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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

In the places I've lived in America the two classes of people who care the least about disposing of trash anywhere but on the ground are lottery players (I assume only the non-winners) and smokers. I see other types of litter, but nothing else nearly as regularly.

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I happened to be watching a girl smoke once, and caught myself thinking, "grr, she's probably going to drop it on the ground". I realized I was being uncharitable, and just because a lot of people leave their cigarettes around doesn't mean this one person is going to.

Then she dropped it on the ground, stomped it and and walked away. It's really hard to be a generous person when others constantly prove cynicism right.

I once said to a smoker outside a laundromat as he threw the butt on the ground "you dropped something".

He replied "we'll pick it up for me then" and walked inside.

I did pick it up, entered the laundromat and threw it in to his basket of clean clothes.

Then we got in a fight, it probably wasn't worth it but it felt really good.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thatHappened/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PeopleBeingJerks/

Hey, I'm not the guy bragging about starting fictional fights.

A fantasy of mine is to throw cigarette butts back into smokers cars when seeing them toss them out at traffic lights and in traffic.

You'll like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cVuvVRUE then.

I wish I had as much free time to do the same.

I really like your style.

I didn't mean to come off well in the story. It was pretty dumb and could have ended quite badly.

You're my hero...

No, totally worth it!

This just made my morning.

Here's the thing about smokers. The very act of smoking is saying "I don't care about my health". If you don't care about your own health, why would you care about the health of strangers or the environment?

Their attitude seems to be "When you smoke, the whole world is an ashtray."

bike commuting every day I am exposed to a lot of litter, from my perspective the vastly most common litter is drink containers, coffee cups in the winter, soda cups in the summer, there is really no contest, it's by far the largest amount. Plastic bags are next, then those disposable flossing plastic U-shaped things, and then all sorts of other things.

I so wish that 7-11, starbucks etc. charged $5 deposit for every drink container they sell, ah one can always dream...

Would you have said the same 30 years ago? Smoking used to be much more common - at least in places where I've lived. As smokers have quit the number of butts they have dropped have gone down. My impression is smokers in general are more likely to drop their used butts, but since there are so few of them you don't see much.

Those stick around for a long time. Toss an apple and it's quickly dirt inside a week or two, toss the bag it came in and that's still mostly intact in 6 months.

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