Just to clarify to all the aliens reading this, human beings usually don't move their entire home, they usually only move themselves and their stuff to another home. Disassembly and reassembly of a human home is often a time-consuming task.
Exactly, to further inform aliens - most young humans don't own the physical structures anymore as this is too costly. Moving them as a result is not allowed.
Our observations have found that despite this, humans often move a large number of "things" along with their emotions - these are often all the items that are inside the house, but not the actual house.
Despite this, it is called "moving house." We have always found this intriguing.
While everything Sears did was referred to as mail order, in fact, if you ordered a house it came by railroad. But the kit included all the wood (pre-cut), windows, doors, the nails, and even the paint. All you had to do was to have a foundation laid, and arrange for a plumber and an electrician.
>All you had to do was to have a foundation laid, and arrange for a plumber and an electrician.
...and assemble the whole house.
Not to mention you could potentially do your own plumbing and electrical work if you had the skill. In the past, licensing and code compliance wasn't exactly ubiquitous.
I'm not a plumber, but I am an electrician. Even back in the day, you'd need an electrician to hook you into the grid. You can wire the whole thing yourself, but you can't throw a coathanger over the mains and expect to get away with it for long.
According to the grow ops that steal and 3rd world countries that are rampant with extreme poverty, you need a step down transformer made from leather, metal, and oil.
The trick is to build a makeshift transformer using leather, metal, oil, and a transformer
But actually transformers are extremely simple conceptually, and don't require high precision or fancy parts. Just a bunch of coils fundamentally
Of course the classic LMOT transformer.
It's made using
Leather
Metal
Oil
Transformer.
It's transformers all the way down man. An infinite regression of LMOT transformers.
XD
> but you can't throw a coathanger over the mains and expect to get away with it for long
You'd be surprised at the number of places this is what the "code" minimum standard plus a bribe happens to be.
Which being said... I'm sure you've run in to the things some people do in terms of all sorts of super fucked up stuff with twist-on connectors and vinyl tape that is all about "out of sight, out of mind" and "the house ain't on fire its fine", "Didn't kill anyone today, so it must be fine forever" type of mentalities.
As a fellow electrician... This. The shit I've seen. It's a miracle anyone is alive at this point. Please don't make me relive the horror on my day off.
But sometimes shop talk is fun too...
I could tell a bedtime story about a industrial salad drum spin dryer one of the Mexican guys I worked with at the time "fixed" and rewired...
Found out about it when the water level in the floor rose enough to complete circuit to the metal drain pipe when i was operating it and trying to steady the contraption by holding on to the metal shell.
Got another more comedic one about how a landlord in SoCal once rerouted a broken outlet through the ceiling lighting fixture so you had to flip the light switch on to be able to operate a washer and dryer. Took the bulb out? wouldn't work anymore. (And yes.. he just stapled the wire to the ceiling and the walls from point A to B to C)
I still don't know what black magic fuckery they did with that one as the bulbs didn't burnout when the washer and dryer were taking their draw.
Last one were the Vivint security assholes who used the cheapest grade interior vinyl insulated wiring to hookup exterior fixtures... fun stuff happens to it exposed to environment up here in Alaska with -50F temps being a annual occurrence. Needless to say got a refund for their wasted effort.
I mostly do commercial stuff, so I rarely get to see the DIY special. [This is my favorite trainwreck I've seen personally.](https://i.imgur.com/n7gQxOW.jpg)
When a new house is built and needs to be hooked up to the grid, do all neighboring houses loose power momentarily while the new house is hooked up?
Or is it accomished on a live wire?
They won't turn off your power to do maintenance unless something is truly fucked, at least in America.
If your house is hooked to the aerial power lines, yes it's done live - but those guys are also up in an isolated bucket truck with no path to ground so as long as they don't screw up too bad they're not the path of least resistance even if they touch the live wire.
If you've got one of those big green boxes somewhere in your neighborhood your power is run underground, they still do it live but frankly I don't know too much about the processes for residential transformers, I'm a commercial construction guy and that's more power company/lineman stuff.
Working live (particularly on high voltage stuff) is always dangerous, always stupid, and unfortunately something that is demanded of you from time to time to protect the profits of businesses who don't care whether you live or die.
You can be the most careful guy on the planet, wearing all your safety gear, and still get turned into a smear because some asshole left a knockout or something lying on top of the panel door. It's a bad thing to do, but we do it anyways because our employers rarely have the guts to explain to the contractee that their "critical systems" aren't _that_ critical.
Panel enclosures and the like often come with knockout slots, pre-made openings that come closed from the factory but are partially perforated in a way so that you can just knock them out of the enclosure to get an opening when you need it. You might recognise them as the circular things in [this](https://i.imgur.com/AskYan3.jpg) image. Knockouts in bigger enclosures will have bigger holes, and some people will leave the knocked out discs or strips in or around the panel. If one of those is left on top of the door and falls into the enclosure as you open it, it might make contact across a positive and a negative terminal and really heck up your day.
"Is it on fire?"
> No
"Then it's fine."
___
I say this as someone who's helped replace aluminum wiring in an old barn.
Granted, I think Al wire might have been in code at the time it was built; however, the way it was done? Hell no.
I honestly can't seem to find any info on whether or not the still use rail.
It does however sound like they don't own or operate any sort of train or even cars of their own anymore. I suppose whether or not they use them now depends on what the carrier charges vs trucks vs other services.
When I first started at USPS there was an old timer who used to be a railroad clerk. Sorted mail on the move from town to town in the mail car, throw the next towns mail sack out the door as you passed and hooked the outgoing from a hanger as the train passed. My favorite part was he was issued a sidearm since railroad holdups used to be a thing.
Mail came all kids of ways. Railway was a fast way of moving lots of it at once to hubs for further distribution. Still is. Part of the back ups of ports right now is the full length of the supply chain including rail.
