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.
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.
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?
They should be liable for consequential damages.
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.
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.
Glad I'm not the only one.
what's the issue here ????
Are those of you on X really this out of touch?
That you personally can’t read it doesn’t imply that everyone else here is a horrible person.
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
GOD I LOVE HN, I CANT REPLY NOW. WHY DO I BOTHER? Since I can't reply, and I was wrong: https://files.catbox.moe/kksyqz.png
Sure.
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/1.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/2.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/3.png
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
> *Any charity you want.*
I choose Habitat for Humanity.
Edit: Good on ya for following through!
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
The whole text Marlin wrote is in the first post in the thread and therefore fully readable without logging in.
Donate to one of the following:
- https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/
I got https://i.imgur.com/JCeLEgG.png which is readable.
Then I enabled mobile browser using devtools and got https://i.imgur.com/ryJk07p.png which is unreadable.
I think mobile vs desktop was the central confusion. Mobile is broken logged out. Desktop works ok.
https://www.alzinfo.org/donate/donation_form/, in memory of Terry Pratchett.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Picking:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.
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."
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.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
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.
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.
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”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their works.
> 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.
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...
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
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?
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.