Another guest contribution from J. Dilkas. For the record, the opinions and ideas expressed are solely (and probably, in the entire universe, only) his own. I read last week that a steel bridge in Pennsylvania got stolen. The whole thing just went missing. The police suspected (which was later confirmed when they arrested two brothers for the caper) that it was stolen for scrap, since the steel in it was worth around $100,000. Apparently people are stealing all kinds of metal now because it’s so expensive. It used to be just gold and silver, but now someone could break into your house, walk right past your jewelry box and rip out your copper plumbing instead! And it got me thinking. Because we’ve got lots of super high-quality metal all around us, just waiting to be stolen–manhole covers. It’s only going to be a matter of time before thieves start prying them up out of the ground and selling them too. But we can beat them to the punch and put some money back in the city’s coffers if we essentially steal them ourselves. I have no way of knowing, but let’s say a manhole cover weighs 30 pounds. And let’s say cast iron sells for two dollars a pound. That’s $60 per manhole. Not great, but let’s imagine the city has 50,000 manholes. (Again, I have no way of knowing if any of these numbers are accurate.) If we sold our manholes, we could pocket a tidy three million dollars just like that. I know, I know, we can’t end it there. We can’t have big gaping holes all over the place, inviting people to fall in. Our three million would be gone in no time settling lawsuits. We have to replace the covers, of course. But if we replace them with smaller, thinner covers, we can cut the cost of each one significantly. Trim a foot from the diameter and maybe half an inch of thickness and maybe we can cut the amount of steel by a third. So now we’re talking about two million dollars to replace them, so we’re still up a mil. And given the size of the contract, we can probably negotiate down another half a million. So we’ve made the city one and a half million dollars, basically from nothing. I’m not saying it’s going to save the city, but hey, I’m just one guy and I just got us more than 1/774th closer to getting rid of the city’s deficit. A few more ideas like that and we’ll be in the clear in no time. __ Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearing house of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.