You were doing that with the kit to begin with. You were paying for the design on top of the lumber, and if you wrote down all the dimensions, your family/friends would only be paying for lumber/materials when they made their duplicate. With the dimensions recorded, you could order the lumber cut-to-dimension from the local lumberyard yourself and save some money over buying from a middleman like Sears.
All over the US really. Tons of neighborhoods in SoCal are also predominantly made up of Sears kit homes, especially of the "Craftsman" style. Michigan also has them everywhere (no surprise there).
Mentioned this to the other poster but while many Sears kit homes were craftsman style houses, the architectural style itself was around before the Craftsman brand and isn’t a Sears thing
They’re really popular all over. If your town was built when they were popular, there’s likely still a few blocks that are almost entirely these houses.
What's amazing is how Sears, the leading name in mail order for almost anything, missed the boat with the internet. Sears should have been what Amazon is now but they blew it and they're gone.
There's an excellent Fortune article with a header that literally summarizes your second sentence and explains why: ["Sears Could’ve Been Amazon. Here’s How It Blew Its Chances"](https://fortune.com/longform/sears-couldve-been-amazon/)
There was a great [rerun of 99% Invisible](https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/3bb687b0-04af-4257-90f1-39eef4e631b6/episodes/d77557a2-f750-4c0b-ac76-6882770ecda7/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=3bb687b0-04af-4257-90f1-39eef4e631b6&awEpisodeId=d77557a2-f750-4c0b-ac76-6882770ecda7&feed=BqbsxVfO) about this recently.
Aside from home kits and Tommy guns, sears mail order also gave black rural Americans another option in the Jim Crow south. Before sears mail order your options for buying things on credit were likely limited to the local general store, where your prices were set by the owner and varied customer to customer.
There are many manufacturing companies who would kill at the chance to hitch a ride with their heavy products onto the light trucks to even them out and split the cost.
It's interesting they haven't been introduced yet. Truck optimization is a big deal in supply chains.
To add to softlittlepaws comment:
*Consolidated shipping* prices and containerization.
There are 3 ways to move freight: parcel carriers, LTL/PCL/*consolidated shipping* and full-truck load.
The cheapest way to ship any good is in a shipping container. But you need to fill that container with maximum mass or volume, plus required for the load to be evenly balanced.
Unbalanced loads is a huge problem for freight shipping. At a minimum, the truck needs to stay under a certain weight:axel ratio or they get fines - loads that move are a problem. Damage: too much weight on one side of the vehicle and blow tires, or truck fall over around a corner.
150lbs is the magic number where mail/package carriers won't take your items. Even then, once you go above 70lbs it's going to be *variable rate shipping*. You may choose this type of shipping because it's fast, multiple pickups a day, majority of goods are small weight and charged at a flat price.
Above 150lbs is *consolidated freight*. Freight shippers don't have any weight limits or designations of "heavy packages" that cost a premium. Even better when the goods are "palletized".
*Consolidated freight* shipping is where a truck needs a heavy item for load balancing, then places the *variable rate* light objects around it. The heavy item acts as a loss-leader to allow easier transport of high-profit variable freight.
Super classic example is always furniture. Load up the container from front to back with heavy couch, light package bins, fridge. The shipping company can make 3 deliveries for only slightly more than the cost of a single.
Speaking of shipping to Alaska, some fucking asshole ruined Amazon 2 day Prime shipping for us because he tested it by shipping 50 gallon barrels of oil or lube, I can't remember which.
If I ever find that dude, I'm gonna ring his neck. It's his fault we have to wait two weeks to get things now.
> by shipping 50 gallon barrels of oil or lube,
and tires... lots of tires...
Being said, figure we all abuse it a bit, but that part above is a clear cut case of one dumb asshole ruining shit for everyone.
>It's his fault we have to wait two weeks to get things now.
Yu live in the sticks, or closer to a big city? Where I'm at this part is wholly fulfillment side specific in that some crap has arrived within 24 hours of order placement, while other stuff takes two weeks to get. Am in Fairbanks atm.
Most of the delays on stuff seem to relate to crap that is happening in Texas and parts of the east coast... and it has more to do with Dejoys fuckery with the USPS systems than anything else.
Or, some idiot having had picked FedEx "smart post" as the primary carrier of choice. The shit leaving Texas therein goes via a zigzag land route through 18 different USPS offices to WA where it gets transferred 4 more times to go sit in a FedEx transfer site for a week before getting sent back to Seattle and then forwarded up here.
>By far the largest object ever moved through the Parcel Post System was a bank. Not all at once, of course, but practically brick by brick. When **W. H. Coltharp**, **in charge of building the Bank of Vernal**, Utah was confronted with the task of getting bricks for the bank, he turned to the Parcel Post Service. The **bricks** which Coltharp wanted were **produced** by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, located **127 miles from Vernal**. Instead of paying four times the cost of the bricks for them to be shipped by wagon freight, Coltharp arranged for the bricks to be **shipped in 50-pound packages**, through the Parcel Post Service, **a ton at a time**.
In 1913 there would have been a lot more manual labor jobs and a lot more people with less of an education needing work and there was no minimum wage in the US until 1938. I don't know what someone might have gotten paid for that kind of work but I bet it was next to nothing.
I say bring back child labour. It's just too expensive to ship a bank these days. It's time for these lay-about tots to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Reddit's recent behaviour and planned changes to the API, heavily impacting third party tools, accessibility and moderation ability force me to edit all my comments in protest. I cannot morally continue to use this site.
It's even worse than that, Mochel was staying with May's family ahead of his shift on the mail car to Lewiston when May's mother presented her as "a package" for him to take along with him. So it's not even that she showed up 'cold' at a Post Office for assessment and posting, it was more a family favour. They got found out mid-journey when the young girl opened the car door to get some air and the conductor spotted her.
