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Comment by progfix | Hacker News Reader

Why no plastic bottles as well? The vast majority of plastic I use is from bottles.

Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated.

I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.

In Norway all bottled beverages come in refillable plastic bottles. They’re basically the same as normal bottles but a bit thicker. You pay about 50 cents for the bottle, and every grocery store has a little machine where you return the bottles and get a refund. The whole system works pretty well. I wish the US had something similar.

Same in Finland and Sweden.

Aluminium cans are recycled too, and most glass bottles.

As a side note, where I live all waste is sorted (mixed, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, clear glass, colored glass, biowaste, batteries, lamps...).

All this might seem like a a waste of money but it is actually beneficial: the municipality creates biogas from biowaste and runs the city buses with it. They produced so much gas that they sold it to neighbouring municipalities at least a few years back.

Probably because there is a health implication there, the possibility that people could get dehydrated and not have easy access to bottled water.

There are also substantial health implications to eliminating plastic cutlery, cups, etc. We may be largely oblivious to it now and we may fail to see the connection between the cutlery going and an uptick in illnesses after the change.

The California bag ban slightly preceded the uptick in "medieval diseases" in California, which has since spread from Southern California to other cities (possibly by homeless people leaving California and taking their diseases with them). The uptick in such infections is generally traced to lack of sanitation among the homeless, but the idea that the bag ban is an element tends to get dismissed because "we can't prove it, man!" basically.

I was still in California and still homeless when the bag ban was instituted. Following the ban, my sons and I saw more homeless people digging through trash cans, probably for free bags they could use for various purposes. I never did it, but some homeless people use plastic bags as a toilet substitute. They poop in a bag and take it to the nearest trash can rather than poop on the sidewalk.

If you are digging bags out of a trash can to have a bag to poop in because you no longer have ready access to free new ones and 10 cents per bag is a financial hardship for you, well, it shouldn't shock anyone that there is an uptick in disease.

But no one actually wants to believe that or take that possibility seriously since no official health organization has announced that this is an issue.

Meanwhile, I have seen articles that suggest the CDC is actively downplaying the uptick in diseases like hepatitis. They aren't aggressively issuing public health warnings and putting this into the news. It's been slow to get press and the problem gets downplayed as largely an issue for homeless people.

From what I have read, a lot of antibiotic resistant infections are bred in third world countries with poor plumbing and the like, then inadvertently exported via travelers. But, hey, the US and Europe can both readily get in on the action by banning all the disposable items that help make modern life less dangerous than life in a third world country. Let's go with that plan.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...

So the solution is public hygiene, like public toilets being available. Not handing out plastic bags to poop in, wrapping poop in plastic is the worst option.

I would love to see more public bathrooms that are well maintained and genuinely accessible to the homeless. The public library is often the only obvious source for a public bathroom available to absolutely anyone and homeless people are frequently asked to leave the library for various reasons and sometimes banned from it.

But way to go to completely miss the point. Disposable plastic bags have myriad other uses, such as carting trash away from your camp or even carrying some of your possessions when you can't currently afford a new bag and your last one broke or whatever.

Pooping in plastic bags in just one use that homeless people have for free plastic bags routinely acquired every time they purchase something. Every time you eliminate one more free resource from the lives of the poorest of the poor, it winds up being a hardship with myriad consequences.

If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.

I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine.

Someday never seems to come on such promises.

I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people were not throwing money at me.

I'm old an cynical. If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.

A lot of people on HN make quite good money and routinely espouse a lot of high-minded ideals. You would think of all places, this would be one where someone trying in earnest to make their life work via some kind of online income would most find help to readily solve their financial problems and stop being desperately poor.

I'm no longer homeless, but I still live on under $20k annually. I get treated like a whiner with no real point for using myself as an example in these discussions.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they usually aren't.

I'm incredibly skeptical of such arguments. People on HN expect good, well-written content on the front page of HN all day, every day. They aggressively use ad blockers, actively find ways around pay walls and routinely tell me that writing doesn't deserve to make money and I should get a real job.

Writing is something I am capable of doing, in spite of my handicaps. I have six years of college and I know a lot of stuff and I can be on a computer at home and write.

