Saving Lebanon’s streets: the engineer with a sustainable fix | Hacker News Reader

Saving Lebanon’s streets: the engineer with a sustainable fix

thenationalnews.com

54 pointsronyfadel26 comments

Lebanon has such talented people. It starts with the immensely talented politicians who robbed the country blind for 30 years through financial engineering and fraudulent schemes. On the other end of the spectrum you have standup guys like this engineer. I hope the latter kind will prevail.

Lebanon even had a relatively successful space program in the 1960s.

People in Lebanon are so poor and desperate they are stealing metal manhole covers, and this engineer is replacing them with plastic covers.

He replaced 3 of them, and he's looking for donations so he can fund more of them.

Not sure about the "sustainable" part, but he is using recycled plastic trash to make them.

That's great. Maybe they should consider making them with rebar inside to get the strength up while keeping the scrap value nominal.

See Kolkata, India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhole_cover#Theft

[Non-steel] fiber-reinforced concrete is an alternative.

You would expect this kind of theft to be happening only in Lebanon, but here in Barcelona (Europe) I see the metal covers missing regularly too.

What a shame that this country has come to.

Frankly, if the price quoted in the article is correct, this would make economic sense all around the world.

Use precast concrete as plastic is flammable.

Newer manhole cover have a hinge that will prevent you from taking the lid off.

Where can we donate?

I would also chip in and donate, so if anyone has information I'd gladly help.

Everytime I see manhole in the written word George Carlin the comedian/philosopher comes to mind. He famously said they will call it “personhole” cover.

And what would be the problem with that?

Manhole would be one of those cases where "man" doesn't really imply anything positive that somebody else is missing out on.

Feminism is not just about giving undeserving women an advantage for no reason, it's about equality. All careers and professions need to be at least 50% women otherwise that is definitional proof of sexism. The sex-gap in tech is not any more important than the even bigger sex-gap in septic system maintenance, which is why it would actually make more sense to call all such access shafts "womanholes" to actively encourage women to become sewage system workers. Men don't need patriarchal notions dispelled from them to feel comfortable taking dirty jobs; Women do.

"Feminism is not just about giving undeserving women an advantage for no reason, it's about equality."

I didn't imply otherwise. You're reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I was saying that a cover for a sewer probably isn't a high priority language thing to clean up. Where things like mailman, chairman, etc, were. Manhole isn't a job or position. I would guess "utility hole" would be a likely change you could make.

Sorry, I'm not responding to anything specific you said. I'm just adding my thoughts. Many women are attracted to certain careers like technology because of the prestige attributed to them by the media. Being a 'hacker' is very trendy. What these women don't understand is that having lots of women in the trenches fighting Arabs and in the trenches repairing our municipal sewage systems is just as important for equality as having women being paid well to sit at a desk and program computers. I hope that didn't makes no sense.

I don’t want to sound sexist in this case, but shouldn’t some jobs have a non-50-50 skew, simply because of one sex being more fit for it? Like for example, the army might be more skewed towards men because of their larger body sizes, while the medical field might be more women because of their better inter-personal skills, and higher studiousness.

And yet this is exactly sexism.

Even if men statistically have larger bodies, can you correlate that to military success? Are you ignoring qualities like grit, confidence, strength, courage, strategy, and leadership which are not “male qualities”?

And interpersonal skills and communication: I’d argue these are not “female qualities”. Does your comment factor a possibility that external pressures around gender norms might create a cycle where women put more effort into these skills, thus demonstrating them more often?

>cycle where women put more effort into these skills, thus demonstrating them more often

That's a good one. Lets see the patriarchy try and disprove that!

While laudable, what happens when people don't want to fit to your quotas because they'd rather do something else? Do you then enforce this by decree? How does that benefit anything beyond an ideology?

That would be a great question to ask a feminist.

Conversely, what problem would it solve?

Well nowadays, due to the evolution of language, “man” is no longer the generic term for “person” as it once was, so it’d be more accurate in cases where women also use the holes.

Maybe we can just call it a hole.

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