Scrap (2006)
文章洞見
原文內容目前無法安全取得，因此未產生文章摘要。
討論洞見
討論主要圍繞 Pittsburgh 及其他地區的 scrap metal／curbside reuse 文化、其經濟與社群意義，以及相關的安全、犯罪和勞動議題。部分參與者分享了把廢金屬、家具或建材放在路邊後迅速被取走的經驗；另一些人則討論貧窮是否源於懶惰、基礎設施遭竊的社會成本，以及原文所承載的舊式個人網誌與獨立網路文化。
共識：證據不足或意見分歧，未下定論。
實務建議
- 大型搬運、拆除或廢料清運不應讓不具備相應能力與保障的人員隨意參與；應先確認工作範圍、專業資格和 liability insurance。[49404732][49405019]
- 若要處理可回收物，可先了解當地 curbside pickup、scrap yard、municipal auction 或私人 scrapper 的規則；這些管道在部分社群中已形成非正式的 reuse network。[49403956][49408464][49405401]
- 不要以材料重量或表面價格直接估算 scrapping 的價值；人工、運輸、拆解成本、密度和回收流程會大幅改變實際收益，塑膠尤其可能因處理成本而不具吸引力。[49405401][49411438]
- 應區分合法回收與基礎設施竊盜；後者可能破壞電力、鐵路與道路安全，造成遠超過 scrap value 的公共損害。[49402927][49403041]
- 討論貧窮或經濟流動時，較完整的分析應同時納入個人行為、結構性資源差距與 chance，而非只使用「懶惰」這類道德化標籤。[49405322][49404229][49403481]
待釐清問題
- Pittsburgh 小城房產的 flood risk、homeowners insurance availability、flood coverage 與保費實際如何？原討論提出了問題，但提供的留言沒有回答。[49405035]
- 不同地區的 scrap metal 價格、合法性、許可要求和 curbside 規則有何差異？現有留言只提供個別經驗，沒有系統比較。[49403956][49402932][49405401]
- 對於導致交通事故或公共服務中斷的金屬竊盜，社會應採取何種兼顧責任、嚇阻與比例原則的處置？[49403041]
- scrapping 的實際收入分布、工作風險，以及其是否能提供長期穩定生計，討論中沒有可靠的量化證據。[49405401][49406851][49409357]
代表性留言
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.
intrasight · HN #49403956
> 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)On a slightly related question if you don't mind answering, were you able to get homeowners insurance with flood coverage for it? What's your relative level of risk from the river? And what are you paying if you did get coverage?
walrus01 · HN #49405035
How do you like Pittsburgh? What are some pros and cons?I spent a day there a couple years ago and it seemed like a really cool lil city that was surprisingly affordable.
soupfordummies · HN #49404474
> 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.
neilv · HN #49404732
I’ve had a perpetual back injury because my small business owner boss had his tech support people move a piano of his while on the clock. Then he has a doctor buddy of his look at it and try to tell me I have hepatitis. Which multiple follow ups proved I didn’t. Don’t do labor outside of what’s expected for the position.
ramgine · HN #49405019
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.
krupan · HN #49403352
Here you go: https://moxie.org/stories.html
rashkov · HN #49405111
Man I miss StumbleUpon so much. That was such a glorious internet time for me. Found so many interesting and weird corners of the internet. I’ve been trying hard to avoid the centralized internet. That button to just send me to random places would be so nice.I feel like you gotta be the change you want to see though. The small indie web, which never really went away I think, seems to be on the rise again. I know I’ve been enjoying clicking through all sorts of small personal sites people have running.
snohobro · HN #49404885
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...
walrus01 · HN #49405022
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.
calmbonsai · HN #49405322
> Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.This doesn't sound right. If that were literally true, and the level of industriousness didn't affect prosperity at all, why would anyone bother to work?
bad_username · HN #49406851
This is a dishonest take predicated on bucketing everyone who isn't rolling in it from investmet income as "poor"You won't be "live in an inner ring suburb, shop at whole foods, and peddle ivory tower takes on HN" level rich by working. But with a little care in avoiding big money sinks you can have stable access to basically all the necessities plus some, own your own home and eventually retire. See for example most construction industry professions.
cucumber3732842 · HN #49409357
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.
delichon · HN #49402927
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
mrisoli · HN #49403867
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copperIt's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
TacticalCoder · HN #49403041
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.
tclancy · HN #49405826
> "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.
zkmon · HN #49406307
Fun excercise: look up some prices for various popular types of plastic (pellets, $/tonne), and compare with common metals like steel, stainless, alu, copper etc. Next, wonder why no scrapper bothers to collect plastic waste. It's out there, for free, in any amount you want!Hint: it's the recycling process (and cost of the steps involved) that would get you. Plastics' low density doesn't help either.
RetroTechie · HN #49411438
Note that this post was written twenty years ago, in 2006 - it just wasn’t published until now.
jrmg · HN #49404249
Thanks! Year added above.
dang · HN #49405413
Kind of an aside, but I’m genuinely surprised Moxie is still on Xitter. Feels misaligned.
Arubis · HN #49405121
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.
zxexz · HN #49405401
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…
mikeaskew4 · HN #49402932
Reminds me a bit of some of Dave Secretary’s TIME FOR SOME STORIES.
baruz · HN #49404842
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.
pibaker · HN #49404159
Be nice, maybe this person isn't very tech-savvy and doesn't know how to setup their own blog?It's not like they are the highly technical founder of a very successful, privacy-focused messaging app....
Arcuru · HN #49405047
I agree, but it is what it is.I work around it with LibRedirect [1]. In my case, I run it in Firefox. I only use for Reddit and Twitter, but it supports many more services.[1] https://libredirect.manerakai.com
Fnoord · HN #49406081
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."
ChrisMarshallNY · HN #49403193
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
tmoertel · HN #49404229
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
p-o · HN #49403481
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
phoronixrly · HN #49402833
Thanks! Link added to toptext.
dang · HN #49405414
[stub for offtopicness]
dang · HN #49405417
Rich guy mocks his hometown
brcmthrowaway · HN #49404143
Many hometowns are mockable, even if someone from them eventually becomes rich and talks about what it was like there publicly.
JuniperMesos · HN #49404328
I don't think he's mocking at all - the Pittsburgh scrapping culture is fascinating. (I've lived here for 20+ years now). I throw stuff on the curb all the time and like magic, it disappears before trash day. I've also picked up a bunch of stuff from neighbors - office chairs, desks, a really nice stash of PVC pipe I used to build a grey water system for my washing machine, etc. it's like a weird little no-internet freecycle. Everyone just knows it often works and goes along with it. There are people who focus on higher value items, people who grab metals, you name it
dgacmu · HN #49408464
I fear FIFTEEN CENTS A POUND is going to become a new vocal stim I will spam 50 times a day.
slopinthebag · HN #49402780
I known exactly what you mean. Drives me up the wall to see these stupid shibboleths ping pong around.
cucumber3732842 · HN #49410185