Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The great junk transfer is coming

theglobeandmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 461 posts

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#181

Post by henrikschroder »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #123

Generational differences in tastes will take its toll on some of this more than other bits. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 who cares one bit about fine china and china cabinets. As more and more people who collected china die off, there's a bigger glut of it. Collections that took a lifetime and thousands of dollars to accumulate end up going for pennies at estate sales while the cabinets end up in a landfil…

Oh no, this reminds me that I have a box in my basement with my grandparents' wedding china that they got in the 1940's or something. My dad gave me the box, and I'm not allowed to throw the thing away as long as he lives.

But it's completely useless. It's pretty, but you can't ever use it. It's not dishwasher safe, it's extremely fragile, and I cannot imagine ever hosting some kind of event where it would be appropriate to bust it out. Hell, I don't even know if my grandparents ever used it, or if it was just a thing that you "should" collect, and therefore they collected it.

It feels like a waste to just throw it out, but I realize you're right, there's not gonna be a market for things like this ten, twenty, years from now.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#182

Post by sitkack »

johnsanders wrote: post #164

I got it when i saw that dirty green Coleman flashlight. Who'd keep that? But ours was red, we used it at night on our farm and I vividly remember how that button felt and sounded when you clicked it on or off.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/V94AAOSwmL9f8vwL/s-l300.jpg one of these?

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#183

Post by ggm »

eddy_chan wrote: post #34

Where I live we have 'council clean-up' days. It's a designated day once per year you can leave a reasonable amount of rubbish outside your house including old furniture, tools, utensils etc etc. The good thing is it's widely advertised and if you sort your stuff out properly and lay it out in an organised manner, lots of amateur collectors will come and take it away to re-sell or re-use leaving only a small amount o…

Me too with a sad twist: no matter how often I put a sign on my council kerbside collection e-waste saying "works" some metal scavenger on a copper hunt cuts the powercord and moves on. They're trashing value to extract the one bit they care about.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#184

Post by hiq »

onion2k wrote: post #128
tjojrtoiertj32 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but seriously, the previous gens. hold onto a lot of junk.

Everyone who owns a house fills it with what other people call junk.

That's a good argument for living in a small place rather than a house as big as you can possibly afford.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#185

Post by Ntrails »

Aeolun wrote: post #136
robocat wrote: post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

I don’t necessarily look forward to this, but I imagine it’ll be very satisfying sorting through my parents’ stuff and finding all the little gems. Of course 80% of it is junk, but 80% of everything I save is junk too, so I can hardly blame them for it. My dad recently threw out a lot of his old school stuff that we’d gone through and looked at a few times during various instances of cleanup over the course of my lif…

> to me the only tangible remains of the time when my dad was a boy/young adult have disappeared.

My parents, when they were young and carefree and enjoying life, used to make mix tapes. Loads of them. There was something almost magical about being able to listen to them in my old car, and experience a little window into what they used to listen to etc.

Sadly my car went to the great scrapyard in the sky and now I hold onto a plethora of cassette tapes I'm unsure I'll ever listen to. Silly really.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#186

Post by nonrandomstring »

robocat wrote: post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

You don't have to be old to experience this problem. This was my take on techno-clutter from a few months back:

https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...

A more funny story:

Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible for the welfare of the donkeys.

Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience, enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured. It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to the village/local-government.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#187

Post by aurea »

jokoon wrote: post #176

I guess somebody will come up with an app to sort all this out so that a few of those objects can find new users. The amazon of used stuff. Not to mention the recycling of things people nobody wants.

What would be the added value of that app compared to already existing options? Where I live (Switzerland) there are already several nation-wide websites where you can publish ads for things you want to sell or give away. And it is absolutely free. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the thread, many charities can clean up a home if needed.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#188

Post by Tade0 »

I hail from a long line of hoarders - it so happens that the three previous generations all experienced war and associated loss of all possessions.

I know what to do with the mass-produced stuff like furniture, souvenirs and electronics, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with with things my parents made themselves.

Myself, I include the cost of space occupied by each item I'm considering buying. With the real estate prices being what they are it's a great way to limit the amount of new stuff pouring in.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#189

Post by abyssin »

helmholtz wrote: post #161
robocat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And an altruistic gift for friends and family: take away their useless rubbish. Tell your aunt you need some wires from that old Pentium computer she has, and take it to be recycled. “Drop in” at your friends on the way to the dump with half a trailer full of rubbish, and ask if they want to fill up the other half for free. When there is a book market on, visit your friends and take away their old books to go to the…

Your comment is cathartic to me for reasons I cannot explain. I hope, for my sake, that everything you mentioned really is something you're doing often. I love the idea of constant forward progress in downsizing not just your own possessions, but that of the near and dears too.

I think I understand your feeling. The thing that makes me most empathetic with my family and friends is visiting them at their house and witnessing their struggling with stuff. It looks like a physical equivalent to the emotions and feelings in which we often find ourselves entrapped.

A light dose of psychedelics does wonders for me in this regard. I’ll suddenly look at my place and see as if for the first time that thing that’s been laying around for weeks. “Oh, I put it there because I was anxious for this and that. Of course that’s not its place. Let’s move it where it belongs.” I love my mostly empty house, there’s so much space to move around and breathe.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#190

Post by thematrixturtle »

ryandrake wrote: post #30
irrational wrote: post #12

I’ve already told my wife that when her parents die we are just going to burn the house down. I’m just half joking. I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. You can’t take it with you. And I have no intention of sorting through it. It’s all going straight to the landfill.

> I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. I almost replied this way, too, but then I remember the junk drawer I have full of DB9 serial cables, Firewire cables, PCI SCSI cards, 256MB RAM chips, 2GB spinning hard disk drives, three prong computer power cables, mice, webcams, power strips, power bricks, and a fully functional Dell OptiPlex GX620 with a screaming Pentium D 3.2GHz CPU. I keep…

Leftover paint exposed to temperature extremes is unlikely to last longer than a year or two.
Post reply on HN