As many of you know, I do much of my work from my home office, which is positioned at a front corner of my home in northern Greensboro. This puts me in a position where I can easily monitor activity on my street.
More than once on our Tuesday garbage pick up day, I've seen a lady in a Toyota stop alongside the assembled containers on our street to lift the lid of the recycling container. She occasionally is seen to write a note to some of my miscreant neighbors threatening all kinds of nasty things should the accused folks fail to follow the rules. It's all reminiscint of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi.
I was reminded of this upon reading a Mark Steyn comment this morning at The Corner, where he discusses the way Brits monitor their garbage criminals.
Just think-- we could extend this sort of thing to all areas of our society in order to correct aberrant individual behavior, especially as it applies to what we've "decided" is our "scientific consensus" on "anthropogenic global warming".
Gosh!
Don't you think that's a GREAT idea? Think of all the good we could accomplish for Mother Earth that way!
Here's my favorite line in the Steyn piece:
"If George Bush put a microchip in your garbage under the Patriot Act, there'd be mass demonstrations across the land. But do it in the guise of saving the planet and everyone's fine with it."
Imagine that!
The "garbage police" are watchdogs of taxpayer money. When people put things in recycling bins that can't be recycled, it costs more to sort the garbage and, in some cases, can even make an entire truck load un-recyclable.
ReplyDeleteIf you want your neighbors to be able to put whatever the heck they want in the recycling bin, you are arguing for their actions to be remediated at taxpayer expense. Personally, I disagree and prefer that the recycling program be conducted in as fiscally efficient a manner as possible.
-- Roch101
Oh I guess you're right, Roch. Garbage Security is something we ALL need to be concerned about. It's such a big threat in our community. Golly,you can never tell when some sort of eco-terrorist might sneak something in there causing bad things to happen.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, maybe the lady in the Toyota was just doing a little identity theft. I think I'll ask her next time I see her.
But I really do wish the Garbage Police would be required to get a court order from an appropriate Garbage Security Court before they are permitted to spy on our citizens without cause. After all, privacy in being free from government surveillance unless absolutely necessary are a cornerstone of our freedoms, right?
I mean, who does Mitch Johnson and the City Government think they are? President Bush and the Administration?
Recycling: Another viewpoint.
ReplyDeleteNoteworthy:
"The whole concept of recycling only has any meaning as a governmentally or socially ordained activity (proceeding from environmentalist/statist premises). In fact, in a free society one wouldn't distinguish recycling from other kinds of for-profit exchanges. That is, just as today when you re-sell your car or your house, you don't think of it as "recycling", so too in a free market you wouldn't distinguish returning bottles or newsprint for credit from other types of trade -- provided that these actions were taken because it was in your own economic interest, not because the government was compelling or haranguing you in to doing so."
Perhaps we should also talk about the often heard shibboleth of "we're running out of landfill space!"
And then, of course, we could talk about the politics of closing the White Street landfill.
ReplyDeleteThis could be LOTS of fun.
Bubba said, "But I really do wish the Garbage Police would be required to get a court order from an appropriate Garbage Security Court before they are permitted to spy on our citizens without cause."
ReplyDeleteA court order isn't necessary because the City of Greensboro OWNS the garbage cans.
"A court order isn't necessary because the City of Greensboro OWNS the garbage cans."
ReplyDeleteBut it's MY garbage, Billy!
"Golly,you can never tell when some sort of eco-terrorist might sneak something in there causing bad things to happen." -- Bubba
ReplyDeleteNo Bubba, you are putting words in my mouth. As I pointed out, cutting down on the amount of contaminated recyclables saves taxpayer money. You ignore that. Why do you want wasteful government services, Bubba?
-- Roch101
Ask Sam who owns your garbage, Bubba. Once it's at the curb, it is no longer yours.
ReplyDeleteRoch, if we could restrict YOU to making only truthful statements on the internet just think how much energy we could save by drastically cutting your power usage.
ReplyDeleteIt's for the children, you know.
"It's for the children, you know."
ReplyDeleteHumor is wasted on some people, jaycee.