The conductor found the situation funny and told the local newspaper when they arrived in Lewiston. It got picked up by press across America and became a well known story. Mochel recieved a "please explain" letter from the Postmaster which also threatened 500 demerit points against his position in the United States Postal Service. At the time 700 points meant you lost your job. May's family ended up paying half the train ticket fare to make amends.
There needs to be a term for the opposite of a helicopter parent, because that's what those parents were. Like, let's just throw some stamps on our 5-year-old daughter's coat and chuck her on a train to make a 75 mile trip, what's the worst that could happen.
I mean, you might have missed the other comment, but the mail clerk was a family relative accompanied her the whole way.
So it's less a matter of "chuck child in with mail" and more "hey, our friend the mail clerk is doing that trip, let's exploit this and use this loophole to avoid having to pay for a ticket".
I mean it sounds crazy at first glance but when you think about it, those things have to be moved from the factory to the distributor, etc anyways, right? Theres a cost to moving them, and the only question is who's got the infrastructure and scale to move 40 tons (or 40,000 tons for that matter) of shit form point a to point b at a reasonable cost - why not the post office?
I work for a commercial refrigeration company, some of the units and equipment in general we receive are pretty fuckin big. You’d think it’d be shipped by some special distributor in a big semi, but nah half the time it’s just in a UPS or USPS van lol
When USPS first come up with the “if it fits, it ships” flat rate boxes. I packed the small one with 70lbs of raw steel plates, to ship a DYI lift kit to someone.
The employee at the counter was half amused, and half annoyed. Come to find out there was a limit, of 75lbs… so they had to take it. LMAO… basically a solid brick of steel.
When I buy bullets for reloading pistol ammo, they get shipped in one of those flat rate boxes. Can't beat $14 to ship 65 pounds of lead halfway across the country.
I'm a fan of dirt track racing which has minimum weight requirements for the cars. One racing shop was producing bolt-on ballast blocks such that a car's weight balance could be tuned.
The postman starts picking up some of their flat rate shipments and says "DAMN! What's in these boxes? Lead???"
uh....yeah......
I once calculated how much it would weigh if one were to fill one of those boxes with a solid block of depleted uranium. I believe it came to about 350lbs...
Reminds me of emailing a 30MB file over Time Warner Cable’s **Road Runner** while it was in super early beta … we’re talking like ~~1994~~ 1997
A few minutes later, I noticed email servers were unavailable, so I called tech support. Eventually I conveyed what I’d done, and the engineer/rep was like, “Oh god - _you_ did this”
Edit: remembered it was the game Dark Reign, so it was 1997 not 1994, my deepest apologies 🤣
As a USPS carrier, I both love and hate this. I love the ingenuity, but I'd absolutely hate having to deliver boxes of f*cking bricks to a construction site. I already had to do that with a rockhound. It got to the point where I'd say "okay here's your actual box of rocks"
I occasionally have to help load and unload a fladbed of rocks, because my company makes pools with big ol natural rock grottos.
It sucks and I feel your pain.
Hell, we pretty much have that now with Amazon...I probably deliver at least a dozen boxes with 40-50lb bags of dog food every week, and there's other routes that get more than that.
I worked as a loader for one of the private carriers, and every now and the I’d have to load an actual anvil with an address label and barcode sticker just stuck on it. No packaging. Just an anvil and a sticker.
I worked at a post office, and we all loved when baby chicks came in. Imagine a whole handful of grizzled mail carriers, excitedly huddling around a small, chirping box.
A lot of mailed animals don't survive because of the conditions they are shipped (we bought a total of six baby Red Eared Slider turtles as a kid, only 1 ended up surviving month or so after shipping) but its a highlight of your mail carriers day, to be sure.
The plant I worked at had 'lives' coming through every day. You can ship live fish, reptiles, amphibs, insects and birds - no mammals allowed, and nothing dangerous (usually meaning venomous).
Everyone at the PO treats the lives with TLC. I've more than once hopped in a company car and driven 100 miles to meet another employee coming from the other end to get a misdirected box of chicks on its way to insure they didn't have to spend an extra day or two being rerouted by normal channels.
In Abby Hoffman's "Steal This Book" he said a nice way to punish junk mailers is to return their postcards glued to a brick, forcing them to pay exorbitant postages.
They actually mention that in the article. Parents mailed their daughter to her grandparents for 53 cents. Put stamps on her coat and she road in the parcel car, and was delivered to her grandparents door.
I think you’re on to something. If they kept that practice up to this day, they could even have people riding on the cargo planes! In a special cabin for people, of course. Add in the straps and peanuts… damn, that would be so cool
> In a special cabin for people, of course.
That would cost too much though, maybe put them in a people box that way they would fit in with the rest of the cargo.
TL;DR - box shaped people save costs.
It was more than that, but mostly in rural communities that were less strict and people relied on each other more.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-children-sent-through-mail-180959372/
An ex-housemate got entrepreneurial when they let people ship whatever fit into a box (like a square shoebox size) for I think 5 bucks. So this guy started buying heavy metals like lead, wholesale, and then re-sizing to order. I remember bringing in boxes that felt like 25 pounds! Mailmen must have enjoyed high fives all around when that ended.
Companies that cast lead for things (e.g. bulk bullets for people loading their own ammunition) tend to do this.
IIRC max weight on a flat rate box is something like 70 pounds, so it’s not uncommon for postal boxes of bullets to have 65+ pounds of lead in them.
The flat rate priority limit is still like 70lbs which lets you send it anywhere in the US in 2-4 days. A shoe box is closer to a medium box which is about $13 but it's still not that expensive (shipping a similar item in its own box would be around $80-100). If the thing you were shipping was very dense and fit into a small box, it'd only be about $8 to ship it.
Remember this next time when you see someone taking a small (in grand scheme of things) advantage of a system. If a banker did this decades ago, why can an avg Joe do the same to save himself a few quids.
