14 ms·

When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful

114 points by luu 11y ago

746F7475 11y ago
Is this a common issue? Do these pre-peeled oranges last keep as long as un-peeled ones? Are they as good, say, a week after they have been peeled? If this is really a common issue (I have no idea I haven't thought about peeling oranges before in this way) and these sell at fast pace, I see no problem. But if store only sells a couple each week and rest are just left to rot then I feel like these probably shouldn't be sold. Or maybe author could ask their local store to implement some sort of "pay extra and we'll peel 'em" deal.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Right, I'm certain that grocery store owners would do something incredibly wasteful that made no business sense... In reality grocery stores are incredibly mercenary, if they do something it's almost certain that it contributes to the bottom line.
- cbhl 11y ago
  The irony is that pre-prepped fruit is used to reduce environmental waste. The store takes fruit that is at the end of it's "on the shelf in its natural skin" life, and processes it to make it appealing to eat for a few days longer. For oranges that might have blemished skin; remove the skin and put it in a plastic tin and you can keep it on shelves for a bit longer. For mangoes and melons and berries you can cut out or toss the bits that are starting to rot, and make fruit salad with the good half of the fruit. And so on.
  - shawn-furyan 11y ago
    Excellent point. This is the fundamental issue with meme outrage. It almost always relies on assuming the complex incentive structure that leads to something existing in the world reduces to 'lazy idiots made it happen'. Looking for nuance in the subject of the meme almost always works against this assumption.
Sanddancer 11y ago
I think the crux of this particular problem is that there was no thought to how to possibly redesign the product to be less wasteful. The argument had been played, "these are bad, and can't be fixed." So, instead of looking at the usage scenarios -- disabled people, parents with young kids who want them to have easier access to a healthier snack, etc -- they went straight to, "oh, they must be lazy." Here, I can see an easier solution than mason jars being two hemispherical plastic halves shrink wrapped together with a perforated area that's easy to tear, like is found on drink containers. Make it out of a bioplastic and you have something that's accessible and environmentally friendly. To pre-answer, no, getting the produce person to help you isn't a real good option. It's doubtful that you're going to want the orange right then, and having a peeled orange in even a produce bag is going to be more problematic than a harder container. So, a harder container that's relatively sealed will help keep it a few days until the person's ready to eat it.
- mcguire 11y ago
  I rather suspect that Whole Foods used the rectangular plastic boxes because they have a billion of them on hand for their other packaged products. They may even be bioplastic, knowing them. Which means that these were pretty much optimal to start with.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  The requirement to find someone and ask for help is a barrier in itself. Also, it depends a lot on the store or chain. If you enter a Wal-Mart hoping to leave with an orange you didn't peel yourself, you're going to get frustrated. If you try the same in Publix, you're going to have a much better experience. But you will pay more on average shopping at the latter, as they very obviously prioritize more highly their employee training, employee wages, and customer service. Last time I was in Wal-Mart, I had a hard enough time just buying a video game locked up behind glass. No one was on duty in the department. Hey, no problem. I picked up the phone behind the desk and started dialing the internal numbers printed on the sticker for the manager's office, customer service, the checkouts, anywhere, hoping to ask someone to come back and help a customer. Nobody picked up, from any extension I tried, after any number of rings. If I were shopping for myself, I would have left (or having learned from previous experience, never entered the store in the first place). But I was already helping someone else shop, so eventually someone finally showed up to do nothing more than turn a key and operate the sale terminal. I imagine that there are an awful lot of people who, like me, would prefer to not ask anyone for help with anything. I have occasionally been asked by my fellow customers in a store of smaller stature to help them reach something, and I can tell that it makes them uncomfortable to need to do that when everyone else can just grab anything at will. When I'm in a situation where I am forced by store policy to get the assistance of a store employee in order to make a purchase, and there is no employee there to assist customers, I can easily extrapolate that out to people who need more help than other customers.
mxfh 11y ago
There is a growing cargo cult between what people belief is ecologically responsible behavior and what keeps waste low in a society. In my opinion this complex consist part out of learned behavior decades ago, remainders of slightly masochist protestant life style ethics and prolonged exposure to green-washing. Plastics are not bad by default compared to all other alternatives¹. Bad is a waste of energy and resources as is littering instead of a closed product life chain. http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/ http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/ ¹How many paper tissues and water+detergent is used at home for preparing a single orange compared to an efficient peeling processing line, that also hopefully doesn't discard the peels in a mixed waste disposal. I would even guess a random pre-peeled orange might even have a higher chance of a smaller footprint in an life-cycle assessment, than a regular orange that has a higher chance of never never being sold or eaten after purchase.
