What I Learned from a Taipei Alley | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned from a Taipei Alley

eugenewei.com

183 pointsNaOH52 comments

My other comment was a little too negative, so here's two positive alternatives.

The American system of throwing lots of great things into unlocked dumpsters does wonders for the poor. It's much more effective than non-profits, who might only help citizens/legal residents/etc. When I was broke in California, I ate food from dumpsters for about 6 months.

The French recycling system has large bottle banks placed in each village, where plastic, glass, and paper can be deposited. The council also issues free compost bins to houses that have gardens, so they can dispose of organic waste and make their own fertiliser.

Other items (wood, electronics, furniture) take more effort. In France these can be taken to a "déchetterie", or scrapyard. That would be great, except that it's recently become a crime to remove items from these. That's actively hostile to the right to repair. In America it was often free to fish for scrap, and in Taiwan & Korea I'd just have to pay a small fee based on weight. Most of the computers and bicycles I owned came from scrapyards.

Can anyone else offer insight from other countries?

I can't imagine needing to eat from dumpsters for months. I hope circumstances have improved for you tremendously! Sometimes I forget the small blessings in life.

Thank you. I wish I could share some good news now, 10 years on, but sadly I can't. That time was during my exchange programme to UCSB.

When I graduated, I went to Canada on a Working Holiday visa. I found a job at a startup, but they only paid 600 CAD/month. I ended up doing remote work instead. In New Zealand I had a good summer job, so saved a little. In Japan I was unemployed, I foolishly went there without finding a job first. Then I worked in South Korea with North Korean refugees for 2 months on a stipend that covered food and shelter. Then a summer job in Austria that paid. Then volunteer missionary work, which emptied my savings. Then failing to find a job in the Netherlands. Then unpaid work at a PCB factory in China, but they let me stay in the dorm and eat in the cafeteria for free. Then a paid job in Shenzhen, and I had savings again. Then trying to start PhD in Korea, but the professor didn't pay my scholarship and my savings were gone soon. Then 5000 INR/mo for a social enterprise in India. Then 4 years in Taiwan for a microSD card manufacturer, and finally saving up enough for plane tickets once a year to visit family. But that ended a couple of months ago.

Now I'm unemployed, living with parents, trying to find anything. My dream had been to return to NZ or Canada but I'll give up dreams just to have income again. Those who give advice usually just criticise my résumé without ideas of how to find a job.

I've been trying since March. I tried job websites (Seek, Indeed). LinkedIn. Direct applications to companies. Custom cover letters. Rewriting my résumé twice. Contacting engineers via their Github profiles to offer to work together on open-source just to get an introduction. Side projects on Show HN. Several recruiters. Friends from previous summer jobs. Offering to start a data migration service with my old Apple IIgs or Mac Plus. Prayer. Now I'm just cold-emailing every company on the accredited employers list. Nothing's working. Please, if you have any idea what I can try next, please get in touch.

How about those remote work websites? Upwork and the like?

And you could start from non-related to IT work (you've done some anyway) like waiter, assistant etc, and with the salary, grow from there (try to find side-gigs, do some personal projects, etc).

Hey Peter,

Did a quick google search and found your GitHub repo. I feel for you on the "not finding a job" thing. I would offer this advice: Try and keep "empty" spots in your resume to a minimum. If there is anything you can add to it that can answer for the blank times, that shows employers that you are driven. My gut says you are good at "IT things," with no specific speciality in a particular area.

Another thing to keep in mind is this: the only job that is beneath you right now is one that doesn't pay. Take anything, because going to work and earning some wage will do wonders for your mental health, and will get you in a better mindset. On top of that, have you approached any recruiters in your area or in the areas you want to work? If you are clear to them that you are going to cover your own relocation costs, perhaps a company would be willing to look at a work visa applicant that way. I can tell you from my experience, from the companies I have worked for doing dev in the US, we wouldn't be interested in dealing with relocating a worker. I am in the West side of Michigan, US. I'm not saying you aren't employable, but just giving some info I've seen.

One of the areas you are inherently ahead of the curve on is i810 work. Your knowledge of IT and also working in Asian countries and abroad makes you a prime person for that kind of work. Perhaps you could market yourself in that way?

I hope this is more helpful to you than "lol get a better resume noob" kind of feedback you have been getting.