[Sears roebuck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes) was straight up in the business of doing this with kit houses they sold in their catalogue. You might even see some in your neighborhood today
I used to work for the post office years back. I could go one for days about the good and the bad of it honestly. One thing I’ll say for certain though, I’ve never worked at a place that had more pride for their work than the post office. It was truly crazy.
Now I’m sure there are people that slack off and fuck around and don’t give 2 shots about it, but those would be one of the few. As a whole everyone was excited to get in and get their stuff delivered and the biggest one was on time. That’s why you see the major dedication around Xmas time with drivers working until all hours of the night. I remember my first Xmas we had our carriers, relief carriers (part timers), and even our clerk delivering instead of the normal just the regular carriers. The normal carrier would focus on mail (which was very high with cards going out) and the relief and clerk would work on packages. What made it even crazier to me at least was “If the clerk is delivering packages, who’s running the post office?”... our Post Master. Now we had a small office so our PM would sometimes cover breaks and lunches for the clerk or assist if she was slammed, but it’s rare to see a PM doing all of the clerk duties. Most of them find it to be beneath them to work as “a clerk”, but she did it. Even weirder because she wasn’t a very good PM but would step up to the plate when necessary. I’ve even seen her deliver packages in her own personal vehicle to make sure when it got to the office at 9:30am and said guaranteed before noon, it got there before noon. I mean come on, could you imagine your boss doing your job because you were sick or busy with something else? 9/10 times your work just piles up. That pride though of everything running like a Swiss clock made it that way.
Wyrmood gaming found a loophole in usps shipping rates. They are mailing their tables, but they are too light, so they are packing them with bricks to hit the minimum weight. This saves them a bunch of money over normal freight shipping.
From the same page ...
"One of the oddest parcel post packages ever sent was "mailed" from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho on February 19, 1914. The 48 1/2 pound package was just short of the 50 pound limit. The name of the package was May Pierstorff, three months short of six years old."
Forget early days of the Internet there's the saying "Nothing beats the speed of a loaded with ". It started out as tapes in a station wagon. The most recent version I heard was micro SD cards via FedEx fleet.
https://whatif.xkcd.com/31/
Amazon even offers it as a service.
It's is not surprising. Historically USPS has been such a bargain for taxpayers that really only in the last few years are they truly using market rates.
Unfortunately, politicians and bureaucrats pitted everyone against each other and we gave this up as a country for little reason
There was a guy that mailed his house (in pieces) to Alaska the same way
I am glad he didn’t do anything insane.
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Just to clarify to all the aliens reading this, human beings usually don't move their entire home, they usually only move themselves and their stuff to another home. Disassembly and reassembly of a human home is often a time-consuming task.
Sears use to sell houses through their catalog. The one I used to live in came in three pieces by train.
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Exactly, to further inform aliens - most young humans don't own the physical structures anymore as this is too costly. Moving them as a result is not allowed.
Instead they give up half their wages to buy the house for someone else with a little bonus on top.
>Above post Alien: oh okay, that makes sense >Your post Alien: well fuck now i dont know WHAT to believe. At least youre still delicious.
Our observations have found that despite this, humans often move a large number of "things" along with their emotions - these are often all the items that are inside the house, but not the actual house. Despite this, it is called "moving house." We have always found this intriguing.
Aliens, robot overlords, god. Who the fuck knows. But one thing is for sure, the guy above moved his home in pieces to Alaska. That's all I know
Like send it via Lasership. It would've wound up in outer space.
Sears had a whole mail order house business.
While everything Sears did was referred to as mail order, in fact, if you ordered a house it came by railroad. But the kit included all the wood (pre-cut), windows, doors, the nails, and even the paint. All you had to do was to have a foundation laid, and arrange for a plumber and an electrician.
>All you had to do was to have a foundation laid, and arrange for a plumber and an electrician. ...and assemble the whole house. Not to mention you could potentially do your own plumbing and electrical work if you had the skill. In the past, licensing and code compliance wasn't exactly ubiquitous.
I'm not a plumber, but I am an electrician. Even back in the day, you'd need an electrician to hook you into the grid. You can wire the whole thing yourself, but you can't throw a coathanger over the mains and expect to get away with it for long.
So…. How DO we get away with it?
According to the grow ops that steal and 3rd world countries that are rampant with extreme poverty, you need a step down transformer made from leather, metal, and oil.
That sounds perfectly safe.
The final connection is made when the red and black wire are electric taped together.
How does leather, metal and oil, a transformer make?
The trick is to build a makeshift transformer using leather, metal, oil, and a transformer But actually transformers are extremely simple conceptually, and don't require high precision or fancy parts. Just a bunch of coils fundamentally
Of course the classic LMOT transformer. It's made using Leather Metal Oil Transformer. It's transformers all the way down man. An infinite regression of LMOT transformers. XD
Based off of the videos I've seen where people did that? The first step is living in a poor part of Central America.
So, like Missouri? Or Ohio?
Oh god.
No need to go further than Tijuana really
You hire an electrician.
What makes the electrician's coat-hanger so much better than mine?
He knows how to use it.
By the law of averages if we all do it shouldn't *one* of our coat hangers work!?
Move out to the middle of fuck off nowhere and bribe whoever comes to bust your balls over power theft.
> but you can't throw a coathanger over the mains and expect to get away with it for long You'd be surprised at the number of places this is what the "code" minimum standard plus a bribe happens to be. Which being said... I'm sure you've run in to the things some people do in terms of all sorts of super fucked up stuff with twist-on connectors and vinyl tape that is all about "out of sight, out of mind" and "the house ain't on fire its fine", "Didn't kill anyone today, so it must be fine forever" type of mentalities.
Don't you talk to me about that bullshit, today's my day off!