This thread is perfect evidence of that truth in at least two cases here.
Isn't it interesting to see the tacit approval regarding government spying on the public?
Of course, you may have noticed they missed the entire point that recycling may not be wise from a market and/or a cost basis standpoint.
Not that that point matters.....recycling is most likely another of those "feel good, accomplish nothing" programs that the eternal do-gooders keep imposing on the rest of us.
Bubba, I had been under the impression you lived in Greensboro, but I guess not. Where do you live where they impose recycling upon you?
ReplyDeleteRecycling is.....Garbage.
ReplyDeleteExcerpt:
"Recycling, which was originally justified as the only solution to a desperate national problem, has become a goal in itself-a goal so important that we must preserve the original problem. It's as if the protagonist of "Pilgrim's Progress," upon being informed that he could drop his sinful burden right there on the road, insisted on clinging to it just so he could continue the pilgrimage to get rid of it. Why is it better to recycle? The usual justifications are that it saves money and protects the environment. These sound reasonable until you actually start handling garbage."
"Bubba, I had been under the impression you lived in Greensboro, but I guess not. Where do you live where they impose recycling upon you?"
ReplyDeleteI live in Greensboro, friend. I pay quarterly for my garbage pickup. I don't have the option to not pay for it.
If I'm paying for it, I have every right to criticize the way it's administered, whether you (or anyone else) like it or not.
Meanwhile, none of the counter comments has seen fit to speak to the issues of concern about recycling that I've brought up.
Why is that?
....from the Charlotte Capitalist:
ReplyDelete"From the book, “Facts, Not Fear” here are some quotes about what really goes on with recycling. [Bracketed comments are mine.]
Space: “The problem isn’t space. Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University points out that all the trash produced by the United States for the next one thousand years could fit in a landfill forty-four miles square by 120 feet deep. That’s right. One thousand years! This is only one-tenth of 1 percent of all the land area of the continental United States.”
Plastic: “Since it is inert, plastic isn’t going to produce chemicals in a landfill that could leak out. And while it does not ‘biodegrade’ or decompose, the fact is that hardly anything decomposes in a landfill because there is not enough oxygen and water to cause biodegradation.”
“Saving Trees”: [ugh. Why doesn’t anyone ever complain about “saving cornstalks?”] “…(T)he trees that will be ‘saved’ are usually those planted specifically to make pulpwood for paper. More recycling would reduce the incentive to maintain and plant such trees.”
The Real Dirt: …”Van Voorst [writer for Time magazine] had discovered a ‘dirty secret.’ A lot of the carefully separated materials were never actually recycled. ‘More than 10,000 tons of old newspapers have piled up in waterfront warehouses in New jersey, ‘ he wrote, and for the entire country the figure could exceed 100 million tons. In Seattle, a recycler pondered what to do with six thousand tons of bottles that couldn’t be reused.”
Real Anti-Value Example: “In 1987 New Jersey passed legislation that required every community in the state to recycle, and the recycling rate for newspapers jumped from 50 percent to 62 percent. This created such a glut that the price of newsprint fell from $45 per ton to minus $25 per ton. That’s right. Recyclers had to pay $25 per ton for someone to haul the newspapers away!”
Recycling at gunpoint: [This is great. Germany will never change.] “In Europe, the recycling craze has gone further, and the results have not been good. In 1991, the German government enacted a recycling law. It requires [forces] businesses to take back from customers and recycle all forms of packaging, including bottles, cans, containers, cartons, and sacks. By 1994, the nonprofit company that collects and sorts the items was $412 million in debt, and in 1993 the government admitted that some of the returned packaging would be incinerated or landfilled.” [Aristotle said, “A is A”. Ayn Rand said “Existence is identity”. The German example shows “Garbage is garbage.”]
[My own view of landfills is that there is value in getting garbage out of our lives. Trash hauling companies would pay landfill owners for the right to dump the hauled garbage. Landfill owners would be responsible for engineering their landfills in the context of capitalism – in a way that does not violate the individual and property rights of other individuals. Boom.]"