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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

My father (makes fake teeth) rips up his carpet every decade and has it burned and the metal dust in it melted down. Usually gets $10k-$15k.

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I would just get a Roomba, bling it out, and then destroy it when it ripped one of my charger cables out of the wall.

Or just get sheet vinyl or something.

A carpet is probably better at holding on to particles as people walk over it.

A vinyl sheet will just lose it to people's boots.

10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day. So he might be happy to make the trade-off for having a nice carpet.

That’s fair. I was just surprised to hear he’d be using carpet in the first place. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, not questioning him.

Carpet is probably the best thing for it, since the dust will work its way down in and stay there instead of sticking to your shoes and winding up all over the city.

> 10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day.

It would be about $2.75 per day, an insignificant amount, but it's much worse than that because you earn it all at once at the end of the ten-year period. So you're making (almost) $2.75 a day toward the end of the period, and a lot less than that toward the beginning.

Really though, it's more a sort of diligence bonus on top of the regular earnings he makes from his teeth manufacturing business. Looked at that way, it's pretty impressive quickly obtain an otherwise lost 10-15K per decade as opposed to just losing money on carpet removal once a decade. And all of it for, what? a few hours of work?

Yeah, it's partly a tradeoff for convenience. The carpet helps capture dust which makes everything more breathable in the lab as well. I'm sure bigger labs have more sophisticated facilities, but he's just one guy in his attic.

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