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Things with (basically) no value whatsoever...........

#23
two fingers said:
Before you get on your high horse, this is not intended to start a debate as to what we should have done or should do in the future with regard to recycling and/or repurposing. Thank you.

In the last couple of weeks, I have had the opportunity to walk through a few buildings that are abandoned. Two were old family practice clinics. A few were just old stores that are owned by a friend and are now filled with his "collections". A couple were houses of distant relatives.

As I walked through, I couldn't help but imagine what those places looked like when they were operating.

In one of the clinics there were plaques on the wall that read....

"To Dr. Miller In appreciation for your outstanding treatment of our mother."
"To Dr. Miller in appreciation for curing my chronic cough of more than twenty years."

Both clinics were full of old desks, files, medical equipment, etc.

My friends "collections" consist of furniture, old store equipment, wooden boxes, etc.

These things hold no value to anyone whatsoever. If I were "awarded" the contents of all of these buildings I wouldn't begin to know what to do with the stuff. I don't need it. Nobody needs it. Sure, I could make up uses for some of it. But why would I? Tearing apart an old broken desk to use the wood to help do repairs for some poor family would take a lot more time than running to Lowe's and getting what I need. Nobody needs 14 old rusty file cabinets.... for anything. Heck, it would make more sense to donate a computer to some poor struggling business man to keep files in rather than help him set up half a dozen file cabinets and a paper system. Nobody needs 35 old stained busted clinic lobby chairs..... old metal shelves from an old drug store.....for anything.

How many of you own baseball trophies from your grandfather's childhood? Even if you give a crap about those items, your kids won't care about them at all. How many of you look around homes of elderly relatives and see hundreds of items that nobody on Earth would ever want or need? Little ceramic cats...... old briefcases.... furniture with no special value....... My grandmother's health is failing. There are a couple of small items I want as keepsakes. But if her couch were dropped off at my house right now it would stay in the driveway until someone came to take it away. Heck, the land under her house is worth more without the house than with it.

Even if one were to donate the entire contents of these buildings to charity, the charities wouldn't be able to do anything with most of it. It would cost more to get a desk to Africa than it would to build a desk in Africa. There are no poor people in need of an old busted desk in my area. And it would cost more to transport buildings worth of this stuff to areas of need than it would to find used stuff in their areas. Even if a clinic were in desperate need of an old exam table or otoscope, these wouldn't pass any kind of inspection anyway. So they legally could not use them. They are literally worthless.

I love watching American Pickers. Those guys always leave behind much more than they take with them. They leave entire warehouses of useless, valueless items behind. And with older generations who remember any of this stuff passing on in droves, these items will become even more worthless in the next couple of decades.

The number of humans who give a crap that Vaudeville shows existed at some point in history is already low. Virtually no person on Earth will care, or want any memorabilia from it, in a matter of a few short years.

30 years from now, who on Earth will give a crap about an Elvis souvenir, a vinyl stool from an old soda counter in a drug store, the dashboard from a '74 Nova, any vinyl record at all, any CD at all, any Peavey speaker or amp from the 80s, thousands and thousands of appliances that will no longer keep up with technology or be supported with parts, DVD players, CRT televisions, National Geographic magazines from the 60s, a butter churn from the 1800s, baseball cards of any kind, etc.?

Most things that we consider "collectible" today will hold zero value in a few short years because there is no context for younger generations. My daughters (now 3 and 6) and their generation will probably never hear or read the names Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, Burt Reynolds, Eric Estrada, Norman Rockwell....... They won't know who Robert Duvall is. They won't know what All in the Family or Three's Company is. (There are probably quite a few people on this forum as we speak who have no idea what/who I am talking about.) So why would any of the memorabilia from any of those shows or people matter to them? Sure, some things will be "timeless". But most won't.

Just looking around my office as I type this, I see things that are of great value to me, but will be of no value whatsoever after I am gone. Pictures of, and artwork from, my kids. An AM/FM radio with CD player I use to listen to local radio stations while I work.

My sister died very young (20 years old) in '94. Virtually everything she owned has no value whatsoever to anyone other than those who knew her well. How quickly that happened (in historical terms) is mind boggling. Clothes she wore.... stuff she used daily..... none of that stuff is relevant to anyone today.

