Scrap (2006)

slopinthebag

I fear FIFTEEN CENTS A POUND is going to become a new vocal stim I will spam 50 times a day.

phoronixrly

https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491

delichon

A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.

mikeaskew4

We have them in Chicago, too. Call streets and san when you got something too big to fit in the can? Nah. Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…

ChrisMarshallNY

One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job. I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion. I'm extremely grateful for what I have. [EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."

krupan

Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.

intrasight

I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon. Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.

brcmthrowaway

Rich guy mocks his hometown

pibaker

Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day. Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.

jrmg

Note that this post was written twenty years ago, in 2006 - it just wasn’t published until now.

neilv

> I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting. If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, politely bow out. As I suspect the author would advise. It's an easy -- even likely -- way for someone to get an adversely life-changing injury. Besides the good writing, it was easy to visualize that playing out, because I've seen it before. Also, don't let anyone do a risky thing like this on your property, unless you know they're both capable professionals, and that they have sufficient insurance covering anything that could plausibly go very bad.

baruz

Reminds me a bit of some of Dave Secretary’s TIME FOR SOME STORIES.

walrus01

I'm ordinarily loathe to post a link to reddit, but here is a very recent example of copper scrapping on an entire cargo ship that's been abandoned by its crew (it took a hit from some kind of munition) in the hormuz area: https://www.reddit.com/r/SeaEmploy/comments/1vum7fj/the_foot... It's a little bit like the scene in the movie Lord of War where an entire cargo airplane is reduced to its skeleton. more details on the ship in question: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cma+cgm+s...

Arubis

Kind of an aside, but I’m genuinely surprised Moxie is still on Xitter. Feels misaligned.

calmbonsai

Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”. Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital. Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.

zxexz

I used to scrap to make an extra buck, it was super fun. I did it for about half a year as my primary income. That was wicked fun, and exhausting. I’ve never been anywhere near that strong at any point in my life, before or after and did not work out once. Did not pay tech wages, but if you’re Smart about it and not unlucky, or if you’re just lucky, you can make a fair bit more than people here seem to expect. I’m back mostly to doing it here or there, mostly for fun, when an interesting opportunity presents itself. Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work. Always be scrapping.

dang

[stub for offtopicness]

tclancy

NH rolls like this too and I didn’t understand it for a decade after moving up to my wife’s territory from … Rhode Island. There was a time in the nineties where the whole economy here ran on used cars on the side of the road. One of the reasons I have not fixed my alcoholism, beyond the obvious, is there is a retired Mainer who depends on my empties as best I can tell. Who am I to stop drinking if some company will pay me too much to write code? We are all part of a larger system. Sorry, meant lager.

zkmon

> "FOUR CENTS A POUND." It's never about money. It's a life style, belief system, social group or community that drives that kind of passion. It happens everywhere, all the time with everyone. It's about how they feel about what they do. When they were successful in moving the furnace out, they get a feeling that is 1000 times more precious than the value of that piece.