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Ask Slashdot: Storing Items In a Sealed Chest For 25 Years?

Posted by timothy on from the termites-not-encouraged dept.

New submitter accet87 writes "We are celebrating the Silver Jubilee of our graduation next month and have come up with an idea where we will build an air-tight chest in which each of us will deposit something and will open the chest only on our Golden Jubilee, i.e. after another 25 years. I want to understand what kind of items can be safely stored for 25 years and what kind of precautions are required to be taken. I am sure things like paper, non-ferrous metallic objects, wood, etc., will hold up well. What about data storage electronically? I don't think CD/DVDs, etc., will be usable. Even if the data is retained, reading it in 2037 may be a challenge."

12 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A vote for Mitt is a vote for less government regulation, lower taxes on our job creators, and curtailing of entitlements for those among us who do not work for them. Are you sick of seeing the family down the street sit home all day, eating McDonalds and waiting for the mailman to come with the precious government check containing your money? Or, when the government runs a defecit because they're sending out too many of those checks, watching it print print print more? Do you believe health care should be earned and payed for and not given away to the dregs of society who abuse their bodies daily and expect us to foot the bill for them? Get real. This country has turned into a Goodwill store, and needs to return to the ideals of the founders and reward those who have ambition, and punish or drive out those who do not.

    1. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by busyqth · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Are you sick of seeing the family down the street sit home all day, eating McDonalds and waiting for the mailman to come with the precious government check containing your money?

      Hey, it's not that bad. They're go to Captain D's more than McDonalds.

      Do you believe health care should be earned and payed for and not given away to the dregs of society who abuse their bodies daily and expect us to foot the bill for them?

      Absolutely! And If you don't have a cool $1 million in the bank to cover expenses after a car wreck or heart attack, well that's just cause you're a lazy bum and you deserve to die, or better yet, live in constant excruciating pain for another miserable 20 years.

      This country has turned into a Goodwill store, and needs to return to the ideals of the founders and reward those who have ambition, and punish or drive out those who do not.

      Let's not just drive them out. Let's just toss them into the sea! That way no one has to deal with the scum.

    2. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by Exitar · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Are you sick of seeing the family down the street sit home all day, eating McDonalds and waiting for the mailman to come with the precious government check containing your money?

      ...

      Do you believe health care should be earned and payed for and not given away to the dregs of society who abuse their bodies daily and expect us to foot the bill for them

      No, I sit home all day eating McDonalds, abusing my body and waiting for the mailman to come with the precious government check containing your money, so I'm fine with that.
      Thank you for your money!

    3. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      You know one thing I don't understand. You listen to people like Neal Boortz or Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck and you constantly hear about how hard business owners and executives work, how they work so hard they have earned their keep, etc.

      I don't doubt they work hard. I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly workaholics with shitty home lives (due to no real work-life balance) who make it that far up the corporate ladder. Fine. I think hard work should be rewarded. I think working harder than you means I should make more than you. No problem. However, one part of this never made any sense to me.

      Let's imagine a business owner who makes $10 million per year. He employs people. Cool. He creates jobs. Good. He had to take risks to get where he is today. Understood. He really does put in some long hours. I don't doubt it. Maybe his average employee who also works hard makes (let's be generous) $50,000 a year. Cool.

      Now, here's the part I don't understand. Somebody explain this to me. It's the one and only thing that makes me sympathetic to the contempt many Leftists have for those who are successful in business. The employee at $50,000 works hard and so does the owner at $10 mil/year. Does the owner work 200 times harder than the employee? If the employee works 40 hours a week, does the owner work 8,000 hours a week to justify his 200x salary? Of course not, that would be impossible. There are only 168 hours in a week.

      Why, it's almost as if the math doesn't add up. It's as though the owner is actually exploiting his labor force by paying them only a small fraction of the wealth that their work is producing. Somebody please tell me what the business owner does that is inherently 200x more valuable than the rank-and-file worker? Somehow I doubt he could afford to fire 200 of them and do that work himself. So explain to me what is so magical about his position?

      So far as I can tell, this will always happen until and unless the corporation is replaced by some kind of employee-owned system.

    4. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by shokk · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      There are plenty of employee-owner businesses. Support them by either going to work for one to help their success or start your own.

      The owner has invested capital in committing to the business. The employee is just there til the next better paying job comes around the corner. The day to day tasks are not all there is to making a business succeed. The fact you think about dividing day to day effort to measure their worth shows that you don't see the long commitment to success.

      Granted, there are a lot of owners that don't take the business seriously and end up driving it into the ground, taking people's livelihoods down with it, that should be shot. But this socialist shpiel is just too broadly painted across every corporation.

      --
      "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
    5. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by LocalH · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Just remember, when you (individual or government) can take from the rich simply because their rich, then you can also take from the poor.

      Why is there a large anti-freedom and anti-private movement in the US and world nowadays? First it's communal ownership of business, then it's communal ownership of private property, and pretty soon we are living in a communist country.

      Why do you hate freedom?

      --
      FC Closer
    6. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      If this is a then consider this Feeding Time

      Wages are based on specific conditions and according to well mapped out and set by local conditions and of course policy. But, ignoring the worker's salary for the moment and answering your question:

      As a general rule, there are 3 factors which go into determining the salary for specific specialist jobs. These are:

      1) Personal Life Risk
      2) Specialist Education or Role Requirements
      3) Role Impact

      If a job falls into one of these categories then the pay scale is set at a minimum bar. Two.. and it goes up? All 3? Jackpot.. you will be rolling in money.. but would you want the job? Let's examine this..

