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Stuff I Wrote
Thursday, May 6th, 20041) Just posted a longish piece for the A Better Earth website on recycling.
2) My Fox column this week looks at the sweatshop side of the outsourcing debate.
11 Responses to “Stuff I Wrote”
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You want to see stupid?
The city of Toronto trucks its garbage across the border to the state of Michigan for disposal.
The reason is that in all of Ontario, they can’t find some useless land to locate a garbage dump on. The evil, Satan worshiping, human hating, tree huggers are getting in the way, you see.
Would anybody venture a guess on the economic efficiency of shipping garbage to a different country, despite having plenty of land available locally?
As always, great article, Radley!
The recycling episode of Penn and Teller’s Bulshit! replays (recycles?) tonight on Showtime. 10:30PM eastern. Right after the new episode, about religion.
I love TV.
What are the people who support higher wages and child labor laws for third world countries thinking?
How can reality and simple facts not get in the way of their lack of reasoning. This stuff is not even complicated economics, it is just pretty much low level logic.
Radley, good stuff.
Peter. It’s an emotional thing. When people see and hear about tragic individual cases they feel a powerful need to do something about it. When they aren’t aware enough to have a point of reference they often don’t see the possible consequences of their visceral actions. Thus if you show a half-starved kid in a Vietnam factory to an American mother of 5, and she’s never seen wholly starved kids in countries the factories moved from, she’ll feel pangs of empathy and guilt and quite likely draw the wrong conclusions.
This is why articles like these are important. They give the perspective necessary to hold back on visceral choices.
Outstanding, as usual.
Over the last couple of years, thanks to this website, everything I learned in elementary school “Social Studies” has been utterly destroyed.
Frankly, though, I feel bad for the Social Studies teachers…
I’m curious how people in third world countries can “climb the corporate ladder” when they work in substandard conditions and work long hours (even though they are paid well above their countries minimum wage)?
I highly doubt that the Nike factory in Vietnam is opening new economic investments for those workers to jump into…
I understand where you are coming from in your article… However, it’s still a sham and major corporations are getting a lot more out of it than the exploited workers are.
Thanks to Radley, I’ve said this following phrase to many people, “If the kids in Pakistan don’t make us soccerballs, how will they eat?” I get blank stares.
As for recycling, Radley and the anti-recycling crowds never mention gov’t subsidies that help the raw materials process. If you had to pay the actual cost of getting AL out of the ground, you wouldn’t be so quick to toss the Bud can back in the ground. There is no free market at work, we are stuck with gov’t intervention screwing up the process.
Last time I went to the scrap yard, I got 60 cents a pound or $1200 a ton for Aluminum. Last I checked a few years ago it cost almost $200 a ton to get rid of muni waste in Jersey. Makes me wonder what would happen if gov’t stepped out of the whole process…
Recycling doesn’t add up, well no shit sherlock. It is still cheaper to mine sand and melt it into glass bottles than it is to rinse, de-sticker and recycle a snapple bottle.
Typical recycling is not recycling at all, it is downcycling. That plastic bench you sat your tubby ass on the other weekend while on a stroll in the park is made from recycled milk jugs. How heartwarming. Was that the original intent of the plastic keeping your butt off the ground? No. Then it’s not recycling. Will that bench degrade in the sun and eventually be landfilled? Yes. So even our feeble attempts at “recycling” are nothing more than prolonging the inevitable toss in the dump. That material most likely will never be reusable again.
Fear not, there is hope. At least, there are idealists out there brainstorming ideas to align our global society with the regenerative capacities of the Earth. Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets has started leasing carpets. When the carpet gets worn out, you send it back and get a new one at a reduced cost. Interface in turn keeps a life long customer base. Instead of going to landfill, the carpet returns to Interface where they reclaim the materials and do some fancy stuff I can’t explain too well and the old material becomes new carpet. The quality/utility/function of the product/material is not lost to some park bench. And it is certainly not sitting in some landfill waiting for the second coming.
I suggest familiarizing yourselves with the Next Industrial Revolution.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98oct/industry.htm
Environmentalists for years have been naysayers and doomsday forecaster’s. And I mean global climate change is inevitable and there is really nothing we can do about it. We’ve redistributed carbon all over the world after breaking it down through combustion,what do you think is going to happen? That’s simple chemistry and physics.
It is however time for a paradigm shift and I believe it is starting.
For example, why are we still shitting in perfectly potable water? Only to have to remove the shit from the water miles later at the MWTP? Shit comes in a perfectly compostable form. Yet we dump (pun intended) it in water, which causes all sorts of issues. Composting toilets and source separation are the new paradigm in human waste disposal.
Frank N, good call on the raw materials subsidies.
Free trade is a contradiction. I mean, look at the upper hand we have simply by being born in this country.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy reading about this positive change. It fascinates the heck out of me.
In the early ’60s, while stationed on Okinawa and living in quanset hut squad bays, we had house-boys. They washed our clothes, shined our boots, etc. The Okinawan government complained that the house-boy earnings were distorting the socio-economic equilibrium of the island. The house-boys were making more money than college-trained professionals. The solution was to limit the number of people a house-boy could work for, thus reducing his wages and giving employment opportunities to additional house boys.
Today, here in the Philippines, a college-educated middle-class professional earns less than $300 per month. How much should an illiterate, uneducated production-line worker be paid without upsetting the socio-economic equilibrium? (Why waste time spending four years in college when you can earn more as a menial?)
The true definition of a “living wage” is how much remains in your pocket after paying necessary living expenses.
Mike Farrell
Cagayan de Oro
Philippines
Mike:
Who cares about “upsetting” the “socio-economic equilibrium” besides asshole government workers? The “socio-economic equilibrium” is a bullshit concept if there ever was one.
Actually you can earn far more as a prostitute in the U.S. than you can in many professions requiring a college degree. I don’t see that as a problem, unless you feel that you are “entitled” to some sort of high wage for going to Podunk U. and getting a degree.