(I'm rambling. Sorry.)

Short version: I guess it just blows my mind how many objects I have seen in the last month that, if they were gone, nobody on Earth would care or even notice. What in the world are we going to do with these things over time? Lots of it can not be recycled or repurposed. Somebody will eventually have to deal with these items. Everything will look very different in 50 years. Most of what we see as valuable today will be utterly useless/worthless by then. The way we look at the Civil War today is how they will view WWII through the 60s. The Old West will seem like the days of the cavemen.

It hurts me head to think about. So, I will give it to you and let you dwell on it for me. Thanks. :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

You forget, scrap metal rats (the people usually found on CL who will do anything for scrap metal) (as an example I once had someone drive down from Seattle to pick up so old no longer functioning law equipment) NEED all of that stuff. If you offered one of them all of that they would probably spontaneously combust.....
 
#24
two fingers said:
These things hold no value to anyone whatsoever.
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KEEPING-UP-WITH-THE-KARDASHIANS.jpg
 
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#26
I see two categories of 'things' discussed here so far:

1. Disposable consumer stuff - cheap particle board furniture, exercise equipment that doesn't get used, kitchen gadgets, etc. This kind of stuff saddens me because it has such a short life and usually ends up in a landfill. A few years ago I read that one of the hot new franchise businesses was 1-800-GOT-JUNK, a service that, for a small fee, will come and pick up your unwanted junk and haul it away. What does it say about our society that we have so much stuff that throwing it away is now a profitable business? Also note that "away" usually means a landfill, the stuff doesn't disappear.

2. Sentimental items that have meaning / value only to the original owner, and maybe a few others. This kind of stuff makes me a little sad too, but in a different way. I don't see it as wasteful as the stuff in category 1. It meant something to someone at the time. I have a box of sweaters that my mother knitted for me. I don't wear sweaters, I prefer a jacket, but I can never get rid of these because they remind me of my mom, who loved me. When I die, some stranger will clean out my house and the sweaters will go to Goodwill or end up in a landfill.

All this is something to think about when you have GAS for some (more) music equipment. Where is that going to be in 50 years?
 
#27
Joe Nerve said:
I read about half, that's pretty good, right? I don't know now if I'm even on topic but I have a burning desire to put out there one of the most painful useless item discards I ever had in my life...

Ya see, back in around 1990, Digidesign came up with this "affordable" digital audio recording thing called Session 8. It was one of, if not THE first digital recording piece of machinery. And it cost a little less than $4000. Ya needed a scuzzy drive to record the music on, and that was only an additional $1000. For one gigabyte. Then you needed a DAT player to mix it down to, another $1000, and well... long story short, I bought it all and within 3 years it was obsolete. I still have the DAT recorder, but tossed the Session 8 and hard drive on one snowy evening a few years later. I stood there watching the snow covering it, knowing there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do with it. Didn't even want to give it away....

You can do way more now with a $30 interface and free software than you could with my $6000 worth of crap.

Ahh....
Click to expand...
Had the same set up and yes I ended up throwing everything in the trash. What a shame.
 
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#28
Some things just get obsolete, like television sets with a cathode ray tube. In a perfect world the scrap metal in them would get recycled. Other things just get so rusted or corroded or worn that they are unusable, like rusted water pipes, not a lot of scrap value in rust!

But then there's the sentimental stuff. A box or two of my late wife's stuff. Can't yet get to the point of throwing out, but on the other hand I haven't looked at any of it since it got thrown in the box three years ago. Useless to anybody else for sure. Every Valentine's Day I gave her a teddy bear, what am I supposed to do with a big box of bears with "I live you" and the year marked on them?
 
#29
My parents are dealing with this same issue right now. My mom tends to keep things based on sentimental value. For example, she still had all of me and my sister's report cards....from kindergarten through high school. I finally convinced her to let those go, but it was tough for her. My dad tends to keep things based on perceived financial value. If he paid "good money" for something 30 years ago, he won't let it go, even if he doesn't have any need for that item anymore. He hasn't been snow skiing in 25 years, but he still has all of his old ski equipment. And we live in the Southeast - not much snow skiing here. I can't make him understand that he's already gotten his money's worth out of those items, and now they're actually COSTING him money in terms of moving, storage, etc.

