I pay roughly a 50% income tax, and in spite of that municipal garbage collection is, well, garbage.

Regular waste is easy enough: weekly collection is OK. Larger items which can be incinerated are OK-ish: need to make an appointment two weeks in advance, and pay by weight.

Anything else and I'm screwed. I'd like to get rid of a metal ladder, but it can't be incinerated. I'm supposed to take it to a municipal recycling centre, but I can't because it's too heavy and I don't drive.

Yet this same ladder, years ago, was delivered to my doorstep after a one-click purchase on some website. Why shouldn't I have a one-click disposal?

Same here. My municipal trash service is awful, and they increase the price every year without making the service better, probably because f-you. They could seriously use some competition.

1. Motor oil, electronics, toxic waste: They say you can't throw them away with the garbage but your only other alternative is to take time out of your weekday to drive that stuff to some government center somewhere (during business hours--I suppose you're not supposed to have a job).

2. Large items that can't fit in the trash can: There are apparently several special times a year when these things will be picked up, but only when several planets align and it's a weekday. You need to place it exactly on the right spot next to the curb, it needs to fit into a certain dimension and be under a certain weight or they'll leave it there and you need to wait for the next blue moon to come along in order to dispose it.

3. Anything else you need to get rid of that doesn't align with the garbage company's tight requirements: $50-100 trip to the dump.

I've had the best luck by just putting stuff in my front lawn with a big red "FREE" sign on it. People will scavenge ANYTHING. I've gotten rid of piles of dirt this way.

> they increase the price every year without making the service better

Inflation?

EDIT: Not sure I understand the downvotes. The cost of milk goes up every year too, and it doesn't get any better. Between inflation and unsustainable municipal expenditures (e.g. pension plans), it's not surprising that trash service follows the same MO.

Maybe the person meant: "increase the price more than the inflation rate". At least, that's how I'd read such a comment.

Maybe, although few people really think of that when complaining about rising prices.

Depends on the municipal government. Some municipal governments are truly corrupt and inefficient, so there might be rent seeking and increases in all sorts of costs.

Because it doesn't happen where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen where he lives.

As for Motor Oil, most auto parts stores will take it, also, many mechanics will.

> 1. Motor oil, electronics, toxic waste: They say you can't throw them away with the garbage but your only other alternative is to take time out of your weekday to drive that stuff to some government center somewhere (during business hours--I suppose you're not supposed to have a job).

or you could reduce your use of those items.

I do and I don't like to pay your toxic garbage and used batteries garbage collection for you.

Everywhere I've lived in the U.S. has a periodic oversized/miscellaneous waste pickup day where they will pick up almost anything that doesn't go in the normal trash, for free. Well, by free I mean for no existing charge above whatever you might already pay as a waste fee or tax. I'm not sure where you live so it's possible this doesn't exist everywhere though (it might only be a U.S. thing?).

The everything-else waste pickup day will take bulky things that don't go in the normal trash or recycling: ladders, washing machines, couches, desks, lamps, tires, bicycles, sewing machines, etc.

For example, Houston has this kind of everything-else pickup 6 times a year. There's once a month pickup of oversized waste of two kinds. It takes tree-related waste in odd-numbered months, and non-tree-related waste in even-numbered months: https://houstontx.gov/solidwaste/treewaste.html

Our city handles this twice a year, they work something out with the regular trash people; who otherwise will only take things if they fit inside their robot-operated arm things.

This is also when scrap hunters drive by with their trailers looking for resale items.

Everyone wins.

Small data point, but I've lived all over California and never heard of such a thing.

From what I can find online, it seems to be fairly common in California too, at least in the larger cities, though some require you to call to schedule a pickup rather than it being a regularly scheduled day. Usually googling for "[city] bulky item pickup" will find the info, if it exists.

For example, here are the pages for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Jose, which all offer the service free of charge: https://www.lacity.org/for-residents/popular-services/bulky-..., https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/bulky-items/, http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/government/city-departments/p..., https://www.sanjoseca.gov/index.aspx?nid=3649

Have this near where I live, but wish there was just a place to take it throughout the year. Don't like having to keep stuff around for ages until one of those days comes around.

You do, it's called throw it in the front yard. Anything metal will be picked up and melted down for $ by junk seekers.

Used motor oil, insulation, car batteries, and other toxic stuff, I could see a door service being useful.

This works in major cities with a self-sustaining population of scrappers.

Chicago trash service is utterly amazing. Literally anything that fits in your house you put in the alley and either the scrappers take it within hours, or the trash men haul it away without complaint.

