalauja eksporto licencijos, kad būtų galima išsiųsti bet kur su magnetais, todėl mes tai stengiamės spręsti su Kinija“, – sakė jis.

Magnetų tiekimo trūkumas gali sulėtinti Optimus robotų gamybą, sakė p. Muskas.

Tesla investuoja milijardus dolerių į Optimus robotus, kurie, pasak p. Musko, kada nors atliks daugybę kasdienių funkcijų.

Praėjusį rudenį vykusiame renginyje jis parodė robotus, tiekiančius gėrimus ir iškraunančius bakalėjos prekes iš automobilio.

Ponas Muskas taip pat pareiškė, kad jis sumažins laiką, kurį praleidžia, būdamas prezidento Trumpo patarėju, kad daugiau dėmesio būtų skirta Teslai, kuri pranešė apie drastišką pelno sumažėjimą.

Automobiliams, gamykliniams robotams, raketoms, išmaniosioms bomboms, slaptiems naikintuvams ir daugeliui kitų gaminių taip pat reikalingi retųjų žemių magnetai, iš dalies pagaminti iš sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų.

Yang Jie, Šanchajaus advokatų kontoros Huiye eksporto kontrolės teisininkas, sakė, kad Kinijos taisyklės reikalauja, kad Prekybos ministerija per 45 darbo dienas nuo jo paskelbimo, ty balandžio 4 d., parengtų eksporto kontrolės protokolą.

Tačiau, atsižvelgiant į pastaruoju metu tarp abiejų šalių tvyrančią įtampą, eksporto licencijų išdavimas siuntoms į JAV gali užtrukti daug ilgiau, perspėjo jis. „Šeši mėnesiai retųjų žemių eksportui yra mano asmeninis greičiausio laiko įvertinimas – tikrasis laikas gali būti daug daugiau, nei šeši mėnesiai“, – sakė jis.

Ne visi humanoidinių robotų gamintojai gali būti taip paveikti, kaip Tesla.

Jonathanas Hurstas, „Agility Robotics“, kito amerikiečių humanoidinių robotų gamintojo, vyriausiasis robotų pareigūnas, teigė, kad robotai gali būti sukurti taip, kad jiems būtų kuo mažiau magnetų, pagamintų iš sunkiųjų retųjų žemių metalų.

Agility sukūrė savo robotus su šiek tiek skirtingomis nuo žmogaus proporcijomis, nei Optimus robotai. Tai suteikia daugiau vietos elektros varikliams, sakė J. Hurstas. Dėl to daugelio „Agility“ robotų varikliai gali neperkaisti.

Nuo balandžio 4 dienos draudimo Kinijos muitinės agentai atidžiai tikrina eksportą, kad įsitikintų, jog jokie magnetai su sunkiaisiais retųjų žemių metalais neįleidžiami iš šalies, sakė pramonės vadovai.” [1]

Gerai, kad tadžikai gali viską daryti Lietuvoje. Taigi, mums nereikia robotų, magnetų ir Kinijos. Lietuvos užsienio reikalų bosai iš antro aukšto gali šlapintis į kiniškas ryžių lėkštes vien tam, kad pasauliui pareklamuotų, kokie drąsūs lietuviai.

 

1.  Elon Musk Warns Rare Earth Magnet Shortage May Delay Tesla’s Robots. Bradsher, Keith.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 23, 2025.