- leereeves 11y ago
  The downside of disposable plastics is that people often don't dispose of them carefully and they decompose very slowly. They're accumulating in the environment.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    I sometimes wonder how feasible or expensive it'd be to: 1) institute trash separation for all waste before it enters landfills, so that recyclables are separated out and processed, since obviously people are not very good at disposing of recyclables separately themselves, and 2) dig up old landfills and process the trash as in #1. Of course, there's also the problem of things like the garbage gyres in the oceans, and of course litter on the land. The latter is solvable I think through cultural changes. In first-world countries litter isn't that much of a problem any more; it became socially unacceptable to litter, just like it became socially unacceptable to smoke indoors.
    - deleted 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
This is silly. Disabled people don't have any special rights, and should not expect any special accommodations, especially when those accommodations would cause excess environmental damage. You may as well complain that Mount McKinley isn't handicapped accessible.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  What a horrible worldview you have. Yes disabled people shouldn't have any special rights but they should have the same rights as everyone else, the right to live as functional life as possible, if that requires that the rest of society make some accommodations then that's fine by me. Any society is the sum of its parts, all its parts and should be judged on how it treats everyone able bodied and not.
  - Chris2048 11y ago
    Where is "the right to live as functional life as possible" an established right?
    - tremon 11y ago
      http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx
      - AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
        Oh, a non-binding, toothless, meaningless document issued by the UN. Seems legit.
        nkrisc 11y ago
        Though it would be a great display of poetic justice, I hope you never end up as a quadriplegic.
        11y ago
whack 11y ago
I generally agree that shaming people for choosing lazy/convenient options is bad. Quality of life and convenience should be a primary design factor, unless it's shown to be disastrously bad in some other respect. Honest question for disability supporters though: Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people better live their lives? Because that's essentially the argument that the article is making in a lot of ways. Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. It bloats the product spec. Makes the implementation more complex, which in turn makes it harder to understand and maintain in the future. It makes the manufacturing more onerous. In all these ways, when going out of your way to make something more accessible-friendly, it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features. Hence my question above. Similar to forcing/shaming companies into making their products disabled-friendly, would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?
- prezjordan 11y ago
  Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses. > Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. If your original design excludes a non-trivial amount of human beings then it's probably not a very good design. Of course context is necessary here, and I can't just throw a snarky one-liner at you. If you're building a puzzle game, then yeah, blind people might not be able to play it and that's okay. If you're making a signup form, then it is inexcusable to leave out folks using assistive technologies because it's "complicated."
  - IanCal 11y ago
    This is why laws around disabled access usually have use the term "reasonable adjustments" or similar. It's worth pointing out that the UK law also covers a businesses website: http://www.out-law.com/page-330 http://www.out-law.com/page-330 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance
mwcampbell 11y ago
What I find most striking about the tweet quoted at the beginning of the article is the assumption that just because something is natural (e.g. the peel on an orange), it's better than the manufactured alternative (e.g. plastic packaging). That assumption can probably be traced back to the belief that the natural world was created by a God who designed it to be good, for our benefit (well, before it was supposedly cursed because of sin). The truth, of course, is that the peel on an orange is merely the product of evolution; it wasn't designed for our benefit. We can do better than nature. So the real solution is to package products in a way that's both convenient for us and not harmful to the environment.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I wonder if wax paper could be an effective way to preserve an orange. It has the downside of not displaying the alluring juiciness of the fruit as well, but the upside of being even easier to open than a plastic container.
- mcguire 11y ago
  I understand the plastic wrap on zucchini falls into that category.