Other cities I lived in were atrocious. You'd be looked at crazy if you had anything remotely considered an abnormal need. Such as traveling a lot and not being able to put your trash bin out every single week for pickup (as you'd be fined daily for leaving it on the street). Something stupidly that simple is exceedingly hard in most places in the US - and picking up large items is usually an even worse experience.

Came here to say just that. I've seen entire living room sets put out in the alley and collected by Streets & Sanitation as if entirely routine. We did get a $10/month garbage fee added last year but it's still a bargain to have literally anything you put out back magically disappear.

The chicago mexican junk trucks are amazing. Your old stove is gone in 30 minites flat for free.

There are plenty of neighborhoods where you'll be fined by the HOA for doing that. Just "tossing in the front yard" isn't a feasible sustainable solution. Anyway if he's paying 50% in income taxes then it's unlikely he even lives in a neighborhood where junk collectors drive around

I don't think I could live in an HOA even if I was paid to. Those things are atrocities. To anyone in the market for buying a home, watch out for those and never buy one if it's under an HOA. You can find lots of horror stories about them online with a quick search.

A good tip for anyone suffering through one: they can't legally interfere with amateur radio towers, so if you're dissatisfied with having to live with your HOA, you can put up as big of an amateur radio tower as you can afford and they can't do anything about it.

Usually they will ding you on every other HOA law to make up for it.

At 50% tax bracket that's exactly the neighborhood scrappers want to be in. Only problem is if it's a gated community. Then you have to pay for what the rest of us (who actually rub shoulders with the world) get for free :)

HOAs can issue fines? That's madness. I'll get fined for putting trash on my curb on the wrong day of the week, or the wrong kind of trash, but it'll be by my local government's very efficient income generators/police.

People voluntarily agree to more strict rules to not have their home value lowered by a dirty house in their block.

typically you'll need to call a "junk collector service" which will charge you about $50/item to get rid of it for you.

Not likely in my area. I'll get a steep fine for illegal waste disposal before any scrapper notices it.

Although posting an ad on Craigslist under "free" could work

Where I live, if you leave anything large and metal by the curb on trash day, scrappers will come take it within hours. :) Hazardous waste is a big problem though.

I hear you, that's why people dump shit in the street, or that's why people pee everywhere in the occidental world (very few public toilets).

Just put it on craigslist for free, someone will want it.

>>I pay roughly a 50% income tax, and in spite of that municipal garbage collection is, well, garbage.

No one pays 50% of their income as tax. That is not how tax brackets work.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of income tax goes to the federal government.

Even with a bracket system, your effective tax rate will asymptotically approach the percentage of the highest bracket as you make more and more money. Given "centre," I assume this person doesn't live in the US, and many places have higher tax brackets than the US does, including some well in excess of 50%. Also they may not have a federal vs. local distinction, etc., etc.

"The Personal Income Tax Rate in Sweden stands at 57.10 percent. Personal Income Tax Rate in Sweden averaged 56.31 percent from 1995 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 61.40 percent in 1996 and a record low of 51.50 percent in 2000."

source: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-rate

Effective federal plus effective state plus payroll plus effective local (income plus property) can approach 50% in the US. Average sales tax paid on post-tax income to state and local can push it over. But yes, only a fraction of it is municipal.

You might not want to make assumptions about taxes without taking location into account.

In spite of having tax funded garbage collection I often have trouble getting rid of certain things. Large items are collected infrequently and I might not want that sitting in my yard for a week or more awaiting pickup. Similarly, car batteries or other things that have special disposal rules can be difficult to find that information easily when it's something you deal with very infrequently. A service like this could help with that and I'd be happy to pay someone a few bucks to solve this problem for me.

It really is bad government. The city council should make a tender and have the local utility come and collect big items for free. That's how it works in the European city I come from. And the utility taxes are all but high.

> The city council should...have the local utility come and collect big items for free

I don't produce lots of big trash. Not sure why I--nor anybody else--should subsidise people who produce lots of big trash.

I think the free service was born out of despair for people consistently leaving big trash on the roadside. While I understand you as I don't produce big trash myself, I guess it's still better to just pay a little more and get rid of the bigger problems having trash on the roadside would bring.

New York City fines people $100 to $400 for using improper receptacles, leaving receptacles uncovered, putting trash in front of others' buildings and/or leaving loose rubbish lying about [1]. Note that these can accumulate, e.g. if you put loose trash in front of someone else's building in an improper receptacle, that could be $300 to $1,000 of fines.

