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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

I think its a poorly understood cultural thing.

If you go to a beach e.g. in Phuket, Thailand, you'll find a mountain of rubbish just off the part where the tourists sit. Plastic bags and bottles, old car parts, tin cans, all sorts of shit. Same in Rarotonga, or many of what you might label third world countries that tourists go to. Right next to where people live and work, blowing around.

In some cultures, rubbish is just ignored. You'd think if you worked next to the beach, you'd at least clean up the little patch next to your stall when you had some downtime, but this just doesn't seem part of the mindset. I don't know if its some kind of "tragedy of the commons" type thinking or what it is.

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I have a related story. I was on an island in Indonesia, and the small town next to the beach (mostly locals, but still tourist related businesses), was full of garbage. I have a photo of a local kid that was sitting on the beach, on top of garbage, because there was no clean place to sit.

Now, down the road a few hundred meters and over a hill was a little cove, with a beautiful beach. It was a little more touristy (about 10 people were there), had a restaurant and chairs to rent, and the beach itself was only about 40m wide with rocks curving around the sides. This beach was also full of garbage. Two tourists showed up, both women in their 20s with snorkeling gear. They wanted to clean up the beach, so they went in the water and start snorkeling around, while picking up the trash. Fairly quickly, they had so much trash they needed garbage bags. They went to the restaurant a few meters away and asked if they had a spare bag, because they're cleaning the beach. Well, they didn't have wallets to pay the local restaurant owner, so they were refused a garbage bag. In the end, they just left the garbage and walked off.

The situation was pretty shocking. This restaurant business relied on this small 40m beach, and not only did they not take the time to keep it clean, they couldn't even do the smallest gesture of providing a garbage bag when someone else offered to clean it for free.

This was something of a problem in America a few decades ago. People thought nothing of just throwing trash along the roads, in parks, etc. Informal dumps were everywhere on vacant lots, in roadside ditches and ravines. This eventuality motivated the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaigns that are credited with changing public attitudes.

But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

> But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

In the situation the GP described, how would concern about litter (i.e. cleaning it up) put the ability to have food and shelter at risk? In fact, one could argue that cleaning up a garbage-strewn tourist beach would attract more tourists and enrich the locals, increasing their ability to provide food and shelter for themselves.

I have a less dramatic but similar story. In Portland OR, there is a lot of Asians (ie, non-American born) and during a conference, we went out to lunch, and we saw a group of Asians, very nice clothes, gold watches, get in to a Lexus and just leave all their lunch (takeout) bags in the gutter. Their cups, straws everything. Just set it down and drove off.

This was in the mid 90s, we were all pretty shocked. But I have since learned, that is what is common in Asian countries, just set your garbage down wherever you want. I even read a blog article where a dev when to a tech convention in some large Asian city, and there were no trash cans anywhere, and that the only place to put garbage was on the ground, and there were people paid to pick it up.

This is largely the way things are in Jerusalem. There is tons of trash all over the place, stuffed into crevices and just loose on the street. It seems to be largely ignored by the locals (it is like this even in very non-touristy areas as well, so it's not just messy tourists).

I took a quick look at the google on this topic and found this:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-total-rubbish-w...

That is incredible. I have been all over the US in many, many parks over 40 years and never once, anywhere, did I see a pile of trash like this. Even in the early 80s this never happened at a park. (I know many, many other countries are way worse, but being 3rd world is at least a partial excuse)

In a big city, in a few places, (I lived on the streets for a bit in a few big cities) there wasn't even trash like this. Even the worst places in Portland, LA and other big cities, unless it was a total slum, it was not like this.

Anywhere there their is a public interest, the US actually gives a crap about keeping it clean. It's surprising how other cultures give the US such a hard time about "recycling" and "being green", I am about to be sick of hearing it.

Considering the size and magnitude of the park systems in the US, we are one of the cleanest, greenest friggin nations the world as ever known. (besides the nasty pollution from factories, but that is another issue)

> I took a quick look at the google on this topic and found this: > https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-total-rubbish-w....

