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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3532 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.

-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.

-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.

Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there.

Not really the same thing. It's more like shooting all the bison and wistfully remembering the days of the great bison herds without feeling any personal responsibility.

On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene.

I am a discerning arbitrageur that leverages deep knowledge of the value of clothes with Gucci and Prada labels, you are a casual thrift store flipper, he is a drooling, smartphone scanning, drone NPC bugman.

As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40.

Ironically, the first thing is obviously way worse. You're okay arbitraging away the opportunity to save 96% but think that arbitraging away the opportunity to save 17% is just going too far.

I'm good with the idea that the we can't always have a Wild West and that part of what made the West fun was the taming of it, and so we can't have it again.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way. It's either a commons that needs preserving or a resource that needs exploiting.

As an aside, my impression is that there is still a lot of finds to be had at estate sales (at least in CA). I think the real reason the thrift store market has dried up is not because of people buying the good stuff from the thrift stores, but because the suppliers have stopped sending the good stuff to the thrift stores. People now find the good stuff at the estate sale, and so the left over junk that gets donated has much less signal to noise. I suspect the higher prices at the thrift store are also related to garden variety inflation, where it is magnified tremendously by not being part of the official basket of goods tracked.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.

Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.

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