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It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. It is more efficient to sort it at the garbage transfer station the way Canadians do. Most places have 3 cans. Gener

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. It is more efficient to sort it at the garbage transfer station the way Canadians do. Most places have 3 cans. General, glass/plastic/cardboard, and biodegradable. Also, SF is considered "progressive" for many of its completely unsustainable policies, like housing controls, which ultimately lead to further economic inefficiency. A truly progressive society is more like Toronto where the poor can generally get help, but we don't mind putting up condos or new office space. Also the Swedes do some things that are much more right wing than America, like Free Schools (essentially private schools operating with a government payment, similar to the coupon model). It isn't a left-right difference. Furthermore, Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade. Also you can't really compare it anyway. There is a far higher amount of cultural homogeneity in Sweden than the US, even in the white portion of the US, and the average IQ is 3 or 4 points higher. As for homelessness, you are living in SF. This is what you get. The US has a much higher veteran rate than Sweden which highly correlates to homelessness (usually due to PTSD and associated drug abuse) and the capital of homelessness in North America is SF.

philsnow 13y ago
> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex. Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.
- mhb 13y ago
  It's counterintuive to me that forcing people to sort their trash will lead to a fondness for recycling. Did the draft engender a fondness for the Vietnam war? A different approach would be to charge people for trash pickup. If the cost for sorted trash removal is enough of a savings, then people will do it.
  - gvr 13y ago
    Change leads to awareness. Whether this awareness leads to fondness depends on the context. In the case of the environment, this seems to sometimes be the case. I think young Swedish people have a much greater appreciation of and respect for the environment than our parents. In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Sorting your garbage rarely leads to a sucking chest wound.
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    (Living in Sweden) Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash. A Swede will happy carry their own bags up to their rooms in hotels, too. Most hotels don't have porters. They don't have the whole tipping thing either generally. You go through life doing things for yourself, not paying others to do things for you. Maybe its the US psyche and is some kind of superiority complex? I'm half-serious; why do people on your side of the pond think its a hassle to sort their trash?
    - gvr 13y ago
      I think you're dead on with the "boo-hoo god forbid I'd have to sort my trash, raise my own kid, pack my grocery bag, carry my luggage mentality." Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag. The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.
      - mattm 13y ago
        I've never understood porters in hotels. You've just transported your bags for possibly thousands of miles and many hours but they are going to take them the last few meters to your room by elevator on a cart and then they expect a tip for it.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. It would sure keep it in the forefront of my mind, but not in the way I think you'd like! More: "How can I get rid of the politicians who force me into this menial waste of time?" I will happily pay in taxes whatever the added processing costs are for allowing me to continue to use Cambridge's terrific "single stream" system, which allows for an astonishing range of waste in a single bin. It doesn't cover the hazardous stuff like batteries and CFLs, but you can make that easier, too, without requiring individuals to maintain bins for 5 different varieties of plastic.
  - prawn 13y ago
    In which case you charge for rubbish collection on a combination of weight/volume and make it a premium for unsorted refuse. That gives people a choice. Pay the premium if they want someone else to do it, or take extra care themselves and save a bit of money. I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there. In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used. Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.
    - millstone 13y ago
      Does requiring people to sort their trash actually work? What sort of feedback and enforcement is in place? Where I live in California, we are given a large recyclables bin and a small trash bin, with the option to pay more for a larger trash bin. This sounds like an incentive to recycle, but it's a perverse one. If I were to just put all my trash in the recycle bin, there would be no consequences at all for me, because the recyclables truck just dumps it all into a big communal heap, with no possibility to trace it back to me. Is this cardboard too wet to recycle? Who knows? In it goes!
      - roel_v 13y ago
- gvr 13y ago
  Yes 10 cans for the complex, which consists of ballpark 50 units. Awareness is definitely a huge part of it - a lot of once "progressive" ideas like recycling and sexual equality was taught to us as kids, and the kids ended up educating the parents. Your point is valid; when you "abstract" away recycling to a centralized plant, the individual most likely won't consider the environmental impact of his purchasing decisions and habits nearly as much.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  How does 10+ cans for a condo complex work? 10+ different chutes? Do you have to walk your trash down to the trashcans yourself?