Fortunately, I didn't inherit the desire to keep or collect everything. Well, except for basses.
 
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#32
My mom had an am radio, gold colored, shaped like a globe, that was a regular fixture in my youth. Still have it.
My stepfather had a rotary telephone, red in color. Still have it.
I have many albums, and a turntable. Probably always will.

Sometimes, sentimentality wins.
 
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#35
My wife and I were recently discussing this, because we've been trying to purge stuff from our apartment to...um...make room for new stuff I guess. So we've thrown out a lot of stuff that's worthless to us, and/or not worth finding the people who might value it.

But one thing that infuriated both of us was the gigantic jar of pennies that we've had sitting in the corner of our office forever. Pennies...actual money...have basically no value whatsoever! The contents of our jar, accumulated over the past 10 or 15 years, easily weighs over 40lbs. And is almost certainly worth less than $50. If we sat down to bundle these pennies in paper wrappers we would be so undervaluing our own time as to essentially concede "I am worthless!" So that ain't gonna happen, ever. But to drag a >40lb container of loose metal to the nearest CoinStar machine -- where they're going to take almost 10% off the top -- just sounds like a setup for one of those "That's two hours of my life I'll never get back" scenarios. So what do we do with pennies? Throw them out?!?!

We couldn't come up with a good answer. But it's really bugging both of us.
 
#36
Joe Nerve said:
Ya see, back in around 1990, Digidesign came up with this "affordable" digital audio recording thing called Session 8. It was one of, if not THE first digital recording piece of machinery. And it cost a little less than $4000. Ya needed a scuzzy drive to record the music on, and that was only an additional $1000. For one gigabyte. Then you needed a DAT player to mix it down to, another $1000, and well... long story short, I bought it all and within 3 years it was obsolete. I still have the DAT recorder, but tossed the Session 8 and hard drive on one snowy evening a few years later. I stood there watching the snow covering it, knowing there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do with it. Didn't even want to give it away.
Click to expand...

Just this past week I gave away a $1200 DAT recorder to a guy I haven't seen or spoken to in almost 40 years. He wants to make recordings of his son's piano recitals, and is an old dog who's more comfortable with the linear tape recorder paradigm than anything that's happened in the last 30 years, and I want to get rid of under-used studio equipment that took up a lot of rackspace, got used maybe once a year, and was barely worth 1/10th of what I paid for it if I tried to eBay it. So it's win-win: I put some good karma out there, I reconnected with an old high school friend, I made some room in my rack, and I can probably write off the entire $1200 donation on my 2015 tax return.

Now if only I can find a taker for the other 30+ rackspaces of anachronistic studio gear...
 
#37
Bob_Ross said:
My wife and I were recently discussing this, because we've been trying to purge stuff from our apartment to...um...make room for new stuff I guess. So we've thrown out a lot of stuff that's worthless to us, and/or not worth finding the people who might value it.

But one thing that infuriated both of us was the gigantic jar of pennies that we've had sitting in the corner of our office forever. Pennies...actual money...have basically no value whatsoever! The contents of our jar, accumulated over the past 10 or 15 years, easily weighs over 40lbs. And is almost certainly worth less than $50. If we sat down to bundle these pennies in paper wrappers we would be so undervaluing our own time as to essentially concede "I am worthless!" So that ain't gonna happen, ever. But to drag a >40lb container of loose metal to the nearest CoinStar machine -- where they're going to take almost 10% off the top -- just sounds like a setup for one of those "That's two hours of my life I'll never get back" scenarios. So what do we do with pennies? Throw them out?!?!

We couldn't come up with a good answer. But it's really bugging both of us.
Click to expand...

According to Google, the mass of a penny is 2.5 grams, which means that 40 pounds of pennies would be worth around $72. If Coinstar takes 10% then you wind up with about $65. You would rather throw away $65 than to let Coinstar have a few dollars for counting it for you?
 

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