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Man Mines Midtown New York Sidewalks
43-year-old Raffi Stepanian makes money searching New York City streets, but it's not loose change or soda cans he's looking for, it's gold. Stepanian says he can make almost $1000 a week scouring the diamond district's streets for bits of gold, platinum, and precious gems. "Material falls off clothes, on the bottom of shoes, it drops off jewelry, and it falls in the dirt and sticks to the gum on the street. The percentage of gold out here on the street is greater than the amount of gold you would find in a mine . . . It comes close to a mother lode because in the street, you're picking up gold left by the industry," he says.
and the streets are paved with gold?
Everyone else will start doing it too, and he'll have to go back to his day job.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I thought data mining, some kind of new information supersidewalk.
Korma: Good
Who else thought this would be more along the lines of about land-mines or claymores? It would at least be a more interesting story...
Also much like old-fashioned gold mining, once others start doing it he can't make as much money doing it anymore
Correction: "*Refining gold ore and other precious metal ores* is a filthy job dripping with toxic chemicals: arsenic, cyanide, lead, mercury, etc." He's not doing any of that. He's literally just picking already refined metal up off the street. While he might be at hazard to whatever filth he has to brush off the metal, he's not not dealing with a large amount of toxic chemicals.
NYC is going to become the next boom town! That's when the whores move in! Oh, wait...
That, too, was my first thought; my second involved him creating sidewalks with big square blocks of cobblestone and a pickaxe...
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Actually, unlike gold (which does require large amounts of toxic chemicals to refine), aluminum isn't refined chemically; instead, it takes large amounts of electricity (which is why you didn't have aluminum production until the 20th century).
In a production-level mine, you will get a lot more minerals out of it than a thousand bucks per week.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh, "Can make". I thought he was averaging that at first.
No, sometimes he almost makes $1000 (in the video, that's "over $800")... Other times, maybe he makes nothing? We don't know.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Do not feed the trolls.
This is a hardcore quack fucker just trying to advertise here.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
My first thought was IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices like Iraq and Afghanistan )
But wouldn't some chiropractic dealings help prevent this destruction? Or would that just be caused by some subluxations?
Tomorrow they'll post an article about a sysadmin at a big company clearing out old home directories and supplementing his income by finding bitcoins.
Oh great, now I have the Paul Simon song stuck in my head:
"People say I'm crazy
I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes
Well that's one way to lose
These walking blues
Diamonds on the soles of your shoes"
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
Shut 'ur trap.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's because he's so good at keeping the street clean!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
True in some places in Colorado things like rain barrels are illegal. Which doesn't make much sense to me at all but there you go.
It's not that they're illegal per se. It's that in arid states, water rights are more than 100% used, and first in time of use gets first priority, meaning the people who have water rights older than yours, get to use their entire allotment of water before you get to use any. Collecting rainwater means someone else doesn't get their full allotment. As it turns out, California is one of the major water rights holders, so it's not because the guy down the street is complaining that you can't retain the water that would otherwise run off your land into the gutter: it's because the likes of California and Arizona have won large numbers of SCOTUS rulings upholding their water rights. (I've been told that water rights cases are the largest category of cases to go to the Supreme Court, but don't have a citation.)
And not being able to collect water in a rainbarrel is by no means the weirdest consequence of this: people who live near irrigation ditches or rivers have been required to cut down trees, because the trees are sucking up groundwater that is being replenished by leakage into the water table from the canal or river.
Water rights is a huge facet of local and state governments in arid states.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
you don't find "-1 funny" to be even slightly amusing?