  - Cederfjard 13y ago
    Yeah, that's the way it's usually done (that you walk your trash down to a common room where the cans are, that is). All garbage chutes I've seen in the last few years have been bolted shut.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- belorn 13y ago
  > Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. Indeed. I always get a bit surprised when I see visiting people throwing cans out of the car window, or a plastic wrapper while walking down the street. I guess its a wonder that they only regard the street as a garbage can and not as a toilet.
  - xahrepap 13y ago
    I live across the street from a small park. It's sad how much garbage is in my yard after the Saturday tee-ball games. I just wonder how these same people would feel if I came to their neighborhood and just dumped my trash in their yards.
  - westicle 13y ago
    Cultural norms... When I was in certain large, developed cities in China (nearly 15 years ago now) most of the toddlers I saw in public had "open bottom" outfits on; they literally used the street as a toilet. Some parents would hold them over the bin when they needed to go. Many wouldn't.
    - briandear 13y ago
      They still do that, even in the nicest neighborhoods in Shanghai. I lived there a little over a year ago and it was poop central for the little ones on the street. Allegedly it results in faster potty training and one could argue that it cuts down on diaper waste.. so it could be called environmental, despite the horror is causes for the foreigners who witness it. Some parents did have more talent than others at aiming their child appropriately.
    - roel_v 13y ago
      I was in a train going North-East from Beijing (can't remember where we were going, or more to the point, whether it was a 'rural' train or not) as little as 5 years ago, and the grandmother in the section opposite the corridor from us made here grandson go nr 2 right there in the middle of the train. Every time the train would swerve, the turds would roll from left to right and back :O| Cultural differences be damned, who in their right mind would accept this as a common practice...
keerthiko 13y ago
A big factor in homelessness is also just weather. You get far more homeless people in a location with year-long homogeneously nice weather like SF, because you actually won't die being homeless. Swedish winters are harsh, and the country's not so big that these people can just go somewhere nicer for the winter. I don't have any stats (does anyone?), but I'm certain a good proportion of the homeless in SF arrived from further away. I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"
- SupremumLimit 13y ago
  A couple of counterexamples. Moscow used to have plenty of homeless people (not sure how it is these days) despite harsh winters. New Zealand has very few, despite similar weather conditions to SF. While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    New Zealand doesn't have anywhere that poor people can immigrate from. But you can take a bus or two to California.
- zanny 13y ago
  I still don't like the regimented age-based education heirarchy, which Europe still subscribes to. Beyond basic skills for human interaction (an understanding of the dominant language, basic arithmetic, necessary social skills like knowing traffic signs, what emergency lights mean what, how to calculate taxes, how interest rates work, and some basic history of the world and the local country) the most important thing is getting them interested in learning more, but it has to be by their own will, or else they won't absorb the information you try to force down their throats. The best way to do that is through exposure - I can easily see children aged 6 - 12 going through a school system where half their day is learning basic requirements to function in society (and none of the really unnecessary things for basic interaction like 18th century literature, ancient civilizations, trigonometry, and the number of electron orbitals on Iron) and the other half is exposure to professions, concepts, and ideas (go to a museum, go to a baseball game, go watch the local smelters forge aluminum, observe a busy intersection and discuss traffic patterns). In other words, to expose them to and enable them to explore a broader spectrum of the world than sitting behind decks looking at a chalkboard reading from a book and writing down notes to repeat on a test and forget the next day.
qw 13y ago
My city (Oslo) has reduced some of the cans by having an optical sorting robot at the garbage processing facility. You can use one can for general, biodegradable and plastic by using different colored bags.
- dalke 13y ago
  My city (Trollhättan, Sweden) had that policy until a few months ago. But earlier this year we got a notice saying that the city's per capita waste bills were some of the highest in Sweden, so they were switching to a bin-based separation system instead.
gvr 13y ago
Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual, almost all universities and certainly the top ones are run by the state and free, and people are accepted based on academic merit. I went to arguably the best engineering physics program in Sweden; it was free, and they paid me a $250 stipend per month, the rest of money needed to live was borrowed at a low rate. It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes. Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?
- fetbaffe 13y ago
  1) Nothing is free. We pay the most taxes in the world. 2) We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs. Edit: Spello
