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(Daily Express) Asinine Nanny state spends $1.5m cutting people's trash cans in half...in vain hope it will halve their waste   (express.co.uk) divider line 64
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mikaloyd 2008-08-17 05:54:12 PM  
Nannied in the boobies

 
Linto 2008-08-17 05:54:56 PM  
That's rubbish

 
DirtyOldGeek 2008-08-17 05:55:28 PM  
The nanny state needs it's own logo, like Florida

 
Dr James Biggles 2008-08-17 05:56:02 PM  
Ah the engineering solution to garbage.

Person A: "The bin is half empty!"

Person B: "The bin is half full!"

(social) Engineer: "No, it's twice as big as it should be!"

 
alex10294 2008-08-17 05:56:11 PM  
They'll have a fun time emptying massively overflowing cans. Then come the littering tickets. Welcome to social fascism.

 
cryinoutloud [TotalFark] 2008-08-17 05:56:13 PM  
Packaging is evil.

 
1. Put snakes on plane 2008-08-17 05:57:22 PM  
It's hard to express how stupid that is. Next maybe they'll halve the size of the water pipes to cut down water usage.

 
BigSnatch [TotalFark] 2008-08-17 05:58:36 PM  
Followup:

"Rushmoor Borough council perplexed by increase of litter."

 
olddinosaur 2008-08-17 06:00:33 PM  
I once "litterbugged" a whole house, and I don't feel a damn bit guilty.

I had this dilapidated house, and the City made me tear it down. They promised $7000 in relocation money, a $50,000 mortgage at 3% fixed rate-------and did not deliver jack sh*t.

They also said I could be jailed and fined $500 a day for living in my own home---welcome to the Peoples' Republic of Communist Christi!

So I dumped the house, 50 Lb. at a clip, among 20-odd dumpsters in a 5-mile range.

The people pay a flat rate for waste hauling so they were not hurt, and the City didn't collect a dump fee.

Worked out to 8.5 tons.

 
ReverendJasen 2008-08-17 06:00:36 PM  
Yeah. So instead of putting their garbage into bins, half of it will be sitting on the ground next to the bin?

 
ReverendJasen 2008-08-17 06:02:25 PM  
olddinosaur: They also said I could be jailed and fined $500 a day for living in my own home---welcome to the Peoples' Republic of Communist Christi!

Wow. What the hell was so wrong with the house? Was the frame/foundation warped, making it about to collapse?

 
lotustuned 2008-08-17 06:04:27 PM  
alex10294: They'll have a fun time emptying massively overflowing cans. Then come the littering tickets. Welcome to social fascism.


No no no, you misunderstand, if the lid of the trashcan is open the council trash collectors wont empty it into their van. Beurocracy at it's finest.

 
SpinStopper [TotalFark] 2008-08-17 06:09:29 PM  
The local garbage collection company at my old residence decided to cut back on garbage pickups by 50%, yet still charged the same rate.

Amazingly enough, all of the vacant lots in the neighborhood suddenly became garbage dumps ;)

 
ReverendJasen 2008-08-17 06:13:03 PM  
lotustuned: No no no, you misunderstand, if the lid of the trashcan is open the council trash collectors wont empty it into their van. Beurocracy at it's finest.

So after several weeks of this, and there's a mountain of garbage, what do they do? Levy fines on the homeowner for leaving garbage out?

 
YorkshireFark 2008-08-17 06:15:05 PM  
Something has to change in our government and fast. Some of the things they propose are simply laughable.

 
Iron Chef Scottish 2008-08-17 06:25:23 PM  
YorkshireFark This kind of thing goes on in every country every day.
The UK press just happens to love reporting this sh*t. And curtain twitching housewives (and Farkers) drink it up.
*insert Daniel Day Lewis sucking noise*

 
Nogale 2008-08-17 06:26:12 PM  
Halve the size of the trash bins, double the size of the rat traps. Not a good idea.

 
Antilope 2008-08-17 06:31:08 PM  
The Ninny State is going to relegate large trash bins to the dust bin of history.

 
Whodat? 2008-08-17 06:33:37 PM  
No, I RTFA and the town government wants to drop its landfill bills, and if the people won't go to every-two-weeks collection, they get smaller cans.

I don't see the problem with this.

But of course, I'm Sheeple. This certainly is an example of the coming Orwellian nightmare.

 
FarkinNortherner [recently expired TotalFark] 2008-08-17 06:34:16 PM  
Iron Chef Scottish: curtain twitching housewives (and Farkers) drink it up.

No kidding.

Holy crap, some council, in some borough I've never heard of, in some count[r]y I'll never visit, is doing something that will have no effect on me whatsoever. To the internet !

 
PandaGurl 2008-08-17 06:36:58 PM  
Makes perfect sense! Everyone knows that when people have overly large trash bins, they make extra garbage just to fill them up.

/sarcasm

 
strathmeyer 2008-08-17 06:41:51 PM  
Sounds like they're trying to cut costs by only collecting every other week, completely unaware that this means there will be twice as much trash every collection.