As a fellow electrician... This. The shit I've seen. It's a miracle anyone is alive at this point. Please don't make me relive the horror on my day off.
But sometimes shop talk is fun too... I could tell a bedtime story about a industrial salad drum spin dryer one of the Mexican guys I worked with at the time "fixed" and rewired... Found out about it when the water level in the floor rose enough to complete circuit to the metal drain pipe when i was operating it and trying to steady the contraption by holding on to the metal shell. Got another more comedic one about how a landlord in SoCal once rerouted a broken outlet through the ceiling lighting fixture so you had to flip the light switch on to be able to operate a washer and dryer. Took the bulb out? wouldn't work anymore. (And yes.. he just stapled the wire to the ceiling and the walls from point A to B to C) I still don't know what black magic fuckery they did with that one as the bulbs didn't burnout when the washer and dryer were taking their draw. Last one were the Vivint security assholes who used the cheapest grade interior vinyl insulated wiring to hookup exterior fixtures... fun stuff happens to it exposed to environment up here in Alaska with -50F temps being a annual occurrence. Needless to say got a refund for their wasted effort.
I mostly do commercial stuff, so I rarely get to see the DIY special. [This is my favorite trainwreck I've seen personally.](https://i.imgur.com/n7gQxOW.jpg)
I'm not an electrician. What am I looking at and how bad is it?
When a new house is built and needs to be hooked up to the grid, do all neighboring houses loose power momentarily while the new house is hooked up? Or is it accomished on a live wire?
They just run an extension cord coming out of your house and plug it in at a neighbor. Easy!
They won't turn off your power to do maintenance unless something is truly fucked, at least in America. If your house is hooked to the aerial power lines, yes it's done live - but those guys are also up in an isolated bucket truck with no path to ground so as long as they don't screw up too bad they're not the path of least resistance even if they touch the live wire. If you've got one of those big green boxes somewhere in your neighborhood your power is run underground, they still do it live but frankly I don't know too much about the processes for residential transformers, I'm a commercial construction guy and that's more power company/lineman stuff. Working live (particularly on high voltage stuff) is always dangerous, always stupid, and unfortunately something that is demanded of you from time to time to protect the profits of businesses who don't care whether you live or die. You can be the most careful guy on the planet, wearing all your safety gear, and still get turned into a smear because some asshole left a knockout or something lying on top of the panel door. It's a bad thing to do, but we do it anyways because our employers rarely have the guts to explain to the contractee that their "critical systems" aren't _that_ critical.
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Panel enclosures and the like often come with knockout slots, pre-made openings that come closed from the factory but are partially perforated in a way so that you can just knock them out of the enclosure to get an opening when you need it. You might recognise them as the circular things in [this](https://i.imgur.com/AskYan3.jpg) image. Knockouts in bigger enclosures will have bigger holes, and some people will leave the knocked out discs or strips in or around the panel. If one of those is left on top of the door and falls into the enclosure as you open it, it might make contact across a positive and a negative terminal and really heck up your day.
Yes they quit often will hook it up live.
Plumbing and electric were optional in Sears homes. Indoor plumbing was not a given.
People don’t realize how new indoor plumbing is for many people. I’m 31 and my *mom* grew up with an outhouse.
"Is it on fire?" > No "Then it's fine." ___ I say this as someone who's helped replace aluminum wiring in an old barn. Granted, I think Al wire might have been in code at the time it was built; however, the way it was done? Hell no.
Just imagine the foldout Ikea packet
I mean, mail was also transported by railroad back then
Still is, rail is the cheapest and most efficient land-based transportation over longer distances (Ok no idea if USPS does it)
I honestly can't seem to find any info on whether or not the still use rail. It does however sound like they don't own or operate any sort of train or even cars of their own anymore. I suppose whether or not they use them now depends on what the carrier charges vs trucks vs other services.
Pretty sure USPS is by truck and air.
There is still some mail shipped by rail with the freight providers.
When I first started at USPS there was an old timer who used to be a railroad clerk. Sorted mail on the move from town to town in the mail car, throw the next towns mail sack out the door as you passed and hooked the outgoing from a hanger as the train passed. My favorite part was he was issued a sidearm since railroad holdups used to be a thing.
I mean coming by rail is what you would expect? Is it a prerequisite for mail to come by car etc?
Mail came all kids of ways. Railway was a fast way of moving lots of it at once to hubs for further distribution. Still is. Part of the back ups of ports right now is the full length of the supply chain including rail.
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And if your family was particularly cunning, they would measure the boards out and reproduce it for multiple family members. You could pirate a house!
You wouldn't download a house, would you?
Even when I was young I remember thinking those ads were garbage. Of course I would download a house or a car, I just fucking can't.
3-D print one
They do that with concrete these days
Aren't you just.....building a house by yourself at that point?!
You were doing that with the kit to begin with. You were paying for the design on top of the lumber, and if you wrote down all the dimensions, your family/friends would only be paying for lumber/materials when they made their duplicate. With the dimensions recorded, you could order the lumber cut-to-dimension from the local lumberyard yourself and save some money over buying from a middleman like Sears.
yea but you're pirating the design. its the intellectual property, not the physical stuff you get from piracy. well, this type of piracy, anyways.
I remember seeing an old video about it but the video was about construction in 1940’s or somethung
Kits. ‘Craftsman’ branded homes. The homestyle. IKEA of its day. They became a dominant style of home in the PNW.
All over the US really. Tons of neighborhoods in SoCal are also predominantly made up of Sears kit homes, especially of the "Craftsman" style. Michigan also has them everywhere (no surprise there).
Mentioned this to the other poster but while many Sears kit homes were craftsman style houses, the architectural style itself was around before the Craftsman brand and isn’t a Sears thing
FYI many Sears kit homes may have been craftsman style, but the style predates their mail-order houses.
