5 ms·

The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some r

The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive.

mc32 7y ago
In San Francisco we have these old ladies who rummage though people's bins looking for redeemable containers. Most are "conscientious" enough to put the rest of the recyclables back in without leaving a mess on the sidewalk, but some are less caring and you wake up having to put things back in the bin. On the other hand I believe rubbish companies consider the practice theft and so they campaign against the practice.
- benatkin 7y ago
  Where I used to live in Emeryville, I would get woken up by someone digging in the trash in the morning. Short of wearing earplugs, which are uncomfortable and not recommended for wearing while sleeping, there was nothing I could do about it. It was infuriating. At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.
  - throwlaplace 7y ago
    >there was nothing I could do about it you could pay more in taxes so that these people could have section 8 housing and food stamps so that they don't have to dig in the trash in order to survive. edit: i see i'm getting downvoted. it boggles the mind. people are starving literally in his driveway (not in another state, not in another country, not abstractly) and he's complaining about the noise of their death rattle. like how do you square that? i'd love someone to actually respond/answer rather than downvote in indignation. are you upset at the politics of the suggestion that the solution to the problem is not getting rid of their sole means to survive but to actually help them? is it divisive because i invoked the hob goblin of hn (higher taxes)? just truly what is the appropriate response here? is it really "fuck em let die so i can sleep blissfully unaware"?
    - ch4s3 7y ago
      I think part of the issue here is that section 8 is rent support payments. It doesn’t pay directly to build housing. California is already a very high tax state, there’s money there. However, because of overly restrictive zoning and the ability of neighbors to block construction, that kind of housing can’t get built.
      - throwlaplace 7y ago
        that's fine. i'll gladly admit that i'm not a welfare economist and that my shoot from the hip solution isn't necessarily the correct one. but at least the thing i'm expressing is "how can we help them" instead of "how can we make life even more difficult for them". this isn't to say i'm proud of myself or something - i'm just sincerely flabbergasted at expressing the latter opinion.
    - mc32 7y ago
      I didn’t downvote, but I’ll reply. When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it. Also let’s say you could and this person got housed and they also decided they would not rummage thru trash. Someone else will take up the slack and rummage. For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger. When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it. Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
      - throwlaplace 7y ago
        >When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it. fine then give that homeless person the $20 yourself - they're in your driveway! you could literally pay them a couple of bucks a day (the worth of the cans in your trash) to skip your house. my point is simple: the reflexive reaction is "banish them" instead of "help them" even if helping them is the most straightforward way to solve the problem. >Someone else will take up the slack and rummage. "let's not try to cure any diseases because there will always be new ones" does that make sense? >When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it this is utterly incredible. please do tell which services are rendered to the homeless at exorbitant cost to anyone (e.g. tax payers) such that it merits comparison with defense contractors.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- zer00eyz 7y ago
  I grew up in Connecticut where we always had redemption value on cans/bottles and so on. The rule was if you sold it you had to take it back. Taking back the cans and bottles was normal for me as a kid, it was how I got change for the vending machines in front of the store. In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash. Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.
  - benatkin 7y ago
    Part of the redemption values is now effectively a tax, because many people who never redeem them. This is fine, except much of it's being scooped up by people picking through the trash, as a disorganized benefit for the poor, which might work well but isn't designed for that purpose.
  - nrp 7y ago
    In the Bay Area, you're probably being served by Recology. They have trucks with multiple compartments for recycling, composting, and trash, but they also have pretty advanced sorting capabilities at their sites: https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-recovery https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-re... I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.
    - zer00eyz 7y ago
      Ummm... In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.
      - nrp 7y ago
        You’d be surprised. In the last city I lived in in Orange County, the waste system was deliberately designed to have a single residential container and full sorting done at the waste facility by a combination of people and machines. The claim was that it was actually more effective than curbside sorting because the professionals and automation knew how to process recyclables better than the average resident. I don’t know if that is what Recology does in single-truck locations, but it seems likely.
throwlaplace 7y ago
>without people exploiting this incentive i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?
- dtwest 7y ago
  Do you think it is good they are digging in the trash? Surely there is a better alternative to this. You may not like the wording but the parent is not wrong.
  - throwlaplace 7y ago
    i've addressed this elsewhere in the thread: of course i don't think it's good but it's not their fault! it's our fault! that's where the parent is wrong because they're not exploiting anything - they're eking out an existence.
    - dtwest 7y ago
      Exploit - to make full use of and derive benefit from. You are interpreting the comment in the most negative way possible. The system needs to change, and we need to help these people in a different way.
      - throwlaplace 7y ago
        lol you're arguing about whether i can infer tone from a paragraph? really? https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/ https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/ put in the paragraph "The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive." and see what the sentiment score is
        7y ago

mc32 7y ago

In San Francisco we have these old ladies who rummage though people's bins looking for redeemable containers. Most are "conscientious" enough to put the rest of the recyclables back in without leaving a mess on the sidewalk, but some are less caring and you wake up having to put things back in the bin. On the other hand I believe rubbish companies consider the practice theft and so they campaign against the practice.

