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The great junk transfer is coming

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Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#311

Post by FollowingTheDao »

donw wrote: post #139
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…

Thank you. The top-level article is unbelievably crass. I have had to deal with this. Sorting through an entire lifetime's worth of knick-knacks, papers, Christmas cards, plaques commemorating achievements and milestones that probably wouldn't even make sense to a twenty-year-old, all of it. Sure, it was hard. It takes time. But so did changing my diapers. And dealing with infant-me crying through the night. And watc…

My mother told me she brought me into the world to experience joy, not her bullsht.

When she died she left one small box and $90k. We did not have to do a thing.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#313

Post by wutbrodo »

dijit wrote: post #283
jahewson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, we had a few of these accumulators on my wife's side of the family. It's like the depression created an entire generation that couldn't bear to throw anything away. Five giant boxes of rags. Every tax return back to 1942. Every disposable coffee cup sleeve. Presents, never opened. Dresses, last worn in the 1980s. Every little white table-shaped thing that comes in a takeaway pizza box. 20 of the same wrench,…

Poverty does that to the brain, if you weren't aware. I have the same hoarding mentality, despite being extremely wealthy by my parents standards. My mum still keeps everything she gets her hands on, part of the reason is because reacquiring once discarded may not be possible. So better to be safe. While you get pretty good at using things to fix other things, these days everything seems to be single-use molded plast…

It's not even poverty as much as material scarcity. That may seem like a distinction without a difference in the capitalist Western context, but the distinction becomes clear in different systems.

My mother grew up fairly wealthy in a socialist economy, with a level of comfort and stability that doesn't match much of what we consider the experience of poverty. But material consumer goods were more difficult to come by and replace than in the 1980s US context that she later immigrated to. that mismatch has been apparent in a hundred conversations where she's unable to answer "why do you need to keep this" but also unable to discard the item.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#314

Post by mauvehaus »

debbiedowner wrote: post #82
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…

What are some examples of the obsolete tools? I can imagine a manual hand drill...

A eggbeater drill is as obsolete as it'll ever get. Good ones are worth hanging on to for those occasions when you need to drill a couple of holes some ways from the nearest outlet. Plus, kids love them and will happily spend a ridiculous amount of time drilling holes in scrap.

They also work in tighter spots than an electric drill. There's usually less bulk off the axis in at least one direction, generally opposite the crank. If you're in a corner, you're usually boned though.

The drills that are guaranteed to be trash in 20 years are the battery ones. I have a set and love them for when I need to drill more than a couple holes, but I have no illusions that I'll be passing them down to anybody because the batteries will be unavailable.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#315

Post by piceas »

jahewson wrote: post #72
calvinmorrison wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in a niche, plan to get rid of it BEFORE you get old. Please, there are collectors, and stuff! I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time. My father, a prodigious collector of oddities has done several wholsale removals of collections. O…

> "This belongs in a museum!" Does it? A museum for who?

In my father's case, a railway historical society :/

I tried to dump as much as possible so they didn't have to spend too much time on it. It took a long time.

My colleagues at work were happy to take various bits such as pandrol clips.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#316

Post by JKCalhoun »

mackrevinack wrote: post #158
ars wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no items in your parents home that reminds you of something you did as a child? Nothing?

i usually just take photos of that type of thing. they take up much less physical space

Yes, this is the solution. I have done the same with my own keepsakes. Take a photo and then toss the keepsake.

The cloud, my backups, are really my only physical "treasure".

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#317

Post by mauvehaus »

donw wrote: post #286
wccrawford wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it probably also doesn't have all the safety features like a riving blade, either. That doesn't mean it's useless, but it does mean it needs more care to use it and novice woodworkers shouldn't rush in blindly.

Fair point! Although a riving knife — which I wish that I had known about when I was younger - shouldn’t be that hard to add.

They are. A proper one goes up and down with the blade. A saw without an in-built provision for that is a surprisingly tough retrofit [0].

A riving knife that doesn't go up and down with the blade is just a pain in the ass that gets removed the first time you aren't making a through cut and rarely gets reinstalled.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4CuchotcM_4 If you've never seen the inside of a Unisaw, there's a lot of parts in that video that weren't there when the saw left the Delta factory. Even if you mass-produced a kit, it would require reworking some of the original parts, possibly at machinist level tolerances.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#318

Post by nonrandomstring »

NickBusey wrote: post #289
nonrandomstring wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article you linked I agree with almost fully, nice work. The only part I have issue with is when the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"” as if that’s a bad thing. I see and agree with your actual point, but a power cycle is generally step one for almost all debugging.

> the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"” as if that’s a bad thing

TBH, as an electronics engineer and computer scientist it's the first thing I do too :) I think my point in that article was that we shouldn't teach that it's the _only_ recourse, and after if it still doesn't work then just replace it.

It's still one step better than the wisdom of my Grandmother's generation:

"If it doesn't work bang it once on the top. If it still doesn't work bang it hard on the side twice. If it still doesn't work, call a man."

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#319

Post by JKCalhoun »

femto wrote: post #180

First thing I did was take a bunch of photos. One of the things that had meaning wasn't the individual items, but the assemblage of the whole: the choices made in the arrangement of tools in the workshop, projects being worked on, the "look and feel" of the house. After that I felt I could "disassemble" things without losing too much: in the process getting rid of cruft and keeping other stuff. A big part of the job…

The article itself illustrates the photo-aspect of it. There are some very touching photos of personal items in the article. No doubt the photos themselves (especially artfully shot) will give some of the same emotional fulfillment.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#320

Post by JKCalhoun »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #272
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

After having to deal with all the stuff my parents left behind I swore to myself that I would not do the same thing to my kids. It's easy to say "just throw it out" but so many items have nostalgia and memories attached. Yet if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff. I need to get on it. I'm not getting younger.

> if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff. That's the thing I hate most about doing deep cleans. I end up emotionally drained from nostalgia. If someone else had thrown away all the mathoms while I was on vacation, I'd never even notice they went missing.

I find it cathartic — if done from time to time.
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