Also, SF is considered "progressive" for many of its completely unsustainable policies, like housing controls, which ultimately lead to further economic inefficiency. A truly progressive society is more like Toronto where the poor can generally get help, but we don't mind putting up condos or new office space.

Also the Swedes do some things that are much more right wing than America, like Free Schools (essentially private schools operating with a government payment, similar to the coupon model). It isn't a left-right difference. Furthermore, Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.

Also you can't really compare it anyway. There is a far higher amount of cultural homogeneity in Sweden than the US, even in the white portion of the US, and the average IQ is 3 or 4 points higher.

As for homelessness, you are living in SF. This is what you get. The US has a much higher veteran rate than Sweden which highly correlates to homelessness (usually due to PTSD and associated drug abuse) and the capital of homelessness in North America is SF.

I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex.

Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going.

Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.

It would sure keep it in the forefront of my mind, but not in the way I think you'd like! More: "How can I get rid of the politicians who force me into this menial waste of time?"

I will happily pay in taxes whatever the added processing costs are for allowing me to continue to use Cambridge's terrific "single stream" system, which allows for an astonishing range of waste in a single bin. It doesn't cover the hazardous stuff like batteries and CFLs, but you can make that easier, too, without requiring individuals to maintain bins for 5 different varieties of plastic.

I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there.

In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used.

Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.

Where I live in California, we are given a large recyclables bin and a small trash bin, with the option to pay more for a larger trash bin. This sounds like an incentive to recycle, but it's a perverse one. If I were to just put all my trash in the recycle bin, there would be no consequences at all for me, because the recyclables truck just dumps it all into a big communal heap, with no possibility to trace it back to me. Is this cardboard too wet to recycle? Who knows? In it goes!

No it doesn't. I live in so-called 'progressive' Holland where separate waste collection has been done for years. It's not efficient now any more (in 2013 we have better waste separation methods as was had in the 1990's) but people have become conditioned to 'separating waste = green' that it's hard to reverse now. Plus, the whole infrastructure exists now anyway, so the switching costs would take another decade to make back - an investment for which there is simply no room in these times.

It's an interesting question, and very difficult to answer. Like climate studies, you'd need to calculate so many side effects, that your answer might be different depending on the context you take into account. I've discussed this topic quite extensively with colleagues in urban planning and environmental sciences in countries across the world, but nobody knows (obviously) and people's preferences tend to align with what they have or have worked on. Personally I tend towards the automated / technology solutions (i.e., centralized), but I can't tell if that's because of a cognitive bias or from an increased ability in estimating these sort of things from experience, so that basically nullifies my opinion, too.

It's water under the bridge anyway.

A different approach would be to charge people for trash pickup. If the cost for sorted trash removal is enough of a savings, then people will do it.

Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash.

A Swede will happy carry their own bags up to their rooms in hotels, too. Most hotels don't have porters. They don't have the whole tipping thing either generally. You go through life doing things for yourself, not paying others to do things for you.

Maybe its the US psyche and is some kind of superiority complex? I'm half-serious; why do people on your side of the pond think its a hassle to sort their trash?

Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag.

The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.

As far as I have ever seen, most people don't mind sorting the trash, the different bins just aren't there.

In places where there is a single recycling can, I can't remember anyone throwing recycling into the trash can, with righteous indignation, muttering about the extra cost to their personal time.

Too bad they're wrong though. Talk about 'Stockholm syndrome' (get it? I'm so funny)

In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.

Go blame Ho Chi Minh as well for the war that shouldn't have happened. Of course by doing that, you'll likely be kicked out of the organic food co-op.

I prefer that we kept all politics off Hacker News. Nobody cares about my (or your) political views unless they pertain to something extremely relevant to the tech and startup communities.

also for wanting to keep politics off HN - you failed pretty badly at that mate!

Indeed. I always get a bit surprised when I see visiting people throwing cans out of the car window, or a plastic wrapper while walking down the street. I guess its a wonder that they only regard the street as a garbage can and not as a toilet.

When I was in certain large, developed cities in China (nearly 15 years ago now) most of the toddlers I saw in public had "open bottom" outfits on; they literally used the street as a toilet. Some parents would hold them over the bin when they needed to go. Many wouldn't.

Your point is valid; when you "abstract" away recycling to a centralized plant, the individual most likely won't consider the environmental impact of his purchasing decisions and habits nearly as much.

It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes.

Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?

In the UK, the right-wing Education Minister, Michael Gove, is a particularly enthusiastic proponent of "free schoools" and has been strongly influenced by the Swedish free school model. In fact, the 2010 Conservative election manifesto even included a page praising the Swedish free school policy.

Edit: Spello

That's overly pessimistic.

Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.

What is the academic merits to become a teacher today? Zero?

Edit: Added extra paragraph.

Sure. I didn't arrive at this through reasoning, it's a contingency. I hope I didn't leave anything non-obvious out:

* In most places, you have to afford the school and you need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).

* In Sweden, you don't need to afford the school: you only need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).

And that we granted every small education institution with the status of university.

So to sum up: the goal of "free" education is to make higher education available for more people. This will lead to lowering of standards of already existing programs because more will attend (normal distribution of skill) and in the universities self interest a majority will pass because universities is paid per graduated student.

And with a gradual lowering of standards this opens up for unqualified students to attend, especially in combination with government programs.

Ergo academic merits does not matter.

In Swedish Almost anyone can be a teacher http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/nastan-vem-som-helst-kan-bl...

This is now norm on many programs at the Swedish universities.

This link shows statistics for people accepted into higher education for this fall semester: http://statistik.vhs.se

Both in the design of the system and in its actual results, it's clear that academic merit matters more than any other factor.

