alt.hn

2/20/2026 at 4:27:51 AM

Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ew5jlqz87o

by tartoran

2/20/2026 at 6:35:55 AM

It 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.

by arjie

2/20/2026 at 10:13:23 AM

Japan, a culture so public-spirited that even the local Yakuza decide to contribute to the plumbing.

by pjc50

2/20/2026 at 11:55:49 AM

There's a pattern where criminal organizations fill governance gaps rather than starting as genuine governments. The Yakuza did this opportunistically at certain historical moments. Hamas is a similar example (not a criminal organisation, but..) , allthough they are more of a institution-building than the Yakuza ever was.

by ArnoVW

2/20/2026 at 1:14:53 PM

Mafias generally fill the same functions of the government but for the underworld: providing "protection", extracting "taxes", enforcing rules via the use of violence, and so on.

by dudefeliciano

2/20/2026 at 6:20:48 PM

[dead]

by knowitnone3

2/20/2026 at 12:36:09 PM

Probably the best example of this are American mafias.

by Pay08

2/20/2026 at 12:42:29 PM

Yes, it’s a big reason why they have always tended to be based out of immigrant communities - those were excluded from mainstream culture, governance, etc.

If you were mainstream you didn’t need the mafia - you were already the gov’t, the police, etc.

by lazide

2/20/2026 at 2:09:58 PM

Hamas, the head-chopping, throw-opposition-off-of-rooftops and slaughter civilians, Hamas..?

I must be misreading.

by simianparrot

2/20/2026 at 5:45:53 PM

Hamas and also Isis performed the functions of local government in their controlled areas.

by pjc50

2/20/2026 at 1:38:44 PM

Plot twist: the donation is from the owner of the company doing the infra project with the intention to launder money.

by tessierashpool9

2/20/2026 at 7:48:38 PM

1) I never bought/sold gold, but AFAIK, that doesn't need to be laundered.

2) Even if the company receives the money, they must still do the work. Only the profit minus taxes is recovered from the total donated value.

by M95D

2/20/2026 at 7:08:25 AM

They likely wouldn’t even accept the money because it’s in gold bars, and they wouldn’t be able to prove its source.

by zaptheimpaler

2/20/2026 at 11:28:17 AM

weird how contributing to your community is "outrageously cool".

How times have changed

by ionwake

2/20/2026 at 6:46:55 AM

I 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.

by shswkna

2/20/2026 at 6:53:01 AM

You went from not understanding them to knowing exactly what they were an expression of pretty quickly!

by vasco

2/20/2026 at 10:30:29 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

2/20/2026 at 7:12:30 AM

Here 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

by zaptheimpaler

2/20/2026 at 8:02:53 AM

This is real and there's no way to get these problems down to zero. However I do believe that the best first step is to make sure the government has more employees and fewer contractors. It will cost more year to year but the delivery will be much closer to what the constituents want and over time I would expect it to save money as well. With that said it's not a silver bullet as that group of people needs to be properly motivated, they still will need specialist help from consultancies, and there may be institutional capture anyway.

by AdamN

2/20/2026 at 7:52:21 AM

The lone ranger donor route feels severely suboptimal, unless perhaps if the donor is a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.

Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Even if say $1M goes to the campaign and NGO bloat, that’s still way more pipe money.

by cyode

2/20/2026 at 8:39:16 AM

> Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund.

Idk man. Thing is where i live we are already crowdfunding to maintain our pipes. It is called local taxes and water utility bills. So if anyone were to ask me for more money for the same task i’m already paying not insubstantial sums for I would be very cross with them. It is just not a good look.

Now i don’t know about Japan. Maybe they don’t pay taxes and utility bills. Somehow doubt it, but who knows.

by krisoft

2/20/2026 at 10:26:04 AM

The lone ranger may have actually done something optimal but indirect. There is a lot of press that went global pointing out real problems. Japanese are proud people, this might actually help direct public funds to solve the problems.

by fhub

2/20/2026 at 2:53:03 PM

>a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.

Not exactly, $3.5M would be a very small share of their net worth . . .

by fuzzfactor

2/20/2026 at 7:48:17 AM

Russia level of inefficiency in infrastructure implementation.

by carabiner

2/20/2026 at 11:53:45 AM

Of course they have faith - the donor is likely the prime contractor, doing a bit of casual circular accounting while doing a charitable donation tax writedown - or just some plain old fashioned laundry.

It’s hard to see another reason for the format of the donation.

by madaxe_again

2/20/2026 at 12:01:43 PM

So cynical. Japanese culture is peculiar. Gold is anonymous.

by Hnrobert42

2/20/2026 at 7:01:08 AM

"would put it to good use - including tackling the deterioration of water pipes"

There is your faith in action. Zero concrete promise, no accountability.

by rester324

2/20/2026 at 7:03:06 AM

* In the culture that also produced this comment. This is not a universal problem, just a societies unable to produce a high trust environment problem.

by 21asdffdsa12

2/20/2026 at 7:09:36 AM

[flagged]

by rester324

2/20/2026 at 2:58:59 PM

[flagged]

by rester324

2/20/2026 at 5:55:38 AM

More 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.

by userbinator

2/20/2026 at 6:10:25 AM

This 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.

by dcrazy

2/20/2026 at 9:32:04 AM

going straight from mycotoxins to microplastics without going through lead speedrun

by avadodin

2/20/2026 at 11:46:14 AM

You owe me a coffee, cheers for the fountain of liquid out my nose. How much for a water feature?

by doublerabbit

2/20/2026 at 8:04:10 AM

And people will still say 'Just painting a bus lane for a few miles cost $20MM!!! Uggah duggah' :-/

by AdamN

2/20/2026 at 6:49:13 AM

Urban trees in Montreal (and presumably other cities) only survive through the summer because of the water they get from leaky pipes.