  - jpttsn 13y ago
    > We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs That's overly pessimistic. Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.
    - fetbaffe 13y ago
      But now you are saying that has do with the size of your wallet (or rather lack of), which is true, but that does not mean we are basing it on academic merit. That is jumping to conclusions and assumptions. What is the academic merits to become a teacher today? Zero? Edit: Added extra paragraph.
      - 13y ago
workhere-io 13y ago
Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade. They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.
- pedalpete 13y ago
  Though statistically you are correct, I'd like to see a comparison of not only current tax rates, but tax rates compared to debt/deficits. The US may be collecting less taxes, but if they're just putting the remainder on credit, then they aren't really any further ahead (and possibly behind). I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything.
  - jpttsn 13y ago
    Sweden collects high taxes even compared to other nations. When it comes to debt, the US is the outlier.
    - roel_v 13y ago
      Actually the US debt-to-GDP ration isn't all that bad, and its deterioration (or increase, depending on interpretation...) of the last decade is largely due to spending on war, not due to fiscal or socio-economic factors (that is to say, this is spending that can 'easily' be cut). Whereas the other countries with ratios similar to that of the US have historically not had much better figures, and their deficits are due to enshrined socio-economic structures.
  - dalke 13y ago
    Any such comparison is tricky. Swedish taxes also pay for child care, medical care, elderly care, and even burial, which are seen more as a purely personal/employer cost in the US.
rorrr2 13y ago
> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial. I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this: Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else. Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.
- gilgoomesh 13y ago
  > Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial. Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities. Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled. There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    > the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone They actually have machines for that. There's a youtube video on how they sort types of plastic. > Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors Sorting by color is trivial to automate. > Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities. Yes. However where I live you have to separate cardboard from everything else. Most other paper gets shredded into pulp and recycled.
- roel_v 13y ago
  "It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial." Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.
deepGem 13y ago
Considering that the average trash stays for at least 10-12 hours inside the house/apartment, it's inefficient to segregate once the waste is in this mixed state for that duration. At least the organic/inorganic waste has to be segregated at source.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
So on the IQ thing, is that because they properly care for the physical and mental well-being of their children, expectant mothers and parents? Or is it because they are some kind of Aryan super-race?
- jpttsn 13y ago
  Probably not.
- lmm 13y ago
  It's politically very hard to study the first hypothesis scientifically, and practically impossible for the second. So we don't know, and won't until society has matured to the point we can face these questions. (I understand what little evidence we have points to maternal health/diet/wellbeing as the single biggest causal factor. Handouts of food - or simply money - to mothers in the latter part of pregnancy are the most effective intervention we know. But again, we know very little and it's very difficult to find anyone who can study these effects from a position of neutrality)
rotskoff 13y ago
The suggestion that Sweden is homogeneous is too common and simply false. I've lived in Stockholm for 6 months and it's a very diverse city. Far more cultural and economic diversity than, say, many Midwestern cities of comparable size. In fact, wikipedia can point you to the facts "As of 2011, Statistics Sweden reported that around 19.6% or 1.858.000 inhabitants of Sweden had foreign background, defined as born abroad or born in Sweden by two parents born abroad." (from "Demographics of Sweden") What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  It's the standard racial theory of Scandinavian social order aka 'We would be like them, except better, if it weren't for those stupid, violent, harmony-disrupting minorities.'
- theorique 13y ago
  It's definitely not homogenous. It's getting "culturally enriched" by Somali Muslim "refugees" over time. The enrichment includes street harassment of Swedish women, no-go enclaves of illegal immigrants, increased rape rates, female genital mutilation, and other nice things. If you get an ethnic Swede drunk and ask him about third world immigration and its effect on his nation, be prepared for an eye opener!
  - ziggamon 13y ago
    Oh, and there's lots of racism too, as represented here. We even have a party in the parliament that represents opinions like that.
    - theorique 13y ago
      Yeah, nationalist / nativist parties seem to be part and parcel of the European nations - e.g. Front National in France, PVV in Netherlands.
  - jpttsn 13y ago
bkanber 13y ago
> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?