Maybe people should stop electing idiots for leaders?

 
kckern 2008-08-17 06:43:00 PM  
+1 for proper use of "half" and "halve"

 
fluffy2097 2008-08-17 06:47:33 PM  
Simple fix for this. Dump your extra trash in front the house of whoever thought this idea up.

 
Gobobo 2008-08-17 06:48:18 PM  
FarkinNortherner:
Holy crap, some council, in some borough I've never heard of, in some count[r]y I'll never visit, is doing something that will have no effect on me whatsoever. To the internet !


To be fair you've probably commented on a story that isn't from Britain.

 
ragnarqk 2008-08-17 06:50:39 PM  
"Wot is this then? My rubbish bin is smaller den wot it was? I reckon I'll have to not make any more rubbish this week, eh wot wot?"

No one is like this. Way to go England.

 
stirfrybry 2008-08-17 06:58:13 PM  
strathmeyer: Sounds like they're trying to cut costs by only collecting every other week, completely unaware that this means there will be twice as much trash every collection.

Maybe people should stop electing idiots for leaders?


That does seem to be the thought process, or it could be that they expet people to waste less because it will be a hassle to be overly wasteful.

It's a poorly thought out solution.

 
simpsonfan 2008-08-17 07:10:09 PM  
People have options:

Make less trash.

Go out late at night, put your trash in public bins other people's bins. Just be sure to remove anything identifying you.

Take and dump it on the steps of City hall. /Not obscure.

 
WireFire2 2008-08-17 07:15:18 PM  
DirtyOldGeek: The nanny state needs it's own logo, like Florida

I'm going to second that one, unlike the jokes about other states nanny state keeps up a strong running.

 
WDFark think for a second 2008-08-17 07:23:21 PM  
so what's to stop the limeys from going out and buying extra trash bins?

/from the sun never setting on the british empire to this?

 
scruffy1 [TotalFark] 2008-08-17 07:33:49 PM  
WDFark think for a second: so what's to stop the limeys from going out and buying extra trash bins?

/from the sun never setting on the british empire to this?


Some towns here in the US have the garbage companies provide specific trash bins, I'm not sure if it's the same in the UK. However most trash companies here will provide you with extra bins if you pay a bit extra for them either in a one time fee or added to your monthly or quarterly bill. Of course it all varies but regarding your question providing your own bin might not be an allowable alternative. But once again I really don't know since I have no clue how their system operates.

 
olddinosaur 2008-08-17 07:35:08 PM  
"reverendjason", the house was rigged with solar electric power, solar hot water heater and rainwater recovery system. It stood totally independent of the system, although I admit it was mighty damn primitive!

It was built in 1943 of surplus ammo crates left over from WWII, and he used about twice the lumber and four times the nails he would have really needed. It looked shoddy I concede, but was solid as a tank.

In Corpus, we use hurricanes for urban renewal: Mine survived seven, while many "nicer" houses were blown away.

The City hated me because I was not beholden unto them for anything, there was nothing they could offer which I needed to have.

My dream is to build a house which stands alone, makes its own power, collects its own water, composts its own sewerage--requires nothing. If that could be done, it would put billions in the pockets of the common people--at the expense of big electric, big Energy---and the tax collector.

So it is easy to see why they stepped on me.

 
cretinbob [TotalFark] 2008-08-17 07:36:37 PM  
www.threadbombing.com

 
Scott77 2008-08-17 07:53:32 PM  
Is there anything that says how many bins you can have?

Back in my drinking days, the county-supplied recycling bins were far too small for my needs. So I stole another three. I can only assume the stolen bins were replaced.

 
BarryJV 2008-08-17 07:56:31 PM  
strathmeyer: Sounds like they're trying to cut costs by only collecting every other week, completely unaware that this means there will be twice as much trash every collection.

That is what the councils did, so the local population protested and forced them into changing the policy. In response, the council halved the size of the waste bins.

Part of the problem is the landfill tax which was introduced by the EU to encourage recycling and which councils have to pay to dispose of waste, even though it can be shown that landfill is less environmentally damaging than recycling for some materials. The tax is not the fault of the councils, but the idiotic responses are. My local council has full-size bins and weekly collections and still meets their recycling targets, so there's obviously better solutions than the ones being tried by Rushmoor Borough.

In my opinion they should just increase the council tax to cover the cost of disposing of all the waste (or even better, stop wasting money on failed political schemes) and then offer discounts on the tax to people that recycle, so you'd save a couple of pounds a year off your tax per kg of metal, maybe a few pence per kg of paper etc. Once people were being paid to recycle, the recycling rates would increase. Unfortunately, governments in general and councils in particular never really have figured out how to give people an incentive to behave in a desired manner.

 
ImJustaTroll 2008-08-17 07:56:48 PM  
mikaloyd: Nannied in the boobies

fap fap fap.

 
olddinosaur 2008-08-17 07:57:59 PM  
Somebody post a link to "My Old Man's A Dustman" by Lonnie Donegan.

Hilarious. No time to look it up.

 
bairy 2008-08-17 08:00:00 PM  
DirtyOldGeek: The nanny state needs it's own logo, like Florida

No. Great Britain needs to stop having complete morons submit non-stories from the most unreliable sources they can find.

