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New York Department of Sanitation Complains That Too Many People Are Stealing Garbage

rabbifink — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:59:43 +0000

The best part of the Gregg Easterbrook article I mentioned yesterday was not What Really Happened 2000-2010? Time Magazine Says It Was Mostly Bad. It was something else that was in the news in New York a couple weeks ago.

The New York Times reported these facts:

Over the last several months, 22,741 New Yorkers contacted the city’s Department of Sanitation and arranged for the pickup of refrigerators, air-conditioners and freezers. In more than 11,000 instances, the machines vanished before sanitation workers arrived in their white trucks to pick them up.

Someone is the garbage and it is not the Department of Sanitation. So what is the problem?

The article says that this “theft” is costing a third party contractor a lot of business! In this case, stealing garbage is costing someone a lot of money. The loser here is Sims Municipal Recycling of New York L.L.C. the company that was supposed to profit off this garbage. This has prompted the NYPD to issue citations for those engaging in recycling without a permit.

Easterbrook is flabbergasted. The city pays Sims $65 million per year. If recycling was profitable, Sims would pay the city for the rights to recycle. Further, the “thieves” are actually saving the city millions of dollars. That is money that should stay in the pockets of its taxpayers.

I am equally disturbed. The city is making it a crime to save the city money! What’s next? Fines for using old paper towel rolls for school projects? Reusing my Snapple bottle for an avocado pit experiment?

But of more important significance is the issue of whether or not this is theft at all.

What happens when the New York City resident places his trash on the curb? Does that somehow transfer ownership to the city? The article says that the the trash belongs to the city. I don’t see how. I would imagine that the disposer’s thinking is: “It is my trash and and I am putting in on the curb for whoever takes it!”

Trash is trash. And one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

The city should be applauding those who take the trash of their neighbor and put it to good use! Not fining them!

In Jewish Law there is a concept called hefker. This is a status of ownership where whoever takes the item first owns the item. A perfect example of hefker is throwing something in the trash.

I think it’s pretty clear that the city’s only interest here is their contract with Sims. I also think that New York taxpayers are being taken for a ride on the recycling train.

I am all for conservation. But bloating spending on conservation to specific contractors is not conservation, it is corruption.

Link: NY Times (Check out the comment on the article. Most are outraged New Yorkers.)

What Really Happened 2000-2010? Time Magazine Says It Was Mostly Bad

rabbifink — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:24:51 +0000

One of my favorite columnists is Gregg Easterbrook. He writes a weekly NFL column on ESPN.com and incorporates politics, science and humor into his football commentary. In fact, before I started this blog, I copied a very good section of one of Easterbrook’s columns into a Facebook Note to share with my Facebook friends. I guess we could consider that my first blog post ever! (I should probably just copy it from Facebook into the blog…) So Easterbrook got me started as a blogger! (Read the Facebook note here: Copied From TMQ on ESPN.com – just what i have been saying…)

I also wrote about him 13 months ago in a great post called Christmas Creep and Judaism (if you have not read that yet, do it now).

Yesterday, Easterbrook wrote another brilliant column that relates back to that Facebook Note. Bad news is news. Good news is not.

Time Magazine’s cover for their December 6, 2010 issue depicts what “really happened” between 2000 and 2010. Here you go:

Easterbrook tallied up the events mentioned on the cover. Here are the results.

Some 118 happenings were chosen by Time editors as the most important in the decade. Four were positive (sports achievements, an African-American inaugurated as president). Fourteen were neither good nor bad (“Pluto demoted to dwarf planet”). One was goofy (“AOL-Time Warner merger” was named by Time as among the world’s most important events of the decade). One made you want to weep for the state of American culture (“‘The Dark Knight’ release” is treated as more important than any book, work of art or music). The rest, 98 of 118 events cited, were negative.

That means that according to Time Magazine 83% of the events worth mentioning this decade are negative events! Easterbrook punctuates his point with this:

The Time selection says nothing about major positive trends such as declining international military spending (rising U.S. spending is the exception to the rule), declining teen pregnancy rates, declining crime, declining accidental deaths. “U.K. foot and mouth crisis” — which harmed only livestock — was cited, but nothing was said about declining cancer rates. “Shark attack” was cited, but nothing was said about the dramatic rise in living standards in most of the developing world. (“Overall, poor countries are catching up with rich countries” on nearly all central measures, according to this important new report.) Yes, journalists have always loved bad news, and have long pretended good news doesn’t exist. But this is ridiculous.

I agree. Bad news is news. Good news is not.

There needs to be demand for good news. If there is a demand for good news, journalists will report it. But as it stands now, bad news sells, good news does not.

I think the marketplace can dictate what is reported. We, as the consumers, need to ask for more positive news.

Bloggers should be writing about good news. CNN I-Reports should have some good news. We should be promoted good behavior through the media. We should be hearing more stories that give us hope and inspiration and less stories that depress us and make us afraid.

People usually do the right thing. It just doesn’t seem that way.

Perhaps if we heard more good news about everyone we would have less biases against particular groups who only seem to make the news when they do something wrong. And not the 99.9% of the time they are doing the right thing.

(More from the article tomorrow!)