> Maple trees drink about 50 litres of water every day, and it seems some of their hydration is coming from Montreal’s crumbling infrastructure.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/montreals-leaky-pipe...

by sharkjacobs

2/20/2026 at 12:40:20 PM

I just realised I've never actually thought about how urban trees get water. I never see them get watered and I assume that would be an incredibly inefficient way to do it.

by Pay08

2/20/2026 at 3:37:46 PM

In Austin we saw water trucks roll up and water em with hoses out the back. It was weird to see after having lived in a wet climate my whole life.

by dpkirchner

2/20/2026 at 10:58:52 AM

For some relevancy, this issue is still on Japanese minds because last year, corroded pipes led to one of the largest sinkholes the country has ever seen, swallowing a truck and drowning the driver in a pit of shit and piss. It took months to recover his body.

Many plumbing companies have since spoken up about how they’ve been requested to fix this infrastructural issue but without the appropriate funds because “how expensive can replacing some pipes be?” And “who cares about leaky pipes under the streets? The water just goes back into the ground.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/02/20/japan/pipe-corr...

by SenHeng

2/20/2026 at 6:47:58 AM

When 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!

by RupertSalt

2/20/2026 at 12:52:48 PM

Is that why the American tourists in Europe always ask if tap water is drinkable?

by mhitza

2/20/2026 at 2:13:41 PM

I'm American and noticed a trend in a subset of Americans that believe only their drinking water is potable. In some cases this applies even when they travel to other portions of the US.

by sidewndr46

2/20/2026 at 1:58:52 PM

I got a nasty stomach bug from drinking the tap water in Sicily.

And then I told the rest of America to watch out for the water in Europe. So it’s me; I’m the reason.

by relaxing

2/20/2026 at 2:21:29 PM

Your messaging must have incredible reach!

I've had my fair share of stomach discomforts while travelling, but I'm very unlikely to associate it with tap water unless I do a controlled self-study.

More often its clearly from food prepared in unhygienic conditions, because that's the only variable during my travels and tap water is the norm for me.

by mhitza

2/20/2026 at 3:03:09 PM

No, its cause a lot of American tap water isn't drinkable lol

by Throaway1982

2/20/2026 at 5:58:56 AM

wood is better than lead

by skirge

2/20/2026 at 5:36:09 AM

And 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

by Animats

2/20/2026 at 12:42:00 PM

Why is it difficult? I assume the proportion of infrastructure experts would stay the same.

by Pay08

2/20/2026 at 12:48:19 PM

Because 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.

by chmod775

2/20/2026 at 5:26:02 PM

If your roommates leave your rent doesn't go down. Infrastructure can't be trivially cut in half.

by zulban

2/20/2026 at 5:34:17 AM

I 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

by schiffern

2/20/2026 at 4:15:47 PM

There 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.

by tmaly

2/20/2026 at 6:26:39 AM

I didn’t know the gold in cryptomomicon was inspired by a real thing!

by idontwantthis

2/20/2026 at 5:58:05 AM

My mind went to the founder of Bitcoin.

by userbinator

2/20/2026 at 6:09:52 AM

The 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.

by argee

2/20/2026 at 8:57:22 AM

I would expect Satoshi to make a lot of money on later wallets that are not identified as theirs.

by yreg

2/20/2026 at 6:17:30 AM

Not sure why the NSA would pay for a Japanese water system.

by bparsons

2/20/2026 at 6:20:48 AM

To keep up the façade.

by Hamuko

2/20/2026 at 8:59:36 AM

Then they should have funded some building preservation programmes instead.

by yreg

2/20/2026 at 6:14:47 PM

A 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."

by prewett

2/20/2026 at 8:49:24 AM

> 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.

by ehnto

2/20/2026 at 8:52:36 AM

$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

by jimnotgym

2/20/2026 at 5:34:40 AM

That is a bad idea. Hydrocarbon polymers like PEX, ferrous alloys, and concrete would be much more practical.

by throwaway5752

2/20/2026 at 5:42:23 AM

I think people are missing the joke, but gold sewer pipes is amusing to consider.

by bombcar

2/20/2026 at 6:37:22 AM

45lbs of gold would get you a ten foot-ish 1 in ID plumbing pipe.

... and we already have a problem with copper theft.

by serf

2/20/2026 at 6:33:39 AM

In fairness, after hundreds of years of people trying to turn lead into gold, this might be one of the more practical attempts.

by moi2388

2/20/2026 at 5:43:01 AM

Well played.

by throw_gold

2/20/2026 at 11:48:45 AM

Even the Yakuza are sick of shitty infrastructure.

by RobotToaster

2/20/2026 at 1:25:56 PM

Satoshi, is that you?

by linhns

2/20/2026 at 10:18:31 AM

The 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.

by stevezsa8

2/20/2026 at 1:52:39 PM

Wow! 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.

by thenthenthen

2/20/2026 at 6:30:18 AM

I 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.

by worthless-trash

2/20/2026 at 6:36:39 AM

Mitsubishi Group has a lot of companies, including a bank, so no the logo doesn't say anything about who donated it.

by jogu

2/20/2026 at 7:46:23 AM

Doesn’t that just mean that they’ve been manufactured by Mitsubishi Materials Corporation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Materials

by Hamuko

2/20/2026 at 7:48:14 AM

And I imagine they could trivially track them, like most modern gold bars sold/collected in this volume.

by worthless-trash

2/20/2026 at 9:09:48 AM

There 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".

by yreg

2/20/2026 at 6:52:03 AM

[dead]

by NedF

2/20/2026 at 6:42:00 AM

25 gold bars ..20 gold bars

100 yens we received

would be un any other country, but not japan

by anonymous344