Moxie Marlinspike recalls the day Pittsburgh scrappers hauled away his furnace
In a nostalgic X post, Moxie Marlinspike shares a journal entry from around 2006 about moving to Pittsburgh in the dead of winter. He describes the city's scrappers—people who collect scrap metal—and a chaotic encounter with two of them who helped remove an old furnace from his basement. The story captures the gritty charm of Pittsburgh and the absurdity of the situation, from a claustrophobic helper to a four-cents-per-pound payoff.
This is, basically, life in Pittsburgh.
- intrasight
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.
- neilv
> I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting.
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.
- walrus01
I'm ordinarily loathe to post a link to reddit, but here is a very recent example of copper scrapping on an entire cargo ship that's been abandoned by its crew (it took a hit from some kind of munition) in the hormuz area:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeaEmploy/comments/1vum7fj/the_foot...
It's a little bit like the scene in the movie Lord of War where an entire cargo airplane is reduced to its skeleton.
more details on the ship in question: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cma+cgm+s...
- calmbonsai
Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital.
Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.
- krupan
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.
- delichon
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.
- jrmg
Note that this post was written twenty years ago, in 2006 - it just wasn’t published until now.
- zxexz
I used to scrap to make an extra buck, it was super fun. I did it for about half a year as my primary income. That was wicked fun, and exhausting. I’ve never been anywhere near that strong at any point in my life, before or after and did not work out once. Did not pay tech wages, but if you’re Smart about it and not unlucky, or if you’re just lucky, you can make a fair bit more than people here seem to expect. I’m back mostly to doing it here or there, mostly for fun, when an interesting opportunity presents itself.
Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work.
Always be scrapping.