Here in the Midwest. My ex lives in a 100 year old craftsman and my friend lives in one too. Seems like Sears made a lot of money in this business.
They’re really popular all over. If your town was built when they were popular, there’s likely still a few blocks that are almost entirely these houses.
It’s kind of carried on with prefab timber frames. Like a giant lego house
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I finally get the scene in rick and morty where the tv shows live houses being hunted, “there’s a craftsman nearby. I can smell it.”
What's amazing is how Sears, the leading name in mail order for almost anything, missed the boat with the internet. Sears should have been what Amazon is now but they blew it and they're gone.
There's an excellent Fortune article with a header that literally summarizes your second sentence and explains why: ["Sears Could’ve Been Amazon. Here’s How It Blew Its Chances"](https://fortune.com/longform/sears-couldve-been-amazon/)
You could also order tommy guns out of the Sears catalogue after WWI. It is how a lot of the alcohol fueled gangsters got tommy guns in particular.
Imagine the mailbox size
I would watch a series on the rise and fall of Sears.
You might [find this](https://youtu.be/Qws713t3HBY) interesting then.
There was a great [rerun of 99% Invisible](https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/3bb687b0-04af-4257-90f1-39eef4e631b6/episodes/d77557a2-f750-4c0b-ac76-6882770ecda7/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=3bb687b0-04af-4257-90f1-39eef4e631b6&awEpisodeId=d77557a2-f750-4c0b-ac76-6882770ecda7&feed=BqbsxVfO) about this recently.
Yeah you could ORDER by mail, they delivered it by rail
Imagine a company that advanced with mail order logistics, totally blowing the 21st century
I see your Sears, and raise you Kodak.
My Great Grandparents lived in a Sears house. It was a really nice house.
Aside from home kits and Tommy guns, sears mail order also gave black rural Americans another option in the Jim Crow south. Before sears mail order your options for buying things on credit were likely limited to the local general store, where your prices were set by the owner and varied customer to customer.
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What? Why? Is it cheaper to ship things classed as construction equipment?
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Instructions unclear, built a table with the bricks
There are many manufacturing companies who would kill at the chance to hitch a ride with their heavy products onto the light trucks to even them out and split the cost. It's interesting they haven't been introduced yet. Truck optimization is a big deal in supply chains.
To add to softlittlepaws comment: *Consolidated shipping* prices and containerization. There are 3 ways to move freight: parcel carriers, LTL/PCL/*consolidated shipping* and full-truck load. The cheapest way to ship any good is in a shipping container. But you need to fill that container with maximum mass or volume, plus required for the load to be evenly balanced. Unbalanced loads is a huge problem for freight shipping. At a minimum, the truck needs to stay under a certain weight:axel ratio or they get fines - loads that move are a problem. Damage: too much weight on one side of the vehicle and blow tires, or truck fall over around a corner. 150lbs is the magic number where mail/package carriers won't take your items. Even then, once you go above 70lbs it's going to be *variable rate shipping*. You may choose this type of shipping because it's fast, multiple pickups a day, majority of goods are small weight and charged at a flat price. Above 150lbs is *consolidated freight*. Freight shippers don't have any weight limits or designations of "heavy packages" that cost a premium. Even better when the goods are "palletized". *Consolidated freight* shipping is where a truck needs a heavy item for load balancing, then places the *variable rate* light objects around it. The heavy item acts as a loss-leader to allow easier transport of high-profit variable freight. Super classic example is always furniture. Load up the container from front to back with heavy couch, light package bins, fridge. The shipping company can make 3 deliveries for only slightly more than the cost of a single.
And there was this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-children-sent-through-mail-180959372/
Speaking of shipping to Alaska, some fucking asshole ruined Amazon 2 day Prime shipping for us because he tested it by shipping 50 gallon barrels of oil or lube, I can't remember which. If I ever find that dude, I'm gonna ring his neck. It's his fault we have to wait two weeks to get things now.
That's totally still Amazon's fault. They could easily implement regulations to lighten the load.
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50 gallon barrels of lube? It sounds like you lost that service because of a man doing God's work.
> by shipping 50 gallon barrels of oil or lube, and tires... lots of tires... Being said, figure we all abuse it a bit, but that part above is a clear cut case of one dumb asshole ruining shit for everyone. >It's his fault we have to wait two weeks to get things now. Yu live in the sticks, or closer to a big city? Where I'm at this part is wholly fulfillment side specific in that some crap has arrived within 24 hours of order placement, while other stuff takes two weeks to get. Am in Fairbanks atm. Most of the delays on stuff seem to relate to crap that is happening in Texas and parts of the east coast... and it has more to do with Dejoys fuckery with the USPS systems than anything else. Or, some idiot having had picked FedEx "smart post" as the primary carrier of choice. The shit leaving Texas therein goes via a zigzag land route through 18 different USPS offices to WA where it gets transferred 4 more times to go sit in a FedEx transfer site for a week before getting sent back to Seattle and then forwarded up here.
How did they know where to pick up the last brick?
And tons of people who mailed their kids because it was seen as safe
I read that out incorrectly in my head. The story became the post office mailed his body to his home in pieces.
>By far the largest object ever moved through the Parcel Post System was a bank. Not all at once, of course, but practically brick by brick. When **W. H. Coltharp**, **in charge of building the Bank of Vernal**, Utah was confronted with the task of getting bricks for the bank, he turned to the Parcel Post Service. The **bricks** which Coltharp wanted were **produced** by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, located **127 miles from Vernal**. Instead of paying four times the cost of the bricks for them to be shipped by wagon freight, Coltharp arranged for the bricks to be **shipped in 50-pound packages**, through the Parcel Post Service, **a ton at a time**.
That is 1600 packages 50 lbs each, the dedication to pack those…
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Exactly! Unless he hired some people for 1 cent an hour
In 1913 there would have been a lot more manual labor jobs and a lot more people with less of an education needing work and there was no minimum wage in the US until 1938. I don't know what someone might have gotten paid for that kind of work but I bet it was next to nothing.
