When we recently looked into self-storage to store our junk, the high prices per cubic foot (in a very HCOL area) made us recontextualize our junk in terms of how much rent each item was paying to live with us. Far more in rent over a few months then just buying a new one of whatever it was, when we needed it.
> Far more in rent over a few months then just buying a new one of whatever it was, when we needed it.
I remember reading an article once that said exactly the same thing. The economics of it just don't add up for most people. Anything over 6 months to 12 months and you're generally better off selling or even giving cheap stuff away and then repurchasing later if you need to. Storage gets expensive pretty fast. The guy working at the storage centre said most weeks he'd either end up emptying an abandoned unit or see someone removing most of their stuff and throwing it into a skip.
My wife uses the local thrift shops as "storage" for a very large fraction of our household goods. The shop will send someone to pick up our donations for storage for free. When we "take stuff out of storage", it isn't quite what we put in, but usually close enough and a nice change of pace. And the storage fee is very modest.
8 years ago, we moved continents. Some stuff got shipped, some stuff stored that was too precious to sell but not precious enough to ship.
Yeah. 8 years of storage for what's now a bunch of kids toys, 120v tools, and some random furniture that we're never going to ship, some handmade stuff.
Anyway, we're going to have an epic yard-sale this year when we actually make it back.
Which you'll probably find is more trouble than it's worth but at least it will get stuff out of your hands. Going to make a serious effort to get rid of a fair bit of stuff this summer myself.
When we left, the community had a pretty good yard-sale culture. We won't make back anything like what we paid for the stuff or the storage, but we'll not have to deal with the storage costs any more.
Otherwise, the tools, books and toys will go to the local thrift stores. And the crap goes to the dump.
To the degree that people get a storage unit to store things that they don't really have a future plan for using/displaying/etc., they should probably reconsider. It's mostly paying money to kick the can down the road and even potentially make it someone else's problem.
The most valuable things I own as a homeowner are my collection of tools for home improvement, but even their value pales in comparison to the value of the property itself. I'm very glad I don't have a hoarder mentality.
The problem is that "sustainable" is always based on past observations. There were 40+ years of observations for these crab and a stable fishery. But if the environment changes for the worse, the data-based definition of "sustainable" for a stock might not change fast enough to compensate.
So the "new sustainability" under climate change has to be much more precautionary than before, and yet not shut down on false signals. It's tricky science even when intentions are good.
On the Pacific NW coast where this is happening, cool marine air will push in and eventually overwhelm the system holding in the heat. The change can be quite abrupt, as the two systems wrestle for dominance, I've felt it (in Seattle) is as a sudden breeze followed by what feels like turning the AC on - literally a 5-10deg temp drop in minutes and can drop 30deg in a couple hours. It doesn't generally end with full-on rain but with cool coastal clouds rolling in.
In this case it was a 40-50 degree (Fahrenheit) swing from the record high to the overnight lows as the air compression from sinking air off the mountains dispersed and marine air came onshore: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/even-more-extreme-ext...
It's been over 30 years since I spent much time in a darkroom but just starting to read that article and my smell-memory conjured up that very distinctive developer/darkroom chemical smell and all of the associated memories - for me too it was always evocative of magic.
In the early 80s, I knew "Yoda" before I knew "Lola". Thanks to Disney's persistence, my kids now know and giggle at "Yoda" (picked up from the internet, not me) and only vaguely know that it came from some old song somewhere.
Our lab has been collecting an ecological time series every January for 35 years. Continuity is critical for monitoring change and the health of the population (under hunting, so there's an economic incentive). Now we have a permanent, unfillable gap. There are many such examples.
I've been a long-time member of a smallish but active forum (I won't post the address, maybe several hundred regulars). We've had very rational discussions and good exchanges of views between (U.S.) left and right in the 15 years I've participated.
However, since the presidential election, things have devolved into sheer anger. On the right, it's defending indefensible behavior (IMO, obviously). On the left, it's grasping more and more ridiculous legal theories and overreacting to trivial culture-war provocations. On both sides, the tit-for-tat has increased exponentially.
This forum has some very rational people who (outside of the politics threads) are very intelligent and sane on many subjects. The fact that this group can't manage it tells me that right now, I don't think anyone can.
We got rid of a lot of junk.