      Point 1 is Personal Risk to your Life. An example here is: deep earth miner. People need to be paid additional money to perform this job due to the danger involved. Call it Hazard Pay if you like.

      Point 2 is Specialist Education or Requirements for the role. A university professor is a good example of this. You can't get the job without spending a lot of your life (time) and money and energy into building the knowledge required to do the job. So, you get paid more to compensate your demonstrated worth.. as the role of 'University lecturer' can only be awarded to someone with a specific level of education and certification.

      Point 3 involves how much impact your role has. Let's use 'Nurse' here as an example. When a nurse interacts with a patient they can affect that persons Lufe or Quality of life. This involves stress. Coincidently, it also touches on point 2 (ignore that for the moment). Take from this point that the more Impact your job/role is .. then the more stress and other negative factors are involved and hence you are compensated for that.

      Now comes the interesting part. If you have a profession which combines any of the above points, or rates highly in them, then you get paid more.

      Doctor is a good example of combining point 2 and point 3. Some doctors train for the better part of a decade to become qualified. Add to that the impact a doctor can have on their patients - literally life and death - and watch the potential salary rise. Difference between a GP and a specialist, say a gyno, is less about the pay (the GP does not earn as much as a specialise, generally) but more about how hard the job is, the effect the job has on the person and how much damage can occur if they screw up.

      Now, your question is why a Business Owner may be paid a lot more than an average worker. Let's use the above rules to work this out, as a start.
      Point 1: No, being a CEO doesn't generally involve personal risk. However, there could be a case for saying here that if the CEO makes a big enough mistake then they may lost *everything* (in this case, everything means their house, life savings, credibility, ability to get another job..)

      Point 2: Yes, being a CEO (generally) requires either specific knowledge or role requires. In most cases, to the highest level possible. It is possible to be a CEO and clueless.. but in that case the board is running the show not the CEO so this is a fringe case

      Point 3: Impact. This really is where a CEO can justify their wage. The CEO may only make 5 or 6 big decisions a year, but one of those decisions could be the difference between the company being profitable that year and the company going into receivership. These types of decisions include business partnerships, large scale investments, company direction, etc. An example of this is that when the Internet was flourishing Microsoft decided to ignore it.. someone, probably a CIO or CEO, made this decision. Look what it cost them. The impact of management of this level can be catastrophic and could result in hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs, or the company going under. It is very stressful. It can destroy your life (socially, personally, eat your time, sap your energy, etc).

      Add turnover to this and you are in for a shocker. These people, CEO and CIO etc, run the company, set the company di

    7. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by babthooka · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      That's a great idea! put Mitt "the shit" Romney in a sealed plastic container, and burry him way down in the ground for 25 years. You really hit the nail this time!

    8. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by jbolden · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Why is there a large anti-freedom and anti-private movement in the US and world nowadays?

      Because wages have been stagnant in the United States and depressed in most of the first world, while productivity has skyrocketed. "Freedom" is failing to deliver on its promise of a better life for most people. An economic system is graded on if it achieves the greatest good for the greatest number, i.e. utility and the last 30 years of conservative economics have been a miserable failure. Conversely the generation before people saw an explosion of living standards and quality of life.

      So they logically conclude that conservative economics is not a good choice for them to bring up their quality of life.

    9. Re:Romney - VOTE FOR YOUR FUTURE by cdrguru · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      This is what the revolution of the prolitariate was supposed to do - Marx thought in like 1850 that England would be taken over by workers because they were being exploited by the business owners. Well, it didn't work out the way he envisioned, and his concept of how things should work just doesn't work either.

      To some extent I can agree with you that the two classes of people you are discussing aren't all that far apart. However, the owner(s) have taken more risks and probably had a significant part of their lives affected by nearly random chance or the benefit of some kind of network effect. We can look back upon Italian, Jewish and Indian immigrants and see powerful network effects that supported business startups. Nearly everyone knows someone that tried and failed at some business startup - and perhaps after a couple of tries actually got something that is working. Literally, what most small businesses have relied upon for several hundred years is one guy or at most a very small group that risks just about everything in the hopes that things will fall into place so their business gets paid. Historically, over the past several hundred years the way it has worked out is the guy or guys that risk it all usually fail but one in ten or twenty actually makes it and is "successful". Yup, they get the 10 million income. Their friends that failed lose their house, their car, often their marriage and everything else.

      Can you actually blame the workers for being willing to take a pittance with no risk to themselves vs. that kind of risk and possibility of reward?

      That is pretty much what it comes down to. You take the risks and maybe you get lucky and people buy from you, but more often than not you take the risks and end up with nothing.

      Don't feel too bad for the losers in this game though. More often than not they borrow money from anyone they can and end up trying again in a year or two. Most of the people playing the new business game are doing it because they really like the odds being against them and feel really good when they win. So good that it makes up for all the times it failed.

  2. Re:Mitt health plan is death camps for pre existin by ZankerH · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    But republicans don't believe in atheist darwinian nazi communism!

  3. Re:Lesson from school by SJHillman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I had a tiny tupperware container (about 1/4 cup) that I had brought milk to school for some science thing (circa 4th grade). I never took it home and never cleaned it out, but it came in handy for giving people a big olfactory surprise. Kept it in my school bag for about two years, by which time the odor had faded quite a bit.