But I guess it's where a bunch of my fellow Americans are these days. I would think having one trash truck hit your street once a week would be preferable, but these folks seem to want several trucks covering the same ground and neighbors putting their trash out every day depending on the company. It is obviously much more efficient to have one trash collector. I'm guessing if this train of thought had been prevalent in the 1800's, the rail gauge would have never been standardized because that would have been "Socialism." Where's the logical stopping point here? Private sewer services?
I've posted the Chomsky quote on the American version of libertarianism several times here, so I am loathe to do it again. This story however, is exactly what Chomsky complained about.
Why is it silly? I have had no choice in my trash pickup, the pays have been reduced and I don't even know what days are heavy pickup any more. I have tried to call the city and they give me dates that are incorrect. I would love to have a choice. But I can't wait for Houston to adopt Cleveland's "high-tech" collection system with trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes. http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/08/city_of_cleveland_to_use_high-.html "The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn't been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables. Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard. " Now it's 1984, knock-knock at your front door....
Rhetorical question. I took the same logic these people apply to garbage pickup and applied it to law enforcement.
I don't see how it's silly. A city has private trash pick-up, and apparently it works for them. The city wants to award a monopoly to one company, some people are upset about it, and they showed up to city hall to speak their mind. Sounds like democracy in action.
if the opposition is to potential fines for failure to recycle -- then it's a pretty common attack. Even by those not so looney as the tea folks. Does Texas even have bottle deposits yet?
Trash pick-up, like a lot of infrastructural businesses, lends itself to monopoly because there is significant savings ($1m/year in this town, apparently) in eliminating redundancy. It's great that these people are involved in local government and are speaking their mind and all. But, they're dumb. They're advocating for a less efficient system on the mistaken ideological belief that it is more capitalist and therefore better. They've taken an intellectual shortcut and assumed competition for individual accounts would be better without examining whether it was more capitalist (which it isn't) or whether it made more financial sense. Fortunately, the Town Council saved them from themselves.
Tea Partiers find just about anything to make noise about. It's tash, people. Put it on the curb and let whomever pick it up. Find something worthwhile to make fliers for.
This is from The Onion... right? People are against a reduction in cost of $1,000,000/year, a reduction in pollution, a reduction in noise and a reduction in traffic because of... ideology? Seriously?
I've had both city-provided trash pick-up, city-awarded contract trash pick-up, and competitive trash pick-up (lived in an unincorporated area). The competitive was half the price of the other two. It was also less reliable and lower level of service, but it was much cheaper.
According the article that might just be misinformation. [rquoter]But in an interview with TPM, Fountain Hills Mayor Jay Schlum attributed the opposition to "misinformation." Any talk of a "trash police" or "green police" is false, the mayor said, pointing out that nobody in Fountain Hills has ever been cited or fined for trash violations, and he didn't expect that to change.[/rquoter]
But every American deserve choice of trash collector! How come this frown upon? Me think it's Obama fault, his socialist policy tearing apart the nation. Obama want one trash collector, Obama is NObama -basso
Why the Mafia Loves Garbage Hauling trash and organized crime. By Michelle Tsai Posted Friday, Jan. 11, 2008, at 3:56 PM ET The Italian government called in the army on Tuesday to clean up the mounting piles of waste in the city of Naples. Residents blame the authorities for not doing more to stop the Camorra, the region's Mafia group, which controls garbage collection and has caused the city's constant waste problem for more than a decade. Organized crime appears to have a hand in trash collection all over the world, from Naples to Tony Soprano's northern New Jersey. Why are gangsters always hauling garbage? It's Mob Economics 101: Find a business that's easy to enter and lucrative to control. Criminal organizations make lots of money from drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit goods, but creating a monopoly on garbage collection is attractive because the business itself is legal, and public contracts return big profits. Compared with something like running a casino or grocery store, the logistics of taking trash from Point A to Point B are a no-brainer. Anyone with a truck and a couple of strong guys can make good money, and there's always a demand for the service. Here's how it works: The mob organizes the trash-hauling businesses in a given city to prevent competition from driving down prices. They fix prices, rig bids, and allocate territories in such a way that customers can't choose who picks up their garbage. The Camorra, a larger and older group than the Sicilian Mafia, have controlled the industry in Naples for about 25 years. The mob harasses non-Camorra garbage collectors and extorts money from them; meanwhile, its own companies do a shoddy job. The country's Mafia groups have also illegally dumped toxic, industrial waste in Naples and other parts of the country. Criminal organizations elsewhere in the world also find profit in trash schemes. In parts of Taiwan, gangs dig into the riverbank for gravel and sell it to construction companies. Then, they fill up the holes with waste they've collected. Georgian crime bosses swooped in when the city of Tbilisi privatized waste transport (PDF). In New York City, La Cosa Nostra more or less dominated trash collection from the 1950s until Rudy Giuliani seized control of the industry as mayor in the 1990s. It all started when members worked their way into the Teamsters union, which included garbage truck drivers; this allowed the mob to dictate which companies the drivers would work for, effectively pushing out non-Mafia operations. (The Mafia also controlled the construction sector through unions.) For a large crime organization, the garbage racket provides relatively little in the way of revenue compared with traditional criminal enterprises like gambling, loan-sharking, and narcotics. This is especially true in Italy, where the mob operates in many industries. The Camorra is thought to make $70 billion a year, much of it from drugs, contraband cigarettes, and DVDs, as well as public sector contracts in construction and cleaning. Another Italian group, the 'Ndrangheta, traffics 80 percent of Europe's cocaine. The Mafia is so pervasive in Italy that, according to a large trade association, it controls one out of every five businesses in the country. Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer. Explainer thanks Howard Abadinsky of St. John's University, Jay Albanese of Virginia Commonwealth University, Tom Behan of the University of Kent, James Calder of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Ko-lin Chin of Rutgers University, and James Jacobs of New York University. Michelle Tsai is a Beijing-based writer working on a book about Chinatowns on six continents. She blogs at ChinatownStories.com. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2181850/
I suspect there's some fuzzy math on the $1m/yr savings too. Because if fees were going down $400/yr per resident, I doubt there'd be an uproar. The head loon claims fees are going up. But you never know. Sometimes they're not very good at math. But I'd wager the 'outrage' if there really is any, is directed more at the recycling then at the choice of pickup company.