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  I think you're reading too much in to "natural". I just see someone trying to say peels are a preexisting attribute of oranges without using the word "preexisting" because that would ruin the joke structure they're using to make their point. "If only there were [roundabout way of describing something that seems obvious to speaker but are feigning ignorance to]..." is a well worn construction.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Exactly. It's like someone made https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-plugin https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-p... but for oranges. (Ignoring of course the advantages name by the OP.)
pigpaws 11y ago
this is horrible. Why isn't that label done in braille?! when does this end?
julie1 11y ago
Ok, when it comes to hygienism, healthy food, the cult of Nature and of the perfect body, where bullying/shaming publicly the weaker was the right way to discuss a problem there is an historical precedent. A regim loving all of this, and nice desgin/architecture and also going to the conclusion disabled people are a waste ... I don't say it to not win a Godwin point. But really social networks don't bring the best out of Humanity. The internet era of NNTP newsgroups, early web had some dark parts but it was more looking like an agora than the arena it has became. Modern internet is becoming scary.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
slavik81 11y ago
I really wish we just tried to properly price externalities. Then we could end these moralizing crusades and it would no longer be a question of whether peeled oranges could be sold, but a question of how much they cost. Sure, I might buy a peeled orange. Maybe that's wasteful, but maybe I make up for it by being less wasteful elsewhere. That should be a possibility, because it would be a big help for people like the OP for whom the product is much more valuable than normal. You get much better results when everyone's incentives are set up to be directly aligned with doing the right thing.
- danharaj 11y ago
  That's the dream of liberal economics, but it hasn't panned out over hundreds of years. If there are incentive structures that automatically align with "the right thing" (whatever that messy concept is), they aren't what we have today.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    It only "didn't pan out" in the sense that people aren't aware of this approach or it's politically unpopular. Hence why we end up with ineffective billboards exhorting me to take shorter showers, even though it's a far more value-dense use of water than the marginal unit used for rice, which has zero economic disincentives to grow. True absurdity. If the farmer had to pay even an opportunity cost (like with David Zetland's all-in auctions[1]), then he would cut back his usage immediately and the crisis would be over. Does that platonically align with "the right thing"? No, but it reduces wasteful uses of water, effectively, without the moral crusade. [1] It wouldn't take away any water they have a right to, but would simply pay for any water usage rights they waive, meaning that growing $10 of rice would cost them $30 in potential payments for letting someone else use the water. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658193 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658193
    - danharaj 11y ago
      Maybe that's a good solution for the particular problem you mentioned, but the only way to banish "moral crusades" which seems in this thread of discussion to be an allusion to the political aspects of economic activity is to price everything correctly everywhere and reduce transaction costs to 0. Not convinced it would work, and if it could work, the only way we could approximate such a solution is by incrementally restructuring the economy as new solutions are developed in order to test them and keep the ones that work. This is a fundamentally political process. There's always an undertone of banishing the political from human activity leaving only economics in conversations like this one that doesn't sit right with me.
danharaj 11y ago
This is a solid argument from the premises, but one of the unspoken premises is that people should live independently or in small nuclear families. Disabled people have fewer accessibility issues when they are integrated into larger social units. Most ableist discrimination is ultimately exclusion from the social participation that is the mechanism of human mutuality. Handicapped people are excluded from reaping the benefits of human cooperation at the local level: trying to fix that with commodities and government stipends soothes some symptoms without solving the root problem: our society implicitly excludes people who need it most. My opinion is that everyone would be better off in larger living groups where everyone contributes labor for others. To each according to their need, from each according to their ability' and all that nonsense. I understand that this idea is considered ridiculous and naive by prevailing wisdom, but whatever /shrug
Houshalter 11y ago
Who even cares if it's wasteful or not? Let people buy what they want. If I want to pay 10 extra cents for a peeled orange, then let me. It's none of your damn business. Is it really lazy? How much time does it take to peel an orange? How much is your time worth? There you go. And that's not even getting to the health issues of it. If you buy a peeled orange, you are more likely to eat it than an unpeeled one. Just like placing a candy jar on the other side of the room makes people eat 10x less candy, than when it's conveniently placed next to them. We should put orange peels on unhealthy food. I know this is true, because I have a bunch of unpeeled oranges going bad, but the other fruit is all eaten. Everytime I think I might like an orange, my brain tells me "eh, maybe later". And they never get eaten.
spinlock 11y ago
I bet the guys/gals at the deli counter would peal an orange for you if you asked nice.

