Free of New York’s Sludge Train, an Alabama Town Is Still Steaming | Hacker News Reader

Free of New York’s Sludge Train, an Alabama Town Is Still Steaming

nytimes.com

23 pointswglb16 comments

Are there any other cities in the USA shipping their human waste to other states?

Also, couldn't they better contain the train cars and vent through activated charcoal liners to reduce the odor?

This really surprised me, in the UK sewage gets treated and then the sludge is used for fertiliser while the water is released into rivers. Shipping it across the country seems quite wasteful.

Maybe they'll institute zoning regulations. The lack of them is why the town was chosen to park the poop train.

It's an unfortunate mindset that people would choose to harm other people just because their city didn't happen to have an ordinance about an edge case that doesn't come about often, especially one that they were currently being litigated against, so they know they're actively harming people.

As a responsible member of the community and just being a decent person in general, it is everyone's responsibility to think about the effect of their actions on others, but I guess that's not how you "win" in life.

In other words, in a chain of events several people decided not to follow the golden rule here. They wouldn't have done this in their neighborhood. They're the reason this happened.

You can't really build airtight legislation and regulation enforcing decency. There is some evidence that you violate the golden rule when you try.

You can totally write regulations that require the consent of the community before doing things like this. It's hard to write them to not have side effects, but it's doable.

A town of <1000 people simply cannot craft city ordinances with all the edge cases that a city of >8500000 can. That is not a reasonable request, and it is not a license for the city of >8500000 to take advantage of the town of <1000.

That's true, but it's the cost this town paid for not wanting regulations at all. They have literally no zoning regs and are now crying that someone took advantage of them. They shouldn't have been so naive.

In the context of a small town, you don't craft airtight zoning regulations because if Harold is being a bad neighbor, you go work it out with Harold. If he's still being a jerk, you ask his friends to help you talk to him.

I don't think it's fair to blame the town for expecting people to be considerate and decent. Blaming them is like blaming consumers for not reading a EULA.

Nah, it's not like there aren't a million towns out there with adequate regulations they could have just copied. Or they could have made that "contact Harold if he's being an jerk" have legal teeth: community review boards and the like. Or zoning, like most towns have.

You don't need perfectly airtight zoning regulations if draft them right: just ask SF residents where the rights of existing residents are almost too strong.

This is a southern town so I strongly suspect the anti-regulation rhetoric won out and now they paid the price.

The Golden Rule is that the people who have the gold make the rules. In this case, NYC has a whole lot more gold than Alabama.

If you are thinking about people being decent to each other, that is the Silver Rule and doesn’t apply to corporations since companies are rewuired to do the profitable thing not the conscionable thing.

In this case: spend money to move the train full of poo elsewhere, or leave it right where it is? The profitsble option is “leave it where it is” because that costs less.

With the whole of New York behind this, can't they just build a couple of miles of new track to provide a new route to the landfill which bypasses the town?

By the time construction is finished, the sludge has moved on to some other lowest bidder.

Why the "poop train" shit train makes more sense, no need to be polite.

What a headline

I can just picture a NYC man with the most smug smirk on his face. He is the NYT reporter who penned this masterpiece.

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