The grunts collecting these machines don't get paid enough to fish them out of the river. They're gonna get marked as missing and the company will replace them with a new one.
Edit: For all I know they could end up building rescue robots that also get thrown into the river.
Yet a solid quarter of their HN comments are attacks and personal name-calling insults.
Docks take-up too much room and would suck-up real-estate from the public commonwealth for private, exclusive use... too much of that is already happening. Underutilized "bikeshare" pod programs stole large areas of curbside real-estate while offering nothing in return for all residents (unless they paid money).
It's a Tragedy of the Commons-situation knowingly-created by these irresponsible, asshole rental companies for $$$ by not demanding proper parking from the asshole segment of their customer-base.
I've seen piles of these goddamn things on street corners, rendering entire sidewalks unusable in orthogonal directions.
Elimination of all asshats who throw scooters in the middle of public commons and thoroughfares. These incidents are why they are banned from large areas of town and on certain campuses.
They should just be banned period. Full stop. Bring your own, or rent one you can carry and must return. Ephemeral transactionality leads to this sort of Idiocracy-backdrop bullshit:
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...
When I see for-rent scooters dumped blocking public commons, I stop and throw them in the nearest gutter, dumpster, sewer, or river to hold the companies responsible for their users monetarily.
If I see a pizza-delivery robot going 5 mph in a bike lane, I'm going to kick it to the curb or run-over it. And, I'll make sure everyone else does the same. They can pay bike messengers who need the work rather than being job-stealing, pointless automation assholes.