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

I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

indyweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 341 posts

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#111

Post by noboostforyou »

ty6853 wrote: post #44
alnwlsn wrote: post #39

It's not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people throw away everything they can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made functional: - a snow blower - various weed eaters - vacuum cleaners - a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had) - a log splitter - pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt) - a chainsaw - multiple typewriters (the Sele…

Because it is cheaper to buy a new one than pay someone to fix most of those. A fairly significant minority of wealthy people got that way because they have no free time to do those things themselves.

> A fairly significant minority of wealthy people

Apologies if this is just a typo but I am really confused by this wording - isn't "significant minority" an oxymoron? If you had to express this as a percentage how many wealthy people are you saying got this way?

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#112

Post by gruturo »

throwforfeds wrote: post #98

My friend is a professor at NYU and, to make a long story short, one of his international students messed up their scheduling and tried to get my friend to change their final meeting time because his flight home for the summer cost >$10k and he didn't want to change it. Like, that's clearly an international first class flight, for a 19 year old. My ass was lucky to catch a $20 bus that may or may not catch on fire. T…

Weird. An international first class ticket is extremely easy to change, likely at no additional cost - so he'd lose approximately 0$ out of those 10k. It's a phone call, and if you're a 19yr old whose family can afford it, most likely it isn't even you having to make that phone call.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#113

Post by JamesSwift »

I was stationed out in Monterey CA for a while and the combination of wealthy civilians + loads of young temporary military personnel (+ a fat BAH for some of them) led to an absolute treasure trove of craigslist finds if you had access to a pickup truck.

I did my part by leaving a nearly brand new king size mattress (got married and had my wife move in 2 months before moving away from the area) as well as multiple items that a Rent-A-Center failed to pick up before we left (large sectional sofa, dining room table + chairs).

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#114

Post by throwforfeds »

gruturo wrote: post #112
throwforfeds wrote: post #98

My friend is a professor at NYU and, to make a long story short, one of his international students messed up their scheduling and tried to get my friend to change their final meeting time because his flight home for the summer cost >$10k and he didn't want to change it. Like, that's clearly an international first class flight, for a 19 year old. My ass was lucky to catch a $20 bus that may or may not catch on fire. T…

Weird. An international first class ticket is extremely easy to change, likely at no additional cost - so he'd lose approximately 0$ out of those 10k. It's a phone call, and if you're a 19yr old whose family can afford it, most likely it isn't even you having to make that phone call.

I'm guessing he didn't want to tell his family he messed up, his professor was unavailable for the rest of the summer, and he might get a low grade in the class for missing the final project. He had been given 2 months to schedule this final review.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#115

Post by linkjuice4all »

matthewowen wrote: post #68

I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.

The real Penn Christmas miracle was getting used tech (laptops/tablets/mp3 players/etc) that was export-controlled. Some students legally couldn’t bring that stuff back to their country and didn’t have time to sell it.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#116

Post by kccqzy »

When I was a freshman and sophomore I bought a lot of second hand furniture at ~70% off from people who were graduating and moving. I thought I would do the same when I graduate, but no, it took a certain type of personality and executive function to deal with disparate buyers, haggling prices and scheduling pickups amidst the busy graduation and commencement season. Not everyone could properly get rid of their fancy furniture. If one grows up in a middle class family where money isn't tight, often throwing it all away is just the easy way to avoid hassle and the mental toll.

I have found that this persists in work too. For some people it is way more difficult to deal with a larger number of simpler tasks than a smaller number of sophisticated tasks, while for others there is basically no observable difference.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#117

Post by nick__m »

anyonecancode wrote: post #96
matthewowen wrote: post #68

I live near UPenn. Some locals call the end of the academic year "Penn Christmas". I definitely see some resentment, but having made an international move in my life I have sympathy for it. You need to buy things to live, shipping that stuff when you move away is often very expensive and time consuming, so you condense your life down to a few suitcases and do the best you can.

Once upon a time, this was a thing for pretty much the entire city of New York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(New_York_City)

It's still that way in Québec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(Quebec)

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#118

Post by neilv »

bityard wrote: post #109

I live near a major university town and one of the highlights of my year is move-out week. At dusk, a friend and I go dumpster diving at the apartments around campus. You definitely wear gloves and clothing you don't mind throwing out afterward, but MOST of the garbage is cleaner than you'd think. Usually the trash is pretty well picked-through by the time we get to it, but every year, we drive off with a pickup truc…

> For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop

On the curb, I've found over 100 total tower/desktop PCs/Macs, countless printers/monitors/televisions, and even a few game consoles, but I don't recall any laptops nor smartphones.

I was thinking either laptops&phones are too easy to move, to easy to sell, they don't last long on the curb, or they're small enough to get tossed into the trash.

If you were opening trash bags in the dumpsters, and still didn't find any, I guess they're too easy to keep/move/sell.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#119

Post by potato3732842 »

ty6853 wrote: post #44
alnwlsn wrote: post #39

It's not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people throw away everything they can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made functional: - a snow blower - various weed eaters - vacuum cleaners - a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had) - a log splitter - pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt) - a chainsaw - multiple typewriters (the Sele…

Because it is cheaper to buy a new one than pay someone to fix most of those. A fairly significant minority of wealthy people got that way because they have no free time to do those things themselves.

Mowers out front of Lowes were $2k on up yesterday...

Sure, maybe you have a landscaper for that. Your landscaper knows a guy who's happy to get paid $100 slap a new $50 Amazon carb on your snowblower and lecture you about not leaving ethanol in it for 2yr straight.

Re: I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students

#120

Post by sokoloff »

morkalork wrote: post #46

Here's a lucky bastard who managed to snag a Herman Miller Aeron chair for $10 off a student moving out: https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficeChairs/comments/1kvcr18/it_fi... I'm only a little jelly.

I spent a little time chasing broken Aerons (often a bad gas strut ($30) or a bad seat ($125-160)) and selling them onward fixed for $350-400 at the start of COVID. A broken Aeron would go for $100-150 (very occasionally free) and people were buying working ones like crazy as remote took off.

I can’t say it was a great return on my time, but it did give me something to do and I ended up with a little pocket money and 6 Aerons for the family and our guest room computer desk.

If you want to do this, look for ones with a bad strut (or set a marketplace alert for Aerons under $150). They’ll seem really broken to most people, so they sell cheap, but it’s a pretty easy fix (just needs a HUGE pipe wrench* and a $30 strut [and optionally, a $20 set of Rollerblade wheels]).

* or a large pipe wrench and a black pipe “cheater” to fit over the handle.

Post reply on HN