This is great but what if, hold on, we paid taxes.
Regular waste is easy enough: weekly collection is OK. Larger items which can be incinerated are OK-ish: need to make an appointment two weeks in advance, and pay by weight.
Anything else and I'm screwed. I'd like to get rid of a metal ladder, but it can't be incinerated. I'm supposed to take it to a municipal recycling centre, but I can't because it's too heavy and I don't drive.
Yet this same ladder, years ago, was delivered to my doorstep after a one-click purchase on some website. Why shouldn't I have a one-click disposal?
Used motor oil, insulation, car batteries, and other toxic stuff, I could see a door service being useful.
A good tip for anyone suffering through one: they can't legally interfere with amateur radio towers, so if you're dissatisfied with having to live with your HOA, you can put up as big of an amateur radio tower as you can afford and they can't do anything about it.
Chicago trash service is utterly amazing. Literally anything that fits in your house you put in the alley and either the scrappers take it within hours, or the trash men haul it away without complaint.
Other cities I lived in were atrocious. You'd be looked at crazy if you had anything remotely considered an abnormal need. Such as traveling a lot and not being able to put your trash bin out every single week for pickup (as you'd be fined daily for leaving it on the street). Something stupidly that simple is exceedingly hard in most places in the US - and picking up large items is usually an even worse experience.
The everything-else waste pickup day will take bulky things that don't go in the normal trash or recycling: ladders, washing machines, couches, desks, lamps, tires, bicycles, sewing machines, etc.
For example, Houston has this kind of everything-else pickup 6 times a year. There's once a month pickup of oversized waste of two kinds. It takes tree-related waste in odd-numbered months, and non-tree-related waste in even-numbered months: https://houstontx.gov/solidwaste/treewaste.html
For example, here are the pages for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Jose, which all offer the service free of charge: https://www.lacity.org/for-residents/popular-services/bulky-..., https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/bulky-items/, http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/government/city-departments/p..., https://www.sanjoseca.gov/index.aspx?nid=3649
This is also when scrap hunters drive by with their trailers looking for resale items.
Everyone wins.
1. Motor oil, electronics, toxic waste: They say you can't throw them away with the garbage but your only other alternative is to take time out of your weekday to drive that stuff to some government center somewhere (during business hours--I suppose you're not supposed to have a job).
2. Large items that can't fit in the trash can: There are apparently several special times a year when these things will be picked up, but only when several planets align and it's a weekday. You need to place it exactly on the right spot next to the curb, it needs to fit into a certain dimension and be under a certain weight or they'll leave it there and you need to wait for the next blue moon to come along in order to dispose it.
3. Anything else you need to get rid of that doesn't align with the garbage company's tight requirements: $50-100 trip to the dump.
I've had the best luck by just putting stuff in my front lawn with a big red "FREE" sign on it. People will scavenge ANYTHING. I've gotten rid of piles of dirt this way.
Inflation?
EDIT: Not sure I understand the downvotes. The cost of milk goes up every year too, and it doesn't get any better. Between inflation and unsustainable municipal expenditures (e.g. pension plans), it's not surprising that trash service follows the same MO.
Because it doesn't happen where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen where he lives.
or you could reduce your use of those items.
I do and I don't like to pay your toxic garbage and used batteries garbage collection for you.
No one pays 50% of their income as tax. That is not how tax brackets work.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of income tax goes to the federal government.
source: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-rate
So if this service rolls out in my area, I can either leave this large piece of garbage in my yard for a week or so waiting for the government to come pick it up, or I can open an app on my phone and have someone pick it up today.
Here's the description from a random city:
For items that are too large to fit into the trash cart, residents may request the free pick up of household bulky goods three times per year. We will retrieve up to four large items such as furniture, appliances or up to 20 plastic bags of refuse or bundles of yard waste (less than 50 pounds each) for each request. Advance notice is required. To schedule a free bulky goods pick up, please contact Waste Management...
The towns around where I grew up used to make you pay money to get rid of metal (!!!!). Consequently it wasn't uncommon to find washing machines and old rims in random places. Then a scrap place opened up, appliances stopped showing up on the side of the road and the scrap place that only took copper quickly got ran out of business.
People don't want to dump stuff illegally, it's just the least worst option in the moment.
I don't produce lots of big trash. Not sure why I--nor anybody else--should subsidise people who produce lots of big trash.
Those fines pay for enforcement. They also pay for picking up garbage dumped by unknown persons. This model shifts the burden from everyone to just the offenders. I find it preferable to small households subsidising big ones.
