rdw1121: let me rephrase.
Anyone can tell the difference in value between a fax modem and an XFi. There’s more gold in, and ON, an xFi that in some low end processors.
See images.
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Mwfhawk:
Yep. The recycling industry is extremely volatile across the spectrum.
And the metals market is one of The most extreme. If a single construction consultant on an island micronation says they
may need to buy a few hundred thousand tons of recycled steel you can watch every commodity jumpe a few points in the following days. If the same guy goes bankrupt and looses his island nation to the bank or investors the markets can drop a twice as much by that afternoon.
When Trump announced the trade sanctions against China, with no details, the steel industry went crazy for 4 days before settling back to where it was before the announcement.
Using American pounds lt steel scrap went from 1/2 cent per pound to as high as 6 cents and as low as 1/25th cent over four days before calming down and returning to a somewhat stable 3/4ths cent.
Using the pyramid methodology I’ve used elsewhere on the site; boardsort is fairly near the top/end of the supply chain. What they further sort and pass on to their buyer is feed: a raw source material. The recYcling equivalent of a gold mine selling ore.
Refinery ownership changes constantly. It’s a make or break job class where you either make it or fail spectacularly with very little in between. The best ones, a small handful, change ownership/management every few months to years. The owner makes 8 digits and cashed out selling it to an employee. The employee who makes a bunch of changes to “do it better”. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not.
So if last week mixed motherboards were good maybe this week colours need to be sorted from greens. Who knows, next month we may have a category for red motherboards.
Maybe the companies were taking cards with brackets all along. OR,
Maybe some boardsort employee had the sole job of removing brackets and nothing else. Maybe that employee got sick, or hurt, or moved. Or retired.
Regardless we now have with and without brackets.
You don’t need to be a scrapper or a tech to tell which of these two boards is worth more. I’m very happy to see that class split. It’s better for everyone. The low price didn’t drop much. The high price allows for proper payouts on the material.
The list of classes has changed a lot over the years. Some classes are long gone. Be it lack of volume or lack of buyer, they are no more.
Sometimes they try adding something for a few weeks and find out the volume just isn’t enough to justify the extra sort.
If after 4 weeks they have to go and dump all of card B back into the card A bin, there’s no sense in keeping the class.
If every user starts pulling the brackets off we can expect that extra class to stick around. If no one goes to the trouble I’d expect it to quietly disappear one day. This is better for me since I (almost) always removed brackets. Just to be polite.
As for the last item:sort order. For many years the list was ordered by class groups and people complained that it wasn’t in order of value. Now it’s in the order of value and the complaint switches to the flip side. ;)
I’m not even sure it’s intentional and not some mistake in eXcel where an employee hit a function key and did an auto sort by accident before saving and uploading.
I’m just happy it’s not some giant wall of unsorted text many other companies use.
Nothin bothers me more than lazy and an unsorted WoT is just plain too lazy to push enter a few times and hit a function key; and use their brain.