philsnow 13y ago

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex. Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.

mhb 13y ago
It's counterintuive to me that forcing people to sort their trash will lead to a fondness for recycling. Did the draft engender a fondness for the Vietnam war? A different approach would be to charge people for trash pickup. If the cost for sorted trash removal is enough of a savings, then people will do it.
- gvr 13y ago
  Change leads to awareness. Whether this awareness leads to fondness depends on the context. In the case of the environment, this seems to sometimes be the case. I think young Swedish people have a much greater appreciation of and respect for the environment than our parents. In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Sorting your garbage rarely leads to a sucking chest wound.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  (Living in Sweden) Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash. A Swede will happy carry their own bags up to their rooms in hotels, too. Most hotels don't have porters. They don't have the whole tipping thing either generally. You go through life doing things for yourself, not paying others to do things for you. Maybe its the US psyche and is some kind of superiority complex? I'm half-serious; why do people on your side of the pond think its a hassle to sort their trash?
  - gvr 13y ago
    I think you're dead on with the "boo-hoo god forbid I'd have to sort my trash, raise my own kid, pack my grocery bag, carry my luggage mentality." Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag. The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.
    - mattm 13y ago
      I've never understood porters in hotels. You've just transported your bags for possibly thousands of miles and many hours but they are going to take them the last few meters to your room by elevator on a cart and then they expect a tip for it.
twoodfin 13y ago
Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. It would sure keep it in the forefront of my mind, but not in the way I think you'd like! More: "How can I get rid of the politicians who force me into this menial waste of time?" I will happily pay in taxes whatever the added processing costs are for allowing me to continue to use Cambridge's terrific "single stream" system, which allows for an astonishing range of waste in a single bin. It doesn't cover the hazardous stuff like batteries and CFLs, but you can make that easier, too, without requiring individuals to maintain bins for 5 different varieties of plastic.
- prawn 13y ago
  In which case you charge for rubbish collection on a combination of weight/volume and make it a premium for unsorted refuse. That gives people a choice. Pay the premium if they want someone else to do it, or take extra care themselves and save a bit of money. I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there. In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used. Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.
  - millstone 13y ago
    Does requiring people to sort their trash actually work? What sort of feedback and enforcement is in place? Where I live in California, we are given a large recyclables bin and a small trash bin, with the option to pay more for a larger trash bin. This sounds like an incentive to recycle, but it's a perverse one. If I were to just put all my trash in the recycle bin, there would be no consequences at all for me, because the recyclables truck just dumps it all into a big communal heap, with no possibility to trace it back to me. Is this cardboard too wet to recycle? Who knows? In it goes!
    - roel_v 13y ago
gvr 13y ago
Yes 10 cans for the complex, which consists of ballpark 50 units. Awareness is definitely a huge part of it - a lot of once "progressive" ideas like recycling and sexual equality was taught to us as kids, and the kids ended up educating the parents. Your point is valid; when you "abstract" away recycling to a centralized plant, the individual most likely won't consider the environmental impact of his purchasing decisions and habits nearly as much.
jlgreco 13y ago
How does 10+ cans for a condo complex work? 10+ different chutes? Do you have to walk your trash down to the trashcans yourself?
- Cederfjard 13y ago
  Yeah, that's the way it's usually done (that you walk your trash down to a common room where the cans are, that is). All garbage chutes I've seen in the last few years have been bolted shut.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
belorn 13y ago
> Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going. Indeed. I always get a bit surprised when I see visiting people throwing cans out of the car window, or a plastic wrapper while walking down the street. I guess its a wonder that they only regard the street as a garbage can and not as a toilet.
- xahrepap 13y ago
  I live across the street from a small park. It's sad how much garbage is in my yard after the Saturday tee-ball games. I just wonder how these same people would feel if I came to their neighborhood and just dumped my trash in their yards.
- westicle 13y ago
  Cultural norms... When I was in certain large, developed cities in China (nearly 15 years ago now) most of the toddlers I saw in public had "open bottom" outfits on; they literally used the street as a toilet. Some parents would hold them over the bin when they needed to go. Many wouldn't.
  - briandear 13y ago
    They still do that, even in the nicest neighborhoods in Shanghai. I lived there a little over a year ago and it was poop central for the little ones on the street. Allegedly it results in faster potty training and one could argue that it cuts down on diaper waste.. so it could be called environmental, despite the horror is causes for the foreigners who witness it. Some parents did have more talent than others at aiming their child appropriately.
  - roel_v 13y ago
    I was in a train going North-East from Beijing (can't remember where we were going, or more to the point, whether it was a 'rural' train or not) as little as 5 years ago, and the grandmother in the section opposite the corridor from us made here grandson go nr 2 right there in the middle of the train. Every time the train would swerve, the turds would roll from left to right and back :O| Cultural differences be damned, who in their right mind would accept this as a common practice...