Link: ESPN.com

Christmas Creep and Judaism

rabbifink — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:27:31 +0000

I am sure you are familiar with the Christmas Creep phenomena. You can’t miss it!

The basic principle of Christmas Creep is that each year Christmas celebrations begin earlier and earlier.

The cynical view is that retailers use the earlier Christmas season to maximize sales. I can’t imagine that works very well. People are going to buy a certain number of gifts, no matter when they start seeing Christmas displays. Right? For more on Christmas Creep read the Wikipedia article here.

There are some holdouts. The contrast between the holdouts and the creepers is evident at the nearby outdoor mall – The Grove.

A few nights ago the “tree” at The Grove was lit in a fireworks display. That is, the sunday before Thanksgiving the Christmas tree was lit.

While this was going on the mall’s Nordstrom displayed the following. I think it gives us a better clue into understanding Christmas Creep.

There is another theory. That is the Unified Theory of Creep. Created by Gregg Easterbrook of ESPN.com, The Unified Theory of Creep assumes that all things eventually creep. You can see it applied in this TMQ article from Easterbrook (scroll down a bit).

According to this theory, it cannot be consumerism that drives creep. It must be something else. The Nordstrom notice tells us everything we need to know.

“We just like the idea of celebrating one idea at a time.” – Nordstrom

The problem is that most people are looking for the “next thing”. People have such a hard time living in the moment and enjoying where they are in life that they miss everything.

In elementary school you just want to get to high school and in high school you just want to get to college and once in college you just want a job and when you get a job you want to find a spouse and when you get married you want to start a family and then you can’t wait until you can get the kids ino school and then college and then retire and then…

You see, we all look to next thing. But living in the moment will give us so much more pleasure. There won’t be a struggle to wait until the next thing, we will just enjoy where we are.

The Unified Theory of Creep is the theory of impatience, of not living in the moment, of yearning for the next thing. Nordstrom has the right idea. Enjoy things one at a time.

I think marriages suffer from this as well. Men looking for their next wife without enjoying the wife they already live with. I think childhood has suffered from this as well. Parents are preparing their children so well to be adults, that they somehow miss out on childhood.

The Jewish idea is clear. We have a halachic principle. “Ein me’arvin simcha b’simcha” – we do not mix one occasion with another occasion. When are we supposed to begin preparations for a holiday? The talmud says 30 days.

The Jewish idea is to cherish where we are at any given moment and time. Not to seek the next moment or occasion.

Nordstrom got it right.

NFL Football: Game of Wimps and Crybabies

rabbifink — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:26:10 +0000

Every casual sports fan in the universe has heard about the big 4th down play that cost the Patriots a victory in their epic matchup with the Colts this past Sunday

Facing 4 and 2 yards to go on their own 28 yard line, Belichik elected to go for the first down and not punt the ball away. The stakes were very high as a failed attempt would give the Colts an almost certain victory and a punt would make their task more difficult but far from impossible. So Belichik rolled the dice. The play actually worked, but they did not get the yardage needed for the 1st down.

The Colts took over on downs and patiently scored the winning touchdown with mere seconds left on the clock.

Below is a video of the play.

Everyone and their grandmother has an opinion about this play. The strongest initial reaction came from a couple of former Patriots defensive players turned analysts. Rodney Harrison and Tedy Bruschi felt this was a huge slight to the Patriots defense. Belichik sent a message to them that he could not trust them to stop the Colts offense and he felt he had a better shot at victory by gambling on 4th down.

Right when it happened I found myself thinking about my favorite ESPN.com columnist, Gregg Easterbrook. He writes the Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ) column and has been saying for years that punting is a worse play than going for the first down on 4th down. There is even a high school team that (almost) NEVER punts – and they win! NFL Head Coaches punt because they won’t be blamed for their defense allowing a score but the Coach is blamed if the 4th down conversion fails. It is all about shifting the blame according to TMQ. Here are some numbers and analysis to back up his claim. In short TMQ claims, punting is for wimps. Read his predictable take on the play here.

The next wave of opinions on the Patriots failed 4th down conversion is in. The Wall Street Journal backs up Belichik’s decision with TMQ-esque numbers. There was a 70% chance of victory with a punt and a 79% chance of victory if they went for the 1st down.

Plus, they have an opinion. Belichik is an abberation. In their own words:

Above all, though, the essence of Mr. Belichick’s “crime” may be something simpler than all this: His decision went against the natural instincts of all human beings when they’re forced to make high-stakes decisions. In a recent study, researchers from Duke and UCLA found that when faced with a decision involving risk, people have an overwhelming tendency to make the supposedly safe choice—to err on the side of caution—even though doing so may lead to worse results.

Passive mistakes can cost more than aggressive mistakes.

It is foolish to be aggressive when the aggressive move carries more risk than the passive move.

It is cowardice to make the passive choice when the aggressive choice carries less risk, and you are just too big a wimp to make the right choice.

And if the defense is going to be upset they are big crybabies. You are on a team. You’re collective job is to win. If you are not willing to do what it takes to win, you don’t belong in a competitive game like NFL Football. The Head Coach is paid to win the games, the players are paid to execute the game plan and we are the suckers who spend our time and energy watching a bunch of wimps and crybabies.