If well-heeled, high-minded people who regularly come together in large numbers on HN can't be arsed to help me stop being poor, then it seems really extremely unlikely to me that the poor will ever get anything like UBI.

I'm not for UBI. I don't think it works. But, moreover, I don't think it will really happen.

I think talk of UBI is like when so-called friends tell you that if they win the lottery, they will give you half of it. In reality, that's typically a lie. It's an easy thing to say because winning the lottery is so very unlikely.

People actually willing to help are willing to do whatever they can in the here and now, no matter how small. But most of what I hear is promises of someday while I continue to flail and most people react to my flailing by making me feel like I am doing something wrong. I'm an embarrassment. I'm doing something socially inappropriate.

Perhaps I shall just go away at some point and leave HN to the well-heeled, high-minded types who like to talk a good game and do nothing. Then I won't be actively making them look like the hypocrites they so obviously are in most cases.

I'm tired and trying to do some paid work. If I don't return to this discussion, everyone here can just assume that's why.

Cash transfers to the homeless enough to cover sanitation and other basic needs doesn’t necessarily imply a universal basic income policy.

> If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.

I sometimes buy lunch for homeless people in my neighborhood, and have given people blankets and cash before, and donated to charities focused on helping the homeless, but it’s pretty hard as an individual to fully help someone who has lots of problems to find all the help they need and get into a stable comfortable situation, without making it a significant long-term project, and taking on huge amounts of personal responsibility. This is frankly a better job for publicly funded social workers, but I have a ton of admiration for any private citizens willing to take it on.

Myself, I don’t have the spare attention or resources to drive someone to work every day, talk to them every day to make sure they stay on track, put them up in my house, hire them for a permanent job, etc. I have enough trouble just taking care of myself and my own small children. My meager bits of help (one meal, a blanket, a respectful conversation, lending someone a phone for a few minutes, ...) might be appreciated but are hardly life changing.

Some of the homeless people I have talked to had trouble getting a job because they didn’t have a regular place to shower, didn’t have clean unripped clothes, etc., and then had trouble holding down a job once they got one because they had substance abuse problems, didn’t have enough structure in their lives to show up on time every shift, and so on. Of course the biggest and most obvious problem was a lack of housing. Which I really have no fix for. It’s a large-scale social problem which can best be tackled collectively.

See, I meant that there are 5 million visitors to HN every month. I run multiple blogs. I do resume work. I do other things.

I've been here nearly a decade. Yet, I still can't make ends meet.

I don't need someone to drive me to work. I don't need someone to hold my hand. I'm not a drug addict or alcoholic.

I am a woman, and sexism is alive and well, so that closes a lot of doors in my face. I'm dirt poor, so a lot of people just assume I'm incompetent and not worth hiring.

Again, I'm extremely tired, moreso existentially than physically. I'm exhausted from saying the same things over and over and over on HN and watching them fall on deaf ears.

I have six years of college. I have a Certificate in GIS.

Stephen Hawking was medically handicapped. He had a real career. Of course, he was male.

I'm quite convinced that classism and sexism are major factors in my intractable poverty. And when I try to talk about such things, no, no one wants to get the memo. They just want to assert they are one of the good guys.

While not helping me.

Because my ongoing problems are not their responsibility and are best handled by a social worker or the government. And it will all get better someday, when we have that mythical beast they call UBI.

I'm a social creature more than a technical one. And I just can't help but feel that if people here really were as committed to resolving such problems as comments here tend to suggest, I would have long ago gotten hooked up with some kind of adequate income in excess of $20k annually.

The fact that I continue to live with intractable poverty makes me feel like it's absolutely all talk and no one genuinely wants to get with the man in the mirror and ask the hard questions.

The status quo works for them. They want it to stay the same.

This is really a conversation I don't want to have. It's not a positive experience for me. It's also not likely to actually make a difference.

A much more likely outcome is that I will eventually be banned if I openly bitch too much in a way that makes people here uncomfortable, as I was from Metafilter, a toxic classist cesspit of a forum that lots of people on HN gush about the wonderfulness of.

Adieu.

Edit: This piece was written before the first paragraph -- asserting that free money wasn't necessarily UBI -- was added to the comment I replied to. I'm too tired to edit the damn thing and make it make sense in light of that additional paragraph being added.