keerthiko 13y ago

A big factor in homelessness is also just weather. You get far more homeless people in a location with year-long homogeneously nice weather like SF, because you actually won't die being homeless. Swedish winters are harsh, and the country's not so big that these people can just go somewhere nicer for the winter. I don't have any stats (does anyone?), but I'm certain a good proportion of the homeless in SF arrived from further away. I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"

SupremumLimit 13y ago
A couple of counterexamples. Moscow used to have plenty of homeless people (not sure how it is these days) despite harsh winters. New Zealand has very few, despite similar weather conditions to SF. While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  New Zealand doesn't have anywhere that poor people can immigrate from. But you can take a bus or two to California.
zanny 13y ago
I still don't like the regimented age-based education heirarchy, which Europe still subscribes to. Beyond basic skills for human interaction (an understanding of the dominant language, basic arithmetic, necessary social skills like knowing traffic signs, what emergency lights mean what, how to calculate taxes, how interest rates work, and some basic history of the world and the local country) the most important thing is getting them interested in learning more, but it has to be by their own will, or else they won't absorb the information you try to force down their throats. The best way to do that is through exposure - I can easily see children aged 6 - 12 going through a school system where half their day is learning basic requirements to function in society (and none of the really unnecessary things for basic interaction like 18th century literature, ancient civilizations, trigonometry, and the number of electron orbitals on Iron) and the other half is exposure to professions, concepts, and ideas (go to a museum, go to a baseball game, go watch the local smelters forge aluminum, observe a busy intersection and discuss traffic patterns). In other words, to expose them to and enable them to explore a broader spectrum of the world than sitting behind decks looking at a chalkboard reading from a book and writing down notes to repeat on a test and forget the next day.

qw 13y ago

My city (Oslo) has reduced some of the cans by having an optical sorting robot at the garbage processing facility. You can use one can for general, biodegradable and plastic by using different colored bags.

dalke 13y ago
My city (Trollhättan, Sweden) had that policy until a few months ago. But earlier this year we got a notice saying that the city's per capita waste bills were some of the highest in Sweden, so they were switching to a bin-based separation system instead.

gvr 13y ago

Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual, almost all universities and certainly the top ones are run by the state and free, and people are accepted based on academic merit. I went to arguably the best engineering physics program in Sweden; it was free, and they paid me a $250 stipend per month, the rest of money needed to live was borrowed at a low rate. It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes. Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?

