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Comment by Mengkudulangsat | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I rarely hear about China "fining" its egregious corporations, they go straight for the executives. America needs to get its spine back.

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In the USA, politicians are bought and paid for by megacorps. They can’t really punish anyone without losing money themselves. In China, politicians are part of the CCP. If they don’t do what the CCP wants they have very serious consequences. Two systems, two very different yet serious problems.

If in America politicians are bought and paid for by large corporations, does it mean the country is no longer a democracy?

Or is it still a democracy and the blame ultimately lies with voters who vote on corporate-backed candidates?

The USA is an oligarchy, with an illusion of choice.

Have you ever seen what happens when a non-corporate-backed (i.e. independent) candidate steps up for election?

They are almost always out-spent and out-campaigned from all sides because both bought parties want to maintain the two-party system at all costs.

There are exceptions of course, but not meaningfully.

Blame Citizens United for all this. That decision marked the day the US completely stopped being a "by the people, for the people" country.

One could make the argument that the USA became an oligarchy during the 1896 Presidential election season. McKinley’s campaign was run by Mark Hanna, and the campaign managed to secure funding from Standard Oil as well as various mining companies. This doomed the Bryan campaign. I find it interesting that the McKinley administration launched the US into war against Spain, and the USA has thereafter been continually at war… so first modern campaign finance, modern press involvement, military-industrial complex, and so on. McKinley looks to be the first truly bought and paid for politician in the USA. The rich got what they wanted and the poor were sent to fight and die and slaughter the innocent in a poor nation (the Philippines in this case). Seems startlingly similar to the current state of the USA.

Maybe one day we'll break free of the lie that election == democracy.

The culture goes even further. We demand individuals to do pointless self flogging rituals like tediously organizing their recycling just to have it be buried in china. Meanwhile corporations are free to waste as much plastic product as they care to without repercussion.

America is all about squeezing the individual for the few in power and wealth.

> We demand individuals to do pointless self flogging rituals like tediously organizing their recycling just to have it be buried in china.

German here. It's not that hard to separate paper, glass, metal, plastics and remainder waste. Paper, glass and metal are recycled at very high rates (over 80% for paper and glass [1][2] and over 90% for metal), and the separation between plastics and remainder waste allows trash incinerator plants to better control their output and, at least assuming that we get large scale post-consumer plastics recycling plants, we already have the behavior and logistics established in place and only need to divert the streams at the collection level.

The key thing is, this sorting has to happen at the consumer, because filtering out valuables for recycling from a merged waste stream is all but impossible and at least in the case of paper, permanently kills off its recyclability.

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...

[2] https://www.bmuv.de/themen/wasser-ressourcen-abfall/kreislau...

[3] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156541/umfrag...

In America we do things differently. We carefully organize our recycling but instead of it being recycled it is sent to China, who extracts the tiny amount of value it can from it, and then buries or dumps the rest in the ocean. There’s some nice articles about it.

I’m stupid enough that I still performatively wash out the glass and aluminum so the workers in China have to do less. But what is a West coast American if not performative?

I thought you were joking, then I looked up numbers, and WTF, y'all only recycle 33% of your glass [1] and barely half of your soda drink cans [2].

[1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...

[2] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-alu...

The first article does blame the consumer education and habits, which is funny. When a company bids on a contract from the government it is much easier and cheaper to collect the “recycling” and ship to China for pseudo-sorting and disposal rather than developing the infrastructure to properly recycle. Cheapest bid wins here in the US so it gets shipped out and the “uneducated” consumer gets the blame for the policy.

In the end how can you encourage someone who does not recycle to do so with this ridiculous reality in place? There’s a nice NYT article about it from a few years ago.

You should do some deeper research into how what recycling really is.

It is that hard when the vast majority of it is just buried. And the take that it needs to be at the consumer level is corporate brainwashing - if corporations aren’t allowed to use plastic excessively, that would alleviate waste far more than any recycling campaign ever has.

Just make sure to consider the sources you’re using to formulate your opinions.

Obligatory mentioning of the fact that recycling is a very local process and not everything ends up in China or in the dump.

China doesn't really have "egregious" corporations, it has egregious CCP/company officers who get uppity and forget where their first loyalty lies.

But yes, America needs to go for the brass more often.

Imagine believing China is a model for corporate governance and oversight...

The nativity here with regards to the CCP is depressing.

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