> eBay pushing the prices of trash up
On the other hand, for those who didn't live near ubiquitous junk availability, eBay kinda did the opposite.
"Surplus resellers" tend to grossly inflate the price of all this junk, so it sits on their shelves indefinitely. Meanwhile, eBay became the yard-sale of old, offering a lot of it for far more reasonable prices (so long as the seller wasn't pretending to be a "real business").
Unfortunately it has got a little too popular in the last 5 years or so which has driven the prices up. The only things which are reasonably priced are broken AND require collection from somewhere obscure or buy it nows listed by idiots. I’ve had a few good bits of luck in that space only recently.
Re:A 1970s Teenager's Bedroom (1998)
by arca_vorago on Friday May 04, 2018 @10:46AM
(#16994945)
"I was privileged to have had a childhood in the age of ubiquitous junk availability."
Garage sales are still a thing and so are flea markets! There is still treasure around if one looks hard enough.
The world was a different place before Ebay, Craigslist and TV shows about flipping junk.
Advent of pricey copper and more consumer goods having salvageable precious metals. There's an incentive to destroy functional goods instead of giving away.
I still can't drive by a dumpster without scoping it for goodies. That's a habit I'll probably never lose.
Likewise. My wife has commented that she knows I’m not looking at other women when my head turns when I’m driving :)
Great habit. Trash picking is excellent because people throw out such great stuff. Perfect working condition, sometimes perfect condition period, sometimes just good for materials. One such Mr. trash picking is shown here with his pile of motors and hand made power tools ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_EN4jB_BI ) though I don't know if this is the video in which he mentions the pile of free motors he has. Another great trash-rescue proponent is DiResta (youtube maker person, seen in glorious trash picking mode here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epBIl4zDk8c ).
My bedroom started looking like that somewhat later in the mid 1980s, kicked off by the winning of some car speakers in a primary school raffle. This inevitably raised the question of what to plug them into. Collecting discarded junk from the 1960s-1970s at jumble sales and car boot sales solved that problem and I learned a lot.
I think that I was privileged to have had a childhood in the age of ubiquitous junk availability. It kept me off the streets and lead to a technical profession and some life long interests. It’s actually more difficult to get hold of stuff now thanks to electrical safety regulations, skips being locked, eBay pushing the prices of trash up and general lack of repairability of anything.
A footnote: 30 years later my bedroom is a radio shack and just as messy and I’m blessed that I found someone understanding enough to put up with it :)