fetbaffe 13y ago
1) Nothing is free. We pay the most taxes in the world. 2) We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs. Edit: Spello
- jpttsn 13y ago
  > We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs That's overly pessimistic. Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.
  - fetbaffe 13y ago
    But now you are saying that has do with the size of your wallet (or rather lack of), which is true, but that does not mean we are basing it on academic merit. That is jumping to conclusions and assumptions. What is the academic merits to become a teacher today? Zero? Edit: Added extra paragraph.
    - 13y ago

workhere-io 13y ago

Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade. They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.

pedalpete 13y ago
Though statistically you are correct, I'd like to see a comparison of not only current tax rates, but tax rates compared to debt/deficits. The US may be collecting less taxes, but if they're just putting the remainder on credit, then they aren't really any further ahead (and possibly behind). I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything.
- jpttsn 13y ago
  Sweden collects high taxes even compared to other nations. When it comes to debt, the US is the outlier.
  - roel_v 13y ago
    Actually the US debt-to-GDP ration isn't all that bad, and its deterioration (or increase, depending on interpretation...) of the last decade is largely due to spending on war, not due to fiscal or socio-economic factors (that is to say, this is spending that can 'easily' be cut). Whereas the other countries with ratios similar to that of the US have historically not had much better figures, and their deficits are due to enshrined socio-economic structures.
- dalke 13y ago
  Any such comparison is tricky. Swedish taxes also pay for child care, medical care, elderly care, and even burial, which are seen more as a purely personal/employer cost in the US.

rorrr2 13y ago

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial. I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this: Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else. Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.

gilgoomesh 13y ago
> Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial. Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities. Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled. There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  > the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone They actually have machines for that. There's a youtube video on how they sort types of plastic. > Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors Sorting by color is trivial to automate. > Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities. Yes. However where I live you have to separate cardboard from everything else. Most other paper gets shredded into pulp and recycled.
roel_v 13y ago
"It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial." Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.

deepGem 13y ago

Considering that the average trash stays for at least 10-12 hours inside the house/apartment, it's inefficient to segregate once the waste is in this mixed state for that duration. At least the organic/inorganic waste has to be segregated at source.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

So on the IQ thing, is that because they properly care for the physical and mental well-being of their children, expectant mothers and parents? Or is it because they are some kind of Aryan super-race?

jpttsn 13y ago
Probably not.
lmm 13y ago
It's politically very hard to study the first hypothesis scientifically, and practically impossible for the second. So we don't know, and won't until society has matured to the point we can face these questions. (I understand what little evidence we have points to maternal health/diet/wellbeing as the single biggest causal factor. Handouts of food - or simply money - to mothers in the latter part of pregnancy are the most effective intervention we know. But again, we know very little and it's very difficult to find anyone who can study these effects from a position of neutrality)

rotskoff 13y ago

The suggestion that Sweden is homogeneous is too common and simply false. I've lived in Stockholm for 6 months and it's a very diverse city. Far more cultural and economic diversity than, say, many Midwestern cities of comparable size. In fact, wikipedia can point you to the facts "As of 2011, Statistics Sweden reported that around 19.6% or 1.858.000 inhabitants of Sweden had foreign background, defined as born abroad or born in Sweden by two parents born abroad." (from "Demographics of Sweden") What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.

pessimizer 13y ago
It's the standard racial theory of Scandinavian social order aka 'We would be like them, except better, if it weren't for those stupid, violent, harmony-disrupting minorities.'
theorique 13y ago
It's definitely not homogenous. It's getting "culturally enriched" by Somali Muslim "refugees" over time. The enrichment includes street harassment of Swedish women, no-go enclaves of illegal immigrants, increased rape rates, female genital mutilation, and other nice things. If you get an ethnic Swede drunk and ask him about third world immigration and its effect on his nation, be prepared for an eye opener!
- ziggamon 13y ago
  Oh, and there's lots of racism too, as represented here. We even have a party in the parliament that represents opinions like that.
  - theorique 13y ago
    Yeah, nationalist / nativist parties seem to be part and parcel of the European nations - e.g. Front National in France, PVV in Netherlands.
- jpttsn 13y ago

bkanber 13y ago

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?