You will Obey

[fargon]

And I thought I wanted to move to Seattle.

[BigV]

Come on, man, you'll love it. I do.

[Undertoad]

We have combined recycling here and it's fantastic. No big sorting, just put all your recycling in one bin, all your other trash in the other, and then forget to put both out every Thursday night.

[Gravdigr]

That's what we do here. They pick up the recycle bin every two weeks.

They started the recycling practice at the same time our rates went up. Recycling is well and good and all, but if you're charging me extra, you're separating that shit yourself.

[Gravdigr]

The recyclables bin stays empty out behind the shop. Never gets put out.


I'm a rebel.

[Lamplighter]

As I was growing up I heard a story about the very early days of Kodak.

Kodak was paying some guy to haul away their industrial waste solutions.
Over time, they reduced, and kept on reducing, the amount they paid him...

Then someone at Kodak found out the guy was re-covering the silver from their waste solutions,
and so did not mind the reductions in his pay... he was making more from the recovered silver.

Maybe this story is or is not true, but it bugs the s**t out of me that
our governments are building environmentally safe dump sites and the roads out to them,
and billing property owners via taxes to pay for these sites and the employees working there.
They also pay Republic/Waste Management/other ilk-corporations to "manage" these sites.

On top of that, homeowners pay monthly fees to these same corporations to pick up trash and re-cyclables.
The same corporation then "mines" the trash and recycle to sell as yet another profit center.
Our City government also ticked me off a few years ago by signing a 10-year contract with Allied Waste,
and each year we see a 10% increase in our monthly fees.

Doesn't all this sound even a little bit like my story about Kodak ?

ETA: PDX and the surrounding Oregon communities actually pay a rancher in far eastern Oregon
for the privilege of paying truckers to haul trash daily from the "recycling/transfer station"
and dump it on his "ranch"

[xoxoxoBruce]

OK, what you guys call garbage, we call trash, and you,ve added the compostable, along with recyclable, that's what I suspected. Some places I've lived they separate trash and garbage, garbage being food and the wet stuff, with trash being everything else. This was before recycle.

[glatt]

I work in a LEED compliant building, and it's a pain in the ass sometimes because it's so hard to throw away unusual stuff.

We had a case involving a big company that makes a plastic kind of deck board. So we had hundreds of offcut samples, each about a foot long, that I had to throw away. Some were pressure treated. Some were sawdust/plastic composites. Some were plain wood. I asked for a big wheeled garbage bin to throw them away, but when the janitor saw what I had put in there, he wouldn't let me throw them away.

I had to bribe him with a bunch of crappy Chinese novelty swords that I also planned to throw away. He about shit himself with glee when he saw the dozen or so blades I was going to toss. I think he drove the Trex boards home in his own car so he could take the swords home too.

FYI this was some of the typical crappy Chinese junk blades I was throwing away.

Looked kinda cool for a few seconds and then after you pick it up and it feels uncomfortable and cheap in your hand, you realize it's just junk.

[xoxoxoBruce]

You could have taught the scouts a lesson, how things that look super cool are usually a bitch to actually work with.

[BigV]

Well, the local government doesn't pick up the trash, I can't think of any places where those people are still city employees. In my experience, they're all contractors with the local government, so, not government employees. But, and IANAL, I reckon that the protectable interest in private affairs would still extend to the transaction between the citizen and the garbage collector, and not to the police.

Think about it, if you get hurt and go to the county hospital, you're being treated by a government employee doctor and nurse--would that imply that they can pass on the information to other government agencies, say, the police, just because they draw their pay from the same source? I really doubt it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Here, I have to contract a trash hauler, there's no government involvement except the law says it's illegal for the hauler to take my trash out of the county. They must take it to the county trash-to-steam plant. Some jurisdictions contract a private hauler or haulers to cover the town. But I believe most of the cities have a trash department with city employees doing the work.

County hospital? What kind of commie system are you running out there? If you don't have money or insurance to pay the hospital consortium's venture fund masters, please be considerate enough to die off the pavement, especially at rush hour.

Besides, Wolf can 'splain how strict the federal laws are about patient information, who can get what. This is a problem one of the problems, gay marriage will hopefully solve for them.

[BigV]

As I said, it is not a federal issue, it's a decision based on our state constitution. Interestingly, the decision I linked to *does* discuss the evisceration (my word, not theirs) of the fourth amendment's protections against illegal search and seizure with two cases. I could not repeat it here, but I did understand the importance of the reference as it applied to this state case. It's worth looking up, if you're interested... Gunwall was one and ... dangit... can't recall the other at the moment.

[xoxoxoBruce]

No, medical information, which you used as an example with the county hospital, is strictly controlled by federal laws.