Moved back to a much richer one 10x larger a couple years later. No robot arm garbage trucks then, and still none now. Bags on the end of the driveway, guys hanging on trucks.
Where I live now, that job now is done by the home owners or by staff of the apartment buildings. The job didn't go away, it's just no longer done by the garbage collectors.
The robot trucks are cheaper than the humans that operate the non-robot trucks, so your argument doesn't make much sense here.
[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector...
Keep in mind a truck lasts for years, while a truck driver has to be paid yearly. I'm not figuring in maintenance costs for the truck here--if you'd like to argue that yearly maintenance costs for the truck are the same as the cost of the truck, I can look that up too, but I'm hoping you are a reasonable person.
not if you understand accounting. I can hire a guy today at <$20/hr operating cost to do it manually. That robot truck is a much more significant capital investment that will amortize over 10+ years.
2. Private garbage collection companies: just because a municipality doesn't have money to buy a robot truck in cash, doesn't mean the private garbage collection company that serves most of the surrounding municipalities doesn't.
3. If you actually look up the prices, the numbers are so skewed in the favor of automation that even without loans or private companies, I very much doubt there are any cases where this would take 10+ years to amortize. Your $20/hour collector translates to $30K/year if they works 30 hours/week, or $300K in 10 years. Is it your claim that robot trucks cost $300K more than non-robot trucks?
I realize this runs against the reality of HN, but not all solutions are technology, and not all technology solutions are as simple as "just do X". It's like the "dropbox is just ..." meme turned up to 11