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Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food
schwit1 writes The new rules would allow garbage collectors to inspect trash cans and ticket offending parties if food and compostable material makes up 10 percent or more of the trash. The fines will begin at $1 for residents and $50 for businesses and apartment buildings. "SPU doesn’t expect to collect many fines, says Tim Croll, the agency’s solid-waste director. The city outlawed recyclable items from the trash nine years ago, but SPU has collected less than $2,000 in fines since then, Croll says. 'The point isn’t to raise revenue,' he said. 'We care more about reminding people to separate their materials.'"
Apparently they see that disposing of food in trash bins instead of compost is a waste. I don't see the problem with the headline.
That isn't what samzenpus is trying to get you to believe. samzenpus is a big believer in the conspiracy of the nanny state - see my journal article that links to all the bullshit he has funneled through to the front page - and he is trying to support the notion that the dirty hippies running Seattle are trying to force everyone to eat moldy vegetables. He isn't describing the wastefulness of compostable material entering the regular waste stream, he is trying to stir up fear of the imminent government takeover and micromanagement of your life.
He could have fit a headline in up there that accurately summarizes the article, but he chose not to. In the same amount of space, a headline along the lines of "Seattle passes ordinance to encourage composting of waste food" would have been orders of magnitude more accurate and informative. He chose this awful headline to stir up excitement with the conservative base that has been steadily taking over what used to be a technology site here at slashdot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm sorry, I don't know who samzenpus is. All that I see is a legitimate article/headline that's getting bashed because of preconceived notions based on fear that somewhere some municipality might regulate how people dispose of their trash. I am libertarian/conservative, and I don't see the problem with local regulation of trash disposal.
Really? At least once a week there is a story like this, chosen to excite the conservatives and to try to make the liberals look bad. Can you show me an article posted in the past several months that does the opposite? No, you cannot.
Are you kidding me? Soulskill's got a dog-whistle called "climate change" he blows on every fucking day. Doesn't even matter what the article's about; the comment section derails immediately into diatribes against the evil nasty capitalists.
Seattle collect compostable material from residents using a separate bin from the garbage bin. They in fact collect 3 kinds of bins; garbage, compostable, and recyclable.
A vital detail that those outside the city (and many within it) don't know - and of course won't get from the inflammatory OMG! NANNY STATE! headline/summary - is that the City of Seattle doesn't have a local landfill. Hasn't for many years; there's no nearby space. Instead, all garbage is loaded onto train cars - hundreds of them a day - and sent by rail to a landfill in rural Oregon, about 250 miles away. That was the cheapest alternative for the city, even though it involves paying twice (once to transport it, and again to the landfill operator). But it's still expensive.
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Given that it's in the best interest of the City _and_ its ratepayers to reduce the amount of landfillable waste (aka number of train cars) in favor of more economic alternatives; specifically, recycling and composting, both of which are able to be handled within a few dozen miles of the city, at much lower cost than the landfill trains. The alternative is to have even more and longer trains and higher rates for garbage for everyone.
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Kind of the opposite of a nanny state; this is pure and simple economics. If the spectre of a few $1 fines for the few residents who can't be bothered to separate their greasy pizza boxes into another bin makes everyone's garbage rates lower, then I'm all for it.
That isn't even the dumbest thing Seattle did this week.
Not a good explanation at all, just a clumsy attempt to justify poor writing.
When the vast majority of the population talks of 'wasting food' they mean one thing - allowing otherwise edible material to become inedible. What happens AFTER it becomes inedible does not matter in the slightest. It does not matter if you put the stuff into the trash or compost, as far as being FOOD it has been wasted.
A headline of 'Seattle Passes Law to Encourage Recycling Organic Material' would actually convey what happened. You may or may not agree with such a law, but at least you know what it is.
A headline of 'Seattle Passes Law to Keep Residents From Wasting Food' tells you NOTHING about what they actually did. Are they going to restrict how many groceries a family can buy? Are they going to check your refrigerator to make sure you don't let leftovers go bad? Are they going to fine you for discard any food? The only reason to write such a stupid headline is as flamebait.
Dude, a properly cooked brussel sprout is HEAVEN. It takes skill to make them right. Next time you are out at a higher end restaurant and they offer them, order them, trust me on this. My evil stepmother used to make me eat them and i hated them with a passion until i had one that was properly prepared.
Good-bye
Get them in season (early winter months), still on the stalk, and cook them properly (refer to the Good Eats episode on Brussels sprouts, for exmaple). There will still be some variations in quality based on the exact batch you have, but the best vegetables I've ever eaten have been when I found particularly good stalks of Brussel sprouts.
Lightly coat in olive oil. Lightly toss in sea salt (or Jane's Mixed Up Salt, if you're in the south.) Roast at 350F for one hour. They come out salty and crispy on the outside, and tender and sweet on the inside. Consume that day as they don't keep very well. But they're so delicious it shouldn't be a problem!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.