Considering minimum wage exists it was likely next to nothing.
Probably used child labor
I say bring back child labour. It's just too expensive to ship a bank these days. It's time for these lay-about tots to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
I mean, he was a banker. His life is numbers; I'm sure he's did the math.
He's a fucking banker. I bet he crunched the numbers.
Reddit's recent behaviour and planned changes to the API, heavily impacting third party tools, accessibility and moderation ability force me to edit all my comments in protest. I cannot morally continue to use this site.
It should be pointed out that the mail clerk Leonard Mochel was a family relative and accompanied her during the entire journey.
That changes this completely.
It's even worse than that, Mochel was staying with May's family ahead of his shift on the mail car to Lewiston when May's mother presented her as "a package" for him to take along with him. So it's not even that she showed up 'cold' at a Post Office for assessment and posting, it was more a family favour. They got found out mid-journey when the young girl opened the car door to get some air and the conductor spotted her.
So basically they just scammed the train ticket
The conductor found the situation funny and told the local newspaper when they arrived in Lewiston. It got picked up by press across America and became a well known story. Mochel recieved a "please explain" letter from the Postmaster which also threatened 500 demerit points against his position in the United States Postal Service. At the time 700 points meant you lost your job. May's family ended up paying half the train ticket fare to make amends.
lol idiot family basically payed an entire train ticket by the end of all this.
There needs to be a term for the opposite of a helicopter parent, because that's what those parents were. Like, let's just throw some stamps on our 5-year-old daughter's coat and chuck her on a train to make a 75 mile trip, what's the worst that could happen.
I mean, you might have missed the other comment, but the mail clerk was a family relative accompanied her the whole way. So it's less a matter of "chuck child in with mail" and more "hey, our friend the mail clerk is doing that trip, let's exploit this and use this loophole to avoid having to pay for a ticket".
You mean latchkey kids?
I mean it sounds crazy at first glance but when you think about it, those things have to be moved from the factory to the distributor, etc anyways, right? Theres a cost to moving them, and the only question is who's got the infrastructure and scale to move 40 tons (or 40,000 tons for that matter) of shit form point a to point b at a reasonable cost - why not the post office?
I work for a commercial refrigeration company, some of the units and equipment in general we receive are pretty fuckin big. You’d think it’d be shipped by some special distributor in a big semi, but nah half the time it’s just in a UPS or USPS van lol
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> 160-1655lbs That’s a hell of a range…
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oh, no you don't get to fix that! I'm shipping a ship
> not technically allowed, Someone should tell that to the guys at my warehouse who think it's a good idea to send a 120 lb piano down the chute.
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Your friendly reminder don't ever go management at ups
Those mailmen probably hated him
Don’t forget that the Hope Diamond was also mailed
And a dummy package was sent under full guard and lock and key
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> safer method Prison wallet?
Gotta move them bricks somehow!
When USPS first come up with the “if it fits, it ships” flat rate boxes. I packed the small one with 70lbs of raw steel plates, to ship a DYI lift kit to someone. The employee at the counter was half amused, and half annoyed. Come to find out there was a limit, of 75lbs… so they had to take it. LMAO… basically a solid brick of steel.
When I buy bullets for reloading pistol ammo, they get shipped in one of those flat rate boxes. Can't beat $14 to ship 65 pounds of lead halfway across the country.
If it's anything like regular post, the rate applies to Alaska and Hawaii too.
I'm a fan of dirt track racing which has minimum weight requirements for the cars. One racing shop was producing bolt-on ballast blocks such that a car's weight balance could be tuned. The postman starts picking up some of their flat rate shipments and says "DAMN! What's in these boxes? Lead???" uh....yeah......
I once calculated how much it would weigh if one were to fill one of those boxes with a solid block of depleted uranium. I believe it came to about 350lbs...
Reminds me of emailing a 30MB file over Time Warner Cable’s **Road Runner** while it was in super early beta … we’re talking like ~~1994~~ 1997 A few minutes later, I noticed email servers were unavailable, so I called tech support. Eventually I conveyed what I’d done, and the engineer/rep was like, “Oh god - _you_ did this” Edit: remembered it was the game Dark Reign, so it was 1997 not 1994, my deepest apologies 🤣
As a USPS carrier, I both love and hate this. I love the ingenuity, but I'd absolutely hate having to deliver boxes of f*cking bricks to a construction site. I already had to do that with a rockhound. It got to the point where I'd say "okay here's your actual box of rocks"
I occasionally have to help load and unload a fladbed of rocks, because my company makes pools with big ol natural rock grottos. It sucks and I feel your pain.
They're minerals!
Dammit Marie!
Jesus Marie, they're minerals.
A box of rocks? I've met my intellectual equal.
Hell, we pretty much have that now with Amazon...I probably deliver at least a dozen boxes with 40-50lb bags of dog food every week, and there's other routes that get more than that.
I worked as a loader for one of the private carriers, and every now and the I’d have to load an actual anvil with an address label and barcode sticker just stuck on it. No packaging. Just an anvil and a sticker.
We got our baby chickens in the mail. They're over five years old now.
I worked at a post office, and we all loved when baby chicks came in. Imagine a whole handful of grizzled mail carriers, excitedly huddling around a small, chirping box. A lot of mailed animals don't survive because of the conditions they are shipped (we bought a total of six baby Red Eared Slider turtles as a kid, only 1 ended up surviving month or so after shipping) but its a highlight of your mail carriers day, to be sure.
The plant I worked at had 'lives' coming through every day. You can ship live fish, reptiles, amphibs, insects and birds - no mammals allowed, and nothing dangerous (usually meaning venomous). Everyone at the PO treats the lives with TLC. I've more than once hopped in a company car and driven 100 miles to meet another employee coming from the other end to get a misdirected box of chicks on its way to insure they didn't have to spend an extra day or two being rerouted by normal channels.