114 points by luu 11y ago

Is this a common issue? Do these pre-peeled oranges last keep as long as un-peeled ones? Are they as good, say, a week after they have been peeled? If this is really a common issue (I have no idea I haven't thought about peeling oranges before in this way) and these sell at fast pace, I see no problem. But if store only sells a couple each week and rest are just left to rot then I feel like these probably shouldn't be sold. Or maybe author could ask their local store to implement some sort of "pay extra and we'll peel 'em" deal.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
Right, I'm certain that grocery store owners would do something incredibly wasteful that made no business sense... In reality grocery stores are incredibly mercenary, if they do something it's almost certain that it contributes to the bottom line.
cbhl 11y ago
The irony is that pre-prepped fruit is used to reduce environmental waste. The store takes fruit that is at the end of it's "on the shelf in its natural skin" life, and processes it to make it appealing to eat for a few days longer. For oranges that might have blemished skin; remove the skin and put it in a plastic tin and you can keep it on shelves for a bit longer. For mangoes and melons and berries you can cut out or toss the bits that are starting to rot, and make fruit salad with the good half of the fruit. And so on.
- shawn-furyan 11y ago
  Excellent point. This is the fundamental issue with meme outrage. It almost always relies on assuming the complex incentive structure that leads to something existing in the world reduces to 'lazy idiots made it happen'. Looking for nuance in the subject of the meme almost always works against this assumption.

Sanddancer 11y ago

I think the crux of this particular problem is that there was no thought to how to possibly redesign the product to be less wasteful. The argument had been played, "these are bad, and can't be fixed." So, instead of looking at the usage scenarios -- disabled people, parents with young kids who want them to have easier access to a healthier snack, etc -- they went straight to, "oh, they must be lazy." Here, I can see an easier solution than mason jars being two hemispherical plastic halves shrink wrapped together with a perforated area that's easy to tear, like is found on drink containers. Make it out of a bioplastic and you have something that's accessible and environmentally friendly. To pre-answer, no, getting the produce person to help you isn't a real good option. It's doubtful that you're going to want the orange right then, and having a peeled orange in even a produce bag is going to be more problematic than a harder container. So, a harder container that's relatively sealed will help keep it a few days until the person's ready to eat it.

mcguire 11y ago
I rather suspect that Whole Foods used the rectangular plastic boxes because they have a billion of them on hand for their other packaged products. They may even be bioplastic, knowing them. Which means that these were pretty much optimal to start with.
logfromblammo 11y ago
The requirement to find someone and ask for help is a barrier in itself. Also, it depends a lot on the store or chain. If you enter a Wal-Mart hoping to leave with an orange you didn't peel yourself, you're going to get frustrated. If you try the same in Publix, you're going to have a much better experience. But you will pay more on average shopping at the latter, as they very obviously prioritize more highly their employee training, employee wages, and customer service. Last time I was in Wal-Mart, I had a hard enough time just buying a video game locked up behind glass. No one was on duty in the department. Hey, no problem. I picked up the phone behind the desk and started dialing the internal numbers printed on the sticker for the manager's office, customer service, the checkouts, anywhere, hoping to ask someone to come back and help a customer. Nobody picked up, from any extension I tried, after any number of rings. If I were shopping for myself, I would have left (or having learned from previous experience, never entered the store in the first place). But I was already helping someone else shop, so eventually someone finally showed up to do nothing more than turn a key and operate the sale terminal. I imagine that there are an awful lot of people who, like me, would prefer to not ask anyone for help with anything. I have occasionally been asked by my fellow customers in a store of smaller stature to help them reach something, and I can tell that it makes them uncomfortable to need to do that when everyone else can just grab anything at will. When I'm in a situation where I am forced by store policy to get the assistance of a store employee in order to make a purchase, and there is no employee there to assist customers, I can easily extrapolate that out to people who need more help than other customers.

mxfh 11y ago

There is a growing cargo cult between what people belief is ecologically responsible behavior and what keeps waste low in a society. In my opinion this complex consist part out of learned behavior decades ago, remainders of slightly masochist protestant life style ethics and prolonged exposure to green-washing. Plastics are not bad by default compared to all other alternatives¹. Bad is a waste of energy and resources as is littering instead of a closed product life chain. http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/ http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/ ¹How many paper tissues and water+detergent is used at home for preparing a single orange compared to an efficient peeling processing line, that also hopefully doesn't discard the peels in a mixed waste disposal. I would even guess a random pre-peeled orange might even have a higher chance of a smaller footprint in an life-cycle assessment, than a regular orange that has a higher chance of never never being sold or eaten after purchase.

