A moment of pride.
Also, Roads & Boats with a good UI coming soon!
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Awesome! More than happy to add the full wording as your title here.
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I wanted to share one of my latest conversations on Kleinanzeigen about a monitor I try to sell.
It is a fixed price and no shipping.
So a person sends me messages and asks when they could come by or if we could meet in the middle.
I reply “I am home tomorrow”. They ask me if I could come to the train station in a big city 1h away from us because they don’t have a car and a ticket costs 30€.
I obviously reply “no I am not bringing a monitor to a place that far away”.
Then they ask if I could lower the price from 50 to 25€ because the ticket is so expensive and it is not worth it otherwise for them.
I just replied with “It is not worth it for me either” and ended the conversation.
I don’t get people. 
I would travel 3h by train to bring a monitor to someone else for 50€. And I have to pay for the train ticket too (30€ for a state wide ticket but only for the slow trains)! So basically it would leave me with 20€. That’s lower than minimum wage. Who would do this?
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People who never learned that their time has value. A surprising number of people calculate relative prices and ‘bargains’ while completely leaving out the inconvenience and travel costs which they put up with for the ‘bargain’ and leave them in the red if they assign their time even a minimal value.
It’s not unreasonable for the erstwhile buyer to ask. For all he knew, you might regard your time as basically without value. If you had, he’d have benefitted, for the low opportunity cost of sending the message. And if you send ten people messages asking them to do a dumb thing which benefits you, you have odds on your side that at least one of them will, probably more.
Most of the time, the effort involved in selling used stuff makes any value in it moot, as you ‘pay’ more in time and effort than anyone is willing to pay you for used electronics. And because disposing of trash costs money in most jurisdictions and a screen you have no further use for is essentially trash to you (if not now, then at some point in the future, when it becomes not worth it to move it to a new location), many people aren’t really expecting to make money when selling used stuff, they’re just avoiding the cost of disposing of the things.
Someone unemployed could probably score lots of bargains by making as many people as he can absolutely ridiculous offers online and benefitting from those who accept out of a desire to be done with the whole thing.
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Every time my partner suggests we have a garage sale (a.k.a. “yard sale”, like a car boot sale, but in your yard or driveway… a lot of suburban American neighborhoods hold “neighborhood garage sales”, where once or twice a year, we all have garage sales on the same day(s) and the HOA (look it up if you don’t know… ours isn’t evil (mostly)) pays for some signage and an ad in the paper, I make a comment about working for $0.50/hr, which, honestly, is a generous estimate based on our actual historical performance.
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Definitely more about avoiding waste than making money. I’ll always prefer that something that has genuine value go to someone that wants it rather than get thrown away. Unfortunately I can no longer shift that responsibility over to charity shops (UK) or second-hand shops (Japan), as the only way anyone does it now is online. And then usually to a reseller, which kind of works but I don’t like much.
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My partner participates in some “community give” a.k.a. “buy nothing” groups on Facebook, where we (she) can offer up things we no longer need and people can ask to be considered. These tend to be hyper-local, like within 5 miles (~8 km)
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Those groups seem to be an American thing or a Facebook thing. My friend in Portland is part of something like that.
I also tend to try and give things away so they are not wasted. Our housekeeper’s mother’s neighbor a couple countries away has the same shoe size as me. How do I know this? Well our housekeeper regularly travels there with a car filled with used things not just from us but whatever she can get her hands on. mostly clothing.
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We have some similar groups in the UK called Freegle. I got rid of loads of stuff recently that way (and donated to charity shops). When I was a broke PhD student I furnished my whole flat via one of these groups, which admittedly did make the place look like several old ladies lived there…
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Buy nothing is such a two bladed axe. Yes, we’ve gotten wetsuits, snowsuits… I even got Spirit Island for free. And we’ve offloaded a bunch of stuff. But whenever you post to offload, you see everything on offer, and we seem to be net importers no matter how we try to manage it.
I tell the Mrs to just take it to goodwill - if she posts it, I know there’s going to be 5 “pickups” tomorrow.
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People can be very flakey, although found that Facebook marketplace is worse for that. I posted a bunch of stuff for pickup only and I had a guy ask me if I would deliver it to him in Hull! (About 1.5 hours drive)
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I think we cycle back and forth between “we have too much stuff!” and “ooh, we could use that”. My partner has been doing a lot of spring cleaning and we are strongly in the “we have too much stuff” zone at the moment.
