[PLUG-TALK] Garb counting

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Tue Jul 6 23:57:16 UTC 2004


On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, GLL wrote:
> Jeme:
> : And I think you'd be perfectly willing to ride the garbage truck once a
> : year and empty trash cans if it meant getting your trash handled by
> : someone else the other 364 days.  In urban areas, this would be
> : significantly cheaper and less demeaning than the current system of paying
> : people to dedicate their lives to cleaning up after others.

[Grr... my editor doesn't recognize your colons as appropriate quotation
indicators and, therefore, doesn't autowrap properly.]

> If the numbers worked out, that would be a VERY cool idea ...

Most menial work can be divided this way.  The requirement being limited
specialized training and general usefulness.

Participation shouldn't be a requirement to receive the benefit of the
system, however.  Otherwise, the handicapped are even more burdened.

> as long as it was a collective in competition with one or more private
> handlers, and not a universal social mandate.

That's just silly.  No private contractor could possibly compete with a
service that had almost no labor overhead.

It's exactly your attitude that prevents such things from being created in
the first place.  The privateers work very hard against the necessary
legislation to institute such a program (you would need, for instance, to
modify laws regarding volunteer labor and liability, mandatory grace for
folks otherwise employed who are engaging in public service projects,
and perhaps even initial investment in the physical and administrative
infrastructure, for starters) because it would demolish their market.
Once such a thing existed, they would seek protections of their industry
and it would soon become grossly uneconomical.  The average person would
pay far more than they would to just give some capitalist a profit.

In most urban areas, necessary infrastructure is monopolized, mandatory,
and privatized.  Competition would be totally destructive to the
infrastructure (streets constantly being torn up to provide new rights of
way for various service carriers, an abundance of oversized service
vehicles serving, longer, more sparse routes, etc.), so these utility
services are narrowed to a single provider.  However, when you've
elminated that kind of marketplace pressure, the entire justification for
private ownership (as weak as it is already) completely collapses.  It
becomes a principle without a rationale.  The public benefit becomes
negative.

Public utilities should be publicly owned and managed.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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