leereeves 11y ago
The downside of disposable plastics is that people often don't dispose of them carefully and they decompose very slowly. They're accumulating in the environment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  I sometimes wonder how feasible or expensive it'd be to: 1) institute trash separation for all waste before it enters landfills, so that recyclables are separated out and processed, since obviously people are not very good at disposing of recyclables separately themselves, and 2) dig up old landfills and process the trash as in #1. Of course, there's also the problem of things like the garbage gyres in the oceans, and of course litter on the land. The latter is solvable I think through cultural changes. In first-world countries litter isn't that much of a problem any more; it became socially unacceptable to litter, just like it became socially unacceptable to smoke indoors.
  - deleted 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

AlgorithmicTime 11y ago

This is silly. Disabled people don't have any special rights, and should not expect any special accommodations, especially when those accommodations would cause excess environmental damage. You may as well complain that Mount McKinley isn't handicapped accessible.

noir_lord 11y ago
What a horrible worldview you have. Yes disabled people shouldn't have any special rights but they should have the same rights as everyone else, the right to live as functional life as possible, if that requires that the rest of society make some accommodations then that's fine by me. Any society is the sum of its parts, all its parts and should be judged on how it treats everyone able bodied and not.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  Where is "the right to live as functional life as possible" an established right?
  - tremon 11y ago
    http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx
    - AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
      Oh, a non-binding, toothless, meaningless document issued by the UN. Seems legit.
      - nkrisc 11y ago
        Though it would be a great display of poetic justice, I hope you never end up as a quadriplegic.
        11y ago

whack 11y ago

I generally agree that shaming people for choosing lazy/convenient options is bad. Quality of life and convenience should be a primary design factor, unless it's shown to be disastrously bad in some other respect. Honest question for disability supporters though: Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people better live their lives? Because that's essentially the argument that the article is making in a lot of ways. Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. It bloats the product spec. Makes the implementation more complex, which in turn makes it harder to understand and maintain in the future. It makes the manufacturing more onerous. In all these ways, when going out of your way to make something more accessible-friendly, it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features. Hence my question above. Similar to forcing/shaming companies into making their products disabled-friendly, would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?

prezjordan 11y ago
Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses. > Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. If your original design excludes a non-trivial amount of human beings then it's probably not a very good design. Of course context is necessary here, and I can't just throw a snarky one-liner at you. If you're building a puzzle game, then yeah, blind people might not be able to play it and that's okay. If you're making a signup form, then it is inexcusable to leave out folks using assistive technologies because it's "complicated."
- IanCal 11y ago
  This is why laws around disabled access usually have use the term "reasonable adjustments" or similar. It's worth pointing out that the UK law also covers a businesses website: http://www.out-law.com/page-330 http://www.out-law.com/page-330 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance

mwcampbell 11y ago

What I find most striking about the tweet quoted at the beginning of the article is the assumption that just because something is natural (e.g. the peel on an orange), it's better than the manufactured alternative (e.g. plastic packaging). That assumption can probably be traced back to the belief that the natural world was created by a God who designed it to be good, for our benefit (well, before it was supposedly cursed because of sin). The truth, of course, is that the peel on an orange is merely the product of evolution; it wasn't designed for our benefit. We can do better than nature. So the real solution is to package products in a way that's both convenient for us and not harmful to the environment.

afarrell 11y ago
I wonder if wax paper could be an effective way to preserve an orange. It has the downside of not displaying the alluring juiciness of the fruit as well, but the upside of being even easier to open than a plastic container.
mcguire 11y ago
I understand the plastic wrap on zucchini falls into that category.
forgottenpass 11y ago
I think you're reading too much in to "natural". I just see someone trying to say peels are a preexisting attribute of oranges without using the word "preexisting" because that would ruin the joke structure they're using to make their point. "If only there were [roundabout way of describing something that seems obvious to speaker but are feigning ignorance to]..." is a well worn construction.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Exactly. It's like someone made https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-plugin https://github.com/baphomet-berlin/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-p... but for oranges. (Ignoring of course the advantages name by the OP.)