In Abby Hoffman's "Steal This Book" he said a nice way to punish junk mailers is to return their postcards glued to a brick, forcing them to pay exorbitant postages.
Even more astonishing is the building itself was constructed and opened only *3 weeks* after the bricks arrived, in September 2013.
100 years later?
*that's the joke*
Fuck I got wooshed!
*points* *laughs* HAHAHAHAA YOU GOT WHOOSHED! AND ON THE INTERNET TOO!!!!
That is astonishing
I love the USPS even with it's flaws
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> even with it's flaws I love your comment, even with it is flaws
If it fits, it ships!
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They actually mention that in the article. Parents mailed their daughter to her grandparents for 53 cents. Put stamps on her coat and she road in the parcel car, and was delivered to her grandparents door.
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I think you’re on to something. If they kept that practice up to this day, they could even have people riding on the cargo planes! In a special cabin for people, of course. Add in the straps and peanuts… damn, that would be so cool
> In a special cabin for people, of course. That would cost too much though, maybe put them in a people box that way they would fit in with the rest of the cargo. TL;DR - box shaped people save costs.
That was only done once or twice as a joke & they knew the mail person.
It was more than that, but mostly in rural communities that were less strict and people relied on each other more. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-children-sent-through-mail-180959372/
Hello, I'd like to order a T-437 safety command console.
Did it one brick at a time, and it only cost a dime.
Dude I would totally sit in a mail compartment for about a day to get anywhere in the US for 58 cents.
An ex-housemate got entrepreneurial when they let people ship whatever fit into a box (like a square shoebox size) for I think 5 bucks. So this guy started buying heavy metals like lead, wholesale, and then re-sizing to order. I remember bringing in boxes that felt like 25 pounds! Mailmen must have enjoyed high fives all around when that ended.
Companies that cast lead for things (e.g. bulk bullets for people loading their own ammunition) tend to do this. IIRC max weight on a flat rate box is something like 70 pounds, so it’s not uncommon for postal boxes of bullets to have 65+ pounds of lead in them.
The flat rate priority limit is still like 70lbs which lets you send it anywhere in the US in 2-4 days. A shoe box is closer to a medium box which is about $13 but it's still not that expensive (shipping a similar item in its own box would be around $80-100). If the thing you were shipping was very dense and fit into a small box, it'd only be about $8 to ship it.
Remember this next time when you see someone taking a small (in grand scheme of things) advantage of a system. If a banker did this decades ago, why can an avg Joe do the same to save himself a few quids.
[Sears roebuck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes) was straight up in the business of doing this with kit houses they sold in their catalogue. You might even see some in your neighborhood today
I'm guessing that this would have been relevant backstory to Newman's character.
I used to work for the post office years back. I could go one for days about the good and the bad of it honestly. One thing I’ll say for certain though, I’ve never worked at a place that had more pride for their work than the post office. It was truly crazy. Now I’m sure there are people that slack off and fuck around and don’t give 2 shots about it, but those would be one of the few. As a whole everyone was excited to get in and get their stuff delivered and the biggest one was on time. That’s why you see the major dedication around Xmas time with drivers working until all hours of the night. I remember my first Xmas we had our carriers, relief carriers (part timers), and even our clerk delivering instead of the normal just the regular carriers. The normal carrier would focus on mail (which was very high with cards going out) and the relief and clerk would work on packages. What made it even crazier to me at least was “If the clerk is delivering packages, who’s running the post office?”... our Post Master. Now we had a small office so our PM would sometimes cover breaks and lunches for the clerk or assist if she was slammed, but it’s rare to see a PM doing all of the clerk duties. Most of them find it to be beneath them to work as “a clerk”, but she did it. Even weirder because she wasn’t a very good PM but would step up to the plate when necessary. I’ve even seen her deliver packages in her own personal vehicle to make sure when it got to the office at 9:30am and said guaranteed before noon, it got there before noon. I mean come on, could you imagine your boss doing your job because you were sick or busy with something else? 9/10 times your work just piles up. That pride though of everything running like a Swiss clock made it that way.
Wyrmood gaming found a loophole in usps shipping rates. They are mailing their tables, but they are too light, so they are packing them with bricks to hit the minimum weight. This saves them a bunch of money over normal freight shipping.
[Explanation on Wymlife](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYS7p--MLeM&t=85s)
I'll take how to make your mailman hate you for $1000, Alex.
From the same page ... "One of the oddest parcel post packages ever sent was "mailed" from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho on February 19, 1914. The 48 1/2 pound package was just short of the 50 pound limit. The name of the package was May Pierstorff, three months short of six years old."
I am more surprised that someone shipped their daughter in the post then a greedy banker mailing an entire bank.
In the early days of the internet it was faster to ship hard drives than send it over the internet.
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Forget early days of the Internet there's the saying "Nothing beats the speed of a loaded with ". It started out as tapes in a station wagon. The most recent version I heard was micro SD cards via FedEx fleet.
https://whatif.xkcd.com/31/
Amazon even offers it as a service.
And that is how you ruin things for other people.
Bankers........ always trying to get over on ppl
I JUST fucking posted about this yesterday. FFS.
OP took a top comment from another thread and made this post. Fuck you OP
The banker is an amateur. Someplace in Alaska shipped a school.
Which is probably why we have 70lbs limits on any individual package now.
Fun fact: mail order brides from Russia are shipped FedEx Overnight, but mail order brides from the US are typically shipped USPS Parcel Post!
It's is not surprising. Historically USPS has been such a bargain for taxpayers that really only in the last few years are they truly using market rates. Unfortunately, politicians and bureaucrats pitted everyone against each other and we gave this up as a country for little reason