Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.

I guess this depends on your tax bracket and political bargaining power. I grew up smelling (and smelling like) solid waste trucked in from the waste treatment facility for the richer suburbs in a racially segregated metro area. The less PC way of sating that is "concentrated rich 95% white person shit".

And let me tell you: despite what they think, MD/JD/MBA shit does not smell like roses. The smell permeated the entire community for days at a time, every month. I also now have a whole set of recommended annual cancer screenings. All from a modern and well regulated landfill that is still in operation.

I shit you not: we had movie days in high school that corresponded with the worse smelling days. Just whole days/weeks of lost learning, regularly, because the whole place smelled like literal human shit.

Now I live in a snow white upper middle class suburb and those problems are behind me, but I'm still very conscious about where my waste really ends up and have gone to war in more than city council meeting about where our literal shit ends up.

But, again, if you have a FAANG salary then your shit and trash will be shipped to someone else's community and it's not your problem. Waste away! /s

I lived near waste center myself (sewage treatment plant in Bayview SF) with all the smells it emitted, but I'm still really glad it exists!

It definitely should be regulated to not offgas like that, but we can/should solve those problems. It wouldn't even be that hard - probably like $10-50M or so.

We need to address the lack of true democratic representation in those communities allows those problems to persist. It's not because of lack of tech or finance.

I guess another way of saying that is that the US does not have "modern, well regulated landfills".

You seem to be conflating landfills (where trash that's trucked away from your curb goes to be buried) and sewage treatment plants (where the stuff you put down your pipes goes to be processed into clean water, fertilizer, and "other"). They are completely different things.

In my city, the solids from the sewage treatment plant are trucked to the landfill.

Most places. the solids are either burned or dumped.

How many toilets would this facility have for workers there? 10 million would only allow for 5 at the current price of 1.7 million per toilet.

I once looked at apartments in Bayview and I feel like you're really underselling how bad it smells. If it were a vast open container of raw sewage, I would not be surprised.

I'm shocked humans are allowed to live there. Nothing that smells that bad could possibly be safe.

Also that whole area is a liquefaction zone, so when the earthquake happens, I'm sure it'll be a bio-hazard disaster.

And that's before accounting for the radioactive waste the US Navy dumped at Hunter's Point. There's a reason why the life expectancy of a black man in San Francisco is 20 years less than that of other men in the city, and actually worse than the life expectancy of black men nationwide.

was curious, here's source for the superfund site searching for radioactivity from the EPA:

https://semspub.epa.gov/work/09/100021230.pdf

Anyways, snark aside: if this was for decades during your formative years, and you were close enough to be regularly exposed to runoff, please start getting regular cancer screenings.

If it was just a few years in your 20s you're probably fine (per the EPA, but maybe also screen).

That’s a solvable problem though. Regulations could be changed to require more buffer areas for the landfill.

Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.

That's a heck of a dystopian view, TBH. Be glad it was just the landfill, otherwise it might have been a nuclear dump? Welp, guess that's just economics, nothing we can do about that, poor unlucky rubes!

I know you didn't mean it that way, but it can sound extraordinarily tone-deaf to talk down to people like this.

A lot of people on the Internet would rather be right than liked. The medium lends itself to this: there's little point in having random people you will never meet like you.

I thought OP was making an interesting point about economics, personally - that there's sort of a law of "conservation of unpleasantness" in a market economy, and if it wasn't the landfill, there would be some other thing objectionable about your property. You approach your career very differently (and by capitalist standards, usually more successfully) if you figure that you're going to dislike some things anyway, but might as well be deliberate in choosing what you dislike.

This was a really good comment, thanks.

It's not necessarily about being liked; that's part of our current culture's narcissism problem. It's about what kind of society do you want to live in. Do you want to live in a society where the prevailing attitude ranges from the personal "welp, sucks to be you! be grateful you have anything at all you gutter trash" to the non-personal "it's unfortunate this machine runs on frickaseed baby faces, well I guess there's nothing we can do".

To be clear, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect here, not accusing.

It'd be great if our society could move past those two sides of the same coin to a more "oh, look, here's an area where people are getting screwed, maybe we can fix that". That's a kind of problem-solving attitude focused on people, not a popularity contest.

Agreed. But, if we're not problem-solving, I'm more the happy to smile along at happy hours and hold very long grudges.

> Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.

Yes, it's my parent's fault for being poor. (Actually, not poor, just not upper middle class in the wrong metro, although most of my colleagues from university onwards called it "working class" so maybe so.) Unfortunate, but reality :-|

Not sure about your second point. Let’s consider an oversimplifying example where population is homogenous in an area/nation. If 50% of the land is unpleasant, then 50% of the population will live next to unpleasant stuff. If only 20% is unpleasant, 20% will love, saving 30% of the population.

Managing a landfill/sewage plant can be worthwhile.

> That’s a solvable problem though.

The vast majority of our problems are, we just continue to refuse to solve them because some rich asses will be slightly less rich if we do.

Ironically, I think the G in FAANG is built on the landfill of San Francisco from a far more toxic era, which is, to your point, sad.

Yeah I lived in Mountain View and it smelled like garbage. Apparently the shoreview outdoor event venue had to mitigate some of the outgassing at one point because you could light the methane coming out of the ground on fire.

And I’d be willing to bet that the cities that exist like this are controlled by one political party and the population happily keeps voting to keep them in power.

It's not specific cities. It's huge metro areas.

If the MBAs send all the stinky stuff to the compost rather than the landfill, it's still going to offend someone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com