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Things like these are why I am firmly committed to my bachelor lifestyle. Any alternative is likely to end in a messy murder… well, possibly a tidy one if I were to partner with a well-organized spouse with an education in forensics.
I simply do not see interior decorating or whether the furniture works together. If viewing a new room, I could pretend to have opinions about the décor. Maybe I could even summon an opinion. But as soon as something is ‘home’, I no longer see style, feng shui or even if a given item clashes badly with everything around it. It just disappears into the familiar and I don’t think about it. I would feel the exact same way about it if it was an exquisite work of art or if each piece of furniture looked uniquely ugly and together they produced a symphony of bad taste. Well, unless the ugly room had a more comfortable sofa, then I’m picking that.
I recognize that I am not the first man to not care about these things and that many of them have survived, even thrived, by simply doing whatever their partner, who does have opinions on it, wants done. My problem here is that I want things to disappear into the fog of familiarity and for them to do that, so I can navigate without any mental effort at all, they have to remain the same. No changes, ever. I mean, sometimes emergencies happen and change follows, but then I quickly get used to the new normal, without ever considering using the ‘opportunity’ to re-decorate, because not only do I not notice the results, I also hate participating in housework of any kind. Even watching people clean my apartment makes me feel a sense of second-hand housework and I get the icks. I let them in and either go out or stay in a room where there is no need to clean.
And if someone asks me if I’m using the stuff in these boxes, my answer might be, “Well, not for a few years… possibly decades,” but if this is interpreted to mean that it is okay to get rid of all the Forgotten Realms boxed sets, I’ll quickly explain that I might well need them in the next couple of decades. You never know. The PCs might visit parts of Faerun they haven’t seen before and wander right into a boxed set.
Well, yes, I do have most of the books on a digital format, which is why I haven’t used the boxed set, but sometimes the digital formats don’t include the maps!
And so, all my old gaming books fill boxes stacked in no particular order anywhere they don’t obstruct the walkway. It doesn’t bother me, but I fear that the sort of person who does spring cleaning, and wonders what their home needs to really make its look pop, would murder me within the year. If they’re shy about murder and/or exceptionally forbearing, it might take two years, but no longer than that.
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Hello UK. Your Summer™ free trial is over. Please subscribe to continue the full experience!
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15 or so years ago, when I moved back to Chicago, I had to rush from work to an Indian grocery to pick some delicacy up to a leasing office and then downtown to catch a train back to where I’d been living to move things into the apartment I’d just leased. (the Indian stuff was a bribe to the person coming to get me at the train station, and was something the store made only for special people, and certainly never white dudes, which lead the checkout clerk asking “who are you?” with surprise). There was a pretty tight time line for all this, because of when the stuff would be ready, the leasing office hours, and the train schedule and the transit connections involved. My ‘L’ trip to the leasing office was disrupted because the line had been shutdown due to police and fire activity next to the tracks. Fortunately, I was only a stop away from the office, and was able to run there before they closed, and then one of the people there gave me a lift to an ‘L’ station on the other side of the stoppage. I was able to get to the train station only a few minutes late, which because it was an Amtrak train, was in plenty of time.
The next day, I learned the stoppage had been caused by some second hand grenades. Well, third hand, at least. Someone had bought a building next to the train, and while clearing out the basement, found a box of grenades. As one does, they took one to the bar to show off. Someone there pointed out it was a WWII German grenade, and they didn’t have the best reputation for stability when new, and that 75 years in a Chicago basement was unlikely to have improved it. When he mentioned there were more in his basement, they called the police, who evacuated the block, shut down the ‘L’, and waited for a military bomb squad. they found at least another box of grenades, plus some machine guns, ammunition, and assorted other Nazi paraphernalia, presumably put their by some returning GI.
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Yes, presumably.
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Every so often part of the UK (often London or Plymouth) is shut down for a bit when someone discovers several tons of explosive left over from the 1940s.
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We had a fairly large bomb here a few weeks bsck, about 2 miles from me, discovered during a housing development.
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millions of bombs were dropped on the uk (and many millions on the rest of Europe, plus all the artillery shells and other expldody things). Something like 5% failed to go boom when they were supposed to. That’s a whole lot of unexploded ordinance.
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For any initial research needs
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