You wouldn't nothing close to Tel Aviv garbage piles in Givatayim, Raanana, Herzliya or Netanya, but at the same time Yaffo, but somehow, Jaffa, Acre and Jerusalem have it much worse. (And before I get accused of racism, Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim are just as bad, with Tiberias getting worse every year.)

Israel is a very heterogenous country, with different communities having radically different lifestyles and ideals - reality that this Haaretz piece completely ignores.

I suspected as much. It doesn't seem worth the flame war (accusation of racism) online to even approach discussing that one group of people are naturally "messy" (for lack of a better term) while another is not.

I find it amusing though that since I don't know the language or the area, I have no idea what any of the names you listed implies. Maybe that's good.

Jewish cities with a (relatively) not religious and wealthy population, Muslim Arab and mixed cities, and finally orthodox Jewish cities (which Tiberias, as many other northern cities, is rapidly becoming). Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.

>Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.

This seems odd, in the US, the more wealth (and I would say possibly some religions) the more likely there are either volunteer projects or budgets for cleaning up public areas.

Is this unique to the US?

Reverse correlation with wealth and proportional correlation with religion, I should've probably been more clear about that

I think there's a few confounding factors.

One is that there's no infrastructure in a lot of these places. When you're in South Ease Asia, there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground.

At least in the larger towns and cities in Vietnam, they have workers that tow around a big rubbish bin on wheels and collect the rubbish off the street, but in smaller villages, they just occasionally pile it up and burn it.

Lack of infrastructure is definitely a problem there.

But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck. Maybe it's because the place is so dirty anyway. My friend was draining the petrol tank, and asked if there was anywhere he could dispose of the water contaminated petrol at the hostel or nearby. They just told him to tip it on the street. They were surprised that he wanted to find a better place to tip it where it wasn't just going to run all over the concrete, then into drains and the sea, not to mention the fire risk of dumping a couple of litres of petrol on the concrete.

I guess you get used to your surroundings. It's certainly not an ingrained culture thing that's peculiar to Asia; Singapore and Japan are both very clean, and I remember Kuala Lumpur being reasonably tidy too.

>"But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck."

I had a religious minister talk about Ghana, there were these plastic baggies everywhere, they were sold with water in them on the streets. So they got all the kids together to pick up the garbage.

One lady was in charge of the final collection, she took all the piles of garbage they collected (spent hours) and through it out the back of their shop on the ground.

Japan has lots of trash cans, and is incredibly spotless. Downtown Tokyo, hardly any trash anywhere. (if any) I saw 1 single homeless guy there. One.

I saw 1 single homeless guy there. One.

Homeless people don’t count as trash.

>Homeless people don’t count as trash.

Oh come on, you know I didn't say that at all. A comment on the internet forum doesn't need to be a full story every time and so context matters, but that is a ridiculous implication.

It was humorous, I won’t bother again.

Welp, here we are again. Written words have no body language to facilitate most of the meaning. Your words didn't come across as funny, and mine seemed to come across as negative in some manner to you. If we had been talking, you would have seen a smirk, and I'd have slapped your shoulder with a "knock it off buddy". (next time add /joke, I'll add /ah-shucks)

/fix internet miscommunication

Even ";-)" would do the trick.

On the other hand, joke markers decrease humorous value for people who would get the joke without their help.

>there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground. //

They don't have bags to take the rubbish home?

Fine, if there's no refuse collection domestically or commercially or you can't afford to have waste taken. But if you carried the waste to where you were then you can carry it to a recycling or disposal point.

Obviously if there's so much trash that it's overwhelming, you disregard it for the sake of your peace of mind. Picking up one bag out of millions in your immediate area feels futile. There also might not be any place to put it. First-world trash management programs don't magically spring out of nowhere. They are planned, developed, and maintained.

This is the same in all the places I've been in Central America like Belize and Mexico. Its like a tropical paradise in the middle of a dumpster.

I suppose its part cultural, and I suppose more developed nations have more resources to throw at clean-up efforts.

That's more of a "broken window effect" than anything. Once your used to some trash, more trash doesn't seem that much worse.

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