Those fines pay for enforcement. They also pay for picking up garbage dumped by unknown persons. This model shifts the burden from everyone to just the offenders. I find it preferable to small households subsidising big ones.

[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/downloads/pdf/about/laws/DSN...

How do you demonstrate that the fridge left on the side of a public road, even if close to someone's home, actually belonged to someone? The examples that you mention are even harder to enforce. Cameras?

My house has never had a fire, so why should I pay for a fire department in my neighborhood?

That's what your argument basically boils down to.

Obviously it's not in our collective best interest to have trash accumulate on the streets. So we all end up paying for it collectively, regardless of how much we consume the service as individuals.

I have less control over whether my house lights on fire than if I make lots of trash. Also, if my house starts burning, it's an immediate threat to my neighbours' safety. If I leave trash outside, it's a less-immediate threat to their comfort.

Economically, clean streets are non-rivalrous (my clean street costs little more than my neighbor's) and retroactively excludable (through fines). This makes it a public enterprise good, akin to mail or trains [1].

Case in point: mattress and A/C sellers in New York City dispose of your old mattress or A/C for you. If pick-up of such things were free, fewer would do that. One response might be to regulate every thing one might purchase that could produce big trash. The other is to just make people who choose to make big trash pay for it.

[1] http://www.pitt.edu/~upjecon/MCG/MICRO/GOVT/Pubgood.html

Don't worry, he's willing to pay a few bucks for it.

But I already do have large item pick-up funded by the city or whatever. I basically never use that service and have no idea when it is. My standard operating procedure is to just put this large eyesore out in my front yard and eventually the government will come pick it up. Either that, or often times private citizens will recycle whatever it is for money.

So if this service rolls out in my area, I can either leave this large piece of garbage in my yard for a week or so waiting for the government to come pick it up, or I can open an app on my phone and have someone pick it up today.

Check with your city, if Waste Management pickups up your garbage you might have three free pickups a year on top of the yearly large item pickup. For the scheduled ones, we usually get a mailer a few weeks before they come up.

Here's the description from a random city:

For items that are too large to fit into the trash cart, residents may request the free pick up of household bulky goods three times per year. We will retrieve up to four large items such as furniture, appliances or up to 20 plastic bags of refuse or bundles of yard waste (less than 50 pounds each) for each request. Advance notice is required. To schedule a free bulky goods pick up, please contact Waste Management...

Why should they? If there are dangerous items to be disposed that 99.99% of the people on a given garbage day don't throw out, should the other people subsidize the disposal? Most residents are not throwing out things that need special care. By making the price more transparent, you can incentivize people to use fewer items that are toxic or bad for the environment.

The other side of the argument is that people simply won't do it. If you make it difficult to dispose of used motor oil, people will just put it in their regular trash bags and it will wind up in a land fill where it's dangerous.

Yup.

The towns around where I grew up used to make you pay money to get rid of metal (!!!!). Consequently it wasn't uncommon to find washing machines and old rims in random places. Then a scrap place opened up, appliances stopped showing up on the side of the road and the scrap place that only took copper quickly got ran out of business.

People don't want to dump stuff illegally, it's just the least worst option in the moment.

I have zero pickups apart from household trash, so broken tv's, those bushes I cut down, or huge boxes etc I have to drive to the recycling place (15 min drive).

I'd happily pay for a service to take it there but there is a catch 22: as an individual I already paid (through taxes) to leave stuff. Companies have not - so if I pay a company to take my things there, I'd also pay twice to leave the stuff there as they can't leave my stuff "for me". If I could somehow give a transport company the right to use my free (tax paid) recycling/dumping right then this would work here. Without that, can't work for individuals. Would work perfectly for businesses though.

I'm running into this issue right now. I'm moving, but I'm kind of stuck with leaving the couch inside instead of being able to put it out on the curb because it's illegal to leave large items on the curb, but large item pickup also doesn't happen until next Tuesday.

Many towns in New Hampshire with spread out population do not want to pay for garbage pickup. Everyone brings everything to the dump themselves. These people "self-uber for garbage" as they say.

Some rich folks pay companies like Waste Management to do it for them.

What's wrong with that model?

> Many towns in New Hampshire with spread out population do not want to pay for garbage pickup. Everyone brings everything to the dump themselves.

Yes, and this is pretty common even in areas where the population isn't particularly spread out.

This is common in many areas of suburban MA within 30 minutes of Boston.

