Speaking as a tire/lube shop technician, a large percentage of the general populace has a warning light of some sort on at any time... Maybe %20 (that we see, if course) in our coverage area, which is a 20k population city and the surrounding rural area.
Sounds like the start of a good idea; but a few implementation issues.
1) Steal one QR code, it can then be duplicated.
2) Works well for the situation where Amazon is not simply connecting you directly to the seller, but not when the seller ships directly to you.
(2) could be potentially modified to have brands insist that amazon themselves act as the final shipper (so it would be sent to their warehouses and verified).
(1) is tough one to crack. A transaction ledger would prevent the duplication problem; but may have scaling issues since you'd potentially need to verify the physical objects on receipt. It also doesn't deal with the situation where the product itself can be decomposed for parts and sold separately (like some electronics). Then the QR code can be used to sell an inferior replacement product (an empty box).
Though the QR code + transaction ledger is probably a necessary first step to dealing with this issue.
It is not just a matter of survival, but being able to perform hard physical labour when carrying a high load of malarial parasites. Europeans in areas of high malarial load just could not sustain the workload that west africans could. Lots of slave owners died of Malaria (particularly their children).
This is why the indentured servants were shipped to the North and the West African’s to the South. Western African slave labour was not able to compete against the lower cost indentured European workers in the North.
The author's point is that we've thrown out too much of what we've perhaps to broadly labeled as waste. We're realizing that some of the "waste" (to use your term) actually has value in it that we previously didn't recognize. It's a waste of effort to climb to the top of a mountain when you could've taken a vehicle to the top, perhaps, but for some folks that value isn't in the destination alone. Author's point is that we should be more aware of what we value, and how much of the "waste" a convenience a convenience removes is truly "waste" vs meaningful/valuable experience/effort for growth and fulfillment.
The fundamental problem with the author's premise, to use your example, is that the effort needed to climb to the top of a mountain every day, is ridiculous.
There's no outsized value in washing your clothes by hand every day, week, month. It's monotonous, very time consuming and physically punishing. There's also similarly no value in cutting your entire lawn by hand. These things are not comparable to climbing a mountain, which you're going to do rarely.
If you have to climb a mountain every day, take a vehicle. Your body will thank you. And so will your loved ones, because climbing a mountain is extremely time consuming, so you'll never see your loved ones again.
This is a separate problem caused by not providing homeless people access to toilets. Seems obvious that the solution is more public restrooms not more plastic bags.
> Seems obvious that the solution is more public restrooms
While I agree, it's like saying wrt plastic bags in the ocean, "Seems obvious that the solution is less littering" or "Seems obvious the solution is biodegradable bags" etc, etc. It is just so much easier for people to change laws and affect everyone than target the specific problem.
In agree. Enact a laws to provide sufficient puplic restrooms and support for homeless people while also enacting changes to reduce plastic bag usage. My issue is with the implication that reducing plastic bags caused this. Not helping venerable people caused this, the need for plastic bags is a side effect.
Two economists have claimed that the ban in San Francisco led to an increase in food-borne diseases. The proposed mechanism is that people don't wash their reusable bags, and dangerous bacteria gets onto them. It isn't clear to me how strong the evidence for this is.
I’ve seen this also and have not seen any evidence to the contrary. Considering how damning this study is to plastic bag bans, I’m guessing this means there aren’t any studies that rebut these findings.
That’s one way to interpret the results. Alternatively, the study shows that in the normal course of human behavior, plastic bag bans may have nontrivial negative health impacts.
Also, it shows that in considering the carbon footprint of reusable bags, we should factor in regular (not occasional) cleaning.
Considering that a reusable bag needs to be reused many (hundreds, if memory serves) of times before reaching carbon neutrality versus single use plastic bags, this is not necessarily a trivial impact.
Carbon neutrality is not the only metric by which we create these regulations. Nor should it be. Single-use bags introduce many externalities that are captured and controlled by imposing a minimal cost.