Daily Express = poor man's Daily Mail (and that's really saying something).

Fark does live up to it's tagline though. It's not news...

 
Blues_Fan 2008-08-17 08:04:24 PM  
The money the council saves on landfill will be needed for rat control.

 
trainonthebrain 2008-08-17 08:08:32 PM  
It's ironic that a newspaper that constantly harks back to the Good Old Days as the greatest time to live in, doesn't support the principle of thriftiness and inventive recycling that people had to do in those days.

 
bmihura 2008-08-17 08:29:54 PM  
I lived in California for two years and thought that was the ultimate Nanny State. But no....

UK wins hands down! It does need its own tag.

 
Bomb Head Mohammed 2008-08-17 08:30:43 PM  
olddinosaur: The people pay a flat rate for waste hauling so they were not hurt, and the City didn't collect a dump fee.

Congratulations! You're an as$hole!

 
cr0sh 2008-08-17 08:35:06 PM  
olddinosaur - that's a f'd up story, you have. I can't understand why they would care, as long as you paid your property taxes. It seems like there is more to your story than you let on (I mean, you purchased the house, right? So - it wasn't under a condemnation order or something at the time of sale? Or - did they bite you after it was sold to you?)...

I want (and am planning) on doing something similar. Right now, my wife and I are working to eliminate all of our non-secured debt (ie, eliminating all credit card debt, leaving our mortgage). We are also trying as hard as possible to reduce our monthly energy usage and we are succeeding quite well. We already have our garbage and recycling to the minimum (tonight we will be putting out our recycling bin for pickup for the first time in three weeks).

I have many other ideas and such for living off the grid. When we get to that point, we are thinking about moving up around Kingman (which is very close to passing a law allowing wind generators on anyone's property), setting up wind and solar, maybe having some goats (for milk, cheese, and meat), living in converted shipping containers (or something similar - my dream home would be a monolithic dome construction, but it isn't cheap).

We are planning on having a water system with separate usage paths (one for fresh, one for grey, one for black), with the fresh (from a well or trucked in) going to the grey (which will consist of drainage from hand-wash sinks and showers, plus collect rainwater), and the grey going to flushing black, or for watering outside, and the black going into a methane digester (which would also provide compost).

A custom solar system is being planned (I have some ideas I need to do some experiments on - basically the idea is to build a cheap thermal mass solar panel system to heat water up and generate steam, which would turn small turbines connected to automobile alternators feeding a battery bank) - possibly with an integrated indoor solar oven (and hot water floor heating system for the winter). Outdoor solar ovens and possibly even a parabolic solar grill would serve for cooking (a microwave oven would supplement).

 
Rearden 2008-08-17 08:43:40 PM  
trainonthebrain: It's ironic that a newspaper that constantly harks back to the Good Old Days as the greatest time to live in, doesn't support the principle of thriftiness and inventive recycling that people had to do in those days.

I'm pretty sure the issue is more about useless idiot busybodies who think confiscating money from people to buy them smaller garbage cans is somehow a good idea that will magically cause everyone to reduce their waste output.

It might help with people who think: "Gee, I better buy more things than I need so I can fill my trash bin to capacity. If I don't have enough stuff to throw out, I'll risk dragging less garbage to the curb! Can't have that!" But for the remaining 99.9999999% of the population, it's asinine.

 
hackiavelli 2008-08-17 08:53:28 PM  
If I wanted to hear whining about the "nanny state" every day I'd listen to talk radio.

 
RoBByBoy 2008-08-17 09:14:24 PM  
I just burn all my trash. Is that bad?

 
Mordien 2008-08-17 09:22:03 PM  
They pick up garbage twice per week where I live. I have no idea why... most people just put their cans out on only one of the two days, anyway.

 
Only_A_Lad 2008-08-17 09:26:05 PM  
alex10294: They'll have a fun time emptying massively overflowing cans. Then come the littering tickets. Welcome to social fascism.

Don't you think comparing a local government's attempts to cut costs to an ideology that murdered millions of people throughout the world is a little overboard? I mean, garbage pickup is relatively minor when compared to, say, Guernica.

 
mfaby 2008-08-17 09:58:19 PM  
HEADLINE SAYS: 'Nanny state spends $1.5m cutting people's trash cans in half...in vain hope it will halve their waste'

It's actually $1.5mm. The 'm' is Roman for 'thousand' and a million is a thousand thousand there for 'mm'.

Between this and people MIS-QUOTING 'having your cake and eating it, too' when its EATING your cake and having it, too' Im gonna go nuts.

The goal of the expression is to state the impossible.

However, its possible to have your cake and eat it too, but its
IMPOSSIBLE to EAT your cake and then have it; got it?

 
Only_A_Lad 2008-08-17 10:20:57 PM  
mfaby: However, its possible to have your cake and eat it too, but its
IMPOSSIBLE to EAT your cake and then have it; got it?


fark! If people don't start figuring out the it's/its thing, I'm going to have to farking explode in anger. Between this and every other mild inconvenience in my life, I just don't know how to take it.

 
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