Makes sense and I've seen it in mountain & destination communities where a lot of the trash is from transients. However, it's possible that could lead to people not disposing of trash properly or burning it. My grandma used to burn her trash when she lived on a farm.

Heck even large towns like Merrimack you haul it your self.

Taxes are extremely high in my area, especially small business nickle and dime taxes. It may shock you to hear my employees spend a minimum of 2 hours every two weeks (to say nothing of the distress of spending time on hold and dealing with unaccountable government agencies) on the phone yelling about non-compliance of pickup and outright lies by the waste management companies about how they do their jobs.

In theory I certainly agree with you. In practice, these agencies and government-backed crony companies have zero accountability, zero recourse, and no customer service.

Their target isn't residential collection -- it's commercial, which isn't covered by taxes in most places.

That makes it sound a lot less stupid. The Uber comparison strongly implies that it is consumer focused, and intended to privatize an existing public service (mass transit in that case).

Why is that inherently better than having it available as a service for a small fee?

Yes, actually, at least for basic pickup. I'd support it for big/dangerous items as well. It is really easy to let that trash bill go if you get poor, and folks tend to dump things when convenient or burn things that shouldn't really be burned to get rid of their trash. They leave large items in rentals they are moving out of and put dangerous items in with the regular trash.

Sure, communal pickup is flawed - but so far, it seems to be the better solution.

It seems like this is in addition to, not necessarily a replacement for, communal pickup

The trash bill for the poor is that for weekly pickup. Luckily, many poor folks live in cities, where the cost is included in taxes. Get outside city limits in somewhere like Indiana, and you have to pay.

In the socialist hell-hole (/s) I live in, I pay taxes for a fairly comprehensive trash and recycling service run by my local government. The service operates weekly. However, they only take care of trash that fits into their standardised trash bags or containers. They will not pick up anything that is too heavy for their workers to lift, such as a broken TV, or too big for their trucks, such as a mattress. Thus, there are additional private services here that have sprung up to take care of non-standard trash, and they do quite well out of it.

I found out first hand that getting my city to dispose of large objects (in my case a box spring) isn't a fun process. I didn't have the means to get it to the dump myself so I had to print off a request for a special collection, mail it in with a check for the fee for said collection, and call at a later time to confirm that they had received my request. More than a week after I decided I wanted to get rid of it they came and picked it up.

In the future many services might be operated by corporations that started as "disruptive". Behind every VC, and inside the Silicon Valley, there is a big and untold libertarian agenda.

I think government will not seize the opportunity to organize itself using internet technologies, for the simple reason that people will complain about surveillance (government slowness and red carpets would also be an issue).

Wouldn't it be better if we were allowed to interact voluntarily? Pay for what we wanted and used, and support people and causes through charity instead of under duress?

Do you want to live next to the guy who either cannot or is unwilling to pay? Nobody else does either.

I was surprised that taxes cover garbage pickup in some cities. I'm in Portland, Oregon and private collectors are assigned to various parts of the city with regulated fees. You choose your can size, frequency, etc. and pay the collector.

In St Paul, MN, we have private trash collection. This results in one or two garbage trucks coming down every street, every single day. The wear on the streets, and especially the alleyways, is incredible. They have to repave them every other year. But we can't have municipal trash collection because "free market" or some crap. Ugh.

And that's why the government puts them in jail.

Seems harsh actually.

In many cities there are assistance programs for the elderly, etc. who are truly broke but fines do work well for negligent landlords, fallow properties, etc.

I assume they give warnings first.

Right, but the punishment for not paying taxes is a lot harsher than seems reasonable for someone who just doesn't pay their garbage-pickup bill. It feels weird for those to be the same thing.

I'm gonna guess it'll be treated much like water bills (when the city owns the water processing, anyway). Threaten to call the health authority and child protective services if you don't pay the bill (after all, living in a home full of waste is a health hazard). Put liens on your house and/or car, eventually taking you to court and possibly garnishing your wages. In the meantime, no water service and they'll probably alert other utilities to your lack of payment so you'll either not get turned on or have to pay a deposit.

Then why not live somewhere else?

In theory perhaps, but every explanation I've heard for how such a society would work has so many holes that they only work for a small subset of real-life cases, and wouldn't scale at all.

I'm sure it would work great for a small community of up to a couple of hundred carefully selected individuals, but I think anyone who thinks it would work for general society is a bit blinded by their ideology.

In the end, the only forms of Government that have worked at scale have centralised governance, and democratic Governments seem to be the least-worst workable systems.

Not really, no. These things work at scale, and it would be incredibly difficult to find a price that works for everyone without it also taking into account their income, or similar. So... a tax.