Politicized is the one that accepts the reality of politics, I don't because I look at result not intent.

What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.

If you get an ethnic Swede drunk and ask him about third world immigration and its effect on his nation, be prepared for an eye opener!

And I'm fed up with stupid racists that think that they just say what everyone really thinks. You don't represent us. We think you are stupid and ignorant.

I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"

While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.

I don't think this is terrible, but it has costs associated with it that will become apparent further down the road -- similar to how the existing education system born from the industrial revolution's needs has proven to. The system you have suggested has a prominent lack of means to introduce people to advanced theoretical physics, economics research, astronomy, abstract mathematics, etc, you get the picture. A generation without a hint of knowledge in the non-practical fields will function fine in the short-term, but it will lead to a stagnation of advancement until an external trigger brings it back about.

Essentially, as I'm guessing you're a hacker-hustler-type, you see the primary course of education to promote passion in "doing," and that's my first instinctual priority for education as well. But classically, education has had a role to do much more than just that (albeit extremely inefficiently) for many generations, and it could be detrimental to focus on only one educational priority of "learn to do things well", with a potential to lose being able to gain exposure to other kinds of intellectual commitments. Maybe it won't happen, but it's a real risk. Who knows what we may have lost already from generations past?

Of course, everyone in the world agrees that the "sitting behind desks competing on test scores forgetting all the knowledge and then stumbling through relearning the real world from scratch" model of today's education is broken and pretty stupid, but it's not that straightforward to fix, unfortunately. Your suggestion is definitely something a single school could adopt (and broad institutionalized educational requirements should be abolished), and I would love to send my future kids there over anything that exists today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.

The US may be collecting less taxes, but if they're just putting the remainder on credit, then they aren't really any further ahead (and possibly behind).

I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything.

(I understand what little evidence we have points to maternal health/diet/wellbeing as the single biggest causal factor. Handouts of food - or simply money - to mothers in the latter part of pregnancy are the most effective intervention we know. But again, we know very little and it's very difficult to find anyone who can study these effects from a position of neutrality)

I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?

It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.

I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this:

Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else.

Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.

Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.

Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled.

There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.

They actually have machines for that. There's a youtube video on how they sort types of plastic.

> Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors

Sorting by color is trivial to automate.

> Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.

Yes. However where I live you have to separate cardboard from everything else. Most other paper gets shredded into pulp and recycled.

Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.

For a long time we used to have general waste and compostables. That was quite understandable because you really want the compostables into a separate heap because of...well, composting and you can produce bio gas off composts if the percentage of decomposing waste is high enough. But I'm pretty sure the separation of glass, wood, papers, cardboards etc. could be done in some automated way that reaches a good enough success rate that would make it economically and ecologically viable.

It has also been tried many times to separate organic matter from the rest (different colour of bags), and using automatic systems to sort it. It has been mostly dropped because it's more expensive than just burning everything unfortunately. Which brings me to the main point. We can be very efficient and recycle most of the waste, find a optimum point where we minimize the environmental footprint - it's just expensive, and the first thing to go when the city need to save money. People just don't care about future generations, or don't believe it's a problem, to accept the cost of recycling.

But it really is a shame, because high density areas like Copenhagen, are ideal for pushing recycling. You get quantities, and you don't have to collect over a large geographical area. So the running cost of collecting is significantly less, and you can build larger and more efficient facilities to process and recycle the waste.

I feel it's worth mentioning that other cities and even other states have long had an unofficial policy of sending their homeless/crazy people to places like SF. This has now become the subject of lawsuits - see for example http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/12/first-lawsuit-fil...

As a fellow Euro, I agree with your overall argument, however.

Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.

I'll be impressed if it can keep social cohesion while allowing immigrants to make a better life for themselves. It's easy for an elite society to stay closed and elite. SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth.

What is the racial/ethnic diversity of Sweden? Showing stats on high immigration where the top of list is finnland, germany, denmark, etc. It's great sweden takes refugee's, but that is easy if they are a tiny fraction of the population. What percentage of the population is a different race or ethnicity? Here is san fransisco http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

For some hard numbers, "15% of the [Swedish] population was born abroad, 5% of the population was born in Sweden to two parents born abroad, and another 7% was born in Sweden to one parent born abroad. Resulting in 27% of the Swedish population being of at least partly foreign descent." (Wikipedia for Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendants . That also shows the complete breakdown, with Iraq, Bosnia, former Yugoslavia, and Iran in positions #2-5, after Finland.)

Compare that to the US: "According to the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey, the US immigrant population was 38,517,234, or 12.5 percent of the total US population." (http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=8... )

12.5% for the US is less than 15% for Sweden.

It's hard to compare the Swedish immigration numbers to the ones in the link you gave, which talks about ethnicity in San Francisco, because the Swedish government tracks nationality, not ethnicity.

It's also difficult to compare San Francisco, which has a higher than average diversity in the US, with all of Sweden. For example, in Botkyrka Municipality near Stockholm nearly half the population has at least one parent born in another country, and that rises to 65% in one of its neighborhoods; a neighborhood where 26% of the neighborhood is a foreign national.

By comparison, that number is 30% (instead of 26%) for the SF Bay Area. However, even then it's not a good comparison because I picked a single neighborhood of 82k people in Sweden, against the Bay Area, which has a population of 7.15 million. The entirety of Sweden is only 9.5 million people.

So yes, you can easily say that San Francisco is a very culturally diverse city. No one disagrees with you.

However, purplelobster's point was that Sweden currently, and over the last two decades, takes in a lot of refugees on a per-capita basis, and even more than the US does - a fact which is not in dispute.

My point was if Stockholm had the same weather and immigration policies as San Fransisco, it would be facing some of the same challenges with poverty and homelessness.