4metals said:
Recently I have been getting a sense that the forum is a bit stagnant. And often when it is slow I go back and read old threads and I become renewed with the potential that this forum has.
Sure...it's stagnant....how much e-scrap are you refining 100%? I think for a while you were trying to granulate boards and recover metals from the pulp...get anywhere? I think "cool"...til I think about what 40,000 lbs of boards looks like. Or even what 1,000 lbs of boards looks like in gaylords, and what I imagine the pulp from grinding them looks like.
What it comes down to for most, is the motivation. When Harold started, back in the day...what % do you think his accountability was on karat? When Hoke wrote her book, how do you think she did?
I talk to antique dealers..."we used to throw away gold filled, nobody would buy it". Nobody would buy a product that is worth $200+ / lb and can be refined pretty easily.
Now we are supposed to figure out how to refine a product that comes in under $6/lb intrinsic? Because that's the future?
This forums past is based upon an innovation that can exist in one mans garage, and is limited by their creativity. The future is a multi-billion dollar complex, the size of a village....with the population to match.
On edit...just to add, by no means intended to be confrontational or otherwise. I'm having a frustrating couple of days and it probably came out in my words. But it's a frustration based on the scale of business that one has to operate to really do "ok", and a frustration based on how that scale has changed over the last 50 years.