Thank you; it's really encouraging to read your comments. I agree - I'll take anything now. For most countries I already have the visa requirements memorised, and I can afford a one-way plane ticket and one month of survival costs. Even though that probably means taking a job in a place where I can't settle long-term, I'll take it now because something is better than nothing.

I suspect by your great amount of traveling around that the problem is not the job market, but your difficulty integrating with society (even outside of any one culture) as a whole. I hope that you can find stability, at least up to your yearnings to travel and live life as a rolling stone. The first step is for you to realize that who you are and what you want to achieve are in conflict with each other. You have had some very low points it sounds like and have not yet changed. Perhaps you never realized that the problem is not with those around you, but within your own self. This is a very self defeating illusion.

I stayed in Taiwan for 4 years to prove that I can settle. Unfortunately their immigration policy can't make that permanent.

I was born with nationality issues that caused me to wander, looking for somewhere that will welcome me. Identity-wise, I associate well with TCKs, international students, and the CouchSurfing community. A full explanation why I don't have a "home" is in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17695674

In my country we used to have bi-annual hard rubbish days where people would leave out old unwanted furniture to be collected by local council. When I had little money and no car, I could walk around the neighbourhood and drag home slightly damaged furniture, fix it up and furnish my home.

Now they've moved to just-in-time collection vouchers, so this perfectly serviceable furniture goes straight into landfill, and poor people don't get the chance to repurpose it.

On the positive side, the council pays a small reward for collecting and returning recyclable bottles, which provides the homeless with a chance of a modest legal income and stops some of them from panhandling.

This effectively happens once every year near American universities. Lots of furnishings in good condition, left in haste by students.

In Germany it depends on the town. You separate paper most of the time (maybe nearly everywhere), and some apartment complexes also have bins for organics (not composting per se, but will be taken for composting). Some towns mandate you also separate all recyclable plastic, some don't.

If you have bulky stuff you either put it on the curb or haul it to communal collection stations/scrapyard, where it's free to offload "a small van full per day" if you have a local license plate. Sometimes people are waiting in front of it and will take anything looking good right out of your hands, but the employees at the scrapyard may also grab some things, afaik they resell this for a low price then (a bit picky though, they didn't want a CRT monitor that I was still using until that day because they already had a slew of 17" LCDs, psss :P). I don't think it's illegal to remove stuff there, but I'd have to check - or you have to pay a small fee.

There have actually been court cases where people were sued by supermarkets when they salvaged produce from the bins (probably trespassing charges, you can google for "containern"=dumpster diving + "urteile"=verdict).

Switzerland uses the principle of "the polluter pays". It is now illegal for cities to charge flat rates for garbage, because simple economics shows us that consumption of things that are unmetered is much higher than things which are metered. In this case, the "consumption" being metered is in fact "production of trash", otherwise known as "consumption of the space in the landfill/incinerator". In my commune, a 35l sack costs 2 CHF.

This is probably the real reason for the blue government trash bags in Taipei: they are probably using the same trash metering policy Switzerland uses.

At the moment the official sacks were introduced, I did some back of the envelope calculations and found that the reduction in our combination "electric and flat garbage tax" bill as it turned into a simple "electric" bill paid for about 2 sacks a week. With paper, PET, glass and compost recycling, we could easily consume less than 2 bags a week as a family of 4. But without recycling, it would easily be 4 bags! The garbage authorities noticed a huge increase in recycling with the introduction of the official sacks.

When the official government sacks were introduced here, there was some grumbling that "if these fancy sacks cost so much per bag, you'd expect that they at least never break!" Too bad that the economic concept of externalities is not widely enough understood.

Families with children (or disabled people) in diapers unavoidably produce more trash than their neighbours. In order to not penalise them, they receive a few rolls of free trash bags per year.

>The American system of throwing lots of great things into unlocked dumpsters does wonders for the poor. It's much more effective than non-profits, who might only help citizens/legal residents/etc. When I was broke in California, I ate food from dumpsters for about 6 months.

That's a little bizarre perspective though. "Yeah, we have a messy waste disposal system, but at least our many starving poor can eat off of the garbage".

How about we should ensure that we don't have either?

I love Taiwan, but I would argue that it's the garbage system that builds a sense of civic cooperation, not the other way around. My impression of Taiwanese culture in general (compared to LA, where I grew up) is one of commitment to the status quo, preference for the path of least resistance, and strong risk aversion.