[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/downloads/pdf/about/laws/DSN...
That's what your argument basically boils down to.
Obviously it's not in our collective best interest to have trash accumulate on the streets. So we all end up paying for it collectively, regardless of how much we consume the service as individuals.
Economically, clean streets are non-rivalrous (my clean street costs little more than my neighbor's) and retroactively excludable (through fines). This makes it a public enterprise good, akin to mail or trains [1].
Case in point: mattress and A/C sellers in New York City dispose of your old mattress or A/C for you. If pick-up of such things were free, fewer would do that. One response might be to regulate every thing one might purchase that could produce big trash. The other is to just make people who choose to make big trash pay for it.
[1] http://www.pitt.edu/~upjecon/MCG/MICRO/GOVT/Pubgood.html
I'd happily pay for a service to take it there but there is a catch 22: as an individual I already paid (through taxes) to leave stuff. Companies have not - so if I pay a company to take my things there, I'd also pay twice to leave the stuff there as they can't leave my stuff "for me". If I could somehow give a transport company the right to use my free (tax paid) recycling/dumping right then this would work here. Without that, can't work for individuals. Would work perfectly for businesses though.
Some rich folks pay companies like Waste Management to do it for them.
What's wrong with that model?
Yes, and this is pretty common even in areas where the population isn't particularly spread out.
In theory I certainly agree with you. In practice, these agencies and government-backed crony companies have zero accountability, zero recourse, and no customer service.
Sure, communal pickup is flawed - but so far, it seems to be the better solution.
I think government will not seize the opportunity to organize itself using internet technologies, for the simple reason that people will complain about surveillance (government slowness and red carpets would also be an issue).
Seems harsh actually.
I'm sure it would work great for a small community of up to a couple of hundred carefully selected individuals, but I think anyone who thinks it would work for general society is a bit blinded by their ideology.
In the end, the only forms of Government that have worked at scale have centralised governance, and democratic Governments seem to be the least-worst workable systems.
Often times, they are improved by working outside the system itself, it seems. So there are some interesting options for tackling this hard problem. The company mentioned in the article may turn out to be a great example of this.
Governments do come in many forms, with varying size, composition, and effectiveness. However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point, as far as I can tell.
But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.
You could do that with the entity called “the state”, but that entity would no longer be the state or government, no matter what it was called. (It might be an arm of the real government, which might consist of entities voluntarily funding the “state” which themselves exercise coercive, in practice, extraction of wealth, or it might be an irrelevant figurehead.)
What about tribal societies?
Sorry for being grumpy, but this is as useful a contribution as "Wouldn't it be better if we harnessed the power of house-elves to magic away our trash?"
To extend your analogy: "The magic house-elves are already making our cars, writing our software, and growing our food. I wonder if we should pay them a bit more to cart away our trash too."
The house-elves shouldn't be doing the law enforcement or the Government (and in fact they _are_ right now, e.g. in the case of for-profit prisons and the Fed, and it's a disaster). But they're a bit under-utilised right now in some areas :)
Basically, this is just setting up a giant tragedy-of-the-commons situation.
You could even argue that such an arrangement is voluntary in a narrow definition of a term. Definitely not one to satisfy most libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, but good enough for us to say we're not living in a state where we have absolutely no power over the state's spending.
Wouldn't a savvy gamesman just vote for their own self-interest?
The idea is that it's more "expressive" than one person = one vote. And it's more manageable than pure direct-democracy. Look, you could fiddle with things and have "minimum" amounts so that people can't completely break a government feature if they don't like it. E.g. 100% of people voting to have 0 military spending. But, if that were to happen, is that not a hint to politicians that none of the voting populace wants military spending?
To me it's another way to give more power to the individuals, rather than leaving it solely in the grasp of politicians.
In the US (a democratic republic), I see that the decision makers act in their own short term self-interest.
The risk with an enlightened despot (think typical corporate structure) is that the person at the top can really cause damage, because they don't have checks on what they can do. We can imagine the downside right now -- the strength of the republic is currently being stress tested to see if it can salvage itself simply by resistance, friction, and inefficiency to prevent Mr. Trump from destroying so much.
Off the top of my head: I would pay twice for x. Given how bad gov services are.
Edit: Cool downvotes Marxist bros. Our national health service can't be super inefficient (I'm just about to go on a waiting list for a year) & my rubbish collection can't have just halved the amount of trash they take every two weeks. You're right!