pigpaws 11y ago

this is horrible. Why isn't that label done in braille?! when does this end?

julie1 11y ago

Ok, when it comes to hygienism, healthy food, the cult of Nature and of the perfect body, where bullying/shaming publicly the weaker was the right way to discuss a problem there is an historical precedent. A regim loving all of this, and nice desgin/architecture and also going to the conclusion disabled people are a waste ... I don't say it to not win a Godwin point. But really social networks don't bring the best out of Humanity. The internet era of NNTP newsgroups, early web had some dark parts but it was more looking like an agora than the arena it has became. Modern internet is becoming scary.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

slavik81 11y ago

I really wish we just tried to properly price externalities. Then we could end these moralizing crusades and it would no longer be a question of whether peeled oranges could be sold, but a question of how much they cost. Sure, I might buy a peeled orange. Maybe that's wasteful, but maybe I make up for it by being less wasteful elsewhere. That should be a possibility, because it would be a big help for people like the OP for whom the product is much more valuable than normal. You get much better results when everyone's incentives are set up to be directly aligned with doing the right thing.

danharaj 11y ago
That's the dream of liberal economics, but it hasn't panned out over hundreds of years. If there are incentive structures that automatically align with "the right thing" (whatever that messy concept is), they aren't what we have today.
- SilasX 11y ago
  It only "didn't pan out" in the sense that people aren't aware of this approach or it's politically unpopular. Hence why we end up with ineffective billboards exhorting me to take shorter showers, even though it's a far more value-dense use of water than the marginal unit used for rice, which has zero economic disincentives to grow. True absurdity. If the farmer had to pay even an opportunity cost (like with David Zetland's all-in auctions[1]), then he would cut back his usage immediately and the crisis would be over. Does that platonically align with "the right thing"? No, but it reduces wasteful uses of water, effectively, without the moral crusade. [1] It wouldn't take away any water they have a right to, but would simply pay for any water usage rights they waive, meaning that growing $10 of rice would cost them $30 in potential payments for letting someone else use the water. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658193 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658193
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Maybe that's a good solution for the particular problem you mentioned, but the only way to banish "moral crusades" which seems in this thread of discussion to be an allusion to the political aspects of economic activity is to price everything correctly everywhere and reduce transaction costs to 0. Not convinced it would work, and if it could work, the only way we could approximate such a solution is by incrementally restructuring the economy as new solutions are developed in order to test them and keep the ones that work. This is a fundamentally political process. There's always an undertone of banishing the political from human activity leaving only economics in conversations like this one that doesn't sit right with me.

danharaj 11y ago

This is a solid argument from the premises, but one of the unspoken premises is that people should live independently or in small nuclear families. Disabled people have fewer accessibility issues when they are integrated into larger social units. Most ableist discrimination is ultimately exclusion from the social participation that is the mechanism of human mutuality. Handicapped people are excluded from reaping the benefits of human cooperation at the local level: trying to fix that with commodities and government stipends soothes some symptoms without solving the root problem: our society implicitly excludes people who need it most. My opinion is that everyone would be better off in larger living groups where everyone contributes labor for others. To each according to their need, from each according to their ability' and all that nonsense. I understand that this idea is considered ridiculous and naive by prevailing wisdom, but whatever /shrug

Houshalter 11y ago

Who even cares if it's wasteful or not? Let people buy what they want. If I want to pay 10 extra cents for a peeled orange, then let me. It's none of your damn business. Is it really lazy? How much time does it take to peel an orange? How much is your time worth? There you go. And that's not even getting to the health issues of it. If you buy a peeled orange, you are more likely to eat it than an unpeeled one. Just like placing a candy jar on the other side of the room makes people eat 10x less candy, than when it's conveniently placed next to them. We should put orange peels on unhealthy food. I know this is true, because I have a bunch of unpeeled oranges going bad, but the other fruit is all eaten. Everytime I think I might like an orange, my brain tells me "eh, maybe later". And they never get eaten.

spinlock 11y ago

I bet the guys/gals at the deli counter would peal an orange for you if you asked nice.