benatkin 7y ago
Where I used to live in Emeryville, I would get woken up by someone digging in the trash in the morning. Short of wearing earplugs, which are uncomfortable and not recommended for wearing while sleeping, there was nothing I could do about it. It was infuriating. At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  >there was nothing I could do about it you could pay more in taxes so that these people could have section 8 housing and food stamps so that they don't have to dig in the trash in order to survive. edit: i see i'm getting downvoted. it boggles the mind. people are starving literally in his driveway (not in another state, not in another country, not abstractly) and he's complaining about the noise of their death rattle. like how do you square that? i'd love someone to actually respond/answer rather than downvote in indignation. are you upset at the politics of the suggestion that the solution to the problem is not getting rid of their sole means to survive but to actually help them? is it divisive because i invoked the hob goblin of hn (higher taxes)? just truly what is the appropriate response here? is it really "fuck em let die so i can sleep blissfully unaware"?
  - ch4s3 7y ago
    I think part of the issue here is that section 8 is rent support payments. It doesn’t pay directly to build housing. California is already a very high tax state, there’s money there. However, because of overly restrictive zoning and the ability of neighbors to block construction, that kind of housing can’t get built.
    - throwlaplace 7y ago
      that's fine. i'll gladly admit that i'm not a welfare economist and that my shoot from the hip solution isn't necessarily the correct one. but at least the thing i'm expressing is "how can we help them" instead of "how can we make life even more difficult for them". this isn't to say i'm proud of myself or something - i'm just sincerely flabbergasted at expressing the latter opinion.
  - mc32 7y ago
    I didn’t downvote, but I’ll reply. When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it. Also let’s say you could and this person got housed and they also decided they would not rummage thru trash. Someone else will take up the slack and rummage. For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger. When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it. Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
    - throwlaplace 7y ago
      >When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it. fine then give that homeless person the $20 yourself - they're in your driveway! you could literally pay them a couple of bucks a day (the worth of the cans in your trash) to skip your house. my point is simple: the reflexive reaction is "banish them" instead of "help them" even if helping them is the most straightforward way to solve the problem. >Someone else will take up the slack and rummage. "let's not try to cure any diseases because there will always be new ones" does that make sense? >When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it this is utterly incredible. please do tell which services are rendered to the homeless at exorbitant cost to anyone (e.g. tax payers) such that it merits comparison with defense contractors.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zer00eyz 7y ago
I grew up in Connecticut where we always had redemption value on cans/bottles and so on. The rule was if you sold it you had to take it back. Taking back the cans and bottles was normal for me as a kid, it was how I got change for the vending machines in front of the store. In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash. Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.
- benatkin 7y ago
  Part of the redemption values is now effectively a tax, because many people who never redeem them. This is fine, except much of it's being scooped up by people picking through the trash, as a disorganized benefit for the poor, which might work well but isn't designed for that purpose.
- nrp 7y ago
  In the Bay Area, you're probably being served by Recology. They have trucks with multiple compartments for recycling, composting, and trash, but they also have pretty advanced sorting capabilities at their sites: https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-recovery https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-re... I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.
  - zer00eyz 7y ago
    Ummm... In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.
    - nrp 7y ago
      You’d be surprised. In the last city I lived in in Orange County, the waste system was deliberately designed to have a single residential container and full sorting done at the waste facility by a combination of people and machines. The claim was that it was actually more effective than curbside sorting because the professionals and automation knew how to process recyclables better than the average resident. I don’t know if that is what Recology does in single-truck locations, but it seems likely.

throwlaplace 7y ago

>without people exploiting this incentive i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?

dtwest 7y ago
Do you think it is good they are digging in the trash? Surely there is a better alternative to this. You may not like the wording but the parent is not wrong.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  i've addressed this elsewhere in the thread: of course i don't think it's good but it's not their fault! it's our fault! that's where the parent is wrong because they're not exploiting anything - they're eking out an existence.
  - dtwest 7y ago
    Exploit - to make full use of and derive benefit from. You are interpreting the comment in the most negative way possible. The system needs to change, and we need to help these people in a different way.
    - throwlaplace 7y ago
      lol you're arguing about whether i can infer tone from a paragraph? really? https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/ https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/ put in the paragraph "The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive." and see what the sentiment score is
      - 7y ago