All of these add up to mean that if the truck is how you're supposed to take your trash out, most people will accept it as the unavoidable hassle that it is. The remainder will either live in a fancy apartment that takes care of it for you, or else litter and/or abuse the few streetside trash cans you can manage to find around here.

That's not to discredit the people in Taiwan who really do give a damn – there's a great video on YouTube by a vlogger who invites the mayor of Taipei (!) to walk the streets picking up cigarette butts and other litter with him, and they share some great insights with each other. But I see Taiwan's trash disposal system much more as a triumph of central planning than the Taiwanese character.

EDIT: forgot the link to the video (no translation from Chinese, though)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtTQO4OsZqU

>who invites the mayor of Taipei (!) to walk the streets picking up cigarette butts

One consequence of the lack public trash cans is that every smoker I've seen disposes of their cigarette butts by throwing them down the steel-grated drains that line every street.

In several years, I've never seen anyone cautioned or fined, despite sometimes doing this in front of police and traffic wardens.

Given the copious rainfall, I can only assume that the butts find their way to the rivers surrounding the city and onward to the ocean. Presumably this could be prevented with a little education and enforcement, but there appears to be little concern.

I like this topic a lot.

Part of the reason this works is because households in Taiwan are much more likely to be multi-generational - there's usually someone home in the evening to take the trash out at the scheduled time. In higher end apartment or condo complexes with more people living alone, there may be a maintenance fee to use a dumpster.

Taking out the trash is also a vaguely social activity (at least among the elderly people in my area) you inevitably run into your neighbors all at the same time in a way that's very uncommon in the US sans for perhaps block parties.

I counter that it doesn't work for a lot of other people, particularly the young and single. Pickup times are during working hours or social hours. There are seriously people who excused themselves from social functions because their rubbish is collected at 7:30 pm.

Recycling is only collected twice a week. Oh, you want to study Chinese? Sorry, the class is the same time as your rubbish collection. Or you've got to be home on Saturday. There is nowhere available to take rubbish and just leave it there.

It causes arguments between housemates. When my girlfriend complained "Why did you put the used bendon box/bubble tea cup/etc in the regular rubbish?" and I suggested that it was my housemate, it started a terrible argument. When she caught my CouchSurfing guests not using soap to wash the oil out of a tin of tuna, she wouldn't talk to me for 3 days and refused to let me have guests again.

If you want to throw away broken glass, and put the pieces inside a cereal box for safety, the rubbish collectors will yell at you for throwing it in non-recycling. The only real solution is to throw everything into the regular truck, run away fast, and never admit it to your girlfriend.

Not going to be popular here but this sort of behavior is a form of abuse. You must conform to an externally defined standard of virtue, or face consequences ...

> You must conform to an externally defined standard of virtue, or face consequences ...

That is basically every East Asian culture in a nutshell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae

While I do think that this might be abusive behavior, I disagree with you.

>You must conform to an externally defined standard of virtue, or face consequences

What you just described is culture.

I used to have arguments. Then I read this book and gained the ability to resolve arguments quickly and prevent them from happening. I wish I had read it 20 years ago.

https://www.audible.com/pd/B00TJJNSQG

i.e. Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication. Thank you, will check it out.

This is one of the small handful of books that changed my life. I think everyone will be happier and have better relationships and social interactions if they follow this book.

What did she have against oily tuna cans?

Can't speak for OP's girlfriend, but depending on your city's recycling system, oily tuna cans in the recycling can cause a problem.

If your city is singlestream, then your oily can will co-mingle with paper products, which can then contaminate the paper products - our systems cannot recycle oily paper, and relies on sorting to remove them from the recycling stream at processing sites.

Also more personally, depending on your recycling/garbage storage conditions, keeping around food residue may cause unpleasant odours or critters.

I think you have two problems here that are in your control.

>When she caught my CouchSurfing guests not using soap to wash the oil out of a tin of tuna, she wouldn't talk to me for 3 days and refused to let me have guests again

You should consider getting a different girlfriend. Someone who blows up, and more importantly, refuses to talk to you because of something like this is not worth the effort.

>If you want to throw away broken glass, and put the pieces inside a cereal box for safety, the rubbish collectors will yell at you for throwing it in non-recycling

Another solution is to care less about the judgment of people who don't understand your circumstances or intentions.

