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Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

Would you be seriously fine with the nearest grocery store being an hour away (over deteriorating roads) and it possibly being 3x as expensive? Plus, what are you going to do about garbage? People forget that is also a social service.

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If they are fine with the nearest store being an hour away, who are you to judge.

A tiny group can just burn garbage, or whoever is serving that town that's an hour away can have their truck spend 2 hours every other week to come pick it up.

Garbage collection is not a social service, it is a commercial paid service in most of the world. In Europe I don't pay taxes for garbage collection, I pay the garbage company for the quantity they pick up.

In Canada, it's generally the case that your taxes go to pick up the garbage. They might hire a company to do it, but it's usually the municipal government that pays. I'm living in a co-op and we get a tax break since we contract ours separately. Even if it's a commercial paid service, how many companies are going to do that in a dying community?

Not in highrises. Residents for that on their own. Though it's a municipal issue, so it may depend on where you live.

True, but in my co-op (one 6 story building and one 3 story building) we get a tax break because we handle our own garbage. It's far less than our garbage bill, but it helps. I know because a) I used to be the co-op treasurer and b) we actually list it as a line item on our budget so everybody in the co-op can see it if they look.

In the most rural parts of the US, people don't have garbage collection at all. They compost some of it, burn some, and either drive the rest to the dump themselves or bury it on their own land.

Not that those things would necessarily apply or happen just because the collective solution would go away, but yes - I would actually be fine with that.

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