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Post by questa on Nov 5, 2017 11:25:09 GMT
That sounds very good Quests. However we are told that pizza boxes can’t be recycled as the oil off the pizza prevents it. I guess our mob have a special section for oily cardboard. I forgot to mention that the bins are emptied mechanically and as the garbage is tipped into the truck, it is observed on CCTV by the driver who can stop the tipping and check on the chip number for ID. I once put out 2 half bricks by mistake and got a letter back with a photo of my bricks hiding in the garbage.
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 5, 2017 12:03:48 GMT
I don't think our collection is that sophisticated, but there is a system for detecting organic matter in the paper-plastic-metal bin which causes it to be rejected and placed back on the footpath still full. Then the employees put white tape over the top with notification of the rejection and instructions that the bin should be put out for the next collection of undifferentiated rubbish.
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Post by tod2 on Nov 5, 2017 13:16:25 GMT
Oh you guys...come to Africa, the land that loves all kind of garbage mixed up in a huge 'muddle'! Yes, we have a sort of garbage re-cycling but you don't have to do it. Plastic see-through bags are given out for free for all paper products. Don't know what you are supposed to do the glass or plastic. My philosophy is this: While starving people are relying on your glass, paper, and plastic to survive by wading through truck load after truck load - do not recycle. Each wave of scavengers knows what he collects and sells to the recycling plant and woe betide you if you are caught poaching other stuff. Of course I fully understand why first world countries can do all this differently. UK has cash to burn keeping families fed and housed, Europe has very few that are not in employment and the beggars I see on the street there are professionals OR don't want another style of living. What am I missing here...? Oh! my very own recycling by using used tin cans for the work force that may come to paint and need to wash a paint brush. Plastic bottles - prick holes in one end and use as a watering can. Just small things.
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Post by bjd on Nov 5, 2017 13:38:38 GMT
I'm surprised anything needs to be thrown away in parts of Africa. After my son spent 4 months teaching in a small school in Kenya, when the neighbours learned he was leaving, they came to ask for anything he was getting rid of. One old lady was happy to get an empty plastic peanut butter jar. Of course, there was no garbage pick-up of any kind.
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Post by Kimby on Nov 5, 2017 16:20:28 GMT
East Africans offered to buy the clothes off our backs and the shoes off our feet in rural Kenya. Imagine what a windfall it would be if we threw away any of our possessions while traveling in Africa.
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Post by bixaorellana on Nov 5, 2017 21:47:03 GMT
There are apparently places to take stuff for recycling here, but ... The garbage pick up is supposed to be three times a week in my neighborhood. The method is that the truck stops a block and a half from my house, rings a bell, and everyone hustles over there with their garbage. This method sucks in a variety of ways, but I now have a way around it. There are ambulant trash collectors who are official and work for the city. I guess they are supposed to collect the trash from the undersized, inadequate-in-number public receptacles. I believe they're also supposed to sweep up trash, although I've never seen any evidence of that on my street. Anyway, for a tip you can get one of the ambulant guys to stop by your house occasionally and take the trash. Money well spent! I don't have a picture of the young man who picks up my stuff, but here is a picture of the kind of cart he and all the ambulant sanitation workers use. The man in the straw hat sitting behind the cart is one of those workers, as you can tell by his khaki uniform ~
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Post by kerouac2 on Nov 5, 2017 22:01:04 GMT
Street cleaners' carts clearly have the same basic design everywhere in the world. Naturally, Singapore is a tiny bit classier.
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Post by whatagain on Nov 6, 2017 0:51:37 GMT
I discarded an old pull over today. Hotel staff retrieved it for me. I guess - as I hoped - someone will use it. I also got rid of a 14 years old t-shirts which like most my t-shirts has holes the size of claws. Cat claws. How strange ;-)
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Post by Kimby on Nov 7, 2017 15:17:04 GMT
Quoting from Quora, where I learned this factoid:
“Most people know that Thomas Jefferson had children with one of his slaves (Sally Hemings), but did you know that she was also his dead wife’s half-sister?
Yeah, his wife inherited her own half-sibling, who was 25 years younger, and Jefferson eventually had several children with her.
I think this one fact made me realize that slavery in the US was even more bizarre and complicated than I’d imagined.”
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Post by mickthecactus on Nov 30, 2017 9:11:26 GMT
The first baseball World Cup was won in 1938 by Great Britain with the US as runners up.
Cuba has won it 25 times.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 24, 2017 14:19:54 GMT
Yesterday I read an interesting article in the paper about how "connected" items are getting completely out of hand. We have all seen a few items presented in recent years that were complete flops, but you absolutely never know what might catch on. I am already bothered by toothbrushes that tell you if you have brushed enough or not. I don't want my toothbrush telling me anything.
There is a toaster that can imprint a weather and temperature report on your toast. There are egg holders that inform you how many eggs they contain. There are cooking pots that will give you a recipe and tell you when to add ingredients or change the heat. There are shower heads to personalise the cleaning experience for each member of the family. There are pillows to monitor your sleep and tell you whether you have slept well or not. There are "story walls" to embed in bedrooms to tell your children stories so that you don't have to. Getting creepier, there are infidelity mattresses to monitor any illicit use of your bed. Naturally, there are GPS devices to monitor the whereabouts of pets, but also to give you a full report of where they have been.