Most young, single, and/or wealthy people don't personally deliver their trash to the truck. The apartment complex I'm living in now in Taipei has trash and recycling bins down the hall on my floor. The last one I lived in had compost too, with separate bins for meat and non-meat food waste. It's still mandatory to use the municipal blue trash bags.

Depending on the vendor, you do occasionally see trash piled up in big round bags that sit on the ground outside restaurants or stalls. Some are much better about limiting disposable plates and utensils than others.

Obviously the lack of space on this small island plays a role but more broadly, I think there is a sort of diffuse sense of social capital, and as Eugene says, civic cooperation, that allows public spaces and institutions to function differently than in the USA.

I would imagine this has to be.

I was trying to imagine how this would work in my apartment building in Manhattan. The building is 15 floors, 10 units per floor and two elevators, which are neither particularly fast or large. It seems like it would be completely unfeasible for everyone to try to deliver their trash to the street at the same time.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the process.

No, I think your assessment is correct. Few residential buildings in Taipei are that tall (my current one, for instance, has 6 floors) but the households that personally deliver their trash to the trucks tend to be individual units (not part of a apartment complex or gated community) in older and more residential parts of the city in buildings with fewer (e.g. 3) floors.

But the bigger factor is that people who have the money to live in newer apartments would prefer to pay for managed trash.

In Hong Kong (not Taiwan) most apartment buildings (certainly tall ones) handle waste disposal. There's a trash can in the back stairway on each floor, into which each floor's residents dispose of waste. Granted, there's no mandatory recycling here (one day, we can only hope!) but I imagine it would work the same way, just with more bins.

Sometime during the day people hired by building management bring the trash down and dispose of it in containers or recycling centers.

When I was walking around recently, I also ran into a self-service trash disposal/compactor installed on the street called iTrash (cute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA-clGCo5YI). For trash, you pay by weight, and for recycling, you receive a small amount of money in return. This would be the high tech solution; it seems like they're piloting it at one location only.

Whether these would save money or not if deployed en masse is an operations research problem, but the more interesting question is whether citizens would wax nostalgic if their musical garbage trucks started to disappear, and if that would influence folks' sense of civic duty.

>A much more vibrant and livable San Francisco likely involves something like 25-50% fewer cars, sidewalks 50% wider, buildings 50% taller, twice the population density, and 25X the number of electric scooters, just to throw out some back of the envelope guesses of enough magnitude to alter one's conception of the city in a significant way. But no incrementalist approach will get the city there.

I totally agree. We need to break out of the cycle of designing cities for cars and then not building up public transit because everyone has cars. Another thing important for a vibrant city is an abundance of street level retail.

I agree with most of that but why should buildings be taller and population density higher? I'd like the opposite: taller buildings == less visible sky, more people around == more noise and more long lines. The three things I didn't like of China when I was there on vacation and I was happy not to find back home.

I think just having more people makes the area more lively. Less people will basically turn it into suburbs. Also higher density means public transportation can be better utilized and reduce the need for cars. I saw this at Arlington and Nova where right around the metro stations, there were high-rises and the area was very walkable and lively.

This article is unreasonable. Taipei has alleys and clever ways of dealing with garbage therefore San Francisco should allow larger number of scooters.

But this ignores the major conflict that has already flared up. Without specific places allocated these scooters end up taking up valuable space in the public domain. Without successfully establishing methods for controlling and enforcing where scooters go they end up everywhere. My work involves wheeling equipment around along sidewalks all over the City and I am frequently blocked by not just individual scooters but entire piles which are heavy and difficult to move in part for the same reason they end up distributed that way. There is no particular place for them and only very limited efforts to collect them and bring order.

If you want to revolutionize some aspect of cities such as transport or trash collection then you have to do it in a way that does not block other people from doing their work and attending their duties. If your revolution starts to cause a lot of damage as the scooter craze already has then it will start to be reigned in by official actions. Thinking that you have absolute infinite license to block streets and pile up scooters in a very small and congested city is unreasonable and wrong and has already failed.

Try again maybe? Maybe aggressive collection of scooters based on Taipei trash collection could work where current methods have failed?

I understand that you want scooters and that would be nice, but I want to be able to use the sidewalks and have already established a pattern of use that leaves them available to the vast majority of others who live, work, or visit the City.