"Homeless people learned long ago that pooping in plastic-bag-lined containers meant you could wrap the session up and dispose of all the stuff without touching it, he said in a long email. So when it got harder to get the bags after the ban went into effect late last year, it became harder to find the bags and people who were able to keep things clean had to work a lot harder."
"Hepatitis A is spread by contact with feces or blood of an infected person. It can be trace amounts and it can be months old"
> other developed countries don't have so many homeless people
Not true.
Here are per-night homeless statistics from UN:
China has 2.6 million
Russia has 5 million
Ukraine 1 million
Germany 860,000
US has 554,000
...
But more profoundely, by homeless ratio, the US is not even close.
Germany, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Canada, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Luxembourg, Croatia, Bosnia, Russia, Peru France, Austria, the Netherlands, China and Greece -- ALL have higher homeless ratios than the United States. The US is in 33rd place for overall worldwide homelessness as a percentage of the population.
Can you please link to "per-night homeless statistics from UN" source that you mentioned? I can't not find it through a little googling.
5 million figure for Russia for example appears on wikipedia [1] where it is cited from IB Times[2]. IB Times[2] cites Homeless World Cup[3] as the source. Homeless World Cup[3] cites the original IB Times[2] article as the source for the 5 million number! This was the first number I investigated and it already seems super suspect.
They really don't. Trying to find a toilet you can use in downtown San Diego even as a regular looking person is a struggle and you will probably end up having to buy something. Businesses won't let you use their facilities if you look dirty or homeless, and there aren't any city owned bathrooms at least that I've seen in the 2 years I've been here so far.
Likewise in San Francisco. I like to take very long all-day or late night walks and bathrooms are very hard to come by. Sure as long as it’s daytime and I look presentable I can usually find a cafe/store that will let me use the bathroom, but after 9pm if I don’t happen to be near a hotel it’s often impossible for me to find a restroom. Many restaurants and convenience stores will say the bathroom is broken (even when it’s clearly not). Also it’s common to find places that physically block access to the restroom with boxes or whatever. Long story short, I’ve had to get used to peeing outside in shadows since it’s rarely possible to find bathrooms. I’m not sure what I’d do if I was female or needed to take a crap.
Fort Worth and Albuquerque give them jobs to clean up streets. In Fort Worth, they pay $10 per hour and provide housing. This would be similar - and a good idea, I think.
As maym86 said, I'd be happy to contribute to the pool of resources that would allow something like this to be sustainable. Would you not?
>The city pays for it. The shelter runs it.
"It is a win-win," said Presbyterian Night Shelter CEO Toby Owen. "We want a clean neighborhood that speaks hope, that speaks dignity to our homeless guests. And it also provides income for these individuals so they can move out and be successful without living in a homeless shelter."
Last year, Clean Slate put 40 homeless people to work, Owen said. Approximately 3,856 tons of trash was collected by Clean Slate workers. And they don't just clean up trash on the street -- they also work as janitors for businesses.
Kind of an a-la-carte approach to civic responsibilities? I can envision ways in which it'd work, and people would feel better about it (in general) than they do taxes. It seems like something like this would work best at a local level, which would obviously apply to the particular example we're discussing. In theory, I'd be on board with it, as long as federal programs/taxes remained. If you found a way to implement it on a larger scale, I'd be surprised/impressed.
>who is this hypothetical poor man who's so bad at managing money that an exact total of the amount he's spending will cause him to overspend ?
It is not hypothetical, it is a peculiar - but not so uncommon - man/woman with a limited amount of money in his/her hands (and of course no credit card or similar), the single 50 in the example (but it could be 20 or 100) banknote.
He/she is willing to spend the whole amount of money, but before didn't because he/she was afraid to be seen as having only that given limited amount of money and by making approximate mental calculation tended to undereestimate (or if you prefer preferred to be on the safe side).
With the barcode reader he/she can spend the whole amount of money he/she has available with no risk of appearing (to the cashier, to the people in queue) as "poor".
The poiont is not that with the new system this kind of "poor" people overspend, rather it is that before it underspent.