And then the article went on to the new sex toys. Now that is an interesing subject.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 24, 2017 14:28:15 GMT
Kerouac, your post immediately called to mind this song, written 20 or so years ago...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 16, 2018 5:14:17 GMT
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Post by questa on Jan 16, 2018 6:14:41 GMT
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Post by bjd on Jan 16, 2018 6:37:56 GMT
I didn't know about Ivan the Terrible, but there are still Stalin supporters in Russia too. I don't know the name of the philosopher who said we are condemned to repeat history if we don't understand it.
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Post by questa on Jan 16, 2018 7:42:48 GMT
"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." The quote is most likely due to George Santayana, and in its original form it read, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
Ivan waged bloody war, annexing the Tatar caliphates and pulling all of Russia into the one country with him as 1st Tsar. Time was when Russia was totally powerful and I can understand the longing of the older Russians to see that time again, and want Putin as the next Ivan.
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Post by bjd on Jan 16, 2018 9:33:51 GMT
The only advantage of the old tsarist system is that they often got knocked off by a pretender to the throne. Putin is in no danger of that -- he probably has food tasters, like Stalin did.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 17, 2018 13:51:10 GMT
On the radio they said that erectile dysfunction has surpassed premature ejaculation as the principal male sex problem.
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Post by mossie on Jan 17, 2018 15:40:23 GMT
Are you boasting or complaining?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 17, 2018 16:24:20 GMT
Neither. But I was a bit annoyed that they did not say why, even though the reason seems totally obvious to me.
In olden times when the equipment stopped working, I think that most men thought it was normal and just put it out to pasture in the back 40. And most men would not have wanted to admit that they had a problem. When the blue pill was finally invented, it unleashed a flood of requests that had never been made before.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 18, 2018 21:22:39 GMT
In 1910 there were 100,000 cars in the UK.
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Post by questa on Jan 19, 2018 5:03:05 GMT
An interesting observation. One reality about Europe’s current political leadership is summarised here:
Macron, the newly elected French president, has no children.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
British prime minister Theresa May has no children.
Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
Holland’s Mark Rutte, Sweden’s Stefan Löfven, Luxembourg's Xavier Bettel, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon —
all have no children.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has no children.
Ironically it would seem that a grossly disproportionate number of the people who make the major decisions about Europe’s future have no direct personal stake in that future.
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Post by bjd on Jan 19, 2018 6:25:34 GMT
Well, Macron does have a stake in the future with his wife's children and grandchildren. And I remember seeing somewhere that Nicola Sturgeon had a miscarriage, so had tried to have kids. In 1910 there were 100,000 cars in the UK. And they were all black! I have talked to other people whose parents emigrated from the UK to N America in the 1950s and what struck everyone were the coloured cars! (see Cuba)
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 20, 2018 7:32:35 GMT
I just learned this astounding fact tonight, once again from the totally wonderful Insert Name Here. WHO do you suppose was the first US citizen to learn about the death of Stalin? It was a young USAF staff sargent who was a Morse code operator in a Security Service unit. His job at the Landsberg, Germany AF base was listening in on Soviet communications. While monitoring Soviet Morse code chatter on March 5th, 1953, he became the very first American to hear of the death of the Soviet supreme leader. That young man was {Spoiler}Johnny Cash
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Post by questa on Jan 20, 2018 22:34:02 GMT
Being able to understand Morse Code is clever, to read it in a language not your own is very clever. To read the code, which would have used Cyrillic Script as well, makes him seem more clever than his later career indicated.
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Post by lagatta on Jan 21, 2018 20:00:41 GMT
I do find it a wee bit of a generalisation (to put it mildly) to say that childless/childfree people have no direct stake in the future. It as if our genes were the only contribution we make to society and the only thing we "pass down" or care about. Certainly anyone in a creative profession leaves a legacy, but so do builders and teachers. That said, I'm very happy that more reproductive-age women have been elected here in the greater Montréal area. There are three city council members who are currently pregnant. When my council member's wife had a baby, he had a very hard time securing enough paternity leave to bond with his baby as much as he had hope. And these officials have staff to answer complaints about daily problems such as "fly tipping"... On the rubbish issue, at the other end of Africa, there is a specific class of people who earn their living via "informal" trash collection and recycling: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabbaleen
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 21, 2018 20:16:23 GMT
I can think of quite a few bad presidents who had lots of kids.
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Post by patricklondon on Jan 22, 2018 7:21:00 GMT
I do find it a wee bit of a generalisation (to put it mildly) to say that childless/childfree people have no direct stake in the future. Not half. I always think today's children will be working to fund my pension soon enough, so I need them to be as healthy, well-educated and productive adults as they can be...! My other bugbear is the assumption that to be an effective politician you have to have a more or less conventional lifestyle or life history, or you can't know what life is like for your constituents. Nobody can learn that for everybody, nor should it be assumed that because they do have this or that feature in common with their constituents, everything else they instinctively think or do will therefore be a fair representation of their interests. Much more important to be able to listen, reflect and learn about people you don't, on paper, have much in common with. My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 22, 2018 10:32:43 GMT
Non observant American presidents always find religion the moment they become a candidate; it's obligatory.
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Post by bjd on Jan 22, 2018 13:16:14 GMT
Non observant American presidents always find religion the moment they become a candidate; it's obligatory. That American influence is not only in the US. I read a biography of Itzhak Rabin (Israeli politician) who was non-observant and when he was named Israeli ambassador to the States he had to start acting religious.
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