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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s less impressive than you think. Most of the ocean is incredibly deep and the bottom isn’t that interesting. You really need to be (relatively) close-ish to shore and (relatively) shallow to see what most people think of as interesting.

In Florida, where I grew up, the state would sink old barges, tires, cement tubes left over from construction projects, etc. to make artificial reefs. Those were pretty cool because they were near shore and attracted the whole food chain from algae and coral all the way up to sharks and other apex predators. Do that in the middle of the ocean and you just add a new pile of junk that maybe a couple tiny shrimp and sightless fish call home.

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I think you’re probably broadly right, because containers won’t be very useful, but in different circumstances things can be more complex than “a couple tiny shrimp and sightless fish”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

> In Florida, where I grew up, the state would sink old barges, tires, cement tubes left over from construction projects, etc. to make artificial reefs.

On the other hand, some of those projects were a net negative for the environment, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef

That would be a good use for all of the oligarch super-yachts they're seizing. For one thing, they can't be sold. The market is going to be flooded with super-yachts. For another, nobody who wants to buy a super-yacht will want to disclose where their money is coming from, or who the actual owner is going to be.

In The Ministry For the Future (World War Z style novel about what the near future might look like as climate change really takes hold) there’s a group that torpedos ships with shipping containers and uses drones to take down private jets and cargo planes. The idea being that if they do it enough, demand will dry up.

It’s a very interesting book.

I like to brainstorm "engineering black swan events", and thought it would be interesting to use torpedoes/unmanned submersible IEDs/fertilizer-filled bulk freighters to attack major container ports, while simultaneously shorting the stocks of the publicly-traded companies that own/operate them. They seem like a very vulnerable part of the world's economy/supply chain.

Most ships aren't worth the cost to decontaminate and sink due to various environmental regulations. Some are reasonable and some are not.

I assume most of the superyacht will eventually go back to their owners where in relations with Russia are normalized if they have not deteriorated into worthlessness

That's probably the worst possible scenario. Even a series of accidental fires would be a better outcome.

Why is that? Giving them back wouldn't particularly bother me.

I think worst case is paying Russia cash value for the stolen yachts

Giving them back would reinforce Russia's belief that it can commit any kind of crime with impunity, which would then result in it becoming even more aggressive.

Why not just sell them cheaper?

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