I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.

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.

One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.

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."

A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.

Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.

Note that this post was written twenty years ago, in 2006 - it just wasn’t published until now.

Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day.

Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.

We have them in Chicago, too. Call streets and san when you got something too big to fit in the can? Nah.

Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…

Rich guy mocks his hometown

Not sure why of all people, Moxie Marlinspike would stay on this cesspool of a network that is X

I fear FIFTEEN CENTS A POUND is going to become a new vocal stim I will spam 50 times a day.