Comment by FunnyBadger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FunnyBadger | Hacker News Reader

It will be handled the exact same way it always has: 90% of the time it's off-loaded at a garage sale, at Goodwill, on E-bay or otherwise sold - almost always below market value because the survivors can't be bothered - they just want it gone.

This is the very basis of yard sales and antiquing.

It's how I get a 1999 BMW Z3 with 20K miles back in 2008 for $5K bundled with a Mac Cube and several $K of other goodies from a widow of a former Apple employee. She just wanted it gone. I didn't even "hardball" her - I gave her what she asked for all of it!

I got a vast stamp and coin collection from my father: my sibs who live within 50 miles of my mother wanted nothing to do with it; she's getting on and needed to deal with it - I was willing to come across the country to take it all. Now I have quite a collection of both valuable stamps and a ton of gold and silver.

It's how you get cheap Ham radio gear, machine tools and furniture also - estate sales.

The article is ignorant of all of this apparently. Never had anyone close to them actually die perhaps. The "problem" will solve itself and no one will notice it ever was a problem!

My take is the population growth differences that accounts for the premise of the article.

The 1950's parents for the first time had extra stuff more so than previous generations with the rise of consumerism, but they also had larger families where the parents of the 1980's took stuff off their parents hands. Garage sales for sure.

Today, the trend is smaller families while the things of the 80's tend not to transfer as well.

This trend will likely continue to be even worse as fast consumerism + innovation makes many items not last more than a few years.

This will be very regional I feel. I have tried to stock my house with used furniture everywhere I've lived. This was very successful when I moved to Cornwall (UK). If you weren't too picky about the styles, there were many options, all at huge discounts over original price. But in contrast to that, in large U.S. urban areas, used furniture shops are not worth your time, with no good deals. I assume this relates, somewhat morbidly, to the difference in death rates vs. new-resident rates.

The difficulties in finding decent used furniture, and not wanting to buy More Particleboard as I've settled in a house I plan to stay in for a good long while, has got me going the other way and building my own furniture.

Articles like this do gently nudge that my personal tastes in styles aren't universal, though, and it will be worth a think at some point as to whether the stuff I'm making is future waste, too.

> The article is ignorant of all of this statement... The "problem" will solve issue and no one will notice it was ever a problem.

I think you've misread the article a little. It's not so much a problem in the sense that there will be an overwhelming wave of junk that piles up on street corners. The problem is that there's a generation which is about to share a collective experience, one which will enforce an already minimalist tendency. The article doesn't spend most of its time going on about waste management. It's about the physical and emotional toil associated with handling an estate. That's why it focuses on stories of individuals struggling.

As someone who lost a parent this last year (and spent three days just removing food from the house), I may be a little biased. But that was my reading.

This is all true, but "cheap" is a tricky term because you have to actively look for it. People picking over stuff to catalog and resell is a valuable service. Like you said, families just want it gone, but even if they wanted top dollar, parting out a collection take a lot of time.

Death is the only way to obtain a lot of hobbyist board games. They usually only go through a printing or two, then are sold and traded for a few years after that until they find the collections that they're loved in, then they sit in those collections for another 50 years until the collector dies.

A collector dying is often cause for a feeding frenzy that will make a hundred people happy. I know of at least two game collectors who had time to plan who threw post-mortem potlatches where the people who they enjoyed playing those games with while they were alive divided the collections between themselves. I guarantee those friends did not feel burdened. Honestly as much an opportunity for renewal as a time of loss.

The most fascinating collection I think, was the auction of notorious mayor, police chief and brow-beater, rather fist beater Frank Rizzo, of Philadelphia.

No where else was there such a collection of awful italian style Tchohkes, religous paintings, horrid furniture and even his own personal police baton.

Or, the article is precisely about you and you don't realize it. You might not be the son in the article. You might be the dad (hopefully with many decades of collecting yet to go).

Oh man, stamps, for the past 10 years I’ve bought “discount” stamps off eBay. Basically buying 45cent or whatever stamps for 25 cents or less and plastering my packages like the… never mind.

Obviously this is the lossy side of stamp collecting, but man, to take a haircut like that after preserving something for 20 or 30 years.

With very rare exceptions, even giant stamp collections are worthless. Stamp collecting is all about collecting, not disposing.

Sure there are catalogs that detail the "listed price" of a stamp, but that's the dealer price to you, not the price they'll buy it at (which is likely < 10%). Buying stamps is really easy, selling them (for their actual value) is hard. (I guess this is true for collections in general.)

Apart from the selling issue, is the searching issue. You might inherit a collection of a few thousand stamps, but it's unlikely to be sorted by value. Which means it has to be examined. By a professional. Which takes time. So there goes any value in it. Which is why a dealer will only pay pennies for a whole collection - it'll chew their time separating the wheat from the chaff.

Best thing you can get any collector to do is dispose of all the value in their collection, or clearly separate the value from the rest, before they pass.

Now me, I have books. Lots and lots of books. The kids will love inheriting those... :)

Yeah, my dad is into stamps... These days he only collects items that are no longer produced (i.e. from Newfoundland), and keeps them highly organized.

No idea if they're actually worth anything, but it gives him pleasure.

My father does this... incessantly. He has stacks of stamps he uses to send out for work and he gets them all at major discount on ebay.

It turns out the post office, mostly doesn't actually care to count up the 1 and 2 cent stamps.

There's a group of hobbyists committing felonies out there making their own stamps and sending them out. The post office doesn't notice.

One sillier trick was, forget a stamp, it'll get returned to sender. Simply put your destination as the return and you get a free mailer.

At least I hear USPS really cares about weight. In Canada... not so much.

I have definitely gotten mail with a postage due ink stamp so they count at least the absence of them

“Mail hacking” was a thing. I forget the name they gave it but read an article in 2600 or Phrack some time ago that talked about some of the tricks like the one you mentioned. The only other one I remember was to put a smear of Vaseline in the corner where stamps normally go. It was enough to trick the sorting machine.

>The "problem" will solve itself and no one will notice it ever was a problem!

Yep, everybody wins. The person selling gets quick cash for minimal hassle, and the person buying gets extremely inexpensive treasures. Win-win

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