It is called “recycling”.
If you're fond of restoring 30-year-old PCs, but then you see some old PC parts being obliterated by scrappers just to get small pitiful pinches of gold.
Submitted 3 weeks ago by lechekaflan@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/54269447-050f-485a-b4a2-775612059e8a.png
Comments
username_1@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
trigg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The step before “recycle” is “reuse”
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
People reusing 30yo computer is legendary, as in the rarity.
username_1@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
What those “enthusiasts” do with the old machinery isn’t reusing. It is hoarding.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
[deleted]ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
…now
You have to be very patient and have an awful lot of storage space - and bet that the junk you’re storing will be worth something some day - to even bother keeping crappy stuff in any large quantity to turn a profit when the stuff is still crappy and not worth a damn.
The reason 386s are getting rare is because nobody in their right mind made that bet when they were still around and completely deprecated.
The only person I met who made a similar bet and won big money was a Brit who bought 6 Jaguar E-Types sight-unseen when they came out, and put them in storage for 30 years (prepared professionally for long-term storage too). When those cars came on the market, brand new with no mile on the clock, they sold for millions, the guy bought a nice house in Hampshire and retired in comfort.
He told me he just knew that model would be highly desirable classic the minute he saw a picture, and almost bankrupted his family to buy them as an investment. Ballsy.
mlg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah I can’t wait for when enthusiasts want my stacks of 2004 laptop RAM sticks and LCD panels.
The demand will open up any second now
StillAlive@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Have you looked at price of gold lately?
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, and one would get more gold by panning sand from a river somewhere in West Papua.
StillAlive@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah but then they’d have to travel there which reduces profit margin.
Justifier@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Go look up what happens to wannabe prospectors operating without license, at least in the USoA
Heck even the videos of gold/gem/geode prospectors I’ve watched make odd offhand comments about sicking police on tresspassers
Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I still have a small box of old ram and a bunch of cpus from that era.( 20 to 30 yrs ago) Had them for years in case someone I knew needed them. I need to take them to a recycling center some day but there isn’t one close by.
modus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I dump all my e-waste at Best Buy. They’re hoping I’ll buy something, but nah.
adarza@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
that’s where we take a lot of our junk, too… but we also buy from there when we can, instead of amazon.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t mind them doing it with irreparable items. But when they do it indiscriminately it bothers me.
ilovededyoupiggy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The Nokia 2626 was no 3310 or 5110, but I bet you could still beat a man to death with it and then call your lady to tell her you’ll be a bit late to dinner. Whoever tore that down for the metals is gonna be kicking themselves pretty hard when the apocalypse comes.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Well there is a LOT of old electrics and they’ll be able to pull a lot more out of them than gold, and they should mostly be recycled as much as possible. There should still be more than enough left for hobbyists to restore, no? Check mexico, there are still millions of old devices out there, even in the wild, but especially in the smaller computer shops
AlexLost@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Scrappers are good, and also the worst. We need someone to care about and put in the effort to extract value from trash. Problem is a lot of trash is actually still usable/valuable “as-is” but get ripped apart for some scraps of value within. The other problem is getting the item to someone who would value it. Hence, there we go around and around.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
There’s gold in them thar boards
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Yeah you are right it’s better when some corp poisons a lake with cyanide mining the gold instead
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 3 weeks ago
Most of these devices have plenty to go around.
ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
My Mom had a saying when I was young(er): vintage is all the crap we couldn’t wait to get rid of and couldn’t throw away fast enough.
Decades later, I totally get what she’s saying: 30 year old PCs are utter crap in my eyes. Good riddance. Who wants to restore that junk: it was cheap-ass commodity hardware at that point. A PDP11 on the other hand… 🙂
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure I guess. I can’t count the number of PCs I brought to the recycler simply because I literally would have had to pay someone to take them back in the days. I wish I had kept them to sell to today’s enthusiasts and get back some of the insane money that stuff sold for when it was new.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
The less something is available, the more it is worth.
Take VHS recorders for example. Something that used to be extremely common is now super rare because it doesn’t get manufactured anymore, but tons of people still have plenty of VHS they want to see so they still get used. After a while those break down too, making the pool even smaller.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Capitalist propaganda. Rare garbage is still garbage. The desire has to be there and often isn’t. But capitalist ideas say you have to hoard for potential.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
They still have usable data on them? They were magnetic and one weak point was cross-magnetizitation on the reel, causing ghost images. What was that defect called again? And the magnetizitation holds 30 years otherwise?
Jaegeras@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Yeah but, one day, someday. All and every VHS tape will be completely useless because of the degradation.
So, people will just end up sitting on piles of just junk.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
There are instances, especially on the federal level, of a Windows XP machine that’s roughly that old running HVAC systems without a connection outward. It requires a connection that isn’t on modern PCs and the support software out of date.
Madison420@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s a commodore 64 running HVAC in iirc a high school.
digitaltrends.com/…/theres-30-year-old-commodore-…