To be clear, my point is that I don't believe the world will become a better place. If five million mostly well-heeled, high-minded people can't manage to help one pathetic, but well-educated person with a work ethic and yadda to resolve their problems, no, they won't really help people who are less "virtuous" than I am.

The world will come up with excuses to blame those in need for their problems. They need to stop drinking. They need to stop using drugs. Etc. ad nauseum.

You know, like we currently do.

I think you're missing the point she's trying to make. She's saying that these types of bans have negative unintended consequences for the poorest people. These consequences get brushed aside "because we can just do X to really help them", but X is never actually done to the degree that it offsets the problem. Her mention of HN is that, this would be one of those places of high ideals where you would expect X to be done, but it isn't. So if it's not even done in a place like HN, then what's the chance that it will be done by the general public? And so X gets brushed aside and the negative unintended consequences pile up.

So your argument is something like “if any system or policy incidentally helps the poorest people while also doing lots of unintended damage, then it is immoral to stop doing it, because replacing the incidental aid to the poor now cut off is politically intractable”?

This is precisely the same logic that says we need to continue to use coal power plants because otherwise the coal miners will lose their jobs, and it’s impossible to support them except by continuing to hire them to mine coal. When the people who want to eliminate coal power (e.g. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016) suggest cash transfers, reeducation plans, other industrial investment, etc. to coal-mining regions to offset the loss of coal jobs, the supporters of coal mining reject the proposals as politically infeasible.

Instead of setting up advocates for the homeless and environmentalists as enemies, it would be more productive to find mutually acceptable solutions.

So your argument

They are not making an argument. They are trying to translate my words in hopes of bridging some communication gap.

Instead of setting up homeless activists and environmentalists as enemies, it would be more productive to find mutually acceptable solutions.

I'm an environmental studies major who gave up my car well before I became homeless, in part for environmental reasons. (In the US, this is routinely interpreted as "Obviously, you are just one of the useless and incompetent poor, not qualified to do any well paid work" rather than "Obviously, you are an extremist nutcase environmental enthusiast willing to walk the walk -- literally! -- not just talk the talk." Cuz: logic (by which I mean prejudice and classism).)

So, I don't know why on earth you think I personally am setting up homeless activists and environmentalists as enemies. I see myself as qualifying for both labels.

Or directly give them the service they need. The example provided was that essentially the city they are in needs public toilets.

The plastic bags being a solution is a misdirection as it is a major health hazard for the people dealing with the poop bags in the trash.

I didn't miss the point, I only targeted the main one you brought up.

I think we need to evaluate public facilities. As for them replacing "trash bags" that's fairly tenuous.

All I can do is target problem areas. Personally, if I could make the rules, I would force all plastic bags to be industrial compostable so that whenever plastic is found, it can be put into the recycling.

We eliminated single use plastic bags in the UK, and there have been very few side effects, and your concept of homeless pooping in them is a new one. Though we may just have better facilities than you.

The rest are mitigated by forcing people to think about what they are doing in advance, in the same way they don't generally forget about putting fuel in the car.

I've been saying for a long time is that plastic bags were the single most important factor in the decrease of infectious and mold-caused diseases in the 20th century. Storing food in containers like paper bags that are easily penetrated by bacteria and spores is pure stupidity. Along with the prevalence of anti-vaxers, I won't be surprised if California will become the least healthy place on earth in the near future.

*I've been saying for a long time is that plastic bags were the single most important factor in the decrease of infectious and mold-caused diseases in the 20th century."

Thanks.

Do you happen to know of any supporting references?

I remember a time when (almost) all bottled water was in glass bottles.. didn't seem to be a problem back then and everyone seemed hydrated.

I also remember when the plastic bottles were hyped because they were so much easier to carry.. not sure it was worth it.

Glass is often harder to recycle than plastic. Our county's single-stream facility recycles glass into construction fill.

We really need to get back to reusing bottles rather than trying to recycle them.

Once upon a time, cities offered potable water every here and there. The problem is that as these watering holes become rarer and rarer, locals sometimes push for the remaining ones to get shut down citing nuisances [0].

[0]: https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine... (French)

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