This article is contrasting SF's incrementalism with the holistic top-down overhaul of the trash collection system in Taipei. It's not saying Taipei's alleys imply SF should allow more scooters.

You have a legitimate grievance, but you are mischaracterizing what the article is about. It's not about scooters. It's an argument that incrementalism will only help you find the nearest local maximum, and that sometimes achieving a breakthrough in building a vibrant city requires centralized holistic policy changes.

>This article is unreasonable. Taipei has alleys and clever ways of dealing with garbage therefore San Francisco should allow larger number of scooters.

The article doesn't make a deduction from one to the other. It just suggests Taipei's ways of dealing with garbage _along_ with other (unrelated) suggestions for city improvement.

A Taiwanese explained to me that since they have to pay for the official trash bags they care about how much stuff they can fit into that bag. Consequentially they compact the trash, take out whatever can be recycled and in general spend some time dealing/thinking about trash. This makes the problem of trash more personal to them so they actively think about it and care more about how much trash is produced. I have seen many Taiwanese carry around a non-disposable set of chopsticks, a glass bottle for water that they fill up at various places and some even have a glass straw.

Also the garbage trucks don't seem to always stop, it was funny to me watching people coming from all directions and running after the truck and throwing the bags in :-).

And that haunting tune the garbage truck blares out as it rolls through the neighborhood!

Same in Switzerland. It works like this - you can only submit trash for collection in authorized bags. Authorized bags can be purchased only in select shops. These bags are expensive and the larger the bag exponentially pricey they are.

Incentive to compact as much as you can in relatively smaller bags, and financial incentives are aligned.

In the countries I have lived, Switzerland was where I had to constantly conscious of trash accumulation and disposal.

> City officials discovered that citizens had been skirting recycling mandates by dumping things in public trash bins

This is certainly true, i often saw signage on trash cans in places like 7-11 saying the trash was for customers only. And when I asked a local where I could toss a wrapper, they just took it and put it in their pocket or something.

This reminded me somewhat of an impressive aspect of Burning Man: no trash cans and no loose garbage anywhere.

I have footage of these garbage trucks:

https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0

Back in my day they used to play Fur Elise. I know other people may find your video unremarkable, but to me it was deeply nostalgic and instantly brought back good childhood memories. Thank you for sharing.

After our last trip to Taiwan we decided to make a mobile game about the garbage trucks, just for fun. You run through a quintessential Taiwanese night market past street food stands, motorcycles, and 7-11's while dodging debris like durian and bubble tea in order to catch the garbage truck.

Here's a quick trailer if anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SXWybqiLjQ

We used to have collection trucks in Lithuania few years after Soviet Union broke down. They used this horrible siren around 7pm once a week or so.

No notion of recycling. But there wasn't that much plastic in use until somewhere around year 1997 or so. I think it switch to public container system around that time too.

Can anyone explain how it works in Japan? I visited twice and I noticed that public garbage cans are basically non-existant. I kept my trash in a plastic bag and dropped it in the wastebasket at the hotel.

Accidentally found out myself (I am just back from a short vacation in Tokyo): one of the guides explained that almost all garbage cans were removed as a consequence of the Sarin attack in the Tokyo Subway in 1995 - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack.

This article has a very interesting take on the subject. And for those that have not seen it live, here is a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHAJ7f0HyjM

As background info: Before this system was introduced, people would simply leave their smelly garbage bags on the street for collection, not a good idea in a hot and windy country.

I was not aware that it also helped to reduce the amount of garbage significantly (as the article describes). That is a very cool side effect - or was this planned?

Not mentioned in the article is that the official blue garbage bags need to be purchased. Garbage collection is effectively pay-by-volume.

They're cheap, but the fact that they're not free changes people's behavior towards using less bags and separating compost and recyclables.

Growing up in Detroit in the late fifties and early sixties we had rag men that would come down the alleys. They blew some sort of whistle and would collect rags, newspapers, cardboard and such. They would have a single horse pulling a wagon.

https://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?20679-sheeny-ma...

In Taiwan they have people on scooters who will haul "trailers" of cardboard for recycling. So it's still a thing. AFAICT, they're not supposed to as it's supposed to be taken by the recycling company but often times either people hand it to them directly or they will retrieve from dumpsters (which take cardboard).

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