Governments are a default state produced by groups of humans. They are inevitable. Making them better is incredibly hard work, but that is the only option.

Often times, they are improved by working outside the system itself, it seems. So there are some interesting options for tackling this hard problem. The company mentioned in the article may turn out to be a great example of this.

Governments do come in many forms, with varying size, composition, and effectiveness. However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point, as far as I can tell.

I agree with you re. anarcho-capitalism. I think that a state is a prerequisite for capitalism.

But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

> But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

You could do that with the entity called “the state”, but that entity would no longer be the state or government, no matter what it was called. (It might be an arm of the real government, which might consist of entities voluntarily funding the “state” which themselves exercise coercive, in practice, extraction of wealth, or it might be an irrelevant figurehead.)

>However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point

What about tribal societies?

I'm talking about larger groups of humans. Things are very different when you have only a few hundred humans or less. Dunbar's number[1] is an important factor here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Don't most people only have real social relationships with a few hundred people or less?

Of course, but I'm not sure what that has to do with governance structures of societies.

Too late to edit, so posting a follow-up for clarification: I don't mean anarcho-capitalism, I mean a voluntarily-funded State.

As an anarcho-capitalist, I'd be really keen on a "HumbleBundle" type government funding model. E.g. you don't get to pick if you pay taxes, but you do get to pick which parts of the state get what proportion of your taxes. E.g. 30% welfare, 0% military, 70% infrastructure development.

You could even argue that such an arrangement is voluntary in a narrow definition of a term. Definitely not one to satisfy most libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, but good enough for us to say we're not living in a state where we have absolutely no power over the state's spending.

How does that resolve? If I pay 0% to the military, but the US gets a favorable trade deal b/c theyre worried for invasion, do I get the reward without any skin in the game?

Wouldn't a savvy gamesman just vote for their own self-interest?

Perhaps that could be a feature? Everyone voting not just for their own self-interest, but for the things they think are important government features. Over the entire populace, it'll average out and their gaming won't amount to much.

The idea is that it's more "expressive" than one person = one vote. And it's more manageable than pure direct-democracy. Look, you could fiddle with things and have "minimum" amounts so that people can't completely break a government feature if they don't like it. E.g. 100% of people voting to have 0 military spending. But, if that were to happen, is that not a hint to politicians that none of the voting populace wants military spending?

To me it's another way to give more power to the individuals, rather than leaving it solely in the grasp of politicians.

Do you think it's desirable to give more power to individuals? Personally, I think enlightened despotism is probably the best form of government in terms of fairness, efficiency, etc.

In the US (a democratic republic), I see that the decision makers act in their own short term self-interest.

The risk with an enlightened despot (think typical corporate structure) is that the person at the top can really cause damage, because they don't have checks on what they can do. We can imagine the downside right now -- the strength of the republic is currently being stress tested to see if it can salvage itself simply by resistance, friction, and inefficiency to prevent Mr. Trump from destroying so much.

Throw in sortition instead of voting, and I'd be volunteering to hand out leaflets :)

Supposing I would be willing to fund a state; what happens when my neighbor doesn't, while still receiving all the benefits of law & order?

Basically, this is just setting up a giant tragedy-of-the-commons situation.

No, it wouldn't, because that's the fantasy that libertarians always push that has no historical or contemporary basis for working as a society.

Sorry for being grumpy, but this is as useful a contribution as "Wouldn't it be better if we harnessed the power of house-elves to magic away our trash?"

... except that the vast majority of what society does is voluntary.

To extend your analogy: "The magic house-elves are already making our cars, writing our software, and growing our food. I wonder if we should pay them a bit more to cart away our trash too."

The house-elves shouldn't be doing the law enforcement or the Government (and in fact they _are_ right now, e.g. in the case of for-profit prisons and the Fed, and it's a disaster). But they're a bit under-utilised right now in some areas :)

It's a shame government services are normally junk (pun unintended). That's my experience.

Off the top of my head: I would pay twice for x. Given how bad gov services are.

Edit: Cool downvotes Marxist bros. Our national health service can't be super inefficient (I'm just about to go on a waiting list for a year) & my rubbish collection can't have just halved the amount of trash they take every two weeks. You're right!

Marxism is entirely orthogonal to the idea of "government-provided services."

Marxism and socialism are often clumped together in these sorts of discussions. They both happen to be examples of pretty-bad and un-free systems of government.

Marx believed in a move from feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism -> to communism.

Socialised production & all ...