Scrap (2006)
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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.
I spent a day there a couple years ago and it seemed like a really cool lil city that was surprisingly affordable.
Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.
Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.
Yeah, I like the ’Burgh.
Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.
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?
I've periodically looked at real estate in some similar "$40k for a whole house?" rust belt towns, but only as a place where I might want to live in part time for a very quiet remote work environment. None of them look like a place where I would ever want to have to engage with the local economy to find a local job in the region.
For now it's a "therapy project" house for me. I go and work on the house and then go biking or kayaking. It's 150 years old and one of the few brick houses from that era.
Edit: Yes. I will be able to get insurance sans flood. The issue is that Fema doesn't often update flood maps.
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.
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...
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
It'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?
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.
India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.
They should be liable for consequential damages.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
Sorry, meant lager.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So it seems to me that authored year is 2006 and publication year is 2026. And usually when you guys or the users put the year in the title, it has to do with year of first publication.
But I am probably overthinking it or I have an incomplete impression of how to interpret what you and others mean when you put the year in the title :p
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.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
make an x account then?
It's not like they are the highly technical founder of a very successful, privacy-focused messaging app....
People there still behave the same though
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.
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."
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Similarly, if someone made an unclear point about meat consumption in support of their argument then it would and should be called out.
No to what? No, if somebody was making a totally different argument we wouldn’t be having a different conversation? Or no that I wouldn’t be proven wrong in your hypothetical where I’m wrong?
>You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Lmao I’d ask what you mean by “you can’t clarify stuff” but
Is 10% too high of an estimate for wealthy people that believe this? 50%? 75%? 90%?
Where would you throw the dart of your estimate and how wide do you think your error bounds are?
Wrapping an interrogation in a polite "just to clarify" and demanding point estimates and error bounds on a generalization is weaponized pedantry designed to derail the thread into an impossible burden of proof.
Is it really the majority? And if it is, is that belief limited to the wealthy or do the middle class also think that? What do the poor think?
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.
You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.
Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
The purpose of the concept is to push kids from a young age to be industrious. You are much less likely to become wealthy if you sit around doing the bare minimum.
Putting in an significant effort isn't a guarantee, but it does increase your chances from whatever the baseline is given your context.
The concept doesn't claim that wealthy people all worked hard; everyone knows you can be wealthy without having worked at all, such as through inheritance or the lottery!
There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
my point isn't that when you put in effort you WILL create wealth. my point also isn't that luck plays a bigger role than effort (though, there's no empirical evidence for that assertion). my point also isn't that if you're poorer you didn't put in effort.
my point is: when you put in effort, you increase the surface area for luck.
put differently: if you don't think putting in effort increases your chances and it is mostly luck, why put in effort at all? luck will just find your door, after all, and if it doesn't, oh well.
And that's why this concept (your "myth") has value and should not die.
Wealth generation is not a meaningful driver, that's why people choose career with very low income trajectory, have hobbies, etc.
Calling people lazy is reductive and pejorative. People aren't inherently lazy.
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to get up to 90% but it’s easy to get to “a majority”.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
You can tell it’s nowhere near 90% because even if you counted every single non-DoD dollar as social safety net it would only be 84% of the budget.
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
No, it’s not. The Protestant work ethic is what causes people to come into work when they’re sick, spreading illness to others.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.
What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.
Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.
eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.
sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.
and this is true even without having AI in the picture.
The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.
Learning about the world gives you an edge, full stop. Cultures that highly value education, surprise surprise, are far more wealthy.
Today, it is almost harder to learn because of how noisy and manipulative the world is today.
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.
I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.
In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.
I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.
That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.
My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.
It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.
Source: Did really dumb things, when I was younger.
Yes. When people make mistakes, they sometimes fall into holes that are hard to climb out of. It is in society’s interest to place ladders in these holes so that these unfortunate people can climb out and become productive members of society.
Instead, we have self-interested parties who have figured out how to extract rents from keeping people trapped in holes. Some of these parties are preventing ladders from being built. Others are destroying existing ladders. Others still are even inventing deeper, stickier holes—crypto scams, ubiquitous gambling, addictive gas-station drugs, dopamine-hit apps—to trap even greater numbers of their fellow human beings.
When a society allows the suffering of others to become a profitable business model, good things rarely follow.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
I lived it in many locales and cultures for a large fraction of my life. Anecdotal but very good anecdotes.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
Around 10-15% of US households are living at the edge of their income. That is per the US Federal Reserve and BLS. This doesn’t account for the widely available government subsidies[0] for people in these income brackets.
Even in the worst cases, there is significant economic slack. Almost the entire time I lived below the poverty line I was usually able to save significant money in that context. So could have almost all of the poor people I knew. The exceptions always seemed to be old people living off Social Security. But they have their own safety nets.
I want proper support for people in poverty. That requires an objective accounting of the nature of their poverty that far too many people are incurious about. Everyone wants to make this way more complicated than it needs to be.
[0] A variety of subpopulations legitimately fall through the cracks and are excluded from significant government support. I was in those cracks.
It is really obvious that many people worried about the poor in the US know nothing at all about the actual poor in the US.
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
>but don't have a bank account
Plenty of bank accounts are free to open. That's not an excuse.
Many poor folks think decades ahead, but they tend to be rather fatalistic.
When I lived in Africa, I was profoundly affected by the poverty I witnessed, and also, by the integrity and kindness of many very poor people.
Also, many bank accounts require things like state ID, credit-worthiness, etc., that are hard for poor folks to get.
This is not required if the person is a minor. And acquiring one is cheap.
>credit-worthiness
No bank will require the user to be credit worthy for a basic checking account.
> If something goes wrong in this process—the overwhelmingly most likely one is that the payer doesn’t have the funds to cover the check (NSF, or “insufficient funds”), but the check being fraudulent or unauthorized is also possible—that wrongness may not be discovered before money “moves” to your bank. And so that payment can be recalled from your bank to the bank the check is drawn on. This will likely result in the bank attempting to recall the money from your account.
> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account.
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=US+low+in...
Growing up with an immigrant family and parents who didn't have the opportunity I did to change environments and control the food around me (either by location, and proximity of nearby stores, and also whats physically in my home) I notice how much my "impulse" control simply changes based on whats around me.
When I am in their home space, the unhealthy diet and health issues abound.
Because of demand?
Or because of a lack of people who have no bigger problems than a proposed liquor store?
The answer is obvious to anyone who follows local politics.
No options, or the friction of pursuing them is too high? You have a fraction of the demand.